..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

To say that Paul Green takes rock ’n’ roll seriously is akin to suggesting that George Steinbrenner wants his Yankees to win baseball games. Inside each man burns a passion so intense, they … well, they turn into monsters when their charges don’t perform up to expectations. There’s no other way to put it.

There is one big difference between this otherwise unrelated pair of dedicated businessmen and franchise owners, however. While Steinbrenner tends to direct his fiery tirades at adult athletes and New York’s mad-dog media corps, Green takes his frustrations out on children.

But, in a good way.

Green is the founder and director of Philadelphia’s Paul Green School of Rock Music, and, as such, is responsible for the education of dozens of aspiring rock gods, ranging in age from 9 and 17. In fact, the one-time Ivy Leaguer has been turning ’em out since 1999.

After becoming intrigued enough by a School of Rock flyer to attend a concert, Philly filmmaker Don Argott persuaded Green to let him be a fly on the wall of the school, for the purpose of creating the documentary, Rock School. After all, if a group of 12- and 14-year-olds could be taught to interpret the intricately woven orchestrations of a Frank Zappa composition, there must be some very special kind of magic afoot.

And, there was. But, what Argott and his producing partner, Sheena Joyce, hadn’t counted on was Green’s highly theatrical -- bordering on tyrannical -- approach to teaching his beloved repertoire of rock classics.

Suddenly, the documentary’s focus was shifted from the individual students, to a guy who came across as being wrapped far too tight to teach anything, let alone rock ’n’ roll. But, a Rock School that wasn’t dominated by the intense presence of Paul Green would be about as meaningful as a documentary on the last 30 years of Indiana University basketball, minus a highlight reel of Bobby Knight freak-outs.

It’s a comparison Green probably would take as a compliment. That’s because, more than anything else, Knight was famous for producing winning teams. And, for all the bad press he received, “The General” never had any trouble recruiting players who excelled as student-athletes and, later, as NBA players and coaches. Still doesn’t.

“When athletic coaches get mad and yell, it’s considered normal,” Green allows, with a sly smile. “But, this is a different medium. In fact, there are only two times in the whole movie when I’m really mad.”

If true, Green might be in line for a Best Actor nomination.

“In one sense, he’s a failed musician,” Argott observed. “He didn’t make it, but, in a way, the school offers him a way to do what he always wanted to do … somewhere where he’s in control. We were very conscious of striking a balance in the way we presented Paul.

“Every time we showed Paul screaming at a kid, we tried to balance that with a scene of him complimenting them, or a scene with his family, or him being self-deprecating. Some people who see the film say Paul’s awesome, while others say he’s a prick, or they still don’t know what to make of him … you really can’t ask for a better character than that.”

The school’s ace guitarist, C.J., is firmly in his mentor’s corner, “At first, I was very intimidated by Paul’s methods. But, I got used to them eventually.

“He helped me realize my potential, and bloom as a musician. Before that, I’d just do my thing at home.”

C.J., who’s traveling with Green on the publicity tour for the film, has dazzled audiences across the country and in Europe. He gigged with Alice Cooper at Sundance, and stood out in performance with the school’s All-Star Band at a Zappanale Festival in Bad Doberan, Germany. The ensemble’s twice been invited back to that gathering, this year as headliners.

When the various bands are shown performing on the film, Green seems to be everywhere, all at once. A fleshy bundle of nervous energy in a rock’-n’-roll T-shirt, he’s incapable of sitting still for more than a moment at a time. While the joint is jumpin’, he’s conducting the band, pacing around the stage, cheering wildly, grimacing and gesticulating wildly, and, once, much to the dismay of a guitarist, pounding away on her waa-waa pedal.

In five years, the Paul Green School of Rock Music franchise has grown from a handful of students in one makeshift headquarters, to nine more facilities in and around Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, with hundreds of kids. He plans to expand the operation to as many as 50 schools, nationwide, over the next year and a half.

“It’s year-round, and the only criterion is a desire to rock,” Green explains. “We don’t audition kids, and there’s a scholarship program for those who can’t pay. In Philadelphia, there’s a lot of kids who can’t pay.”

Green’s approach to rock is anything but loosey-goosey. He cautions that the School of Rock has been founded on “formal” methodology, which means his students should expect to spend time working on scales, chords, improvisation, ear training, vocal exercises and reading charts.

“When I took philosophy at Penn, we studied Plato and Descartes,” recalled Green, at a table inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s venerable Cinegrill nightclub. “Our teachers didn’t come to us on the first day of classes, asking what we might be reading or wanted to study. For them, this was the canon of western thought.

“Rock music is getting to the point where it can be looked at in an educational way, and, for me, Zeppelin and Zappa are Plato and Descartes. If I can get the kids to listen to Zeppelin, I try to push them back even further, to Robert Johnson.”

Among the other groups whose music is banged into the heads of the kids are Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, the Beatles, Queen and Santana.

“I’d rather have them be a failure at Zappa than a success at Nirvana,” he said. “Education’s an on-going thing. The music of the ’60s and ’70s will never come back … that ethos of combining a scholarly approach with a visceral element.

“Music today is neither scholarly nor visceral.”

Although Philadelphia was home to some of the finest of ’60s- and ’70s R&B, Green is in no rush to begin a School of Soul extension.

“We do rock writ large,” he adds. “We’ve done Jesus Christ Superstar, a funk and reggae show, a hip-hop show, but, at the core, there’s rock. When you get too far away from your constituency, that’s when you lose them.”

There are some ingredients in the recipe for rock-’n’-roll stew even Green has trouble getting his hands on, though.

“I don’t know how to write songs,” he acknowledges. “I just think of stuff and write it down. I don’t know if it can be taught, but I do know that I can’t do it.”

That’s why he concentrates on the basics.

“A lot people don’t know that before he became famous, Jimi Hendrix played guitar for Little Richard and the Isley Brothers,” he adds. “When he stopped doing the R&B, and came up with the words and ideas, he had the chords to put behind them. C.J. is getting stage experience, and learning how a guitar works, what all the knobs do, and about touring.

“So, when he does get his heart broken, he’s got the chords to put behind the saddest song ever written.”

As for the perils of the road and fame: “Before we began a west coast tour last year -- 19 shows, in 17 days … crazy -- I prepared the kids by telling them all about drugs, groupies and chaos. I also tried to warn them about the bad side of rock ’n’ roll.”

Argott used a small, lightweight Panasonic DVX100 24P camera, which allowed him to squeeze into corners and move unobtrusively around the school’s crowded corridors. He pinned a lavaliere mike on Green, but otherwise relied on the camera’s built-in sound recorder. A boom mike would only have gotten in the way, and made the kids more conscious of his mission.
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“He became everybody’s Crazy Uncle Don, the guy who always is pointing the camera in their face,” Joyce recalled. “Eventually, people forgot he was there. And, anyway, their parents and friends all had cameras, and would shoot their concerts and everything else they did.”

If any or all of this scenario sounds familiar to people who’ve seen Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock, it should. Jack Black does a passable imitation of Green, in his scruffy dress and cranky demeanor, and, his curriculum is practically a carbon-copy of the original.

Paramount continues to assert that any similarities between the two entities are purely coincidental. Fact is, though, sister-company VH1 had spent some time with Green and his students in 2002, taping material ostensibly intended for a reality-based show. The crew disappeared one day, and Green didn’t smell a rat until publicity material for “The School of Rock” began showing up in theaters and on TV.

Naturally, Green blew his stack. Paramount denied lifting the idea from the material gathered by the VH1 crew, and Linklater and Black surrounded themselves in a shroud of plausible deniability. Lawyers cost money, of which Viacom has a bundle, and Green and Argott had very little.

Rumor has it that Paramount even had the chutzpah to threaten a lawsuit, if Argott’s movie debuted at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival bearing the title, Rock School. Apparently, the studio’s lawyers relented in the face of overwhelming evidence of the insanity of their demand.

It wasn’t the last time Argott and Joyce would be confronted with the arrogance of corporate greed and power. Rock School, which had required an investment of $40,000 to get into shape for the festival circuit, would need another $460,000 to finish.

“We had to spend $200,000 on music licensing,” Joyce said. “With those kinds of numbers, and prints costing $60,000 a piece, you can find yourself in the big leagues in a hurry.”

When their pleas -- after all, this was a documentary about a school -- for reduced licensing fees fell on deaf ears, Argott was forced to eliminate several live-performance scenes. They included one of C.J.’s guitar rave-up to Van Halen’s “Eruption,” and an emotional speech at Zappanale, by Green, in which some protected Zappa music could be heard in the background.

“The audience might not miss those scenes,” said Argott. “But, when you can’t license something -- can’t put a moment back in -- you somehow have to replace that emotion. We had to find all sorts of creative ways to get that emotion across, without the music.”

Argott also hoped to include interviews with well known rockers about what they were doing, musically, when they were growing up.

“I couldn’t even get Joan Jett on the phone,” he conceded. “It also broke our heart to cut material from the school’s Queen show. They did the full ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ -- the opera parts, too -- which Queen never even did live.”

So what did the coach think of Rock School?

“At first, watching it at home on video, I thought it kind of made me look like a jerk,” he admitted. “But when I saw it at LA Film Festival, everyone laughed and cheered at the right moments, and no one punched me in the stomach.”

June 2, 2005
- Gary Dretzka