Ring Mountain Kids Rock Out

Earlier this month, hundreds of music fans packed into the Fillmore in San Francisco, paying upwards of $700 a ticket to see the likes of Linkin Park, Kings of Leon, and All-American Rejects. Those massive popular bands served as mere opening acts for the headliner, Alec and Gunshot, an upstart punk rock group fronted by Alec LeFurgy, a fifth grader at Ring Mountain Day School.

No way, you say? Fair enough. The concert itself was a mirage, but LeFurgy has a Fillmore-style concert poster that says otherwise. LeFurgy and his fellow 5th and 6th graders at the Mill Valley school recently got the chance of a lifetime to create their own rock concert poster as part of an art class project. They then visited the Fillmore itself, where the walls are adorned with a mindblowing array of concert posters from the biggest names in music history, including Marin-associated artists like Santana, the Grateful Dead, Quiksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane.

"It was pretty amazing," LeFurgy said. "Everyone really got into it - you could tell by the expression on their faces. And it was great to see all of the posters up on the wall at school at the end."

The project, in which students created rock posters featuring themselves as the headlining act, was the brainchild of 34-year-old Ring Mountain visual arts teacher Pedro Mena. As a former concert promoter, Mena has long idolized the late Marin rock impresario Bill Graham, a Holocaust survivor whose live music juggernaut, which included the Fillmore, revolutionized the music business in the 1960s. Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991, but his story inspired Mena to write an all-ages children's book about Graham. Mena assigned the book as homework for his students as a starting point for the project.

"I knew that the rock poster art itself would really engage the kids just aesthetically," he said. "That history happened in our backyard here. I saw the history of Bill Graham himself as a little movie in your head. They were really taken aback by his life and how integral a piece the concert poster was."

The students used Adobe Photoshop to make the posters. Once Mena showed the students some samples, they were hooked. They borrowed instruments from the music department and jumped in front of the camera to ham it up. The students picked up Photoshop so quickly that Mena had them design their own backstage laminates with the extra time. The laminates served as their passes to an official backstage Fillmore tour a few weeks later.

"It was pretty special," he said. "None of them had been there. I was picturing them some day going on their first dates there or seeing their first show there and being able to say, 'I was on the stage of the Fillmore when I was in fifth grade.' It's a whole lot more than a concert venue, that's for sure."