Clik here to view.
(Photo by Dion Ogust)
Paul Green, of School of Rock fame, has a raspy voice and man-child ways that make his cinematic doppelganger Jack Black look like a naïf. He bounds about Todd Rundgren’s old Utopia Studios, reading inspiring notes from his iPhone or leaping onto the stage to thrash out some licks to the music he’s rehearsing a roomful of local kids through — Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” — with a minimum of self-consciousness. He’s as rock ‘n roll, in his jeans and black shirt, slight paunch and oft-noted ass crack bared, as anything bad ass not seen on a record cover or in some publicist’s promo package. He’s as rock ‘n roll, to put it another way, as Woodstock’s ever been.
Yet his Academy of Rock’s first sessions, bounding for a pair of May performances of both the Floyd classic and a full-throated kids tribute to the evergreen wonders of Led Zeppelin, are also as professionally run and organized, in their way, as the recording industry that once kept the town’s economy humming…or the Woodstock Day School where Green’s kids and so many of these 50-plus students learning their rockin’ craft, go.
“If you know your songs, sit in a chair…Jody, get your ass on the floor,” he’s bellowing at the start of his Academy’s weekly three hour session Saturday, April 13. “Now when I call your name I want you to say something nice about the person who’s just spoken before you, got that?”
The Paul Green Rock Academy, which he owns and operates with his wife Lisa, started up last month and is planning concerts of the Floyd on May 17 and 18, and “A Tribute to Led Zeppelin” May 31 and June 1 at the Byrdcliffe Barn, where Green put on a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar late last summer…a room who’s size, he says, “is perfect for this.” They’re currently negotiating purchase of a permanent home, along with necessary permitting, not far from where we are in Bearsville, but just over the Saugerties line.
Most importantly, they’ve recently finished organizing a curriculum for their first-ever Summer Camp Intensives, which will include such offerings as “Make a Kids’ Rock Album With Marco Benevento” from July 8 through 12, “Rock Strings Withy Tracy Bonham,” from July 15 to 19, “Experimental Analog Recording with Aaron Freeman (aka Gene Ween)” from July 15 to 19, “Songwriting Workshop with Gail Ann Dorsey,” from July 22 through 26, and “Percussion Camp with Jason Bowman” from July 29 through August 6. All limited to 16 students max, each, at $375 per student.
And there are the sessions like those in action at Utopia right now, on Fridays and Saturdays, which will repeat each season, always focusing on classic albums or band set lists for kids to learn, perfect, and perform.
“We’ll likely do something focused on Woodstock musicians — The Band, John Sebastian — in the fall,” Green says, later (after these intense classes are done with for the week). “We’re looking into a tribute to the Woodstock Festival for next summer.”
Ah, that festival…It turns out it, and producer Michael Lang, had something in getting Green and his idea of rock education to town.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Green was a Philly-area musician teaching guitar on the side when he started taking in more students, forming a class, in the late 1990s. By 2002 he was borrowing money to start his first Paul Green School of Rock Music in a dilapidated building, and after Spin Magazine profiled him and his rock teaching methods a few months later, he became the focus of a VH1 shoot, then the Hollywood film starring Jack Black was made and released (claiming coincidence, in true rock and roll style), and eventually another documentary (Rock School) was finished, which eventually came out in 2005. By which time Green got bought out and started working new takes on his rock education ideas.