The Interview: Emily Easton, Girls Rock!
By Sarah Dahnke in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 16, 2006 3:02AM
We may have mentioned this recently, but Chicagoist believes that children are the future. So when we ran across a group of ladies who want to inspire the youth of Chicago to band together and form a million tiny rock bands, we wanted to tell their story. (We also wanted to find someone who could make use of that Hello Kitty guitar that’s just been sitting in the closet collecting dust.)
Girls Rock! is a non-profit organization that is hosting its very first camp this week. The camp was open to local girls, ages nine to 16, interested in learning to play rock music and forming bands. No previous musical experience was required for these little ladies to enroll in classes to learn guitar, bass or drums, which they will practice all week. They will also be inspired at the end of each day by watching fellow women who have embraced the rock. There will be daily performances by estrogen-filled bands, including The Passerines, Daemon Familiar, Youth Dekay, Gamine Thief, Opportunity School and Mika Miko. The five-day camp will conclude with one killer showcase where the girls will rock out with their new-found bandmates.
We recently spoke with Emily Easton, director of the camp, to learn a little bit about what inspired the establishment of such a camp and why it is important for girls to, um, ROCK!
Chicagoist: Can you tell me a little bit about Girls Rock! and how it got started?
Emily Easton: Well, it existed already. The first camp was in Portland, and I think it’s about five years old now. They actually have a year-round camp at this point and a camp for adults. Out of them grew the Willie Mae camp, which is in New York City. One of the people who started the camp in Chicago had volunteered for Willie Mae. She was an old friend of mine from college, and I ran into her in a coffee shop. When she told me what she was doing, I ended up getting so involved that I took over as director when she moved a few weeks ago. But then, as about four or five of us were planning this camp, we found out that there was another group of girls at Roosevelt University who were doing the exact same camp for the exact same week. So we banded together and became this coherent organization and decided to push ahead this year because we were all so excited about the project that we didn’t want to wait until 2007.
Chicagoist: Were the girls at Roosevelt doing a similar camp, or was it under the Girls Rock! name?
EE: It was almost a completely similar camp. Both New York and Portland have been very supportive of our efforts to do a separate camp in Chicago, but both camps did want us to remain independent. We’re not sponsored by New York or sponsored by Portland. We just do our on thing in Chicago and look to them for advice and help. The girls who were doing the camp at Roosevelt are all in a band together called Gamine Thief, and one of them is using this as her master’s project for, I believe, a Social Service M.A.
Chicagoist: What about you and those who were part of your camp before you guys came together? What are your backgrounds?
EE: All of us went to the University of Chicago. We knew each other through the radio station there, WHPK. A few of the members had played in a band together called Starluster. I had mainly been around WHPK. I used to work at Reckless, so I knew a lot of people right off the bat who were going to be interested in doing this. One of the members is soon to become a lawyer, so she’s probably one of the most helpful persons we can have as far as IRS forms and the like.
Chicagoist: But this is the first time you guys have ever done this in Chicago, right?
EE: Yeah, this will be the first time this has ever happened in Chicago, and this will be my first time being involved with a rock camp in general. Some of us have camp backgrounds, and some of us have rock backgrounds. We had just never put two and two together.
Chicagoist: Does the camp only teach rock music?
EE: The focus is on rock music, but we’ve been doing everything we can because at least three of the applications we have received specified that they wanted to do hip hop. And hip hop is actually much more practical, especially if you live in an apartment building, you can’t really practice drums. But you can practice breaks and beats and rapping at a much lower volume. So we built in a turntable workshop for this year, and we’re having a couple of MCs come in and perform and talk. We’re hoping to expand that for next year. The real problem this year is that we couldn’t get enough mixers, you know, because those are pretty high-level pieces of equipment to have nine-year-olds learning on.
Chicagoist: What are the instrument classes, specifically?
EE: There will be guitar, bass, drums … for those who want to sing, we’ll give them a little extra practice with singing. All of the bands will be two-three guitarists, one bassist and one drummer. Next year we’re hoping to expand into keyboards, and like I said, offer kids more of a chance to DJ. We’ll work with some other instruments as we can get our hands on them to play with.
Chicagoist: Who are some of your instructors?
EE: DJ Mother Hubbard is going to be doing a DJ workshop. I think we have someone from the Chicago Screen Printing Workshop coming in on a day where the girls will design a T-shirt. We’ll print it in the second half of the workshop, so they can all have their own band T-shirt. The head of Busy Beaver Buttons is coming in to do a button-making workshop. As per instructors, it’s a lot of local musicians. On the very first day there’s someone coming in from Ear Love who will be teaching a workshop about how to protect your hearing. There are bands playing every day at camp, and the requirement for bands is that they had to have a majority of female members.
Chicagoist: You seem to be really promoting the whole DIY aspect of being in a band, rather than just how to play specific instruments.
EE: Yeah, that’s kind of the goal. I know personally I can’t play anything very well at all, but there’s lots of other ways to be involved with being in a band without picking up anything or going on stage. And while they all have two hours of instrument lessons every morning and two hours of band practice every afternoon, there are other ways to get involved and stay involved with the scene without necessarily being a musician yourself. When we do the camp in 2007, we’re hoping to have some classes like “How to handle a label deal” and “How to book a tour” and “How to deal with a promoter” and stuff like that, which we didn’t really think was appropriate for nine-year-olds, but it’s all information you’ll need if you’re going to be in a functioning band. We’re trying to give them the whole rounded curriculum, if you will.
Chicagoist: How successful have these camps been in New York and Portland?
EE: I know that people are crazy about the Portland camp. It started very similar to ours, as one week in the summertime, offered to a very small group of girls. And now there’s something like three or four sessions, and they have year-round workshops. And they have a workshop for adults. The support they have gotten has been unbelievable. And the New York camp was up to 60 or 70 girls per sessions, and they have two-three sessions per year. It’s hard to get the word out there, though. There are so many summer camps that it’s hard to establish yourself as a camp. But they have shown that there’s definitely an interest for this. I think that as the hipster population gets older and starts having kids, there’ll be more of a demand to get your kids into the DIY type of thing.
Wanna catch the Girls Rock! showcase live? Come to Schuba’s (3159 N. Southport) at 1 p.m. this Saturday. The cover is a measly 5 bucks, and the proceeds go toward providing rock resources for girls in Chicago.
Photo of Portland Girls Rock! camp showcase via gwen.