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Artist
Dan Zimmerman
12+ albums
daytrottersinger-songwriter
about
Dan Zimmerman, the son of a Methodist preacher, was born in 1948. His earliest memories are sitting in a hard pew listening to his father's booming baritone voice. At age 9, Dan and a friend wrote and illustrated their own books, imaginations fueled by Mad, Famous Monsters Of Filmland, and the palpable proximity of Hollywood and Disneyland. In 1957, he also started playing guitar, thumbing through songbooks, and a few years later harmonizing on Everly Brothers tunes with his brother. When the family moved to Arizona in 1962, he pined for the waves of Hermosa Beach, picking out surf music when he wasn't singing in the youth choir. However, it wasn't until he entered the Syracuse School Of Art that the plot thickened enough for his own music to develop. In 1968 he learned that his parents were getting divorced. Drugs were everywhere. The sub-zero winters reached deep. And of course there was the war. He began writing songs to sort though the psychic thicket. In 1969 it all came to a head. The country was on a collision course with itself. Dan was one of those who fell through the cracks. He dropped out of school and, throwing his guitar and sketchbook into a van, hit the road with a derelict friend and his three-legged dog. Suddenly he found himself trying to live the life of an itinerant singer/songwriter and artist, careening from state to state. When his troubled friend, fleeing phantoms, dropped him off in the middle of Wyoming, Dan hitchhiked to Portland, Oregon, t
