Daniel Gerard Joaquin McIntosh Sr. manages the Talking Head Club downtown on Davis Street, where he's better known as "Talking Dan." In the run-up to the club's announced Dec. 31 closing, though, McIntosh and the club's president and liquor license holder, Roman Kuebler, kept mum, declining to talk with
City Paper music editor Jess Harvell. Working on a story about the closing, Harvell consulted
City Paper's news side, searching for ways to hunt up the current owner of the building where the business is located. Ten minutes of internet searching later, and it began to look like
Talking Dan--who has a lengthy record of criminal charges, including a 2005 pot conviction--might be part of the Talking Head's problem. Once McIntosh was informed of the findings on Dec. 28, he addressed such concerns at length over the phone.
"I sold some pot, I got into trouble for it," McIntosh, 31, says of his criminal record. "Apparently now everything I've done in my past is going to be an issue with the Talking Head."
McIntosh says that Kuebler was aware of McIntosh's troubled past with the law before bringing him in as a partner in the business a few years ago, and that Kuebler was understanding when McIntosh was convicted in 2005 in Baltimore County of possession with intent to distribute marijuana.
"He said, `I know you're a good person,'" McIntosh recalls Kuebler saying, "`I'm your friend, and I'm not going to hold this against you.'" Kuebler did not return phone calls for this article.
McIntosh asserts that his legal entanglements have nothing to do with the Talking Head closing, which instead is due to a recent financial coup de grace. "We were beating a horse for four years, to make it move," McIntosh says of the club's struggling operations, "and then stuff like that happens." The "stuff," McIntosh explains, revolves around preparations he and others had made recently to purchase the Talking Head building at 203 Davis St. Their efforts, which McIntosh says included paying for a $2,600 appraisal, came to naught when the club's vending machine provider, Michael J. DePasquale, Jr., got a contract to buy the place from under the Talking Head. Compounding this wrinkle, McIntosh adds, was the club's ongoing inability to make timely rent payments and the status of its lease under changing property owners.
What McIntosh didn't know was that DePasquale filed criminal harassment and telephone misuse charges against him on Nov. 12, 2006, and that a trial date in the case is scheduled for Jan. 4. "I had no idea about that," McIntosh responds when told. "Wow. That's very interesting. I'm on probation for my other shit. My next call will be to my attorney."
DePasquale's complaint states that McIntosh was "threatening me and my wife" because "he objects to me purchasing a property, that we are settling on 11-17-06--he is a tenant there." The complaint says DePasquale has saved recordings of threatening messages from McIntosh. "I have told him to stop," the complaint ends, but McIntosh "continues to threaten our lives and violence [sic]."
DePasquale, reached by phone on Dec. 28, declined to comment, saying the criminal complaint against McIntosh speaks for itself. As for McIntosh's claim that DePasquale sought to snatch the property up from under the Talking Head, DePasquale says, "you're a reporter, you know not to believe that." McIntosh says that DePasquale's contract to buy the building has since lapsed.
McIntosh, meanwhile, says he would prefer the Talking Head go out gracefully, with prospects for re-opening elsewhere. "I wanted to end it on a happy note," he says. "I tell you, I just like rocking and rolling, and I'm trying to end it on a nice, exciting note. We've discussed a few locations--in a neighborhood of some kind, maybe Hampden.
"I grew up in Hampden, and I'd be into bringing something back, to go back and offer something of pure substance," McIntosh continues. "I know the names of a lot of those junkies on those corners in Hampden, 'cause I'm a very rare case, one of the few who I came up with who did not wind up junkies or in jail."
Actually, McIntosh acknowledges, he's been both a junkie and in jail. In the late 1990s, he did time in York, Pa., on drug charges, and earlier in the 1990s "I was a straight-up fucking junkie--but I don't see what that has to do with the Talking Head," McIntosh says. Since then, his troubles have continued, though he says his "intent is pure" and that his more recent legal imbroglios amount to "a few questionable things in the eyes of some," as opposed to his earlier misdeeds, which were "questionable things in the eyes of everyone."
The 2005 Baltimore County pot conviction, McIntosh says, wasn't as big a deal as it appeared. "They had a tip that I was some kind of drug kingpin and came in looking for 100 pounds of weed," he recalls of the Nov. 3, 2004, raid on his Pikesville home. "And they walked away with an ounce and a half."
According to the court file, the raid also turned up lights for growing pot and $4,800 in cash. On the same day, police followed McIntosh to another location in Baltimore City, where they recovered 36 live pot plants, six pounds of pot, $41,742 in cash, and two guns.
"They followed me to his house and busted his house," McIntosh recalls, adding that "it was kind of my fault" the location was raided.
McIntosh was not convicted in connection with the Baltimore City haul, only with what was at his Pikesville home, and he pleaded guilty. The court noted his prior convictions--a 1993 assault and a 1997 drug possession with intent to distribute--and gave him a three-year suspended sentence, 80 hours of community service, and two years of supervised probation.
Just before midnight on Nov. 15, 2004--the day before he was indicted in Baltimore County as a result of the raid--McIntosh was pulled over on Calvert Street in Mount Vernon for having a headlight out. He was found to have a suspended license for outstanding child-support commitments; the arresting officer searched McIntosh and found six Valium pills in his pocket. For that, on Feb. 14, 2005--two days before his Baltimore County pot conviction--McIntosh earned a drug-possession conviction with a 90-day suspended sentence and one year of probation.
Since 2002, when the Talking Head first opened, McIntosh has been embroiled in a series of legal battles with the mothers of two of his three children. McIntosh's need for legal representation on these matters (not to mention the criminal cases), on top of the responsibilities of being a father providing for his children, translate into a need for income that the Talking Head hasn't met recently, he says.
The club, McIntosh says, "doesn't pay anybody anymore, and hasn't been for six months, and I essentially stopped working there." Instead, he says he "does a lot of construction work," and collects rent on properties that he's involved in. "I come from poor," he stresses, "so I just roll around and get it where I can--it's all just money in my pocket." Things are looking up, financially, he says, since he moved recently to Sparks in Baltimore County.
Since McIntosh's problems overlap with the Talking Head's problems--at least insofar as the pending charges filed by DePasquale are concerned--McIntosh seeks to distance himself from the club. "I'm not actually the owner of the company," McIntosh asserts. But the 2005 renewal application for the club's liquor license, which was filled out by Kuebler, the licensee, lists McIntosh as 25 percent owner, with the rest belonging to Kuebler. "That's roughly true," McIntosh says, "but that's just something that Roman said--there's nothing in the company's corporate charter about that." Kuebler did not respond to requests to clear up the questions about the club's ownership structure.
McIntosh, meanwhile, decries City Paper's interest in his problems. "This is not something the alternative press should be doing," he says, adding that "you're going after the wrong side here." His complaints about City Paper aren't new. In the 2005 Best of Baltimore issue, the club was designated "Best Rock Club," and, while praising its esoteric bookings of local and traveling bands, the write-up included an unsupported observation about Talking Head Club's "laissez-faire approach to underage drinking." The paper apologized in print for the misstep, but McIntosh was agitated by the insinuation.
In talking about his problems and the end of the Talking Head for this article, though, McIntosh speaks at length, in reasoned tones, with an it-is-what-it-is attitude.
"I just felt the need to call you and say a few things because it would be a shame for all who are involved with the club to be tarnished by me," he says. "I've looked at my [court] record before, and said, `That guy's a fucking killer,' so I can understand" why it's newsworthy. "But, as crazy as [the record] looks, every single one of those things is easily explained. It's all been blown out of proportion."
