Jered Threatin Says He Has Booked Shows for Ten Fake Bands
Jered Threatin (nee Jered Eames), the L.A. musician who last year booked an entire failed European tour using a handful of fake business entities, pseudonyms and fake social network numbers, and ended up going viral as a result of its catastrophic failure and elaborate con-like scheme, has an important anniversary coming up this week: on Friday, November 1, he will perform at the Underworld in London, one year to the date of his first show there. It should be a curious experience, to say the least: Threatin has been teasing a performance-art-style show like no other, so I’m genuinely wondering what the folks who venture out, presumably a few dozen of them, will witness.
Meanwhile, Threatin has granted a new interview to Ultimate Guitar. Alongside some requisite chest-puffing and self-hype — to be expected given his history — there are a couple of nuggets I found interesting.
First, this absolutely brutal burn leveled against the bandmates who accompanied him to Europe last year. The bandmates who, I might add, traveled to Europe on a whim, lost a ton of their own money, and won judgments against Jered in court afterwards.
“My backing band for this event is Elijah Stavely on drums, Chris Jaxon on bass, and Brandon Herrin on rhythm guitar. On my last tour, I had the tour booked before I even hired a backing band. So, I ended up hiring some low-level people that would effectively just stand there, hold instruments, and pose as a band. I knew we were playing to no one, so I wasn’t particularly concerned with their musical abilities. This time around I had more time to audition musicians and assess skill. It was a much different process.”
Later, Threatin revealed that he’s got another trick up his sleeve: he claims to have booked shows elsewhere in the U.K. under fake bands names at two of the venues in which he performed to empty rooms last year, simply to prove it could be done again, and that when those days come he will arrive to perform surprise shows as Threatin. He also claims to have invented eight other fake bands, each with their own unique backstory and faked online presence:
“I have already begun booking my next concept tour; The Threatin Incognito Tour. I have created 10 fake bands, all with their own band names, backstories, and the right image and social media numbers to fool booking agents and venues. I have already booked two shows at two of the venues I fooled during my stunt last year; the Bristol Exchange and The Asylum in Birmingham. Hiding in the event schedules of these two venues are bands that do not exist. But, they were booked solely on image and social media numbers. We’ll see if these venues are able to identify the fake bands before the day of the event where I will otherwise arrive and perform a surprise show. I have done this just to show it could be done, again. 8 more venues in the US and UK will have the same quarrel. The industry is built on lies, so, lies is what you feed it.
It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out, but my guess is a whole lot of empty rooms followed by diminishing returns media attention-wise. Meanwhile, London this Friday… any MetalSucks readers going?
