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Joe Stanco
06/07/2002 By JEROME WEEKS / The Dallas Morning News
Dallas poet, musician and teacher Joe Stanco died Wednesday evening in his East Dallas home with his family. He suffered from malignant melanoma cancer, which had been operated on nine years ago but which had spread to his lymph system.
Making witty lyrics and silly sounds was something that Joseph Martin Stanco, 54, inherited and passed on. Mr. Stanco's grandfather was a drummer in vaudeville. Mr. Stanco joined his four brothers in the late '80s in Stanco and Co., a local band with an eclectic, oddball style. |
He was also the father of Natalie, Gabrielle and Hilary, three members of the Ideal Females, an all-girl group that enjoyed local popularity in the '90s. His daughters were still in elementary school when they began playing clubs, so he and his wife, Michele, had to enforce a school-night ban on gigs.
Perhaps most famously, Mr. Stanco was a founding member of Victor Dada, the comedy-poetry-music troupe that in 1986 led to the development of Club Dada, a mainstay of the Deep Ellum scene.
"It all goes back to that little red shed in back of Joe's house on Victor Street," Mr. Stanco's brother Tommy said Thursday of Victor Dada's early experimentation with sound poetry and performance art. In the '70s, "they were just banging on pots and pans in the living room with mikes strung from the ceiling. Then they moved to the shed and started writing on the walls with Marks-A-Lots."
That's where the idea took hold of re-creating the efforts of dadaism, the post-World War I "anti-art" movement. Hence, the name, Victor Dada.
Tom Henvey, another Victor Dada member, said that instead of standing around and being serious, the poets and artists "got up with whips and pop guns and blew bubbles."
Mr. Stanco was not involved in the running of Club Dada. Instead, he taught at Richland College, heading the honors program.
Mr. Stanco's poems were included in DART's Poetry in Motion program. His CD and book, Dallason, includes "roll on, Trinity." Mr. Stanco said in 1999 that he'd watched the city try to kill the Trinity River over the years, so he decided to give it an elegy.
Tommy Stanco said that his brother had been at work on a second CD inspired by the car-accident deaths of their sister and her husband in 1980.
A memorial for Mr. Stanco will be 7 p.m. Saturday at St. Pius Catholic Church. A benefit for his family will be June 18 at Club Dada. Another benefit June 25 at Poor David's Pub will feature performances by Sara Hickman and Randy Erwin. On July 4 what would have been Mr. Stanco's 55th birthday a celebratory reading of his writings will be held at Paperbacks Plus.
From DallasNews.com |