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Afterschool program building Lincoln's next generation of musicians...
BY MICAH MERTES, Lincoln Journal Star
Tuesday, Dec 16, 2008
At the Academy, learning to be a rock star
After the school day's final bell rings, three of the members of the local band Where's Charlie? head to the fourth floor of Irving Middle School for their Academy of Rock class.
Charlie Tauzin, 14, the group's manic frontman, just got in trouble with the principal for wearing a shirt boasting a swear word. These guys are irked. Tired of sitting at a desk and saying "Mr." and "Mrs." Ready to play their guitars and drums as loud as they please.
"We're writing a song right now about one of our teachers," Tauzin says, "and it's just kind of transformed from this one teacher to authority in general. Just like how pretty much none of this is fair."
The guys jump, holler, thrash and tackle their instruments with the verve of people who have just spent the last several hours doing something they loathe.
When you first hear about Lincoln's Academy of Rock program, you might think: "Ugh... kids with guitars." Or you might dismiss it as nice, cute, silly fun.
But then you hear the students play.
This is something more than kids with guitars. This is, perhaps, the future of the Lincoln music scene.
The Academy of Rock program was launched about two years ago by Jason Schmidt through the Northeast Family Center. Schmidt had started a similar after-school program called the School of Rock through the YMCA, but that was just one class. Schmidt wanted to expand the program and give more kids a chance to find their inner rocker.
"I thought, if we're really going to get kids excited about doing something with their lives, we need to meet them with the things that they're learning to do after school," Schmidt said.
Since its inception, the academy has grown from one class a semester to 14, from a handful of students to about 150 ranging in age from kindergarten to high school from different Lincoln area schools. There's now even a class for adults.
Dozens of original bands have emerged from the program. Some have managers, and almost all have played shows at downtown venues.
What sets Academy of Rock apart from typical music instruction is that the program teaches a lot more than music. Classes focus on stage presence, writing original music, using a sound board, booking shows, making your own merchandise, finding a manager, networking and building your own band MySpace page. That's basically, Schmidt says, "all of the things any musician would like to know when they're first starting off."
The education in all the stuff that goes with the music is giving the Academy students a leg up.
The band Dodging Bullets, for instance, already has pages on MySpace, YouTube, iLike and PureVolume, and its members are just in seventh grade. The outfit Third World War sounds as good as any professional cover band. First grader Kaitlyn Foley, 7, who's still playing solo, can play the keyboard and drums for several songs and sing a pretty solid rendition of 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up?"
"I'm very excited to see what the Lincoln music scene is going to look like in, you know, 10 years when all these kids are playing at the age of getting to play the bar scene," says Jarrett Portnoy, 23, an Academy instructor and the drummer for the local band Julia Knew. "There's plenty of high school bands out there that don't sound nearly as good that have been playing together for, you know, three or four years. Considering that they're in sixth and seventh grade and already doing that, I think it's really going to be kind of a force in the Lincoln music scene once these kids start maturing."
As Tauzin of Where's Charlie? puts it: "It's going to be like a mini punk class of '77, where all these bands just exploded.
"It's going to be a microsize version of that in my opinion because suddenly there's going to be like, 'Hey, why so many good bands from Nebraska?' and everybody's going to be like, 'I don't know, what happened?'"
