Everything I Know I Learned from Rock Stars

Adult Group Class / Ensemble Program

Music fans spanning generations are invited to discover favorite artists anew in Bill Paige’s Everything I Know I Learned From Rock Stars, on Eckhartz Press
Paige, a journalist whose professional career includes music promotion, marketing, public relations, and broadcasting, shares long unavailable interviews with artists including Roy Orbison, Queen, The Go-Go’s, Cheap Trick, Joe Jackson, and Boy George, as well as the stories behind decades of musical experiences from both sides of the concert stage.

In 1998, Bill Paige joined a music class called “The Band Band,” at Chicago’s famed Old Town School of Folk Music. That seemed a good place to start, as he originally learned to play guitar strumming along to The Band’s Music from Big Pink. In so doing he embarked on the latest phase of a musical journey that had started many years before – at the keys of a typewriter.

A professional writer and editor, Paige’s first byline appeared in 1975 in the Illinois Entertainer, a venerable Chicago music publication. For more than 15 years, the Entertainer, as well as United Press International, Billboard, Performance, Creem, Chicago Sun-Times, among others, published scores of his reviews, articles, and interviews with rock legends including Roy Orbison, Grace Slick, Roger Daltry, Lindsey Buckingham, Debbie Harry, Peter Gabriel, Nils Lofgren, Electric Light Orchestra, and Queen.

Paige continued to take performance and songwriting classes with acclaimed OTSFM instructors Steve Dawson, Steve Levitt, Jim Tomasello, and Arlo Leach. He also performed in many concerts organized by the school, starting in 2001 with an anniversary celebration of The Band’s The Last Waltz, and continuing with “artist tributes” featuring the song catalogs of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bob Marley, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Steve Goodman, and Phil Ochs, among many others.

Grouped with: Pop & Rock