Dave Shapiro & Daniel Williams
RIP
The ongoing display of love, admiration, respect, and sorrow for Dave Shapiro, Daniel Williams, and the four others lost in yesterday’s tragic accident highlights one of the few remaining positives of social media. The posts offer a small measure of solace as our shared music community collectively mourns the loss of six people whose lives touched nearly everyone reading this.
Much has been said (and much better) by those much closer to them than I. This is a massive loss for our scene, yes, but doubly so for those nearest and dearest.
Like many of you, I met Dave when he was the in-house booking agent for EVR, and I watched his career with wonder as he helped build a generation of bands into headliners, at a time when rock music was supposedly over and done.
Shapiro, Tim Borror, and Matt Andersen uniting as Sound Talent Group in 2018 made a great deal of sense. Each of them is driven but kind, funny but firm; some of the best qualities in a talent agent, and even more so in a friend.
Dave and I, of course, shared a love of all things Iron Maiden. We were both disappointed when his workday was too hectic for him to come to my Q&A with Bruce Dickinson last month, but hey, it was noon on a Monday. Duh, right?
This guy looked after so many bands, and yet, each seemed like his favorite.
In 2009, I spent a few days on the tour bus with one of Shapiro’s many rising upstarts, The Devil Wears Prada, when Alternative Press readers had voted them Band Of The Year. I wrote an in-depth cover story about the six of them, who ranged in age from 20 to 24 at the time. Daniel Williams, while a powerhouse behind the kit, was very easygoing and always smiled.
In the early days of Prada, Williams was the band business guy; the promoter at the local-band level; the guy who paid for their T-shirts to be printed. He invested $2,000 into their first two tours.
The clean-cut drummer was listening to Taking Back Sunday before he got into Terror, Throwdown, and Madball followed by more progressive heavy acts like Underoath, Misery Signals, and The Bled.
While Williams is into “more chill” music these days (Minus The Bear is a current favorite), he’s exceedingly careful to point out that TDWP work hard to progress without monkeying with the staples of the sound their fans expect.
He doesn’t see anything to be gained by a stylistic about-face, something Rubey and Hranica also mention guarding against.
“I love the new As Cities Burn record [2009’s Hell Or High Water], and I loved their original stuff when they were less experimental,” he points out by way of example. As Cities Burn are good friends of his, but for Prada, “I feel like if we ever want to do a different style, we should make it a new band.”
Williams went to school for computer science, but he realizes a few years of being in a band is enough to set you back in that field as a career choice1. He's more interested in interning for a management company or booking agency someday, but doesn't see TDWP running out of steam anytime soon.
If anything, he’s eager to log as many more road miles and albums as possible if for no other reason than to distance themselves from their novelty Big Tymers cover on 2008’s Punk Goes Crunk comp. "I’ll tell you what I don’t want to be remembered for: ‘Still Fly,’” he says, laughing. “It’s really fun to play because everybody knows every single word. But at the same time, I don’t want people to remember us as a cover-song band, like Alien Ant Farm. ‘Smooth Criminal’ is the only Alien Ant Farm song I remember.”
While watching kids sing along to a novelty cover song is fun and plenty of the band’s song titles are themselves funny, at the end of the day, the group’s faith in Jesus Christ anchors TDWP in something more meaningful…
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As much as they feel blessed by their relatively quick rise - though, as Williams points out, "Panic! At The Disco did their first tour in a bus!" and TDWP did, in fact, pay some dues on a few hard tours, such as the Sounds Of The Underground run in 2007 with bands like Goatwhore - the elusive thing they crave, plain and simple, is respect. Not just for their evangelical message, but for their live show, passion, musicianship, songwriting and their progression from high school band to proficient metal powerhouse.
All of them know the perception beyond the diehards who voted for them to land this cover story: They have a corny name. They’re “little kids” with throat tattoos. Their shows are full of tweens. They have no "cred."
“People don't necessarily take us seriously because we're younger. I guess I'm young because I'm 24, but I consider that getting old," Williams says, laughing. "I love our fans to death, but I really want bearded, fat, metal dudes at our show. I really, really do. And I don't know why. Maybe it's because I've been around this scene for so long.
“But I really want to be a respected metal band. And I think the next record is going to prove that a little bit and show people that The Devil Wears Prada can write some technical stuff but still sound like The Devil Wears Prada.”
Daniel was just as gracious and kind when I ran into him a few years later at the house shared by Shapiro and some of Pierce The Veil, Dave’s first clients.
Vic, Mike, Tony, Jaime, Dave, and Daniel are maybe the sweetest group of guys one could meet in “this thing of ours,” certainly among those doing it at that level. I will always associate them together, and my heart breaks for them.
Shapiro’s legacy will live in every performance from Pierce The Veil, Beartooth, and all of the bands he was so passionate about, as a colleague and as a friend.
May all six people2 who left us yesterday rest in peace.
Daniel did eventually put that computer science degree to work, joining GoPro as a software engineer in 2017. Earlier this month, he accepted a job at Apple.
Worded carefully out of respect for privacy, as their names have not been made public.