Memories of Dan Hartman

Patrick McNamara

Patrick was the attorney in charge of Dan's day-to-day business during the last 3 years of his life, and handled much of the work for his Estate's Executor for the year after his death.

I thought you might like to know a little more about Multi-Level and one or two other stories from his business life, none of which were confidential, so I thought I'd share them.

The house in your pictures is technically not the house that Dan lived in for very long. It is on the same property, and was designed by an architect hired by Dan, but the house where he lived for so long was actually taken down by him (everything but the Studio and the chimney), and what you see in the pictures was put up around the studio and the chimney. A cape colonial to a 10,000 square foot post-modern glass house.

He essentially lived in the Studio (which was originally the garage to the original house) while the old house came down and the new house went up - he seemed to enjoy the whole process. He told me that he had looked around Westport for a house to buy that was similar to the one he ultimately built, but finally decided that he couldn't leave his Studio - that it had taken him years to figure out how to get everything he wanted out of that Studio, and he didn't want to risk ending up with a brand new studio that didn't work as well.

The house wasn't quite finished when he died, but it was pretty close, and he did get to enjoy a holiday season there in good health. Dan's studio equipment was moved to California so that it could be used in conjunction with his music education foundation, which is headed by Charlie Midnight (another really nice guy with great Dan stories), Dan's writing partner, who lived in California. Dan would have loved the fact that kids were learning to produce on his equipment.

I occasionally teach copyright law classes and I often use Dan's story about how he discovered that "Love Sensation" had been sampled in Black Box's "Ride On Time" to explain how ownership issues arise in the area of sampling. "Ride On Time" came out in Europe as an Italian dance hit that had some pretty good legs. A friend of Dan's in England called him on the phone one day, saying that he had heard a song that he knew Dan would love, and that he had overnighted Dan a copy. The next day, the friend calls and says, so what do you think? Dan's response - "I think I wrote it."

It seems that Black Box hadn't bothered to ask Dan if they could sample one of the hooks from Dan's hit "Love Sensation." Since the sample was the hook for "Ride On Time" it was a pretty big "error". I suspect that Black Box never expected the song to leave Italy. After much negotiation, Dan ended up with a good percentage of that song. The other funny thing from that story is that the lyric from Love Sensation is actually "Right On Time". It seems that the Italians had misunderstood the lyric, although frankly the Ride On Time lyric makes no sense in their song either.

A final personal story - the night Dan died, I received a call from one of his employees at the time, letting me know. I went over to another lawyer's apartment for a drink that evening - to toast Dan, mostly. As I got into the cab to go home, guess what was playing on the radio, "I Can Dream About You." It still gives me goose bumps when I think about it.

A nicer (or smarter) client I've never had.

Thanks for your work on the site.

Patrick McNamara

Many thanks to Patrick for his contribution.

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