‘Rock’ of Ages

Veteran jazz musician Bob Dorough sat at a table in the Silver Lake club Spaceland recently, intently poring over sheet music, trying to nail down the words and tunes to songs he was to perform in just a matter of minutes.

“These kids know the songs better than I do,” the 72-year-old Dorough said, nodding his ponytailed noggin in the direction of three twentysomething singers who would be joining him on stage.

The thing is, Dorough wrote the songs in question. But he was hardly ashamed that he couldn’t remember them as well as the youngsters.

That was the whole idea.

The songs being featured were from “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated educational clips that were a staple of ABC-TV’s Saturday morning programming in the mid-’70s, with such clever ditties as “Conjunction Junction” and “Three Is a Magic Number.” With Dorough as musical director and the primary writer, along with such esteemed colleagues as jazzman David Frishberg and young recruit Lynn Aherns, the series covered four curricula: “Multiplication Rock,” “Grammar Rock,” “Science Rock” and “America Rock.”

But the fact that Dorough had to bone up on the songs while his young accomplices did not says less about any failure of his memory than about the success of his writing: There’s a whole generation--the so-called Generation X, to be exact--that’s now come of age with these tuneful lessons indelibly stamped in their synapses.

“It’s phenomenal,” says George Newall, who as an advertising executive at the McCaffrey & McCall agency was one of the “Schoolhouse Rock” creators and wrote several of the songs. “I can go into any bar and if the waitress or bartender is under 35, I can simply say ‘Conjunction Junction’ and they’ll reply, ‘What’s your function?’ I’ve won a lot of $10 bets with that.”

And with that coming-of-age of people who in their youth were fed a steady diet of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the series is experiencing a remarkable renaissance.

ABC, with its children’s programming division now staffed with some of that very generation, revived the series in 1993, not only airing the old clips but also commissioning the original creative crew to produce new series dealing with more topics; a “Money Rock” set has been on most recently. They’ve also packaged the old ones into home videos and spun off several CD-ROM “learning games” from the series, as well as published a book by Newall and co-creator Tom Yohe. (It doesn’t hurt that ABC is now owned by the Walt Disney Co., whose chairman, Michael Eisner, was the ABC vice president of children’s programming when “Schoolhouse Rock” was created.)

And Rhino’s Kid Rhino label has this week released a four-CD anthology of all the ‘70s “Schoolhouse” songs--the first time most of this music has been available. That comes on the heels of “Schoolhouse Rock Rocks,” an album of new versions of the songs by such young music figures as the Lemonheads, rapper Skee-Lo and the band Blind Melon, whose “Three Is a Magic Number” was the group’s last recording before the October cocaine overdose death of singer Shannon Hoon. (MTV will show a special on the album’s making this weekend.)

“We had the ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ videos on our tour bus for years, really bad bootleg copies before they released the official versions,” Blind Melon guitarist Rogers Stevens says. “That was a song we were planning on possibly recording anyway. So when they approached us about the album, it was something we really wanted to do.”

On the surface, this phenomenon is just one more in a string of Gen-X nostalgia revivals a la “The Brady Bunch” rediscovery of recent years. In fact, just as that TV series was brought back to unlikely life as an off-Broadway theater presentation with irony-laden productions from real scripts, “Schoolhouse Rock” was turned into a musical revue by the small Chicago company the Body Politic, which last year took the production to New York.

“It was like going to ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ with everyone singing along,” says Newall, who is executive producer of the new series along with Yohe, who was also his partner in the original productions.

“The Simpsons” also paid homage recently, with a spot-on takeoff of “I’m Just a Bill” recast as “I’m an Amendment”--which skewered special-interest groups trying to place their views into the Constitution.

But there’s more to this revival than mere nostalgia. “Schoolhouse Rock” actually taught Gen-Xers useful information in ways that conventional education could not.

Newall says that, not long ago, he was approached by a young Canadian-born woman who, thanking him profusely, explained that she never could have passed her U.S. citizenship test without the “Schoolhouse Rock” song of the preamble to the Constitution. In fact, it was a clerk at the immigration office who suggested that she use the “Schoolhouse” video as a study aid.

“I guess the dimension of melody is something that gives the learning process a boost,” says Dorough, who was brought to the project by Newall to serve as musical director.

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But that’s clear to anyone trying to say the alphabet without humming the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The “Schoolhouse Rock” method is to flesh out each lesson with personality. That was the directive that Dorough remembers coming straight from McCaffrey & McCall’s David McCall--the person who first had the idea for an educational song series--when they first met: “David McCall said, ‘Don’t write down to the kids.’ ”

Linda Steiner was a kid in the ‘70s, and now, at 33, as vice president of ABC Children’s Television, recalls that what stuck with her was not just the facts but the stories of the “Schoolhouse” clips, especially “I’m Just a Bill,” written by Frishberg to explain the legislative process.

“For my brother and me, that was our favorite song of these,” Steiner says. “I identified with the bill being lonely as he sat on the steps of Congress waiting to become a law.”

And as a result, it’s made unlikely Gen-X heroes out of Dorough, Frishberg and trumpeter-singer-actor Jack Sheldon, the main voice of “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill.”

They all perform “Schoolhouse” songs in their jazz club sets, and all report that these days those are the songs that get them the most response. And they also find fans in very unexpected places.

“I’ve known Clint Eastwood for about 20 years now, and he’s always liked me,” Sheldon says. “But when his new wife [thirtysomething Salinas newscaster Dina Ruiz] met me and found out I’d done ‘Conjunction Junction,’ she started screaming. It gave Clint a whole new perspective toward me. He looked at me with more respect.”

* MTV will air a special on the making of the “Schoolhouse Rock Rocks” album Friday at 4:30 p.m. with repeats Saturday (2 and 9:30 p.m.) and Sunday (9:30 a.m. and 5 and 11:30 p.m.).