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.