.Kid Rock

Recently, The New York Times published a letter mimicking a famous MasterCard commercial: “Price of two tickets: $190. Parking: $15. Two cokes and a popcorn: $12.50. Two tour T-shirts: $50. Taking a ten-year-old to his first Bruce Springsteen concert: priceless.”

It was unclear whether the author meant this missive facetiously, but one can only hope so. After all, to think your child could experience the same thrill you did when you first saw Bruce Springsteen is to completely misunderstand the importance of context in rock ‘n’ roll.

This is not to say that rock is dead, moribund, or even passé. It just holds an entirely different place in the zeitgeist now.

At first, parents didn’t know about rock ‘n’ roll, which became part of its great appeal. Today’s parents, however, do. Many are better at keeping up with current bands than their children, speed-dialing KFOG to request the new White Stripes track while their kid begs them to change the station to KFRC. Entire clans now attend Springsteen shows the way families used to go to football games, and moms drag their daughters to free Patti Smith concerts in the (fallow) hope of destroying their kid’s love of Britney Spears.

Meanwhile, parents of small children often feel about Barney the way Tipper Gore wanted us to feel about NWA.

For that type of parent — and their name is legion, especially in Berkeley — Dan Zanes has become a savior whose work is essential to every family CD rack. Zanes, who formed the seminal Boston alt-rock band the Del Fuegos in the early ’80s, is currently kid rock’s leading light.

On his six self-made, self-distributed records (including Rocket Ship Beach, Family Dance, and this year’s House Party), Zanes has mined the annals of folk music for kid-friendly — and rock-friendly — music, performed with famous guests like Aimee Mann, Lou Reed, Suzanne Vega, and Sheryl Crow. He employs traditional blues, bluegrass, sea chanteys, and folk for his fare — songs from Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” — in addition to writing his own ditties. Touring the country as Dan Zanes and Friends, he then encourages parents to bring their kids for concerts intended to please listeners of every age.

In short, to parents who love rock ‘n’ roll, Zanes really is the new Bruce Springsteen — or perhaps more accurately, the new Minutemen or Hüsker Dü. That’s why his two upcoming shows at Zellerbach Hall this weekend have created such excitement among young East Bay parents.

Zanes says he has no axe to grind with kid rock in general: His daughter Anna listened to Barney when she was little, and he isn’t out to make her the next Ben Kweller, whose grunge band Radish got signed when he was just twelve. Instead, the idea for making kid rock, Zanes says, began when he began thinking about the environment he wanted Anna to grow up in.

“I guess there’s a lot of people who envision the ideal home life as being a house with the Clash playing on the stereo all the time,” Zanes says. “But what I wanted her to have was a house where musicians came and went. Where people sat in the kitchen playing guitar and laughing and dancing.”

That, he says, was the kind of house he himself grew up in, in New Hampshire. “Our mother was pretty bohemian. We grew up listening to folk, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Dylan, and the Band — all the things leftie liberal parents in the ’60s played for their kids.”

Thus, as a teenager Zanes had trouble with “modern” rock. Bowie and Zeppelin left him cold; punk, he admits, “was so much noise.” Instead, he liked Jan and Dean. “It wasn’t high concept, it was soulful, and it made me think. ‘I could do this too.'”

So Zanes formed the Del Fuegos with his brother, Warren. The band signed to Warner Bros. — who hyped them to the skies — but the Fuegos’ garage-folk ethos arrived about twenty years too early. In retrospect, Zanes isn’t surprised the Fuegos didn’t make it: they were utterly out of sync not just with punk, but with rock itself.

“To us,” he notes wryly, “the spirit of rock was like folk music or early hip-hop. It was part of everyday experience. To me, the biggest message of punk was that it didn’t have to be about leather pants and colored lights and enormous stages. It was something anyone could do, and that is our message today, too. When you play music for your kids, you can easily put yourself into the equation.”

Ironically, one of the many rocks the luckless Del Fuegos foundered on was a Miller beer commercial in which Zanes declared that “Rock ‘n’ roll is folk music — it’s made for and by folk.” In the days before commercial endorsements were considered de rigueur for hip bands, the Fuegos permanently alienated the entire rock cognoscenti by “selling out.”

Zanes laughs ruefully now when reminded of those rocky days of old. “I’m grateful that I had that experience, to make records and go out and tour and everything — it really was the American Dream. We were so fortunate to do it, and I got a lot out of it, but the shows I play now are much more like the really early, early Del Fuegos shows. All we cared about back then was how many shows we could play and how many people we could force to dance.”

But it didn’t last. “Once we got signed, the walls started to go up,” Zanes continues. “Every time we got to a show it was like, ‘Here we are, see you later.’ When I finished up with that, I was really disconnected, from music and from people. Then I went to a bluegrass festival in West Virginia with my brother-in-law. It was the biggest bluegrass festival in the world — it had Ralph Stanley and everyone, playing on the smallest stage you’d ever seen. They’d play and walk off and sign CDs and say hello to every single person there. The wall was down, and it was paradise, and I thought: ‘Why would I ever want anything but this?'”

Inspired, Zanes eventually created his kid-rock persona and the online record label Festival Five, mostly financed with the help of various parents he met on the playgrounds of New York City. Dan Zanes and Friends move tons of records, sell out every show, and just recently reached the pinnacle of success in their chosen field: a featured spot on Sesame Street, set to air in March.

More importantly, Zanes says, he’s fulfilled that particular vision of a diverse musical home-life. “In our neighborhood in Brooklyn, I know everyone on the street,” he says. “And there’s a lot more diversity here [than in New Hampshire], which is great on every level, but especially on a musical one. It’s the United States of America out there, and it’s all there for the asking. I’ve really gotten a lot from my West Indian neighbors, seeing how music fits into their lives. It helps me think about how life can be, how my life should be, how my life now is.”

One thing that’s striking about Zanes’ newfound success is how informed it is by parenthood itself. “When I was in rock,” he says, “every day was about what I could do for Dan that day.” Parenthood, he says, helped him join the human race — a condition that’s necessarily made his music a lot more welcoming to the masses.

Zanes’ strategy has worked for others as well. His Brooklyn home sits right around the corner from another set of rock ‘n’ roll parents enamored of Family Rock. Along with their daughter Rachel, Jason and Tina Trachtenburg comprise the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, a family act whose popularity has already landed them on Conan O’Brien and into the South by Southwest lineup.

As their new record’s title — Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle, Vol. I — implies, the Trachtenburgs, who formed their act in Seattle three years ago when Rachel was six, play indie rock at its quirkiest. Mom Tina buys vacation slide shows of strangers at flea markets. Dad Jason writes songs based on them. Rachel plays the drums.

Like a lower-profile Zanes, Jason was an unknown indie-rock guy toiling in several local bands prior to his new incarnation. Now he’s reaching heights he could formerly only dream of. Unlike Zanes, however, the Trachtenburgs’ music isn’t particularly suitable for toddlers, catering instead to the family’s own personal need to keep rocking together. The only reason Rachel is in the band, says Tina, was “she was always with us. We took her out to shows because we couldn’t afford a babysitter, so we thought, why have her just sitting there watching? Why not get her involved?”

Rachel played along. “Did she say, ‘I want to be a drummer?'” Tina asks rhetorically. “No, of course not. Mozart probably didn’t say, ‘I want to play piano.’ You have to guide your children into things. So she likes to sew on the sewing machine like I do, and she likes playing rock shows like her Dad does.”

Rachel’s peers don’t treat her differently, Tina says, because they don’t really know what she’s up to at midnight at the Mercury Lounge. Rachel –who is home-schooled while in Brooklyn but attends a public school in Seattle — likes Blondie, ELO, the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra, and she also likes to attend rock shows with her parents, even if they rage on past midnight.

“People always stare at me like I’m a terrible mom,” Tina says, laughing. “But we go home as soon as she wants to go home.”

In many ways, Zanes and the Trachtenburgs couldn’t be further apart. Zanes is looking to reconfigure the rock paradigm; the Trachtenburgs — who record for big indie label Bar None, play late nightclub gigs, and chart on CMJ — are still firmly entrenched in it. But the success of both groups proves that the new generation will transform rock ‘n’ roll into something all their own.

For parents, it’s a sign that you don’t have to put away childish things the minute you have a child.

Zanes also sees it as an effort to divorce music from the music business. “More and more, music had become something we just buy and sell,” he says. “But I’m optimistic now. I think people are beginning to remember that music is a fun thing that brings people together — that it’s a communal event.”

Tina Trachtenburg agrees. “The community you bring your child up in is so important. It’s really important that your kid doesn’t feel weird — meaning that you don’t feel weird in it, either. When we got pregnant I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ll have to go to Disneyland, we’ll have to get an ugly new car.’ But we haven’t done either of those things. We haven’t really changed at all — except for the better.”