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Dan Diamond takes in the evening ocean
air on South Beach. Photo by Margaret Griffis |
If you’ve passed as many velvet ropes as I
have, chances are you’ve developed more than a few bad habits.
Living in this decadent city, full of opulence and excess, one
would be hard-pressed not to overly indulge in the myriad
hedonistic pleasures so readily available. Maybe you smoke too
much. Maybe you drink and become a Jekyll and Hyde-style angry
drunk. Perhaps your wickedness is an affinity for discreetly
hitting the blow in public without dropping a spec of white, or
maybe you just pick your nose. I don’t know. I, for one, am
ready to admit I suffer from the combination bad habits of
blowing deadlines and being attracted to gorgeous women with
poor dispositions. It’s a curse.
Regardless of what vice has hold of you, if you’ve ever felt the
guilt associated with falling back into an addiction, whether it
be drugs, sex or just Cheeseburger Baby, then you’ll appreciate
the lyrical styles of Detroit transplant Dan Diamond.
Rarely
in an electronic music scene where songs have few, if any,
vocals do we find powerful and compelling lyrics that, in all
honesty, have the power to make a person reassess one’s
priorities in life, or at the very least consider a short stint
in rehab. But such are the words behind the beats of vocal
artist Diamond, who after a three-day binge of alcohol and
cocaine-fueled madness went down into his friend’s basement and,
with a $10 microphone from Radio Shack, recorded the words to “Bad
Habits.”
The
track, which would make a wonderful supplement to any 12-step
program, is really more of a spoken word testimonial capturing
the essence of the painful struggle Diamond and a lot of us have
endured.
“I used
to play that track for the people in rehab with me and they’d
ask me all the time what I was thinking when I wrote that song.
I’d tell them I wasn’t trying to write a song. It was just the
way I was feeling after three days of not sleeping and doing
drugs,” said Diamond.
The
track and the accompanying music video directed by Jimmie
“Speedy” Gonzalez can be found on Bad Boy Bill’s
latest CD/DVD combo, Behind the Decks Live.
If you are too cheap to buy that, you can also check it out for
free on Diamond’s Myspace page at myspace.com/dandiamond (not to
be confused with this site by an unrelated singing Dan Diamond,
www.entertainersplus.com/dandiamond), or move to Canada and wait
till it airs on BPM:TV. On Myspace, however, you can also
access some of his more popular tracks, like “Club Therapy,”
which was remixed by the irrepressible Peace Division and
enjoyed a few weeks at number one on Beatport’s list.
It was
through Beatport, in fact, that Diamond was able to collaborate
with one his idols, John Acquaviva, who offered him a
spot on the main stage of the pseudo-underground Detroit
Electronic Music Festival, an opportunity that may have just
saved Diamond’s life.
“When
you do drugs, you get to this level where you can’t get any
higher and there’s nowhere else to go but down. I mean, you
know, you hit rock bottom. That’s where I was when all of sudden
my phone rang and it was John Acquaviva. He’s like, ‘Hey, I was
on Beatport.com and I heard this song and it’s just so powerful.
I wanted to see if maybe we could work together.’ That was it —
it was a dream come true and I started crying and screaming
‘holy shit!’” recalled Diamond.
After
that fateful phone call, Diamond felt an urgency to clean up his
act and checked himself into an in-patient rehab clinic in
Detroit. As part of the healing process, the clinic advised him
to stay away from his regular haunts and suggested he move into
a halfway house. He found one in Delray Beach, but when he got
there it wasn’t quite what he expected.
“I got
there and everyone was sniffing coke and smoking crack. I was
like, I ain’t doing this. I mean I certainly wasn’t going to
live in a house with that shit. I was like fuck no. I’m
out of here. I got on the Tri-rail, which took me to the
Metrorail, which took me to the bus and boom, I was on South
Beach,” said Diamond.
One of
Diamond’s regular gigs is at the Clevelander, which is
slated to reopen June 15, says Diamond.
Spotted
*Nelly
Furtado, after kicking off her tour at the Seminole Hard
Rock Hotel, at Mansion hiding in a corner last Wednesday
night. They got her a cake.
*Cristiano
Ronaldo, Portuguese soccer player for Manchester United,
having dinner at the Blue Door at Delano last Tuesday
*Alonzo
Mourning and James Posey from your Miami Heat hanging
by the bar at Delano with a couple friends and
drinking Patrón, last Tuesday
*Mourning and wife Tracy at the weekend’s Ocean Drive en
Español party at the Delano, last Thursday
*The
king of cheesy lines David Caruso at Social Miami
at the Sagamore Hotel, last Wednesday night
*Allen
Iverson and Warren Sapp poolside at Skybar,
last Tuesday night, drinking Cristal straight from the bottle.
The pair had either had their fill of booze or were simply
offering libations by pouring out their unfinished bottles on
the ground.
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