The King of Cool

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"Our average age has gotten younger, it's twelve years old now, and they're playing in bands! We've got seven-year-olds in bands, and they can play! Our kids are from Ann Arbor and the surrounding communities. I speak in the schools all the time, and our bands play their ice cream social circuit. We've got these kids playing Black Sabbath sets at the ice cream social! It's everything rock never knew it would be!

"We have twenty bands, usually four or five students in each band, and always students playing with instructors--if a seven-year-old can keep up with a forty-year-old, he'll have chops to spare. The bands play classic rock, advanced bands do whole sets of single bands, like we've done Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and we've done Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and the Who. And we do shows all the time. The Tap Room in Ypsilanti has been a great outlet for us. We get the Saturday slot between six and eight."

But rock and roll isn't just for kids; it's for adults too. "Our adults are from all walks of life, usually very well established in their careers. But there's a problem: a lot of adults reach about forty and realize that they've screwed up. They've got a successful career, true, but they don't know how to rock!

"Though for adults," he adds, "it's really mostly the blues. A lot of guys over forty have the blues because the blues is about daily life and the daily struggle for existence. Plus, for anyone just learning the guitar, the blues only has three chords and five notes, and it doesn't take long to play the blues."