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Smash the Guitar for Mommy
With its motto, 'No Canoes -- Lots of Rock,' Camp Jam in Georgia puts a
parent-approved heavy metal riff on kids' summer enrichment.
By Ellen Barry, Times Staff Writer
ATLANTA — A small hand appeared at the door, followed by a small boy,
his black T-shirt falling almost to his knees. He looked around at the
other children and asked, in the bell-clear voice that precedes puberty:
"Is this the punk class?"
It was. The teacher, the 20-year-old guitarist for a band called Genghis
Tron, was introducing a roomful of students to the throbbing power
chords that form the backbone of punk and heavy metal.
A few doors away, a professional voice coach was helping 14-year-old
Cory Blanchette rehearse a song he had never heard: "Should I Stay or
Should I Go," which was recorded by The Clash eight years before he was
born.
And in every direction, along the halls of a Jewish day school outside
Atlanta, children of the suburbs were being instructed in speed-metal,
death-metal, ripping, shredding, maniacally insane guitar solos, and
jumping onto the bass drum for dramatic effect without hurting yourself.
It is a sign of the times that parents in the Atlanta area are lining up
this summer to send their children to Camp Jam, a $495 weeklong day camp
under the direction of Jeff Carlisi, former guitarist for the arena rock
band 38 Special, which had major hits in "Hold on Loosely" and "Rockin'
Into the Night."
In his weaker moments, Carlisi wondered whether his concept (the camp's
motto is "No Canoes — Lots of Rock") would find the right audience in a
culture that has moved away from high-voltage rock 'n' roll.
But the 9- to 17-year-old campers who showed up here recently wore their
hair over their eyes and spoke with reverence of Jimmy Page. Their taste
for hard rock had been nurtured by baby boomers — parents able to see
heavy metal as a wholesome, enriching after-school activity.
"Ten or 20 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do this," Carlisi
said. "Now I have parents coming up to me and saying, 'I just want to
thank you for what you've done for my child. You've changed them.' "
Carlisi, 51, can well remember the age of the guitar hero, when Duane
Allman and Eric Clapton were worshiped as gods. Through the 1970s and
into the 1980s, Carlisi and his bandmates in 38 Special wore their hair
long and their shirts half-buttoned. Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band they
often played with, their solos were so intense that, as one ardent
reviewer wrote in 1984, "Double-Barreled Howitzer might be a more
accurate moniker for this six-man musical assault team." Intensity,
Carlisi said, "was a kind of doctrine for us."
Throughout the 1990s — a period of baleful melodies and grunge chic —
Carlisi watched and waited. His band was playing motorcycle rallies and
county fairs; young people, eyes shining in recognition, approached him
and said, "My mom loved your band."
A hypothesis was forming. If the band's fans had become parents, then
maybe they would encourage their children to learn hard rock.
Carlisi and his business partner, Dan Lipson, rented space and tested
their theory this summer in the heart of Atlanta's wealthy northern
suburbs. Applicants were required to have six months' experience playing
or singing "in a semi-structured environment," but were not expected to
have played in a band.
On the first day of camp — one of four weeklong sessions that will
continue through July — Carlisi waited outside while station wagons and
minivans dropped off 70 campers. They came with instruments in cases,
their T-shirts declaring allegiance to the East Village underground club
CBGB and the bands that played there.
The truth was, many of these campers looked like they would be more
comfortable in Little League. The first time they were asked to stand
onstage, said one instructor, some trembled.
That day, the counselors sat together and, in a single, intense hour,
grouped them into bands. The rest of the week proceeded like a
particularly loud psychology experiment.
"These kids, they want to rip, they want to shred," Carlisi said.
"They're hungry for all of it."
Lesson 1: Make it a little more dirty.
Josh Bell, 11, stood in front of vocal coach Felicia Sorensen, singing,
in the voice he had cultivated in a church choir, "Smells Like Teen
Spirit," Kurt Cobain's grunge anthem. He sang in the sweet tenor you
might expect from a young Harry Potter.
"A mulatto," he sang. "An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido."
Sorensen, who has sung backup for Usher and Amy Grant, watched
critically from across the room. When she works with young vocalists,
she trains them to "bring up emotion" from their lives. She and Josh
were working on anger.
"Remember," she told him, "You're a rock star."
The students at Camp Jam pose a considerable rock 'n' roll problem in
that many of them are, frankly, adorable. For a set of black-clad,
metal-friendly counselors, the challenge was to instill them with enough
confidence to not perform perfectly.
By Wednesday, 13-year-old Jennifer Wright and her band had practiced
"Should I Stay or Should I Go" so often that it began to sound polished.
It was all wrong. Instructor Alan Yates, a singer-songwriter in a black
T-shirt and silver hoop earrings, took them aside. "Make it more
rocking. A little more dirty, and not so pretty," he told the band.
"It's not a pretty song."
They disappeared into a practice room, where they figured out something
important: If they learned the song well enough, they could start
"messing around and making weird noises," as Jennifer put it. The next
time the band got onstage, the sound was ragged and a little distorted.
Yates approved.
Their inhibitions fell away. Jennifer — at 13, darkly pretty and taller
than any of the boys in her band — played so hard she broke guitar
strings.
Lesson 2: Have creative differences.
Here, as in all great rock ventures, egos collide. Drummers deliver
ultimatums. Artists complain to their parents. On the second day, a
camper came up to Carlisi and said, "I think my mom called yesterday.
She said she wants me to be in another band."
"I said, 'Does your mom want you to be in a band because you're better
than your bandmates?' "
"He said, 'Uh-huh.' "
Carlisi sat the boy down with Liberty DeVitto, Billy Joel's longtime
drummer, who was on hand to teach a class: As the best musician in a
band, DeVitto explained, you pull the rest of the band up to your level.
The boy walked away, thinking hard, and did not repeat his request.
There's nothing more important to teach campers than the combustible
emotional environment of a band, said Carlisi, who likened these
relationships to a "very difficult marriage of five or six people." He
split from 38 Special in 1996, at a time when conflicts simmering for
two decades began to seem insurmountable.
"In the beginning, it's all for one and one for all, you're not making a
dime," he said. "The money gets into it, and greed gets into it, and it
really ruins everything."
By midweek, some of the campers' bands had developed internal strains of
their own. Jessi Lail, a 14-year-old with thick red hair, was crushed to
learn that another girl was to sing the Evanescence song "Bring Me to
Life."
"That was my solo," she said with a dark look from a seat in the
bleachers. "Solo. My song. As in, not sharing it with other people."
Lesson 3: Act cool onstage.
It was the eleventh hour and Cory was still hanging back. In rehearsals
of "Should I Stay or Should I Go," he sang with the physical enthusiasm
of a man waiting for a bus. A velvet-voiced singer, he looked at his
feet. He smiled as if in apology.
By Thursday afternoon, his bandmates had become so concerned about his
stage persona that they discussed giving him an unplugged guitar to
hold.
Performance anxiety is particularly acute for lead singers, who stand
before the audience with nothing but personality and a microphone stand
to protect them, said Lee Adkins, the camp's staff director. Adkins, a
bass player who toured for years with an Atlanta band called Soup,
offered a tutorial in lead-singer antics.
In a practice room, he jumped onto a chair, pretending to play a guitar
solo. A student copied the move. When jumping onto the drum set in a
moment of musical ecstasy, it's essential to jump with both feet, Adkins
explained.
"It's a passion thing, but you can't just do it, because something bad
will happen," he said. "You will fall down."
Others consulted with Maryn Vance, a rock musician and choreographer who
advises Atlanta hip-hop artists on posture, microphone technique and eye
contact.
She tries to discourage them from using hokey gestures such as holding
an imaginary telephone to their ears when singing about a phone call.
She teaches singers to step away from the microphone, ceding the
audience's focus, when other musicians are playing solos.
"Get into it, so we know this is about you," she said. "If you're going
to be introverted and be this deep, dark soul over the bass guitar —
then get into that."
Mainly, though, she watched and marveled. "I think about the fact that
when I was the same age my parents sent me to cotillion," she said.
Lesson 4: Smile for mom and dad.
At 6 p.m. on Friday, the parents filed into the auditorium to see their
children perform. The mothers wore pearl earrings and hair bands; the
fathers wore golf shirts and khaki pants. They set their umbrellas down
beside their feet. On the walls of the auditorium, banners commemorated
soccer championships.
The parents had their own reasons for sending their kids to rock 'n'
roll camp. Julie Iarossi, 43, gave a dreamy smile when she recalled her
10th-grade boyfriend, who played the drums.
John Kennedy described his 13-year-old son, Drake, as "an extremely fine
conversationalist," but worried about his tendency to shyness.
Many were remembering their own adolescence, when parents stood at a
distance from the turmoil of youth culture. That's not the kind of
father he wants to be, said John Boydston, 45, father of Max, 9.
Back then, high school musicians bagged groceries to save for guitars
and congregated in garages, where they played songs that sounded bad.
Their parents reminded them of this.
It would be different for the campers. With their parents surrounding
them, they were stepping onto a sound set worth $20,000: 8,000-watt
amplifiers and a sound system that a touring band could use. A
professional sound engineer was on hand for mixing.
After some last-minute adjustments to accommodate Orthodox Jewish
campers who needed to get home before the Sabbath, a semicircle of
preteens with electric guitars, one dressed as a schoolboy in homage to
Angus Young, took the stage for AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock (We
Salute You.)" Even 11-year-old Hannah Greenberg, the youngest girl at
the camp, gave little rock-star hops at strategic moments.
As Cory Blanchette finished singing "Should I Stay or Should I Go," his
mother, Gail, felt her eyes well up with tears. Kennedy beamed as his
son Drake bounced back and forth over his guitar, long hair flying.
"I was just so proud," Kennedy said. "There was a transformation. A
total transformation."
As for Josh Bell, it was clear that he had managed to dredge up anger
from somewhere. He got onstage, a blond boy with wire-rimmed glasses.
Then, fronting the band Sheep, he sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" — "I
feel stupid, and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us" — with such
an aggressive roar that the crowd came to life, hooting and clapping.
From her seat on the bleachers, his mother, Mary, wondered aloud if he
might be possessed.
Before the performance, he had warned her she might be shocked by what
she would see in him that night.
"He said, 'Don't worry, Mom, I've learned a new song,' " Mary said. "And
he asked, 'What's a libido?' "
Smash the Guitar for Mommy
With its motto, 'No Canoes -- Lots of Rock,' Camp Jam in Georgia puts a
parent-approved heavy metal riff on kids' summer enrichment.
By Ellen Barry, Times Staff Writer
ATLANTA — A small hand appeared at the door, followed by a small boy,
his black T-shirt falling almost to his knees. He looked around at the
other children and asked, in the bell-clear voice that precedes puberty:
"Is this the punk class?"
It was. The teacher, the 20-year-old guitarist for a band called Genghis
Tron, was introducing a roomful of students to the throbbing power
chords that form the backbone of punk and heavy metal.
A few doors away, a professional voice coach was helping 14-year-old
Cory Blanchette rehearse a song he had never heard: "Should I Stay or
Should I Go," which was recorded by The Clash eight years before he was
born.
And in every direction, along the halls of a Jewish day school outside
Atlanta, children of the suburbs were being instructed in speed-metal,
death-metal, ripping, shredding, maniacally insane guitar solos, and
jumping onto the bass drum for dramatic effect without hurting yourself.
It is a sign of the times that parents in the Atlanta area are lining up
this summer to send their children to Camp Jam, a $495 weeklong day camp
under the direction of Jeff Carlisi, former guitarist for the arena rock
band 38 Special, which had major hits in "Hold on Loosely" and "Rockin'
Into the Night."
In his weaker moments, Carlisi wondered whether his concept (the camp's
motto is "No Canoes — Lots of Rock") would find the right audience in a
culture that has moved away from high-voltage rock 'n' roll.
But the 9- to 17-year-old campers who showed up here recently wore their
hair over their eyes and spoke with reverence of Jimmy Page. Their taste
for hard rock had been nurtured by baby boomers — parents able to see
heavy metal as a wholesome, enriching after-school activity.
"Ten or 20 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do this," Carlisi
said. "Now I have parents coming up to me and saying, 'I just want to
thank you for what you've done for my child. You've changed them.' "
Carlisi, 51, can well remember the age of the guitar hero, when Duane
Allman and Eric Clapton were worshiped as gods. Through the 1970s and
into the 1980s, Carlisi and his bandmates in 38 Special wore their hair
long and their shirts half-buttoned. Like Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band they
often played with, their solos were so intense that, as one ardent
reviewer wrote in 1984, "Double-Barreled Howitzer might be a more
accurate moniker for this six-man musical assault team." Intensity,
Carlisi said, "was a kind of doctrine for us."
Throughout the 1990s — a period of baleful melodies and grunge chic —
Carlisi watched and waited. His band was playing motorcycle rallies and
county fairs; young people, eyes shining in recognition, approached him
and said, "My mom loved your band."
A hypothesis was forming. If the band's fans had become parents, then
maybe they would encourage their children to learn hard rock.
Carlisi and his business partner, Dan Lipson, rented space and tested
their theory this summer in the heart of Atlanta's wealthy northern
suburbs. Applicants were required to have six months' experience playing
or singing "in a semi-structured environment," but were not expected to
have played in a band.
On the first day of camp — one of four weeklong sessions that will
continue through July — Carlisi waited outside while station wagons and
minivans dropped off 70 campers. They came with instruments in cases,
their T-shirts declaring allegiance to the East Village underground club
CBGB and the bands that played there.
The truth was, many of these campers looked like they would be more
comfortable in Little League. The first time they were asked to stand
onstage, said one instructor, some trembled.
That day, the counselors sat together and, in a single, intense hour,
grouped them into bands. The rest of the week proceeded like a
particularly loud psychology experiment.
"These kids, they want to rip, they want to shred," Carlisi said.
"They're hungry for all of it."
Lesson 1: Make it a little more dirty.
Josh Bell, 11, stood in front of vocal coach Felicia Sorensen, singing,
in the voice he had cultivated in a church choir, "Smells Like Teen
Spirit," Kurt Cobain's grunge anthem. He sang in the sweet tenor you
might expect from a young Harry Potter.
"A mulatto," he sang. "An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido."
Sorensen, who has sung backup for Usher and Amy Grant, watched
critically from across the room. When she works with young vocalists,
she trains them to "bring up emotion" from their lives. She and Josh
were working on anger.
"Remember," she told him, "You're a rock star."
The students at Camp Jam pose a considerable rock 'n' roll problem in
that many of them are, frankly, adorable. For a set of black-clad,
metal-friendly counselors, the challenge was to instill them with enough
confidence to not perform perfectly.
By Wednesday, 13-year-old Jennifer Wright and her band had practiced
"Should I Stay or Should I Go" so often that it began to sound polished.
It was all wrong. Instructor Alan Yates, a singer-songwriter in a black
T-shirt and silver hoop earrings, took them aside. "Make it more
rocking. A little more dirty, and not so pretty," he told the band.
"It's not a pretty song."
They disappeared into a practice room, where they figured out something
important: If they learned the song well enough, they could start
"messing around and making weird noises," as Jennifer put it. The next
time the band got onstage, the sound was ragged and a little distorted.
Yates approved.
Their inhibitions fell away. Jennifer — at 13, darkly pretty and taller
than any of the boys in her band — played so hard she broke guitar
strings.
Lesson 2: Have creative differences.
Here, as in all great rock ventures, egos collide. Drummers deliver
ultimatums. Artists complain to their parents. On the second day, a
camper came up to Carlisi and said, "I think my mom called yesterday.
She said she wants me to be in another band."
"I said, 'Does your mom want you to be in a band because you're better
than your bandmates?' "
"He said, 'Uh-huh.' "
Carlisi sat the boy down with Liberty DeVitto, Billy Joel's longtime
drummer, who was on hand to teach a class: As the best musician in a
band, DeVitto explained, you pull the rest of the band up to your level.
The boy walked away, thinking hard, and did not repeat his request.
There's nothing more important to teach campers than the combustible
emotional environment of a band, said Carlisi, who likened these
relationships to a "very difficult marriage of five or six people." He
split from 38 Special in 1996, at a time when conflicts simmering for
two decades began to seem insurmountable.
"In the beginning, it's all for one and one for all, you're not making a
dime," he said. "The money gets into it, and greed gets into it, and it
really ruins everything."
By midweek, some of the campers' bands had developed internal strains of
their own. Jessi Lail, a 14-year-old with thick red hair, was crushed to
learn that another girl was to sing the Evanescence song "Bring Me to
Life."
"That was my solo," she said with a dark look from a seat in the
bleachers. "Solo. My song. As in, not sharing it with other people."
Lesson 3: Act cool onstage.
It was the eleventh hour and Cory was still hanging back. In rehearsals
of "Should I Stay or Should I Go," he sang with the physical enthusiasm
of a man waiting for a bus. A velvet-voiced singer, he looked at his
feet. He smiled as if in apology.
By Thursday afternoon, his bandmates had become so concerned about his
stage persona that they discussed giving him an unplugged guitar to
hold.
Performance anxiety is particularly acute for lead singers, who stand
before the audience with nothing but personality and a microphone stand
to protect them, said Lee Adkins, the camp's staff director. Adkins, a
bass player who toured for years with an Atlanta band called Soup,
offered a tutorial in lead-singer antics.
In a practice room, he jumped onto a chair, pretending to play a guitar
solo. A student copied the move. When jumping onto the drum set in a
moment of musical ecstasy, it's essential to jump with both feet, Adkins
explained.
"It's a passion thing, but you can't just do it, because something bad
will happen," he said. "You will fall down."
Others consulted with Maryn Vance, a rock musician and choreographer who
advises Atlanta hip-hop artists on posture, microphone technique and eye
contact.
She tries to discourage them from using hokey gestures such as holding
an imaginary telephone to their ears when singing about a phone call.
She teaches singers to step away from the microphone, ceding the
audience's focus, when other musicians are playing solos.
"Get into it, so we know this is about you," she said. "If you're going
to be introverted and be this deep, dark soul over the bass guitar —
then get into that."
Mainly, though, she watched and marveled. "I think about the fact that
when I was the same age my parents sent me to cotillion," she said.
Lesson 4: Smile for mom and dad.
At 6 p.m. on Friday, the parents filed into the auditorium to see their
children perform. The mothers wore pearl earrings and hair bands; the
fathers wore golf shirts and khaki pants. They set their umbrellas down
beside their feet. On the walls of the auditorium, banners commemorated
soccer championships.
The parents had their own reasons for sending their kids to rock 'n'
roll camp. Julie Iarossi, 43, gave a dreamy smile when she recalled her
10th-grade boyfriend, who played the drums.
John Kennedy described his 13-year-old son, Drake, as "an extremely fine
conversationalist," but worried about his tendency to shyness.
Many were remembering their own adolescence, when parents stood at a
distance from the turmoil of youth culture. That's not the kind of
father he wants to be, said John Boydston, 45, father of Max, 9.
Back then, high school musicians bagged groceries to save for guitars
and congregated in garages, where they played songs that sounded bad.
Their parents reminded them of this.
It would be different for the campers. With their parents surrounding
them, they were stepping onto a sound set worth $20,000: 8,000-watt
amplifiers and a sound system that a touring band could use. A
professional sound engineer was on hand for mixing.
After some last-minute adjustments to accommodate Orthodox Jewish
campers who needed to get home before the Sabbath, a semicircle of
preteens with electric guitars, one dressed as a schoolboy in homage to
Angus Young, took the stage for AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock (We
Salute You.)" Even 11-year-old Hannah Greenberg, the youngest girl at
the camp, gave little rock-star hops at strategic moments.
As Cory Blanchette finished singing "Should I Stay or Should I Go," his
mother, Gail, felt her eyes well up with tears. Kennedy beamed as his
son Drake bounced back and forth over his guitar, long hair flying.
"I was just so proud," Kennedy said. "There was a transformation. A
total transformation."
As for Josh Bell, it was clear that he had managed to dredge up anger
from somewhere. He got onstage, a blond boy with wire-rimmed glasses.
Then, fronting the band Sheep, he sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" — "I
feel stupid, and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us" — with such
an aggressive roar that the crowd came to life, hooting and clapping.
From her seat on the bleachers, his mother, Mary, wondered aloud if he
might be possessed.
Before the performance, he had warned her she might be shocked by what
she would see in him that night.
"He said, 'Don't worry, Mom, I've learned a new song,' " Mary said. "And
he asked, 'What's a libido?' "
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