RRC4G, Part the Second

I'm going to finish my post about Rock Camp in a second, but first: did you ever see a discarded object somewhere and wonder about its provenance? Like, you see a pair of underwear by the side of the road and you try to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to its arriving there? This morning I was going into the post office, as I do every morning, and in the ashtray out front was an 8-track tape of Ike and Tina Turner. Dude, an 8-track! It's been about 30 years since I saw one of those in real life. It was all beat-up and broken. I'm dying to know what it was doing in an ashtray in front of the post office.

Anyway, on with the show.

...continued from the sweaty lunchtime dance party below.

After lunch some campers would go to workshops while others practiced with their bands, then later they’d switch off. Although I had a lot of fun teaching, this was my favorite part. My responsibility was to go around to my students and see how they were doing with their bands, and if they needed any help with their bass parts, which I did, but basically I went around to all of the bands and helped them with their songs, if they needed it. I have to tell you, writing and arranging songs is my absolute favorite activity in the world. I wish I could do it all the time. I would do it, can do it, and have done it for extended periods of time and to the exclusion of any other activity including eating and sleeping. So, a couple of dozen bands all working on songs at the same time? Pretty much my idea of heaven.

I was consistently impressed by the level of musicianship on display. I mean, with the older girls who’ve been at it a while, I expected it, but some of the younger girls who’d only been playing a year or less…man. Blew me away. Especially the drummers, for some reason. You know, drums was the first instrument I wanted to play. When I was like 13, I took lessons for about a month, but I got frustrated and quit. I figured I was too much of a spaz to play drums. At camp, I sort of became assistant manager to a band who called themselves the Rockin’ Kitty Cats. They were the very youngest girls at camp, all beginners on their instruments (and all completely adorable). I happened on to their practice session one day when their assigned manager, a very cool chick from L.A. named Ray Ray, was feeling slightly overwhelmed, and I stuck around to help out and the band sort of adopted me. Anyway, the RKC didn’t have a drummer, so Ray Ray was sitting in for them. One afternoon Ray Ray had to take a break and the girls wanted to practice their song, so they were like, “Jenny! You play the drums!” And I was thinking, ahhh, I’m a total spaz, but I knew that wasn’t gonna fly with a bunch of excited 8- and 9-year-olds. So I sat down, clicked off 1-2-3-4 on the sticks, and lo and behold I rocked out! The beat was admittedly very simple, but still. Now I have drum fever.

I think the thing that impressed me most about camp was how positive and fun the atmosphere stayed. Staffers got stressed, but everyone kept it together. There was always someone to turn to if you needed help. And despite how groups of girls are often portrayed in the media--as jealous, as manipulative, as back-stabbing, as “mean girls”--I saw absolutely none of that behavior in anyone. Every girl I met that week was totally cool in her own way.

Oh, wait--speaking of totally cool, there was a documentary crew there filming for a movie about Rock Camp. There were 5 girls, I believe, that they were following in particular, including one of my bass students. I think I managed to stay mostly off-camera, although I was focused on teaching so I’m not sure. At one point, though--see, one of my girls wanted to learn Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy,” so I was trying to figure it out on guitar. And I’m sitting in this room alone (so I think), and I get to the point where I’m playing it well enough to get into it, but still really really sloppy, and after jamming on it for a couple of minutes I look up and one of the camerawomen is like 2 inches away from me, filming. And before I could say, “You’re definitely not putting that in the movie, right?” she goes, “That was great!” and runs out of the room. I seriously doubt that it will end up in the movie, but if it did I’d be mortified.

So that, in a nutshell, is RRC4G. Oh, except for the final showcase, of course. How they managed to get 25 bands on- and offstage in 2 hours is beyond me, but it worked. And can I just say, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard an 11-year-old girl singing a song about global warming that includes the line “Bush is an idiot/He won’t sign the Kyoto Protocol,” followed by thunderous applause and cheers from the audience. That shit is rad, yo. But while I enjoyed all of the performances, I think my favorite was a blistering punk/metal number called “Counterattack” by a band known as the Screaming Monkeys, featuring a tiny bassist named Alexia.

At the very least, I plan on going back next summer. My final word for now: if these girls represent the future of music, then rest assured that it’s in good hands.

This post is frickin' long...

...and has taken many a lunch break to write, and I'm still not done. But anyway, I figured I'd post the first part.

So, Rock ‘n’Roll Camp for Girls. What is it all about, you ask? Well, RRC4G was founded in 2000 by a woman named Misty McElroy. It was actually her college thesis project, and was only intended to be a one-time thing. However, it was so successful that she did it again the next year, and the next, and now it’s grown to the point where scores of girls ages 8-18, from all over the country and all around the world, descend on Portland each summer for one very intense week of music-making.

The basic idea is to give girls a sense of entitlement to music as a form of self-expression, to allow them to find their individual voices (literally and figuratively), explore their creativity, learn to work productively with others, and most importantly, to have FUN. (Because playing music is like, the funnest thing ever.) They take classes at beginner, intermediate, or advanced levels of guitar, bass, drums, keys, vocals, or DJing. They form bands based on age and preferred style of music, including but not limited to rock, pop, punk, goth, r&b, and hip-hop, and they write an original song with their band. They take workshops on things like DIY recording, zine-making, surviving as a female artist in the music industry, and just surviving as a female in the world (i.e., basic self-defense). They finish the week off with an always-sold-out showcase at a Portland club, where each band performs its original song. And the whole thing takes place within a specifically feminist framework: all of the teaching and guidance positions are filled by experienced women musicians (though men are allowed to volunteer in other capacities, and there were a couple of dudes there) in an atmosphere that is positive, open, nurturing, and as non-hierarchical as possible.

I first read about the camp in a magazine (I think it was Bust) a couple of years ago, and immediately thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. My female musician friends and I were always complaining about how it seems most girls would rather have a boyfriend who’s in a band than be in a band themselves, and wondering how we could encourage more girls to make their own music, and here someone had come up with an awesome way to do just that. I’ve wanted to volunteer ever since, but this year was the first time I could afford to do it. I offered to do just about anything, and was assigned to teach a beginner bass class. There was another beginner bass teacher as well, and a total of 8 students, and we decided to keep them all together rather than breaking them up into separate groups (which I think I think was a really good idea, as she and I had different approaches to teaching that complemented each other nicely). Our girls were amazing--attentive, focused, and quick to learn. In fact I couldn’t believe how quickly some of them picked things up. There’s a picture above of some the bass students--check out the little one in front with the curly brown hair. Her name is Alexia, and she came all the way from Thailand to be at camp. She was my student. She had never played the bass before, and she had these tiny little fingers...yet by the end of the week, she was jamming out killer bass lines with her band.

In the mornings, camp would start out with an assembly. The girls would do fun community-building exercises and sing the camp song, a groovy blues number, accompanied on guitar by none other than Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney. Then it was instrument instruction until lunch. During lunch, bands would come and play. On the first day, the Donnas came! I can’t tell you how much I fucking adore the Donnas. Unfortunately they were not allowed to play due to landlord suckiness, but they had a Q&A with the girls and then hung out and signed autographs (see picture above). I talked to each of them a little bit, more so to Torry, the drummer, who I’m totally crushed out on, and I tried to control myself but I think I gushed a bit. Anyway, the rest of the week the bands actually got to play, including a local hip-hop outfit that played on Friday, and turned all of the hundreds of campers and staffers into one giant sweaty lunchtime dance party.

...to be continued

In this case, the three names thing makes sense.

Since I know that among my vast readership are a number of Once & Again fans, I thought I’d mention this: I was puttering around the internets on my lunch break, as I often do, and I came across this article on MSNBC.com about Evan Rachel Wood, which posits that she may be “America’s Next Great Actress.” It caught my eye because I just watched The Upside of Anger this weekend, in which she co-stars with a number of other notable young female actors, not to mention the formidable Joan Allen, and it reminded me of how much I like her and how easily she stands out even among very talented ensembles. (Verdict on the movie: great acting, yes; some interesting writing but also some clichés; weird, jarring ending; overall, left me kind of...meh.)

Of course Evan was a regular on the late great O&A, where her baby-dyke-coming-out story was handled better than I’ve ever seen anywhere, both by the writers and by her, and where I first noticed her--her pale ethereality, especially set against her darker, earthier castmates, made it hard not to. She was the standout among acting standouts in the otherwise overwrought Thirteen, and, as I said, she continued to shine in The Upside of Anger. So, I don’t know if she’s America’s Next Great Actress, but I’m certainly looking forward to her future projects.

Chicks rock, if you don't know it.

This Sunday I returned from Portland, where I spent a week as a volunteer instructor at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls. It was an amazing experience, and one that I want to write more about, as soon as I catch up on all the work I was already behind on when I left.

In the meantime, just a drive-by to mention that the one show I’m really watching this summer is Rock Star: INXS. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an American Idol-esque competition to find a new lead singer for the Aussie rock band. Since the potential frontwomen and men are singing classic rock tunes, the cheese factor is considerably less than on AI (and the house band is effin’ hot), but the performances are just as over-the-top and, occasionally, painful. The women fare particularly badly; they all seem to come from that Janis Joplin/Melissa Etheridge bluesy belter mold that I just can’t stand, and I cringe as they work to set rock feminism back 30 years, pouting and strutting around the stage all boobs and butts and bellies (although the men do their fair share of strutting and preening as well).

There’s one exception: a 22-year-old Minnesotan with a massive headful of dreads named Jordis Unga (the surname is Tongan, apparently, which is awesome. Not enough Pacific Islanders in rock, I always say). She has consistently offered distinctive, nuanced takes on the songs she sings, and has refused to take part in the tiresome histrionics that her competitors seem compelled to engage in, relying instead on her vocal gifts and natural presence, both of which are considerable. Last night she gave a flawlessly rendered and absolutely stunning performance of “The Man Who Sold the World” that had me in tears. Dave Navarro called it one of the best vocal performances he’s ever seen, and I’d consider that only slightly hyperbolic (I'd certainly say she outclassed both Bowie and Cobain). If you’re not watching the show, check it out, if only to see Jordis’s next performance.