Bob Calhoun is a big guy, six-foot-three and 300 pounds by his reckoning, with a big voice and a personality to match—several of them, actually. Under his given name he doesfund-raising research and freelance writing. But as Count Dante the 39-year-old is the Deadliest Man Alive—wrestler, rocker, and motivational speaker delivering infomercialesque spiels about his “Kung-Fu Rock and Roll Success Seminar that has transformed millions of worthless losers into martial arts millionaires!”
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In high school in San Francisco’s south suburbs, “where all I had were comic book spinner racks and UHF TV to keep me company,” Calhoun grew fascinated with the story of the original Count Dante—a south-side Chicago Irish boy named John Keehan who taught and promoted martial arts here in the 1960s and early ’70s. (You can read my 2006 Reader feature about him and Floyd Webb, the local filmmaker who’s working on a documentary about him, on the paper’s Web site.) After some early success in introducing karate to a wider audience, Keehan fell out of favor with the martial arts establishment. Among other things, he advocated full-contact matches, and one of his students was killed in a rumble with another school. He changed his name to Count Juan Raphael Dante, dubbing himself the deadliest man alive, and ran ads in wrestling magazines and comic books promoting a fighting style called Kata Dante that incorporated “MAIMING, MUTILATING, DISFIGURING, PARALYZING and CRIPPLING techniques.” After assorted run-ins with the law and the Chicago Outfit, Keehan died of a bleeding peptic ulcer in 1975, at the age of 36.
The spirit of Dante followed Calhoun into young adulthood, inspiring him in 1996 to name his band after the Count’s martial arts club, the Black Dragon Fighting Society, and assume the Count’s moniker as its front man. He knew nothing of Keehan or his checkered history, but the old ads made it clear the man had been a huckster. So Calhoun’s Count Dante became a fast-talking kung-fu hustler with a little Tom Vu thrown in. “At first we were just going to wear bowling shirts—or whatever people wore in the mid-90s—and play distorted rock,” he says. “But then I got the idea to wear leopard-print kimonos and deliver a success seminar on stage.”
San Francisco hipsters started donning masks and tutus, practicing body slams, drop kicks, and pinfalls on one another before howlingly drunk crowds. A few talented amateurs and semipros jumped in the ring, but most of the acts got by on absurdity, shamelessly hamming it up in not just luchador masks but also team and corporate mascot costumes, karate gis, and whatever they could cobble together from Halloweens past. As Calhoun explains in his book, their “wrestling” techniques were culled from “odd combinations of karate classes we took as kids, judo and jiu-jitsu classes we took as adults, and high school Greco-Roman mat wrestling, with a few ring moves…learned by slowing down videotapes of old WrestleManias.”
ISW was typically a cooperative sport, with matches based on unwritten scripts and hand signals. But some wrestlers forgot that it was performance art. “One wrestler never got the concept—he was always breaking peoples’ noses,” says Calhoun. “Some guys got obsessed with the violence and started to become their character, wanting to become Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson mixed together, even though he’s playing a chef who’s fighting a guy in a chicken suit.”
Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society continue to perform as a band, playing tunes like “Beware the Wonder Bra” and “God Damn Those Milwaukee Women.” They recently opened for the Dickies in San Francisco. Calhoun considers the Quimby’s reading a way to test the midwestern waters. “If the ghost of John Keehan or some samurai sword-wielding Internet ninja don’t behead me, then I’d really love to bring the band to Chicago,” he says. “I think it’s really fertile ground for my Kung Fu Rock and Roll Success Seminar.” Wrestling, however, is out for now, in large part because Calhoun has forsworn his old pattern of jumping from temp job to temp job and taken a regular gig researching sources for fund raising at Berkeley.
With Bob Calhoun and Dante documentarian Floyd Webb, Fri 9/5, 7 PM, Quimby’s, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910. FA
