Young heartthrobs take their musical lessons to eager schooltime fans

A white stretch limousine pulled up outside a concert hall in Inglewood on Friday morning and three entertainers hopped out. Swarming nearby were hysterical young fans.

But this wasn’t the Forum, the city’s regular venue for big-time entertainers. This was Crozier Junior High School, one stop on the 1989 JAM--Joining Academics with Music--tour.

As the curtains parted on the auditorium stage, an up-tempo dancing tune began. Out popped aspiring teen-dream idol Bobby Ross Avila, a 13-year-old from San Bernardino who’s been making music since he was 2. All he did was dance and sing, as his brother, Isaiah, 11, and his 15-year-old neighbor, Terry Shephard, accompanied him with synchronized steps.

Soon the audience was screaming, waving and dancing. The fans were so excited that a few of the girls rushed up to smear lipstick on Bobby’s cheek.

“I go to the schools to preach to the kids,” said Bobby, as he delivered a message about staying in school and keeping straight.

“Some rappers have explicit raps and they mess with the kids’ minds. It shouldn’t be like that. If you have a goal and dream and believe in God and yourself, you can be anyone you want to be.”

The JAM sessions began 15 years ago when Devoux Lewis Grant, a traveling disc jockey known as Dion, visited his former high school in Los Angeles and discovered that many students had lost interest in school.

With a humble storefront on the Los Angeles-Inglewood line as his command post, Grant organizes free mini-concerts in area schools pushing just about any campaign a principal favors: good attendance, high grades, a student body active in the fight against drugs or a campus free of graffiti.

“We’ll celebrate anything,” said Dion, who acted as a type of bodyguard to keep the young ladies from “girl-handling” the young singer.

Since October, the tour has hit schools in Hollywood, Watts, Altadena, Huntington Park and Marina del Rey.

Friday it was Inglewood.

Bobby, whose first album was just released, hopped off the stage during a slower song to get closer to his fans. As they squealed, he would lean close to a selected young girl, look into her eyes and crooooooooon the words to “I Won’t Let You Go.”

Teeny-bopper heaven.

Teen-singer’s delight.

One of the anointed turned her head away and covered her dripping eyes.

“I wasn’t really crying,” she insisted later. “Just embarrassed.”

Before he took the stage, Bobby said his music has a message. Listen to the lyrics, he advised.

In “Merry go Round,” he sings of how hard it is to make it in today’s world:

This is too short.

It’s not a game.

We laugh, cry and hurt,

and all bleed the same.

“Drugs Ain’t My Thang” is as the title proclaims:

They say that cancer and AIDS

Are killer number one.

Well ain’t drugs a killer too?

What are we gonna do?

Gary O’Neal of RCA Records, which has Bobby under contract, said Friday’s concert will teach kids more than any class they’ll attend that day.

“I hate to say it, but it’s true,” he said. “Music is that powerful.”

Larry Richardson, a drafting and wood-shop teacher who was tap-dancing in the aisles during one of Bobby’s tunes, had his own thoughts about the message.

“These concerts bring the people who these kids emulate right to their school,” Richardson said. “The messages are positive, and the kids love it.”

After the concerts, students will write essays on the messages that came across during the performances, Crozier Assistant Principal Marcia Hazelton said.

“I think Dion’s concerts are helping to give kids the motivation to stay in school,” Hazelton said. “The message is that you don’t have to sell drugs to ride around in a limousine.”

Dion, who studied business at West Los Angeles College after spending 18 months with the Army in Vietnam, gets the concerts going by contacting record companies. He uses his own sound equipment and technical crews at the schools. Although the companies and other sponsors foot the bill, Grant said everyone benefits.

“The record companies owe the kids,” he said. “I ask the artists, ‘If the President of the United States has to go out and meet the public, why do you think you’re any different?’ ”

Joan Scott, director of publicity for Motown Records, which has sent several artists on school tours, said, “Once the singers get out there and see how hungry these kids are for attention and inspiration, they get into it.”

And it helps sell albums too. “How could you better sell your new artists than put them in front of people buying their products?” she said.

Sindy Lopez, 14, said the dancing was first rate and the records, tapes, T-shirts, photographs and posters handed out to the audience were great too.

“He dances like the rappers, but his music is more for the girls,” she said.

Charlovohn Bell, an eighth-grader, said he sees a big difference between the JAM sessions and the larger concerts at the nearby Forum.

“At most concerts, the singers do their gig and then leave,” he said. “Some singers just want to get their fancy cars, but I learned that not all of them are in it for the money.”