Smash the Guitar for Mommy

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.”

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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?’ ”