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Dan ‘The Automator’ Nakamura: A Much Better Tomorrow

Dan Nakamura. Photo courtesy of Pam Nashel.

By Kimberly Chun

Producer, engineer and mixer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura doesn’t look like a man who dispenses style tips to bejeweled, Versace-clad hip-hop superstars and scruffy, shoe-gazing indie rockers. Nothing against his short-cropped black hair, subdued sky-blue sports shirt and tasteful chrome watch — but the San Francisco native doesn’t look like a fashion barometer. Today, he’s kicking back in the Potrero Hill offices of 75 Ark, his record company, propping his leg against the wall and sipping his water straight up.

But that mild-mannered appearance masks the heart of a hip-hop style consul. Nakamura started turning heads — and getting laughs — with his slick suits and tongue-in-chic appearances as Nathaniel Merriweather, half of Handsome Boy Modeling School, along with Stetsasonic DJ and De La Soul producer Prince Paul, who dubbed himself Chest Rockwell. Named after a skit on the Chris Elliott cult TV program “Get a Life,” Handsome Boy Modeling School had Nakamura emerging from behind the mixing board, dispensing style tips at an in-store show at Amoeba and on TV programs like MTV’s “Lovelines” and opening for Radiohead — instead of hunkering down among his old synths, tape echo and samplers at his San Francisco project studio, the Glue Factory.

“We were giving style tips to Thom [Yorke] of Radiohead, and they were pretty bizarre. He was wearing this big cableknit sweater and we told him to cut off the sleeves to show off his muscles,” says Nakamura, 34, with a laugh. “At the L.A. show, we encouraged Colin [Greenwood] the bass player to come out in waiter garments and serve us champagne while we were playing. That was a really handsome moment.”

Nakamura chuckles to himself, looking more like your nice guy next door than an automatic fashionista. The characters and the jokes were designed to tweak the self-aggrandizing pretensions of a certain school of rappers.

“We just kind of changed up the way people perceived hip hop,” Nakamura says jovially. “In hip hop music, a lot of people pretend they’re big notorious gangsters and they take on drug dealer names and names like Tony Montana or Manuel Escobar. We were just like, ‘Let’s run a modeling school.’ It just felt like the right thing to do.”

But the record was dead serious musically, he adds. The pair got a impressive party of their peers involved in the project: Del the Funkee Homosapien, Sean Lennon, Father Guido Sarducci, Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, DJ Shadow and Mike D of the Beastie Boys.

Some of those players surface in Nakamura’s latest project, Deltron 3030. For this futuristic excursion into the year 3030, Del the Funkee Homosapien — as his sci-fi cartoon character Deltron Zero — contributed the rhymes. Kid Koala — a.k.a. Eric San, playing Skiznod the Boy Wonder — manned the turntables, and Nakamura — as the Cantankerous Captain Aptos — produced, arranged, mixed and composed the synth-swept, eerie and infectious sounds. Guests such as Lennon, Damon Albarn of Blur, Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies, Peanut Butter Wolf and Money Mark back up the 3030 crew, as Del raps about a post-apocalyptic world where everyone wants to be a DJ and producer and where international banks control the populace—a scenario that doesn’t sound too farfetched today.

“It’s about everyday life in the future-basically how things that happen in the 20th century are going to affect us in the future,” explains Nakamura. “There’s a lot about globalization and corporate takeovers, monopolies, how companies like CNN and Microsoft are taking over stuff under the auspices of being better for people, how that’s an insidious wave.”

This CD and a series of Deltron shows, which ended in San Francisco’s Maritime Hall last week, are just the latest in a long line of compelling projects by Nakamura. The noted producer, engineer and mixer has tackled hip hop and indie rock projects ranging from the Beastie Boys, Dr. Octagon and DJ Shadow to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cornershop and Stereolab. But he got his start in music as an adolescent classical violinist — no surprise for any Asian American who grew up immersed in orchestra practice, college prep courses and SAT tutorials.

Those violin lessons didn’t stop Nakamura from cultivating his love of pop, soul and rap music. After he started DJing in clubs during his teen years, he began doing remixes, put out the influential record “Music to Be Murdered By,” and hooked up with the college kids who became artists on the Bay Area label Soulsides: DJ Shadow, Blackalicious and Latryx. He engineered most of their early records at his home studio, including the Shadow’s ear-opening “Endtroducing,” which ended up at the top of many critics’ “Best of 1996” lists. That led to the Doctor Octagon album, Dr. Octagonecologyst, with Kool Keith and DJ Q-Bert of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz; it’s considered by many to be a ground-breaking recording — with no small thanks to Nakamura’s old-world strings, neo-Gothic synths and menacingly cool, dub-inflected textures. That in turn led to gigs such as mixing “The Negotiation Limerick File” on the Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty CD and the reassessment of early recordings such as his A Better Tomorrow EP, now re-released as A Much Better Tomorrow on 75 Ark.

Today when he’s not working on recordings for bands like the Guerrillas or planning the second Handsome Boy Modeling School album, Nakamura hangs out with friends like Money Mark, Hatori and Lennon when he’s in New York. So does Nakamura feel like he’s part of a supercool Asian musical mafia? “It’s funny,” he says. “At first, I ended up working with a lot of Indian people, Cornershop, then [the album] ‘Bombay the Hard Way’ and stuff with the Ali Khan family, and Talvin Singh was talking to me. It was just sort of random. I just like working with people I enjoy, friends of mine.”