Local teen rockers’ coast-to-coast summer

Rock drummer Parker DeShaw and guitarist Bodie Hanninen returned earlier this month from School of Rock AllStars band tours. DeShaw’s group played East Coast venues; Hanninen’s band worked in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas.

On Friday, Aug. 18, they performed together with the School of Rock Eden Prairie House Band in Petaluma, California. The school’s premier, 12-member ensemble is on a 10-day West Coast tour, including a recording session in Portland. The Petaluma gig features north San Francisco Bay area School of Rock bands and the EP rockers.

The warren of studios that is School of Rock Eden Prairie is cradled inside a business center on curvy Edenvale Boulevard. Forty yards west of the studios, bike and hike tribes on the Minnesota River Bluffs Regional Trail have no clue that covers of Iron Maiden, Metallica, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and Frank Zappa are being perfected or re-invented by young rockers and their professional tutors.

The day before their West Coast trip, DeShaw and Hanninen took a 10-minute rehearsal break for a post-AllStars tours interview. We huddled in a corridor lined with practice rooms and musician autographs. The two Shakopee High School juniors could have been exhausted but glowed with smiles and life.

DeShaw’s group played bar-restaurant music rooms in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. “They were mainly venues made for musicians, so it was cool to be in the bigger rooms. … It was both a grind and joy.”

Hanninen’s group had played similar venues. He confessed that he was tired near the end, but added, “Ya know, I think if it was another week longer, I wouldn’t have minded.”

School of Rock AllStars tour bands are made up of accomplished student keyboarders, guitarists, percussionists, bass guitarists and vocalists from around the country. The tours are set up by experienced School of Rock staff to showcase talent at festivals and well-known venues like Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, and Club Dada in Dallas. The AllStars also promote mental health awareness and raise funds for The Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide.

DeShaw and Hanninen were among the 1% of School of Rock’s 62,000 performance program students selected for this year’s AllStars tours. The elite ensembles rode motor coaches from gig to gig, setting up and breaking down their cargoes of speakers, amplifiers, mic stands and instruments.

During a pre-tour interview at School of Rock EP, this reporter was handed an industrial-strength noise reduction headset by music director Andrew Seitz. Hanninen and DeShaw provided me three minutes of Living Colour’s signature hard rock classic “Cult of Personality” to snap action photos.

Hanninen had auditioned in Chicago with other nervous hopefuls in front of a panel of judges. “It was cool,” he said, “… But it definitely wasn’t a TV show [like ‘America’s Got Talent’].” He’s been playing guitar for 11 or 12 years, three or four of them with the School of Rock. He also plays keyboard and sings backup vocals.

Parker is also a guitarist, but a video of his drum riffs earned him an audition in New Jersey. More than a decade at the school has enabled him to jam with other “really really good musicians.”

Bodie Hanninen and Parker DeShaw sketched their respective School of Rock stories in brief, broad outlines. They had worked hard; had played local stages and band shells with other school ensembles. They had heard the shouts and applause lofted at their bands by families and friends on Sunday afternoons in Twin Cities lounges otherwise closed to teenage electricity. They were cheered while on gigs in Europe.

This summer was the first time in years that School of Rock EP had been represented on the AllStars Tours. Parker thought that an EP bass guitarist had been an AllStar, maybe seven years ago. Bodie and Andrew were less sure. But two local AllStars this year is a very big deal.

Pride molded director Seitz’s bearded face, “These kids,” he said, “have played more shows than I think most of the instructors at this school … it’s not their first rodeo.”

Snapshots and upshots

School of Rock EP general manager Molly Zupon fetched Hanninen and DeShaw from a rehearsal studio for a follow-up chat about their road tour experiences.

DeShaw’s group had played Brooklyn and Amityville, New York; Teterboro, New Jersey; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and New Haven, Connecticut.

“It was like both a grind and a joy, you know,” said DeShaw. “We’d get up at like 7:30 [in the morning]and get back to the hotel at 11:30 [at night]. We would always be on the road, always be doing something.”

In Orange, Connecticut, they visited the PEZ candy factory, which reportedly produces about 12 million flavored tablets a day. Its visitor center sent them off with souvenir PEZ dispensers.

DeShaw was impressed with Toad’s Place. The New Haven music venue on New England-y York Street is nearly surrounded by Yale University. The likes of Kanye West and hundreds of rock legends and the almost-famous, from the B-52s to Zulu Spear, have done their things for Yalie students and faculty.

Meanwhile out West

Record-setting temperatures in Oklahoma; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Houston and Dallas and places in-between welcomed Hanninen’s tour. “It was scorching,” he said. “We really didn’t spend much time outside.”

They did visit the Alamo in San Antonio and a rock fortress in Dallas. Club Dada has been around since 1986 in Deep Ellum. The historic, arts- and performance-rich neighborhood brands itself “Music Capital of North Texas.” Among Hanninen’s favorite songs were Zappa’s “I’m a Beautiful Guy” and Labelle’s cover of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” With his guitar, the kid from Shakopee matched the fevered hit’s saxophone solos. The audience was also fevered. “Someone from the crowd,” he said, “grabbed the whammy bar from my guitar.”

Note: See the sidebar for definitions of “whammy bar” and “moshing.”

Back East, DeShaw had a big moment near the end of the last song at the end of a set. Everyone on stage moved closer to his crazy drum riffs, perhaps to be teleported somewhere. “And I’d be like going, just banging my head, and everyone would be moshing in the pit. … It was really fun.”

Having not been asked for autographs on the RockStar Tours is not an issue for Parker or Bodie. They are on a new adventure. The School of Rock EP House Band shared stage time with northern California counterparts on Friday at the Phoenix Theater, Petaluma.

Editor’s note: Writer Jeff Strate is a founding board member of EPLN.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Aug. 19 to reflect the passage of time.

ROCK WORLD DEFINITIONS

A whammy bar, or wang bar, is a lever on a guitar that enables musicians to quickly change the pitch and/or the length of the strings for a pitch bend or vibrato effect. For a YouTube demonstration of the whammy, click here.

Moshing — Wikipedia definition
“Moshing (also known as slam dancing or simply slamming) is an extreme style of dancing in which participants push or slam into each other. Taking place in an area called the mosh pit (or simply the pit), it is typically performed to aggressive styles of live music such as punk rock and heavy metal.”