Rock of Love

[December 26th, 2007]

It’s mid-morning in inner Southeast Portland, and a small fleet of minivans and station wagons is splashing up water from dirty puddles beneath the Hawthorne Bridge. The vehicles stop to drop long-haired, hoodie-clad teenagers with large black bags off at school. And even though it’s Sunday, the kids look stoked. But then, this is no ordinary school.

In the front office of Paul Green’s School of Rock, a blond pre-teen boy and frumpy-looking teenage girl trade riffs on unplugged electric guitars. Noise comes from every direction; laughing, strumming, banging.

The Paul Green School of Rock, founded in Philadelphia in 1998, takes kids ages 8 to 18 and immediately starts training them to play everything from punk to metal, classic rock to Britpop. Since the Portland branch opened in 2006, its students have performed songs by AC/DC, the Beatles and Oasis, among other artists, at some of Portland’s most grown-up rock clubs. Today’s group is working on Best of the Northwest, a Friday, Dec. 28, show at the Wonder Ballroom that pays tribute to influential Northwest acts like the Kingsmen and Nirvana, as well as cult favorites like Portland D.I.Y. legends Dead Moon. Part of what makes the show special is the list of performers scheduled to take the stage with the kids—it’s enough to make any Northwest rock fan faint from sheer joy: Stephen Malkmus, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard and the Wipers’ Sam Henry among them.

A deeper voice comes over the swirl of shrill and booming sounds to call out a cryptic combination of room names and song titles, eliciting both cheers and groans from the student body. “That’s how it is, guys, somebody has to use the quiet room—we’ll change it up tomorrow.” That voice belongs to 32-year-old rock school instructor Ben Barnett, the guy who put the Best of the Northwest show together.

In his snug stocking cap and hooded sweatshirt, it’s not hard to imagine Barnett—whose natural vocabulary is full of “dude” and “tight”—as a teen himself. From his tiny bedroom in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, where framed pictures of dogs playing pool line the walls, Barnett talks about growing up in Auburn, Calif. “There wasn’t much to do but play music” in Auburn, he says. A founding member of Portland punk-pop outfit the Thermals and the central figure behind an amorphous and often gut-wrenching, decade-plus-long project called Kind of Like Spitting, Barnett has spent his whole life making music—much of it personal in nature. And he is, by most measures, what one would call an indie success. Except, until six months ago, Barnett’s career in music never really made him happy.

On one hand, music had taken Barnett all over the country and made him new friends, and “my guitar never broke my heart,” he says. But on the other hand, “I felt like other people were getting more out of it than I was. I felt like a lot of people liked it more than I did.” Despite his modest popularity, Barnett says he was almost always broke and had a hard time keeping a steady job between tours. “I couldn’t rationalize holding one down,” he says. “It was always like, ‘Why get one now? They’re just going to fire me when I go on tour in a month.’”

After Kind of Like Spitting’s most recent national tour in 2006, Barnett’s fiancée left him and the latest incarnation of KOLS fell apart due to personality clashes. He was as down as he’d ever been in his life, and felt that his time performing as KOLS had been a waste. He stopped performing and writing songs, put an end to KOLS and settled in to work at a small coffee shop called Blend on East Burnside.

Then, last June, Barnett got to talking about music with a customer, rock-school instructor Joe Wickstrom. Wickstrom asked if Barnett would want to sub in on a class for him, and Barnett agreed. Barnett had worked at rock camps before, but walking into the Paul Green School “was like the sky had opened and someone had given me this gift,” he says. He quit the coffee shop that day.

The Paul Green School strives to be honest with its students about the realities of life as a working musician. That’s something Barnett is uniquely equipped to teach. “All of my failures as a rock musician, all the suffering, regret and sadness—all of a sudden it’s a skill set,” Barnett says. “And not just the sad stuff, but the successes, too...I could have a positive influence on people instead of this selfish pursuit of playing music that was just all about me.”

Back at the school, 14-year-old girl named Tuesday is totally owning Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” bouncing to and fro and practicing swinging the microphone stand. Barnett head-bangs along with the band of mostly black-clad teenage rockers, mouthing the words as Tuesday thrashes and screams: “They say she’s a dyke/ But I know/ She is my best friend, yeah!” The song comes to a raucous end. “Awesome, that was awesome, you guys are killing it,” Barnett tells the band.

The Best of the Northwest show is just three weeks away. It’s the first show Barnett has been responsible for, and because he handpicked the tunes, he seems to know every instrument’s part to every song, a blessing and a curse for around 30 or so students that will perform at the concert. School of Rock kids in other cities have occasionally performed with big-name songwriters, but the concentration and breadth of talent at the Best of the Northwest show is unprecedented. Thus the students’ fear of celebrity becomes a major form of motivation.

“Remember that David Bazan, the guy who wrote this song,” he tells lanky 15-year-old singer Galen, pink-haired 12-year-old drummer Noah and the other shaggy teens playing Pedro the Lion’s “Penetration,” “will be playing with you. He’s going to notice if the tempo is slow.”

Some parents might be reluctant to let their children sing a song with the lyric, “If it isn’t penetration/ Then it isn’t worth a kiss” (which Barnett interprets as a dis on the increasingly hit-oriented music industry). But the school doesn’t censor its material, and that seems to be fine by most of the young rockers’ parents. “I want the world to come into our family while we’re still there, so we can talk about it and have a discussion about it while they’re still with us,” says Galen’s mom, Linda Hefferman.

As Barnett heads downstairs to another rehearsal room, Galen’s 11-year-old brother, Jean-Luc—an adorable kid with blond hair past his shoulders—reaches for a sip of Barnett’s coffee. “You can’t have my coffee, dude, you’re too small!” Barnett tells him, laughing. “I drink coffee every weekend,” Jean-Luc replies in his chipmunk-high register. Inside the rehearsal room, kids are having some trouble with the Shins’ “New Slang.” Barnett stops in to offer some encouragement. When he comes out, I ask him what he said to the group. “Well, what I always tell them,” he says, “is that ‘we are not a gimmick.’ They respond to that, and they get real gangster with it. Like, ‘We’re Rock School, bitch!’”

“They love Ben,” says Hefferman of her two sons. “Jean-Luc took six weeks of guitar lessons from him last summer, and just absolutely thrived.” Jean-Luc himself (after discussing his favorite High on Fire album) agrees, but for reasons other kids might not appreciate. “He’s a real good instructor. He can be mean when he needs to be, but not in a bad way.” (“You’re not sucking that bad,” Barnett tells one frustrated student.)

“He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had,” 15-year-old Caleb says in the lobby after rehearsal. “And I like how he says ‘fudge’ and ‘shizz,’ ’cause technically there’s some rule about cussing.”

When they say goodbye to 2007, though, the rock school kids will also have to say goodbye to Ben Barnett. He has taken the job of music director for the Paul Green School’s new Seattle branch, slated to open in 2008. “It’s kinda heartbreaking,” Barnett says of saying goodbye to his current students. “But ultimately I’ll see them a lot. My school will be working with their school.” As for leaving Portland, though, he’s been ready for a move for quite some time. Barnett says he loves the Rose City, but “whether it’s Portland or some other place that’s cool—I dunno, Jamaica—14 years is 14 years. I’m looking forward to discovering someplace new.”