The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
Letter From Camp
Rock of Underages
A week of teen and tween self-empowerment in the Live Music Capital of the World.
Bruce says: Glych’s performance can be seen on YouTube (September 16th, 2009 at 9:07pm)
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Other groups were having troubles too. A couple bands had changed members and were behind schedule. The ten- and eleven-year-olds in the Flaming Lollipops had never played their instruments before. A few of the girls in the British Cheese Stick People were so shy they just stared at their shoes and gave short answers to their coach’s questions. It was hard enough being thirteen and stuck in a room full of girls they barely knew. Now they had to write a song, figure out their parts, and learn to look as if they knew what they were doing. And rock. In front of four hundred people.
WEDNESDAY
GLYCH started over and worked on a song based on one of Gabby’s guitar riffs. It sounded like surf pop, with Holly playing a double snare shot and Yinka singing a playful melody. This time the verse and the chorus matched. The girls came up with a stop at the end of the verse, Yinka added a hooky vocal line, and the guitarists played a descending riff. It was cool but complicated. At one point their coach Akina Adderley left the room and sat in the kitchen. “Sometimes someone does a three-count, sometimes someone does a four-count,” she said. “But they’ll figure it out—they always do. I told them to just keep playing, that it’ll work out fine.” Other groups were stuck on the verse or the chorus or both. Coach Melissa Bryan, also sitting in the kitchen, said she was having trouble getting the girls in the British Cheese Stick People to gel. She too had left them to work it out on their own.
I walked around the building and listened to the thunderous drums, scronking guitars, and earnest vocals. “I’m sick of it / I’m sick of you” came from the room with the New Wave—ish band Dude . . . Your House Is on Fire. Off Topic—with Genesis Myers, the shy ten-year-old I’d seen on Monday, playing keyboards—was powering through a straight-ahead punkish song. The Flaming Lollipops had come up with a simple two-chord tune. The British Cheese Stick People sounded tentative in their playing, but their song—something about a purple squirrel—sounded real, with a nice melody.
In the afternoon the girls had a workshop with Mary Kearney, a University of Texas professor who specializes in feminist and media studies. “They’re trying to figure out how to perform,” she told me. “I try to connect how women present bodies in music videos with how these girls will present themselves onstage.”
Kearney talked about objectification: “It’s a big word,” she told the girls, “but I want you to learn it.” She showed the video for Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly,” a piece of horrible eighties kitsch with the singer and guitarist striking girlie-magazine poses in sexy outfits. “What’s she doing?” Kearney asked. “I notice she’s crawling around on the floor,” said one girl. “It looked to me like she was just wearing underwear,” said another. Kearney asked if they saw any shots of Ford actually playing her instrument. “No!” the girls replied in unison. “It happens with women all the time,” Kearney told them. “Women musicians are usually thought of in that order: women, then musicians. Men are just musicians.”
THURSDAY
By mid-morning GLYCH had finished their song. Called “Get Down,” it began with Holly’s double snare hits, then Laura’s slinky bass line, then Celeste and Gabby, and finally Yinka, who had finished the words, which were about singing, dancing, playing music, and being rock stars. The chorus, which Yinka sang, was particularly catchy: “Get down, down, down, down / Baby, get down.” As Adderley had hoped, they’d worked it out.
Other bands were finishing up their songs too. Immune to Gravity had a three-chord song with snarling guitars. Coach Rachel Badger stood outside the Flaming Lollipops’ door, occasionally opening it and yelling out the chord changes: “D! C!” The song didn’t have a name, but it was about being a vampire (“Don’t be scared / I don’t bite / Ha, ha, ha, ha!”). A few days earlier, coach Bryan had discovered that both the bassist and drummer in the British Cheese Stick People played flute, so she got them to work the instrument into their song. “It seems like things are coming together today,” she said.
FRIDAY
The last day of rock camp felt like show-and-tell. All the bands had their songs; now they ran through them over and over while the members of other bands cruised around and listened in doorways. GLYCH worked on their introductions for the next night’s big show. “How are y’all doing today?” asked Yinka. “I said, ‘How are y’all doing today? ’ ” Off Topic blazed through their song, with the vocalist singing, “I’m a nervous wreck / You stress me out,” while Genesis played a plinky keyboard part. The Death Angels chanted, “Less talk! More rock!” The Balloon Animals practiced “High School Wonderland,” with everyone clapping and singing an insanely catchy chorus: “Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.”
Marks watched the British Cheese Stick People do their three-chord “Quest for the Purple Squirrel.” At the solo break, the bass player put down her bass and the drummer got out from behind her kit, and each picked up a flute. With the guitarist banging open chords, the flutists played the song’s vocal melody. Marks, at the end of the song, had tears in her eyes. “That made my week,” she said.
SATURDAY
The Parish, an Austin club that usually plays host to tattooed grown-ups and performances by the likes of Fastball and the Meat Puppets, was jammed with four hundred parents, siblings, and friends, who clearly felt a mix of emotions and genuine awe at what they were seeing and hearing. The scripted moments were cute: the Flaming Lollipops walking off the stage singing, “Lollipop, lollipop, ooh lolly, lollipop”; Celeste holding her guitar behind her head and playing the “Smoke on the Water” riff during her introduction. The unscripted moments were downright uplifting, such as when Genesis, smiling broadly, threw her arms in the air in triumph at the end of Off Topic’s song. And GLYCH was awesome. Holly started with the surf beat, Laura came in, Celeste played the riff high, Gabby played it low, and Yinka sang about the joys of music and the dream of fame.
There were plenty of what are known in the music business as “mistakes”—lost drum beats, wrong chords—but there were also plenty of moments that made you remember why you love rock and roll, which is often best when played by amateurs: the chorus of “Get Down”; the simple solo by the bass player in the Balloon Animals, who had not even touched the instrument one week before; the buzz saw guitars of Immune to Gravity; the chorus to “High School Wonderland.” I woke up singing it in my head the next morning and found myself humming it all day: “Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.” It wasn’t full rock star glory, but it was still pretty cool: something created from scratch that lived on long after the amps were turned off.
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