This is Saul Hudson.
Most people know him as Slash from… some band… I forget.
I do remember he’s pretty good at shredding up the ol’ rock guitar. He is/was so good, in fact, there are still kids today discovering the power of rock n roll, and especially the now classic tunes of that one band Slash was in that was kinda popular.
Some of those kids attend the School of Rock. Yeah, it’s a real thing, and not really inspired by that Jack Black movie as you might think. It’s a for-profit music education company that was formerly called, ‘Paul Green School of Rock Music’ While it might sound a bit shady at first, the history of the company is pretty legit.
Paul Green was a music teacher who found inviting students to ‘jam’ with his band, in addition to lessons, allowed them to progress more quickly in their talents. While he titled his endeavor with his own moniker, he was referring to his creation as “Rock School” from it’s inception, and even registered the SchoolofRock.com domain in 2001 and officially opened his ‘Paul Green School of Rock Music’ in 2002 in Philadelphia. (The movie came out in 2003).
It seems the movie and the school were destined to collide in some form. In 2002, a crew from Viacom came to the school and shot footage of the kids learning and performing with the idea that it would make a good reality show. But the project was seemingly abandoned soon after the shooting. In 2003, two other film-makers decided to do a documentary and began shooting at the school, intending to follow the students through a whole year. Nine months into the production, they learned that Paramount would be releasing ‘School of Rock’ featuring Jack Black in an almost identical situation.
Some critics argued Jack Blacks character of Dewey Finn was based on the child-like antics of Green, but the screenwriter of the film is on record saying he had never heard of ‘Rock School’.
As for Green’s take on the situation, he said, “It opened a lot of other doors, corporate partnerships, and given us access to the rock stars that we play with. It was like Jack Black was the nationwide commercial for us and our movie was the industry cred.”
He considered a lawsuit, but decided against it, reasoning that the School benefited from the film saying “I considered suing, but what are you going to do? It’s better, in a karmic sense, to just reap the rewards”
He was bought out in 2009 by Sterling Partners who then franchised the business and officially adopted the ‘School of Rock’ title. In January 2012, the headquarters relocated from New Jersey to the Chicago with a staff of 14 and an additional 11 employees in Denver, Colorado. The company has 1,500 part-time employees, primarily music instructors in its owned and franchised locations.
And recently… in one of those locations… some kids were working on some Guns and Roses tunes when they were visited by a surprise guest.
Check out the band working through “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as Slash walks in… he then joins them on a “Paradise City” jam.
To say the kids were blown away is an understatement.
