Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).
That's right folks, everyone's favorite all-male hard rock Lady Gaga (+ other female pop artists) cover band returns to Boston — this Thursday night at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge! Be there, or be having less fun than the rest of us.
And here's a little taste of the tunes...
In case you missed out on seeing Boston's premiere all-male hard rock Lady Gaga cover band at the Midway this past weekend, you're in luck: we got the whole thing on tape! Well, technically on built-on digital flash hardrive but, you know, whatever. The audio quality is a little rough (because isn't it always?), but you get the gist. You can watch a playlist of the full set over on YouTube, but here are a few gems from the night: "You & I"
"Bad Romance"
Plus we had a few surprises this time in the form of non-Gaga female pop artists (because frankly, Gaga's catalog is kind of limited, and we needed new material). Like this:
In anticipation of this Saturday's Alejandro & the Fame show at the Midway Cafe in JP, we put together another quick demo of one of our songs. So, sorry, this isn't a new Lady Gaga song, but rather a better version of an already existing Lady Gaga song, done by us. This isn't the final mix or master, but it's a good idea of how we rock (and if you really feel like bringing the mosh and punching someone in the face, fast forward about 3 minutes for the breakdown 'cause it's awesome)
Quick update about a few events I've got coming up. One, I'll doing a show THIS Friday, December 14 at the All Asia in Central Square, Cambridge with my / Boston's premiere all-male hard rock Lady Gaga cover band Alejandro and the Fame. These shows are always a blast for everyone involved, and are almost always guaranteed to sell out, so make you get there (lookin' at you, People On The Other Side Of The River Who Missed Our Last Show Because It Was Allllllll The Way In JP Oh BooHoo). Admission is a scant $6, and we hit the stage around 10:30pm! I'm also excited to announce that I'll be performing a short set for MORTIFIED at Oberon on Saturday, December 22. For those who haven't heard of this, MORTIFIED is a night of performance in which real-live grown adult humans read horribly horribly embarrassing things from their high school journals / AIM transcripts / etc, and hilarity ensues. And so, during my set, you'll be treated to some particularly painful gems that I dugout from my high school and middle school songwriting notebooks. Ever wonder what kind of angsty tunes I wrote when I was 14 (including "Dot of my 'I'" and instant never-classic "Fuck You Hotchkiss Lane")? Here's your only chance to hear them live! More information to come when I got it.
And finally, I was asked to write up a few scripts for the 2nd Annual Boston One-Minute Play Festival at the Boston Playwrights Theatre, January 5-7. I believe the evening as a whole contains about 100 one-minute plays (yes, really, but c'mon, that's barely an hour and a half!), so I'm sure there's going to be some great variety. And if you don't like a play, well, just wait one minute! I will say that writing a play, complete with a status quo, conflict, rising action,and denouement is remarkably more difficult than you might expect it to be, but I'm pretty pleased with what I came up with (and I should be blogging a bit more about it soon over at their website).
That's all for now, folks! See you Friday!
Boston's premiere all-male Lady Gaga cover band plays the Midway Cafe in JP! Doors at 8pm! Be there! I can literally walk my equipment over to the club from my house! Wooohoo!
Oh yeah, and here's the Facebook event. Whoops. Sorry, I got excited.
And remember: just dance, motherfuckers
Tonight. Alejandro and the Fame rocks your favorite seedy drag club in downtown Boston. Drag queens upstairs; all-male glam rock Lady Gaga cover songs downstairs. You've been warned.
Not really; just the Milky Way bar/restaurant in Jamaica Plain. Great pizza, great drinks, great rock and roll; Alejandro and the Fame will be headlining tonight's Halloween show. Costumes encouraged! Come on out for a night of glitter, mohawks, distortion, and monsters.
Earlier today, consumer technology weblog Gizmodo.com made a post about accidentally ending up on an OKCupid date with the world champion of Magic: The Gathering.Under normal circumstances, this could be a fairly entertaining anecdote. Instead, Gizmodo.com intern Alyssa Bereznak uses the opportunity to show how much of a terrible, judgmental human being she is, and little more. The first and most obvious problem with this article: how is it newsworthy? The "point" of the story is to illustrate that people often exclude important and possibly dealbreaking details in their online dating profiles, and that we should all be more careful and "Google the shit out of your next online date."
Really, Alyssa? As your article indicates, Jon Finkel was about the only eligible bachelor that contacted on you on OKCupid. Despite his other redeeming qualities — Magic: The Gathering was the ultimate dealbreaker? While I've never been a Magic player myself (as in, regular/collecting player; yes, I've played the game, usually when Brian McGackin talks me into it), I struggle to see how this could be the ultimate, most disgusting and irredeemable sin that an online date could make. Maybe the author wasn't aware that Magic world champions can make upwards of $230,000 per tournament. Sorry, Alyssa — you just lost your Sugardaddy!
The most insulting part of the article is the way she compares Magic: The Gathering champion status to divorce and single parenthood as crucial details that one should be expected in his/her online dating profile. Did you ever stop to think, Melissa, that Jon does not want his championship status to be such an important factor in his relationships? To some people, he's a celebrity (he does have his own playing card, after all) — might that status skew his relationship prospects at all? He's a Magic: The Gathering rock star, and I'm sure there are plenty of geeky groupies out there looking for a piece of his mana. What if Chris Evans was looking for dates online, and decide not to include the fact that he's, you know, Captain America, for fear of meeting online desperate starfuckers and scaring off all of the ladies he'd actually want to date? To prove my point, here's a the exact same story, with a few minor details changed. This time, instead of a Magic: The Gathering world champion, my online date is secretly — well, you'll see.
Earlier this month, I came home drunk and made an OKCupid profile. What the hell, I thought. I'm busy, I'm single, and everybody's doing it. Sure, I'd heard some stories, but what was the worst that could happen?
Two weeks into my online dating experiment, OKCupid had broken me down. It was like the online equivalent to hanging out alone in a dark, date-rapey, drum-n-bass club. Every time I signed on, I was hit by a barrage of creepy messages. "hey qt, iwud lik veru much for me nd u to be marry n procreate." Or "you look strong hehe." So when I saw an IM from a girl named Stefanie that said, "You should go out with me :)" I was relieved. She seemed normal. I gave her my name. "Google away," I said. Then dinner was ready, and I signed off without remembering to do the same.
We met for a drink later that week. Stefanie was short and thin, dressed in garish glam-punk outfit that either looked like it was way too coordinated or scrapped together at the last minute from Goodwill. We started talking about normal stuff—family, work, college. I told her that I was a musician. And then she casually mentioned that she was as well.
"Actually," she paused. "I'm fucking Lady Gaga"
I laughed. Oh that's a funny joke! I thought. This girl is funny! But the earnest look on her face told me she wasn't kidding.
I gulped my beer and thought about the life of a pop star, and the fashion celebrity. After all, I'd taken an Andy Warhol class, too, and as much I was never really into what Gaga was doing, I certainly understood it (or at least, I thought I did). But before I could dig deeper, we had to go. Stefanie had bought us tickets for a drag show in the basement of a seedy leather bar. It was not a particularly romantic evening.
The next day I Googled my date and a wealth of information flowed into my browser. A Wikipedia page! Competition videos! Fanboy forums comparing him to Chuck Norris! This chick wasn't just some professional who dabbled in music at a tender age. She's Lady motherfucking Gaga!
Just like you're obligated to mention you're divorced or have a kid in your online profile, shouldn't someone also be required to disclose any indisputable international popstar status? But maybe to her it was a long time ago? We met for round two later that week.
At dinner I got straight down to it. Did she still perform? "Yes." Strike one. How often? "I'm preparing for a tour next month." Strike two. Who did she hang out with? "I've met all my best friends through the music industry and drag shows." Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. Eventually I even felt a little bit bad that I care at all about her career. Here was a gal who had dedicated a good chunk of her life to becoming a prototypical celebrity/popstar, on a date with a guy who fancies dreams of singer-songwriter brilliance. This is what happens, I thought, when you leave things out of your online profile.
I later found out that Stefanie infiltrated her way into OKCupid dates with at least two other people I sort of know, including one of my co-workers. Fathers, warn your sons! This could happen to you. You'll think you've found a normal, edgy indie girl with a job, only to end up sharing goat cheese with genderqueer popstar far too obsessed with deconstructing the popular notions of "celebrity" based on what she once heard in an Andy Warhol class she took at NYU.
Maybe I'm an OKCupid asshole for calling it that way. Maybe I'm shallow for not being able to see past Stefanie's international superstardom. I'll own that. But there's a larger point here: that judging people on shallow stuff is human nature; one person's pop stardom is another person's fingernail biting, or sports obsession, or verbal tic. No online dating profile in the world is comprehensive enough to highlight every person's peccadillo, or anticipate the inane biases that each of us lugs around. There's no snapshot in the world that can account for our snap judgments.
So what did I learn? Google the shit out of your next online date. Like, hardcore.
We've been working on these for about a month between recording, mixing, and mastering, but I'm finally satisfied with the results — and I hope you are as well! All instruments were recorded/engineered by my, except for the lead vocals which were done by Paul Cantillon (aka "Cody Grey"). We'll be sending these out to some clubs as we try to book some more shows, so keep an eye out for our updated events list. In the meantime, enjoy, and tell your friends to do the same. [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/1035013" height="200"]
Here's another look at one of our new Alejandro and the Fame demos — "Telephone" by Lady Gaga (featuring Beyoncé). It's still a little rough, but you get the idea. And I mean, c'mon — Beyoncé's breakdown has never been this hardcore.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19498710"]
Alejandro and the Fame: Boston's premiere all-male Lady Gaga cover band. Putting the fucking metal into Lady Gaga since 2011.
....Or, more accurately, brand new Alejandro and the Fame demos of Lady Gaga songs, because that's what we do — glam rock Lady Gaga covers with more Mohawks, more glitter, and more balls. Here's a preliminary mix of "Paparazzi" that was done on my laptop over the weekend. It's still not the final version, and we've got a few more tunes to come for your listening pleasure, but I hope you enjoy it anyway! [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18819764"]
For those who missed (or those who simply want to relive it), here's the complete (minus the talky parts) Alejandro & the Fame on the Day Before the Rapture. It was pretty epic [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz9Z5AOnGBA&w=480&h=303]
Read MoreFriday night was the first performance of my all-male Lady Gaga cover band, Alejandro & the Fame. In light of the then-impending rapture, we changed our name to Alejandro & the Harbingers of the Apocalypse. We have since returned to the Fame.
Audio/video to come, but for now, here's some pictures to tide you over:
Yes, I'm wearing leopard print leggings and jean shorts. No, I do not own the leopard print leggings. Yes, I did make my own jean shorts.
Photos by Justin Seward
Does anyone else find it as strange as I do that people like Lady Gaga and Bob Dylan stand up as examples of individualism, and preach about being yourself, et cetera (Gaga more so), while exerting a fairly conscious and contrived effort to be anything but themselves? It's come to my attention that we live in a society where we admire individualism and self as a construct, a world that stresses not just being yourself, but the active creation of the You you want to be.
I swear, I'm not trying to preach anything, or assert any well-formed ideas; I'm just trying to get your braingears moving.
That was pretty much the genesis of the new piece I just put up on FiveByFiveHundred.com, about a boy who longs to grow up and be himself, and the trials he faces along the way.
I have to apologize for the radio silence here at ThomDunn.net over the last few weeks. Layne Anderson, a close friend and former roommate of mine, passed away unexpectedly on April 7th, and as much as I've kept up with everything (well, almost everything), time has been rather a blur. I've chronicled the situation as impersonally as possible over at FiveByFiveHundred.com in two posts — Shark Grief, about my own grieving process, and iWake, which as entirely fictional account of a some inappropriate gallows humor inspired by the situation of which Layne would have most certainly approved. Meanwhile, this week's entry steps away from the morbidity and explores the quantum mechanics of one night stands as interpreted through Bell's Theorem, using the Shrödinger's Cat experiment as a proof. Hopefully, that sounds ridiculous (and ridiculously intriguing) enough for you to check out Shrödinger's Cat Call, also over at FiveByFiveHundred.com.
Also in the last two weeks, we've officially opened Sons of the Prophet at the Huntington, which is then moving to the Roundabout Theatre Company Off-Broadway in the Fall. Plus, I did some filming for Art & Design of the 20th & 21st Centuries and the Boston Print Fair, did a small reading of my new play, True Believers (which is set at a Comic Book Convention and features a cameo by the Cyborg Head of Stan Lee, among other things), and started rehearsals and arrangements for my (wait for it) all-male hard rock Lady Gaga tribute band, Alejandro & the Fame, which is going to be every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Come check us out on May 20th at the afterparty for Propeller Theatre Company's all-male production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors at the Huntington's B.U. Theatre.
Woo. Okay. I think that's it. Tune in next week for your regularly scheduled programming.
