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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.
Calhoun encountered one of the original Count’s over-the-top ads while writing reviews of old bargain-bin comics for a zine called Obscuria. The ad showed an Afroed, scowling Dante looking ready to scoop out an attacker’s eyeballs with his fingertips. Calhoun was impressed: “I mean, he claimed to have won death matches—death matches!”
ISW caught on with a wider audience, even joining the 1995 Lollapalooza tour, but creative differences and personality conflicts brought it back to San Francisco and caused a split between Legend and manager/promoter Audra Angeli-Morse. Once she took control, ISW became intertwined with punk. Legend had originally booked fellow rockabilly acts to play between matches, but Angeli-Morse enlisted bands like NOFX, 7 Seconds, the Dickies, and the Donnas. The tortilla flinging was also Angeli-Morse’s idea—unlike beer bottles, corn tortillas rarely cause lacerations—and it became one of ISW’s trademarks.
“I only did Uncle NAMBLA twice, but that was more than enough,” he explains. “I really laid down all integrity for showbiz there.”
“Some of my best friends in the show had left, and there was bad blood with those that were left in it,” says Calhoun. “You can’t do a show for almost seven years and not end up with that kind of baggage, I guess. I mean, even the Beatles broke up, and the record label had to force Metallica into group therapy just to keep them together, right?”
With Bob Calhoun and Dante documentarian Floyd Webb, Fri 9/5, 7 PM, Quimby’s, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910. FA
