Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

School of Rock helps fulfill kids’ favorite MTV fantasies


 Paul Green's pupils from his School of Rock will jam out Sunday for a Big Easy Concert House crowd. 
 (The Spokesman-Review)
Jeremy Hadley Correspondent

You never had a music teacher like Paul Green.

Today, Green and 27 of his students stroll down the Venice Beach boardwalk having just returned from a rendezvous with the widow of Frank Zappa. In a few minutes, the class will climb aboard a school bus and head toward a small rock club in Phoenix where the students will recite the classics of Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa.

“We’re all set for tomorrow’s show,” 30-year-old Green said in a telephone interview. “All the kids just bought new sunglasses on the boardwalk.”

Welcome to the Paul Green School of Rock, an interactive school of music with four schools in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for kids ages 11 to 17. The school is equal parts guitar licks and scissor kicks for rock stardom-starved youngsters.

Green’s classroom, with 27 of the best and brightest students from his three Philadelphia-area schools, takes form on stage Sunday at the Big Easy Concert House as part of its 16-day, 17-show tour. Green’s lesson plan: run through a slab of classic rock favorites such as Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song.”

“Like any great idea, it was purely accidental,” said Green, a University of Pennsylvania philosophy graduate, who came up with the idea after putting himself through college giving guitar lessons.

“One afternoon, I got the idea to take a few students over to my practice space to jam. I thought it would be fun.” But instead of a fun jam session, Green got a heavy dose of reality. “Up to that point, I thought I had done a pretty good job of teaching. Then I heard the kids play,” he said.

Even though his students knew their chords and scales, they couldn’t play a lick. And Green took that personally. “I told them that we were going to come here every Saturday until they could play,” he said.

Six years later, the Paul Green School of Rock has played more than 200 concerts worldwide, including tiny rock clubs and large outdoor music festivals.

The secret?

“Cover songs,” Green said. “Suddenly the kids were grasping all these things I had been trying to teach them for months. Instead of just saying, ‘this is 7/8 time,’ I was teaching them entire songs in 7/8 time so they could get a feel for the groove.”

Green and his students have ridden that groove from the pages of Spin Magazine to MTV features. Currently, VH1 is working on a Paul Green School of Rock documentary as well as a potential reality show. And last year, the school gained notoriety as the likely influence for the Jack Black blockbuster “School of Rock.”

Don’t for a minute think it’s just a cutesy novelty though. “If it was just the novelty of kids playing rock ‘n’ roll, it would’ve lasted just a few shows. The truth is, the kids are so good, it just ends up being a very entertaining show,” Green said.