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What happens when NYC kids take lessons in rock music? Really good bands.
By
Jayson Greene
Published Oct 7, 2026
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Illustration by Edith Young for Gothamist
By
Jayson Greene
Published Oct 7, 2026
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In the lobby of the School of Rock in Gowanus, a 16-year-old girl sits alone on the couch quietly rehearsing Jimmy Page’s solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” on her unamplified electric guitar. She seems lost in concentration as she learns to nail the notes of this sleazy 1970s rock song. In another life, she might have been puzzling over the notes of a fugue.
At the front desk, a young female employee with a lip piercing explains the nuances of sludge metal, doom metal, and psych metal to a flustered-looking mother who asked a question about scheduling. Meanwhile, the descending riff of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" blares from the practice rooms behind the glass door. It’s a song that the School of Rock treats a bit like the Suzuki Method treats “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” — a standard, a building block.
I grew up studying classical violin in the early ’90s, a time when learning to play rock music was done on a kid’s own time, if at all. So it continually disarms me to enter into this genial parallel universe — one in which teachers expound eagerly on the relative merits of pre- and post-Bruce Dickinson Iron Maiden as class lets out.
The School of Rock has come far since its beginnings in 1998, when a man named Paul Green taught full-band curriculum to high school-aged students out of a former dentist's office in Philadelphia. Green also had a reputation for fostering a sexually charged, frequently abusive environment among his students, and in 2025, allegations of more serious abuses surfaced. Green had already separated from the School of Rock corporate entity in 2010; the allegations stem from the schools he personally ran, which have all since closed.
The School of Rock now boasts more than 300 locations across the United States. There are six locations spread out across the five boroughs, with three in Brooklyn alone. My 10-year-old son has been attending School of Rock for two years, during which he has met many like-minded kids — ones who, according to the unfailingly cheerful head of the Gowanus branch, “maybe don’t succeed in sports generally, or who are maybe not feeling empowered in their traditional school environment.”
The idea of rock and roll as "dangerous" music has long been waning. But even as recently as two decades ago, to play dangerous music you needed to be seen as dangerous. Prep school kids like the Strokes were still expected to be spotted partying downtown, coke ringing their nostrils and booze oozing out their pores.
Today, New York's biggest rock band is undoubtedly Geese, a group of brownstone Brooklyn kids whose parents are authors and musicians. Geese met and formed under the auspices of two institutions: The Park Slope Rock School (no relation to the School of Rock, confusingly), and the School of Rock. They are products of this endearing new world, one in which rock music is not just harmless, but wholesome.
What happened to make the devil’s music so approachable? Time does its part, for sure. We sometimes edit out the more salacious biographical details from our treasured artists’ lives, and the classical canon is not so saintly after all: Mozart once wrote a ditty called “Leck mich im Arsch” (run it through Google Translate, if you dare). My third grade choral instructor also left out Louis Armstrong’s brief tenure as a pimp from her speech to our assembled families before leading the children in our rendition of “What A Wonderful World.” No matter the era, musicians rarely mix well with polite company.
But in the sleeve tattoos, greying hair, and Sub Pop T-shirts of the parents dropping their kids off at School of Rock, I spy another possible reason. These are Gen X parents who came of age during the moral panic around punk, rap and heavy metal. These were the Tipper Gore years of music censorship, leading to congressional hearings and the birth of the Parental Advisory sticker. It’s not hard to imagine this generational cohort eager to prove the music they loved is no more toxic or dangerous than any other generation. A generation into the School of Rock universe, where classes have names like “My Chemical Romance vs. Paramore” and Black Sabbath is Beethoven, what have we learned?
Dominic DiGesu, the bassist of Geese, attended School of Rock's Manhattan location, first on Ninth Avenue in Midtown and then on the East Side, when he was 10 years old. His first memory of the classes is belting out Aerosmith’s “Cryin” (“a fan favorite,” he remembers.) He credits one of his School of Rock teachers, Nick Llobet, who went on to form the New York indie band youbet, as crucial to his development as a musician.
“He told me, ‘You can take this seriously if you want to,’” DiGesu remembered. “No one had ever said that to me before.”
Another one of DiGesu’s earliest teachers was Bob Jones, then the director of the School of Rock New York location. Jones “knew all of us individually before we were a band,” DiGesu said. Future Geese guitarist Emily Green, a high school classmate of DiGesu’s, also took lessons from Jones at the Park Slope Rock School. Through Jones, DiGesu met not only Green but also Geese frontman Cameron Winter and drummer Max Bassin. The band formed when they were barely teenagers, all of them still taking lessons. Several of their earliest recordings are still hosted by the Park Slope Rock School’s Bandcamp page.
"I would never want to stand up in front of Geese and say, you know, we made them, because we didn't, at all,” Jones said. “They would play a Coldplay cover when Cameron was 12 years old, and the room would be dead silent. Because he just had it, you know? Max could rip on the drums, even as a little boy. The analogy I like to use is that we just hold the flashlight. The kids do all the work."
Before he began working in rock schools, Jones' only experience teaching children was one-on-one lessons in classical double bass, from his previous life as a conservatory student at Michigan State University.
"Something really clicked," Jones said, and soon he was volunteering to fill every available sub list and lead every available School of Rock summer camp. By 2016, he was running the New York School of Rock where he would meet DiGesu, and in 2022, he became an equity partner in the School of Rock franchise.
Cameron Winter, Emily Green, Dominic DiGesu and Max Bassin of Geese at Banker's Anchor on September 27, 2025 in New York, New York.
Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone via Getty Images
"I've made every friend I've ever had through music,” he said. “It makes me feel way better [to share that with others] than anything else I've ever done."
Jones and the teachers at his location tend to approach their jobs with a bear-hug enthusiasm that recalls a camp counselor. "It's a very specific subset to be able to play this music, know this music, and to work with kids," he said.
When I ask Jones what kids learn about themselves rehearsing and performing rock music, as opposed to, say, chamber music, or jazz band, he points to rock music’s democratic nature. Skill matters in rock, but it’s always been a partner to participation. “We've had kids that had real trouble singing the right notes, and they got up there and did it anyway," he said.
Jones fondly remembers a student drummer who would always “flip the beat,” or mix up the basic kick-snare-kick-snare pattern of the rock 'n' roll backbeat, whenever he was onstage. The first time he got through one song without mixing things up, Jones said, "everyone cheered."
“No one ever teased him for that,” he said. “No one said, ‘You're ruining the song.’ They were all pulling for him. They wanted him to succeed.”
This is integral to School of Rock's philosophy, according to Jones. "You have to try things and fail sometimes.” The moments that go awry teach the children as much as, or more than, the moments of triumph. … Nine times out of ten, they realize, 'I didn't get booed; no one died."
My 10-year-old son, Harrison, has been taking guitar and vocal lessons at the School of Rock’s Gowanus location for two years. He wears a Megadeth or Metallica shirt to school nearly five days a week. Although his school offers a free string orchestra program, the School of Rock represents his primary musical education, and as I listened to him navigate the tricky dual-guitar harmony line in Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” with his guitar instructor, I was reminded of learning the Bach Double with my violin teacher. His syllabus will be completely different from mine.
One afternoon, I met fellow School of Rock parent Chondra Echert-Sanchez in the lobby while waiting for our children to finish their lessons. A poet and writer, Echert-Sanchez is married to Claudio Sanchez of the popular progressive rock band Coheed and Cambria: their son, Atlas, studies guitar and vocals at School Of Rock.
“Atlas certainly falls outside the norm when it comes to his interests,” Echert-Sanchez said, adding that “it can be really challenging to find peers who are interested in what he's interested in.” School of Rock “makes music the reward it's supposed to be,” she said, adding that “Claudio sings and plays guitar as a career, but Atlas will not take direction from him. Claudio’s extra proud because it’s his own thing, you know?”
“It's a very fragile thing we do, because it is so tied to identity and a young person's confidence,” mused Vincent Blackshadow Braimes, the music director of the Gowanus school and my son’s guitar teacher. “Even if you aren't a good math teacher, kids still have to learn math. But they don't have to learn rock and roll. They could drop out at any time.”
This might be true, but many do not. DiGesu was still participating in School of Rock when Geese released their first album, 2018’s "A Beautiful Memory*."* If anything, Geese’s current globe-spanning career emerged directly from their prolonged rock-school tutelage, like successful students graduating medical school. My son, at the start of his third year, seems more committed to School of Rock than to anything else in his life.
“It's a community we build, and that's why it's successful,” Jones said. “The kids are like, 'I want to be there. That's where my teachers are, that's where my friends are.' This is something that kids can really wrap around themselves.”
Tagged
Existing in New York City
Music
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Jayson Greene
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