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Students rock through the ages
Teens learn turntable etiquette while listening to their father and mother's music
from: silive.com
by Kathryn Carse, Staten Island Advance
The sound coming from a third-floor hallway of Tottenville High School on a Friday afternoon would give a visitor of a certain age pause.
"Hush" by Deep Purple is blaring away, as loud as the vintage audio-visual equipment in Room C301 will allow, resulting in a distortion familiar to almost anyone who cranked up the volume on vinyl records through the 1970s.
And there chatting beneath the barrage of sound emanating from a blue record player and its single speaker is a group of about 20 T-shirted Tottenville students, members of the after-school Classic Rock Club.
When the song comes to an end,Bill Spurge, social studies teacher and moderator of the club, barks "learn how to lift that thing" to club president Michael Maraventano. The love of the music comes a little more intuitively than the manual dexterity to lift the needle off the record without scratching the vinyl.
After having many conversations about music, Maraventano and Spurge started the club last year with a small group of teens, but its popularity has grown so that most Fridays between 20 and 30 students attend. As a result, Spurge has received support from the Beacon program, a Department of Youth and Community Development initiative that is dedicated to providing quality after-school opportunities.
THEY DON'T SETTLE
Ask Spurge and he'll tell you the participants, highly motivated honor and Institute students, are "intelligent kids who don't settle for what is there, who are willing to explore."
He guides the exploration. The afternoon's casual agenda includes a playlist that begins and ends with the Beatles -- the only group that can be repeated more than once. Spurge is a walking Beatles almanac, and no one gets away without an appreciation for the Fab Four, but he also emphasizes diversity in listening -- from the Monkees to Black Sabbath.
His desk is piled with CDs and vinyl albums -- Cream, the Police, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, The Yardbirds, JOAN JETT. ("They raid their cellars," says Spurge of his students' contributions. "You can smell the must.")
Carissa Pignatelli has a tote bag full of vinyl records that her father, who raised her on the Beatles, rescued from being thrown out by a friend. A big fan of the local group Dead Men Dreaming and System of a Down, the Annadale resident enjoys sharing the music and exploring the roots of today's music in the guitar chords of early rock.
The classic rock radio stations -- 105.5 and Q104.3 -- offer the same music, but, Miss Pignatelli says, "They don't have as much variety as we have here."
DISCOVERING SOUL MATES
With over 4,000 students, Tottenville is the largest high school on the island. So it is no small thing not only to discover the music, but also soul mates who enjoy hanging out and are open to listening to different kinds of rock music.
Christine Zazzaera remembers jogging with her fencing team on the third floor one rainy day when, much to her surprise, she heard music she loved.
"There are more harmonies, more music, it is not synthesized," she said of old-time rock. The 15-year-old Eltingville resident cites the Ramones -- "they made hundreds of songs with just four chords," -- Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Derek and the Dominoes, Yardbirds, Blue Oyster Cult, Jimi Hendrix and, of course, the Beatles among her favorites.
When she heard her first vinyl recording -- JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS singing "Bad Reputation" -- she couldn't wait to tell her guitar teacher -- Jimmy Mack.
Eric Rodriguez said he loves the creative energy of those early albums. He listens to everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Tori Amos, guided by a search for music that should "take some thought," that inspires, that awakens a "universal feeling of greatness." The 16-year-old Rossville resident said he finds that more readily in the combination of music and album cover designs of earlier decades.
Trent Reznor is a particular hero for the artistic expression and poetic lyrics he brings to every album (which includes Web design). Rodriguez' adventurous spirit also has led him to discover Rasputina, a contemporary rock band that combines cellos and percussion -- "Mozart meets Ozzie," Rodriguez said.
A FAMILY THING
The scene at the Classic Rock Club is so familiar, -- teens paying attention to each other and to music that speaks to them -- that, minus the school furniture, it could easily be someone's basement 30 years ago. However, unlike their predecessors, many of these teens were introduced to rock music by their parents, often during family car trips.
The music continues to be a source of connections. In 15-year-old Samantha Blendell's Tottenville home, rock music is part of family life. Her 46-year-old father, Martin, describes his adolescence as a time when he and his sister played the same albums over and over again on a victrola until "you could hardly hear them by the time we were done." The father said he enjoys sharing with his three children music in which he found "a lot of social and emotional value; that tried to appeal to something better in us." Having hooked them on the music he said he felt compelled to bring them to a live performance before everyone they wanted to hear was dead, so he got tickets for the family to see the Rolling Stones in Boston.
These days when he and his daughter drive around, she keeps him informed about the latest tunes, but they have a common frame of reference.
"I trust their basic values and ability to separate negative and positive messages," Blendell said. "Or just put the message aside and listen to the music."
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