WOODSTOCK, N.Y. (AP) – It’s a syllabus you can head bang to.
Students at the Woodstock Music Lab will bend notes alongside guitar heroes, and jamming in class will be encouraged. Assignments will include recreating the Beach Boy’s classic “Pet Sounds” note-for-note and making a progressive-rock album based on Egyptian mythology.
So it will go at the rock school for college-age students planned for the famous Catskill Mountains artists’ colony in the coming years. Think Juilliard with power chords. Or, as co-founder Paul Green said, think of a “giant, fertile petri dish” where young guitarists, producers and arrangers rub shoulders with each other.
“Odds are you can step out of the studio and say, ‘I need a saxophone,’ and some other kid here working on a jazz project will say, ‘I’ll be right down!'” Green said as he showed off the old elementary school that will become the school. “It gives you that sort of Abbey Road, Muscle Shoals, Motown sort of collective beehive.”
Green is the voluble, veteran rock teacher often credited as being the inspiration for Jack Black’s jet-fueled character in the 2003 movie “School of Rock,” though the movie’s writer has denied that. Among the other co-founders is Michael Lang, the promoter of the original 1969 Woodstock festival, which took place in a muddy field some 50 miles from here.