Anyone who has ever strummed a guitar or banged on a set of drums has dreams of forming a band and playing on stage.

Three North County musicians are living that dream.

Tom Sless and Connelly Doan, both 17 and seniors at Dulaney High School, and Aaron Sless, an eighth-grader at Cockeysville Middle School, will perform at the Recher Theater, in Towson, on Sunday, Nov. 8.

Their band, Red Light District, will play original songs composed by Tom Sless and Connelly Doan, along with favorites made famous by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and The Who.

 “We play a good blend of classic rock that adults like and modern alternative rock that younger people like,” said Tom Sless, of Phoenix, who plays guitar and sings.

“But the best thing is when we play one of our own songs, and people come up to us and say, ‘I really liked that one. Who did it?’ and we tell them it’s ours. That feels great.”

All three have an appreciation for music that belies their ages. Doan’s mother, Kathy Dengler, recalled her 1-year-old son being riveted to the television during a concert by tenor Luciano Pavarotti. By the time he was 3, Doan knew all the words to the musical, “Cats.” When asked to bring his favorite Christmas present to his first grade class, he took in a CD by jazz saxophonist Ronnie Laws.

Doan, who lives in Baldwin, is the band’s drummer and vocalist.

Tom and Aaron Sless both own guitars they bought on a family trip to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, the unofficial center of the hippie movement in the 1960s.

“They just love music,” said their father, Steve Sless. “They’re always playing, singing, tapping at the table.”

But the trio has other interests, too.

Aaron, the band’s bass guitarist, plays football for the Cockeysville Recreation Council and plays saxophone in the school band. He takes classes in the Gifted and Talented program and gets good grades.

“I don’t sing and I don’t write music. They needed a bass guitar player and here I am. But that’s OK,” Aaron said at a recent rehearsal.

His older brother, Tom, is quarterback for Dulaney’s football team, plays trumpet in the school band and has just mailed off a handful of college applications.

Doan plays club baseball and varsity baseball at Dulaney. He plays percussion instruments in the school band and wrote his college essays on the importance of music in his life.

Doan and Tom Sless have been playing guitar and drums at each other’s houses since middle school. It was after they began writing their own music that they decided to form a band.

They went onto Wikipedia to find a name and clicked on random pages until they found “Red Light District.”

“We liked the name, then we saw what it meant, but we still liked the name,” Doan said.

According to Wikipedia, a red-light district is “a neighborhood or a part of a neighborhood where businesses connected to the sex industry (sex shops, strip clubs, adult theaters, etc.) exist.”

Their band played this summer at a Margate, N.J., bar and two Baltimore bars, the Ottobar and the Quarter at Bourbon Street. It also participated in WIYY-FM’s Noise in the Basement series, which provides a chance for local bands to get air time.

The band made a demo CD this summer of four original songs at Sheffield Studio, in Phoenix. Since then, Sless and Doan have written five more songs.

“I was real impressed with them,” said Alex Silver, a freelance audio engineer at Sheffield who helped them make the CD. “It was their first time in the studio, and it’s so different from rehearsing or playing at home. They were real consistent.”

The four original songs they recorded can be heard by going to www.myspace.com/redlightdistrict09.

Doors open at 6 p.m. on Nov. 8 for performances at the Recher Theater, at 512 York Road, Towson.
To contact Red Light District, e-mail redlightdistrict09@gmail.com.

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user comments (2)

user musicman says...

I caught this band last week and they were awesome! Great sound and some powerful vocals!

Posted 9:59 AM, 11.13.09

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user musicman says...

These guys are coming back to the Recher on december 20th. Don't miss this show! Gotta love "eldorado!"

Posted 4:44 PM, 11.19.09

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