Schooled!

[June 10th, 2009]

The first time I heard Starparty’s Caleb Misclevitz sing, he was 15 years old and trying to perfect Elliott Smith’s “Rose Parade” in a basement practice room at the Portland outpost of School of Rock. “The trumpet has obviously been drinking,” he sang nervously. “’Cause he’s fucking up even the simplest lines.” Misclevitz forced the swear loudly, finding power in the rebellion the word represented.

A year and a half later, the 16-year-old singer-guitarist is a bit taller and a lot less nervous. It’s the last day of school for seniors at Wilson High, where Misclevitz and his Starparty bandmates—16-year-old bassist Raine Frederickson and 17-year-old drummer Sonia Weber—attend classes. Just before 2 pm, cars peel out in the parking lot while teens trade hugs and playful punches on the school’s front steps. Starparty meets me at a nearby park after school. A few minutes into our interview, Misclevitz cracks up mid-answer. “Sorry,” he says, his bemused gaze focused on a small flock of noisy kids 20 feet away. “The people smoking weed in the background are distracting me.”

There are a lot of distractions for teenage rock bands. Weber—a longtime punk fan who has increasingly dabbled in metal (today she’s sporting a cryptic Dethklok T-shirt)—says she’s been in a few different groups, but Starparty is the first one to feel like a real band. Most high school bands lack direction, she says. “They don’t know how to get shows—they don’t know how to take the next step to actually make it something that’s productive.”

The Portland public school system can’t help much in that arena; Wilson High has some music classes (including a guitar class Weber thought was “boring”), but many Portland public schools don’t offer music. That’s where the members of Starparty have a leg up on their classmates: In 2007, they all attended the Paul Green School of Rock, a national chain of for-profit music schools that opened a Portland location in 2006. “It does sound lame, because it’s called School of Rock,” Misclevitz admits. But when he actually began taking lessons (from former Portland teacher and musician Ben Barnett, who now runs the school’s Seattle branch), it opened up his entire musical world. “I think in my first guitar lesson I didn’t even touch my guitar; he just gave me a list of like 20 different records to listen to,” he says. “And I went out and listened to all of them. I think there was one I didn’t like.”

The ’90s-era indie rock bands Barnett recommended—Built to Spill, Superchunk and the more obscure wordy Illinois pre-emo outfit Braid among them—are evident in the developing thrust of Starparty’s sound (Misclevitz and Frederickson, who had previously been “a Hutch and Kathy thing,” added Weber in late 2008). From the clean, spiraling guitar on “Skydiving” to the Operation Ivy-esque departures of “Cute Names for Dangerous Things,” the band—which records to digital 8-track rather than Pro Tools or GarageBand—has its roots in music released well before the band came of age.

But Starparty’s lyrics, written primarily by Misclevitz, help set the band apart from its influences. Misclevitz writes from the unique perspective of a kid who’s got his whole life ahead of him, but is struggling with what that phrase really means: “Life is not a box of chocolates; life is like an airplane ride,” he sings on “Skydiving.” “And holding your breath won’t make you survive/ And the drinks are falling down, crash position’s assumed/ There’s nothing left that we can do.”

But the most pressing threat to Starparty’s existence isn’t life’s metaphorical airplane crash, it’s graduation. Weber has one year of high school left, while Misclevitz and Frederickson have two. The band’s seemingly bright future—it won 20 hours of recording time at the Vault recording studio and an opening slot at this Thursday’s Cleveland High fundraiser by winning a Battle of the Bands in April (full disclosure: I was one of four judges)—is one reason Weber tentatively plans to attend PSU after high school. “The goal is just stay together,” Frederickson says, pulling his shaggy blond hair out of his eyes. “Because it’s so much fun playing with each other.”

Misclevitz, ever the realist, provides a glimpse into his own post-high-school plans: “I don’t think it’s easy to get a place to live anywhere but here.”