ReZoom

Our music columnist traces the boom in boomer music, as students go from music camps to music stores to reclaim their rock star dreams.

"It's the passion, the energy, the excitement about music ... I think it's the fountain of youth."

Professional photographer Barry Berenson, 50, of Gig Harbor, WA, gets his energy flowing with intensive weekend workshops in acoustic blues guitar at rural Southeast Ohio's Fur Peace Ranch, hosted by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitar hero Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna). Berenson and thousands of other late-blooming musicians are rediscovering their youthful desires. And no little blue pills are needed.

As kids, just about all of us played guitar or another instrument, stopping when "real life" got in the way.

That happened to Marjorie Thompson, 53. She picked up the guitar in 1964, and got pretty good at playing the folk music of Dave Van Ronk and Mississippi John Hurt. Then music took a backseat to biology, both academic and applied. "I had to go to college and be a scientist and have seven kids along the way," she explains. Today those kids are aged 12 to 27, and Dr. Thompson is the Undergraduate Dean of Biology at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Restarting the Fire
At 48, her passion for music reignited, and she attended several music camps. She was soon writing and performing her original songs (she now has more than 90). Overcoming "paralyzing stage fright," she began playing professionally in 2002 and today does as many as 80 concerts a year and is releasing her fifth CD. "If you're going to do something," she says with a laugh, "you might as well overdo it."

Most of us won't go quite that far, but plenty of us are rediscovering our love of playing music. After a few years (or decades) away from music, with careers and families pretty well established, and with a little more leisure time and extra cash on our hands, lots of us are heading back to the local or online music store. We can now afford the instruments we dreamed of as kids, as well as the books, CDs, DVDs, private lessons and workshops to learn to play them.

And the retailers saw us coming. The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) website tells its members: "Moved by the music they grew up with and an inherent desire to express themselves, many boomers will jump at the chance to fulfill their rock star fantasies or achieve their lifelong goals of learning to make music. Best of all, they now have expendable income to buy the kind of instruments they've always wanted."

 

And those instruments are out there. Did you always want to be Paul McCartney back in the 1960s? Now you can pick up a reproduction of his iconic violin-shaped Hofner electric bass. And naturally, there are DVDs and online sites to teach you all those Beatles licks. Or maybe it's Eric Clapton's black Strat, Slash's sunburst Les Paul or Emmylou Harris' big-bodied Gibson acoustic. They've all been painstakingly replicated for moneyed boomers.

So many of us have been returning to our adolescent musical passions – or at last working up the nerve to take up an instrument for the first time – that adult music students, ages 25-55, are the fastest growing group of new music students, according to the Music Teachers National Association.

If your tastes run somewhere between rock and classical, there are dozens of folk music workshops. Many boomers, veteran musicians included, have damaged hearing after years of cranking it up. By our 40s and 50s, we're ready for something quieter. But no "Kumbaya" for this crowd. Whether it's the blues and ragtime taught by Kaukonen and Fur Peace instructors like Roy Book Binder and Marjorie Thompson, or contemporary sounds from Jack Johnson and Ben Harper, today's acoustic players bring rock energy.

Fur Peace Ranch combines Kaukonen's star power and downhome philosophy into a program based in fingerstyle folk-blues. Its floating faculty features such prominent players as former Muddy Waters guitarist Bob Margolin and singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier. Workshops are a great way to be immersed in the music in the company of equally obsessed peers. No phones, no kids, no chores.

"I really like coming to the Fur Peace Ranch," says 40-something Red Hopkins of Mason, Ohio. "It's like my favorite place in the whole planet. The reasons I come here are a lot of the people are from the same generation as me. We all like the same music, so we all have a lot of things in common."

Larry Nager is ReZoom's resident music columnist. A former music critic and editor for daily newspapers in Memphis and Cincinnati, he is also the author of "Memphis Beat."

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