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Dan Kennedy reads Rock On at Quimby’s!

Friday, February 15th, 7:00 PM
FREE

McSweeney’s contributor Dan Kennedy will read from his book, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad — an absurd, funny, and outrageous take on his stint as Creative Marketing Director at Atlantic Records.

How do you land a sweet six-figure marketing gig at the hallowed record label known for launching acts like Led Zeppelin and Stone Temple Pilots? Wait, before you answer, we’ll also throw in a plush office, a hip assistant, an expense account, and free Starbucks coffee. For all of this you have to have a rock-and-roll resume like Dan Kennedy’s.

*Dressed up as a member of Kiss every Halloween
*Memorized Led Zeppelin IV by the age of ten
*Fronted a lip-synch band in junior high
*Played drums in an almost all-girl band
*Was employed as a college DJ as a college drop-out
*Worked at a record store

So when he’s hired by a major label Dan Kennedy thinks he has landed a pass to the secret kingdom of rock and roll. The problem is, he’s basically walked into an episode of The Office. Whether he’s creating an ad campaign celebrating 25 years of love songs by Phil Collins or trying to grasp the rationale behind cross-promoting a ladies’ razor with Jewel’s new single about not selling out, Kennedy’s in way over his head. And from the looks of those sitting around the boardroom, he’s not alone.

Cameos by aging pop stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs, Iggy Pop, and others amp up a hilarious power ballad to rock and roll, office life, and all the working stiffs who’ve done their damndest to hide from human resources when the ax falls.

A regular contributor to McSweeney’s and host of the popular Moth StorySLAM in New York, DAN KENNEDY is the author of the widely acclaimed Loser Goes First. His work has appeared in GQ; Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s Humor Category; Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists; and other publications.

“Dan Kennedy’s book is a delightful and delirious evocation of the love/hate relationship virtually my whole generation (and several before and after, come to think of it) have had with the music industry basically our whole lives. The difference is that the rest of us may have dreamed it, but Kennedy actually lived it out, in the ugliest trenches of the never-ending battle between commerce and rock and roll, and lived to tell the tale. The results aren’t pretty, but luckily for him, and us, they are hilarious.”
– Todd Hanson, Headwriter of the The Onion

Join dancing girl press authors, Kristy Odelius and Kathleen Rooney, as they read from their recently released collections.

About the Authors:
Kristy Odelius’s reviews, articles and poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, ACM, Versal, Combo, Moria, Diagram, Pavement Saw, La Petite Zine and others. Her work has been anthologised in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, a new volume from Cracked Slab books. She is Assistant Professor of English at North Park University, where she teaches poetry and British Romantic literature. Strange Trades her first full-length collection of poems is due out in 2008. Bee Spit, a chapbook length sequence, will be released in November 2007 by dancing girl press.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her first book is Reading with Oprah: the Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas, 2005); it will be released in a paperback with new material in Spring 2008. Her second book, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness, poetry collaborations with Elisa Gabbert, will be published by Otoliths Books in winter 2008. Her third book, Live Nude Girl: an Idiosyncratic History of Art Modeling, is forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in 2009. A 2003 recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, her own poems, as well as collaborations with Elisa Gabbert, have appeared in a variety of journals, as have her essays and criticism. A chapbook Something Really Wonderful (w/ Elisa Gabbert) will be released in November 2007 by dancing girl press.

More info at http://www.dancinggirlpress.com