How Little Stevie Is Working To Keep Rock & Roll Alive for Middle and High Schoolers

Last night, guitarist Stevie Van Zandt, fresh off the end of the U.S. leg of “The River Tour” with Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, was back in New York City to host the premiere of Ron Howard’s documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years, in theaters today.

But this was no ordinary red carpet benefit. Some of the biggest stars attending were actually the teachers and students who have benefitted from Van Zandt’s non-profit, the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation (RRFF), which is working tirelessly to find a way to keep rock and roll alive for the current generation of middle and high schoolers.

How is this done? By offering over 70 free multimedia lesson plans on the Teach Rock website, covering everything from the ways Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix were linked to the Civil Rights Movement to lessons like The Emergence of Grunge and The Rise of Disco, all of which can be incorporated into a classroom setting.

Add to it a recent partnership with Scholastic, which will host a national webcast about The Beatles and their impact on Oct. 19, moderated by Whoopi Goldberg, with Van Zandt and special guests speaking to students across the country, and over one million students and teachers are about to learn much more about this non-profit.

For Van Zandt, The Beatles have always held a very important place in his heart.

“The Beatles are everything to me,” he says. “They started the revolution that became the Renaissance of the sixties. They also represented this new idea of a band that wasn’t ‘look at me I’m a star,’ but it was friendship and family and communicating a sense of community.”

Despite the fact that there’s a new generation that may never have heard of The Beatles, Van Zandt is determined to ensure that today’s middle- and high-schoolers know how crucial the music of that era was to kids both here in the U.S. and abroad.

“Suddenly we could communicate with each other,” he says. “Through music, teenagers in America could connect directly with young people in France and Germany and Japan. It was a way of communicating without our governments, without people in-between.”

Getting others onboard to help support this mission was a no-brainer, too.

“Steve doesn’t live a life, he lives a crusade,” says Paul Shaffer, renowned for his work as the bandleader on The Late Show With David Letterman, who co-hosted last night’s premiere. “When he calls up with a cause, he believes and you believe. He won me over with the importance of educating kids about our indigenous music here in this country, a little something called rock and roll.”

The Eight Days a Week in the Classroom materials available at the RRFF’s teachrock.org website will afford students a comprehensive view of the sixties via the musical foursome that stood at the center of that era, connecting the film with the classroom.

Parade’s Ace Reporter—and Bruce Springsteen aficionado—Zachary Kaplan, 12, talks to Little Stevie:

What do you wish kids my age knew about rock and roll?

It was the art form that took popular music and allowed for personal expression to take place. And communication in a way that was communicating serious issues, like politics. It was motivating. It was fun and you could dance to it, but you could also express your own feelings and still have a hit record. It was the only time in history when the best music being made was also the most commercial. You’ll never see that again.

Do you think studying rock and roll could help kids in school?

 Yes. Definitely. Two big reasons we’re doing our curriculum is because of the dropout rate in our country. One out of two kids in poor neighborhoods are dropping out of high school and two out of five kids nationwide are dropping out. This is a terrible epidemic, but if a kid likes one single teacher or one single class, they’ll come to school. We want to be that class.

What are your biggest goals for the foundation?

We’re just starting to get known. We’ve been working behind the scenes to make sure we had substantial lessons in place. We have 70 lessons online and we’ve outlined 200, which is our goal. We also get sidetracked with projects like The Beatles. I was also so inspired by Dave Grohl’s HBO show, Sonic Highways, where he goes to six to eight towns and talks about interesting musical things there that I thought, ‘Let’s do lessons based on that show.’ So we’re doing that, too, and we’re encouraging kids to make their own Sonic Highways show. Wherever you live there is some kind of rock and roll history. We’re encouraging kids to interview their parents and grandparents and ask them: What venues did you go to as a kid, is that place still there, what’s there in its place, who did you see, who did you enjoy listening to growing up? This is another sidetrack project, but it’s so useful!