I should write more about the career of singer and songwriter Dan Hartman, but here’s something quick. Dan’s most famous solo song is “I Can Dream About You” from the “Streets of Fire” soundtrack, hitting #6 in 1984. This is the version you heard on the radio and the video I remember from MTV. That’s Dan’s voice, though in the movie, you’d hear singer Winston Ford. The person who looks like he’s singing isn’t Hartman or Ford. That’s actor Stoney Jackson, who you can also spot in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video and Disney’s 1994 “Angels in the Outfield.” The “back-up singers” are actors Robert Townsend, Mykelti Williamson, and Grand L. Bush.
There’s a second version of the video where you see Hartman’s face. The movie clip is playing on TVs in a bar and Hartman is the bartender.
So that’s the face behind the voice, but there’s also a song you hear on classic rock radio all the time, and never realized it was written and sung by Dan Hartman. That’s because the band is named for someone else. Here’s Dan and The Edgar Winter Group, around 1973 and “Free Ride.”
As a songwriter and producer, Dan Hartman worked with everyone from The Plasmatics to James Brown to Disney, co-writing a song for “Oliver & Company.” Dan Hartman died in 1994, just 43, of an AIDS-related brain tumor.