SIMMONS TOPS TOMMY LEE AS REALITY STAR...

KISS frontman Gene Simmons attempts to turn classical music students into hard rockers in "Rock School."
 
By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer

"Lovely" and "moving" are not words I ever would have thought to apply to anything connected to mega-tongued, fire-spitting KISS frontman Gene Simmons. (I hear you say "Beth," but that was Peter Criss.) Yet they are the very terms to describe "Gene Simmons' Rock School," a teenage reality makeover competition that premieres tonight on VH1, in a sort of "academic rock block" with the neither lovely nor moving nor remotely real "Tommy Lee Goes to College" (getting its cable-TV "second window" premiere, following its NBC bow Tuesday).

Arranged more or less along the lines of the Jack Black film "School of Rock," "Rock School" finds Simmons, sans all but his ordinary daily makeup, taking a post at a 450-year-old English prep school in order to transform 10 classically trained young musicians into a fighting rock unit. (Their baptism of fire will be to open for Motorhead!) Like that film, it promises to be a story of transformation and empowerment in which the teacher will himself be taught.

Simmons, who briefly taught sixth grade in Spanish Harlem before rock stardom turned him into a different sort of professor, says he wants to know whether he would have been any good at the job. And notwithstanding his pupils' initial impressions of him as "arrogant," "intimidating" and "a bit of a weirdo," the evidence on screen suggests he would be. He may not know how to behave in a public-radio interview, but he can talk to kids and has a natural sympathy for the misfit and underdog — rock 'n' roll being traditionally a venue in which the last become first. "Rock is about finding who you are," Mr. Simmons, as he gets to be called, tells his charges. "You don't necessarily have to play your instrument very well at all. You can just barely get by and you can be in a rock band."

There are some superfluous bits of exaggerated business: Simmons arrives in a limousine, flanked by blond hotties; deputy headmistress Mary Ireland is set up as a kind of watchful nemesis. But by the standards of the genre, the show is exceptionally genuine, in part because it focuses on kids, and in part because the teacher thoroughly knows and loves his subject. Tonight's episode ends with the choosing of a lead singer — appropriately, it is the class outcast, an intense little kid with ginger hair who "speaks Elvish" and sings out of time and out of tune, but with full-body attitude. It's a killingly sweet moment — "People are going to say, come, Josh, sit at our table," he excitedly foresees — that had me near tears, I don't mind saying. (Well, I do a bit — but it did.)

"Tommy Lee Goes to College," on the other hand, in which the Mötley Crüe drummer spends a semester (or so) at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is almost pure artifice. It also is built upon a movie trope — it is, essentially, the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle "Back to School," in which a rascally old millionaire upsets the groves of academe. You have to wait until the end credits to read that "Some elements have been produced and/or edited for comedy," but you will have worked that out long before then, from the sound and visual effects, the non-documentary camera placement, and the scene in which a "mobile army of interior decorators" arrive to "pimp" Tommy's new (off-campus) dorm room. "Now it's tight," Tommy tells pleased roomie Matt. "Got the cappuccino machine crackin', the flatty [that's a flat-screen TV to you] .... Dude, look at the snazzy alarm clocks."

Though Tommy declares his intention to "treat this with nothing but respect and love," and tells his "hot tutor" Natalie "I didn't come here to just goof around and party," the fact is that he has come not to study and learn — he isn't even enrolled — but to make a television show. Once you accept "Tommy Lee Goes to College" as merely an old-style campus comedy, it's entertaining enough, in its lunkheaded, vaguely sexist way.

The star may actually have a brain in his head, but the comedy, in the first couple of episodes at least, is built almost entirely on his lack of aptitude — horrified confusion is his nearly constant expression. But some sort of triumph surely awaits him at the end (in tonight's episode he does manage to correctly identify a Turkish filbert in his horticulture class); and, of course, whatever happens here, he can always go back to being plain old Tommy Lee, a well-paying job for which he is uniquely qualified.

'Gene Simmons’ 
Rock School,' rockin'

Sweet journey back to class for the Kiss singer
By Steven Rosen

In the face-off between new reality shows about aging hard-rockers returning to school, score a victory for Kiss’s Gene Simmons over Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee. Also score a victory for cable over broadcast.
NBC’s cloying “Tommy Lee Goes to College” never establishes why that rocker wants to be there. That leaves the series with a sense of aimlessness. There's a goof going on but we're not really sure who's being goofed.
By contrast, VH1’s “Gene Simmons’ Rock School,” which premieres tomorrow night, has a clear sense of purpose and narrative development. “Rock School” is also cheerful and even cute, if predictable. (After its premiere, “Rock School” switches to 10:30 on Fridays, following repeats of NBC’s “Tommy Lee.”)
Taking a cue from the hit movie “School of Rock,” the 55-year-old Simmons, who even looks like a weary, middle-aged Jack Black, arrives at England’s 450-year-old Christ's Hospital boarding school to unteach, as he puts it, a class of musically gifted 13-year-olds.
The school is beautiful, a veritable castle in the countryside, and one of the show's chief attractions. Another is the students’ chicly archaic uniforms of dark tunic-like coats and long gowns. They look like little monks in the making.
Almost all the students in the class favor classical over pop, and Simmons' mission is to make a rock band out of them. Early on he admonishes that attitude is far more important than musical accomplishment. He tells one boy he’s too good for rock.
One could quarrel with that, and for that reason the premise of the series seems stale. Simmons’ Kiss in its day was indeed a bluntly simplistic musical act that got by on theatrical bombast and lots of pancake makeup, but that's hardly the rule for rock bands, as we know. The biggest current British rock bands like Radiohead and Coldplay are extremely accomplished musically.
But “Rock School” is less about rock than giving the students a chance to loosen up and have fun. Under Simmons’ tutelage, they try to act like young rock gods. A red-headed boy named Joshua, who is studying trumpet, renames himself “Emperor” and tries out for lead singer by writhing about and screeching like Johnny Rotten. The other kids are appalled. Simmons is delighted.
Certainly, some of the chemistry of "Rock School" is Simmons’ bad-boy image as a man of many women, and in the premiere episode he's seen in a limousine with two leggy blondes, making a devilish face in close-up. Old footage of Kiss concerts shows him sticking out his tongue, and there’s an obscured shot of a female fan baring her breasts at a concert.
But in class we see a very different Simmons, and therein lies the real charm of the show. We meet Simmons the man, and he's a likeable sort, someone we can identify with. This gives "Rock School" some depth of the sort that's entirely lacking in “Tommy Lee Goes to College." 
Initially, Simmons comes on mock-tough, causing one girl to scream, but he proves to be disarmingly nice with a friendly, supportive classroom demeanor. He smiles and laughs a lot.
He explains early on that he once had a job as a teacher until Kiss took off. He'd long wondered if he would have been good at teaching. From the evidence here, he could have been.
He might not own a mansion, however. Or his own show on VH1.

Aug. 19, 2005
Gene Simmons' Rock School
By Erik Pedersen

Simmons tongue-ties Brits
with rowdy 'Rock School'

Vince Horiuchi
TELEVISION

Now this is how a reality show about a crazed rocker should be done.
   VH1's "Gene Simmons' Rock School" is an outrageously funny half-hour show about a clash of cultures: the blood-spewing Simmons of the rock group KISS and a group of frightened English schoolchildren forced to learn about rock 'n' roll.
   There's plenty to laugh at here, even if it is a carbon copy of the 2003 Jack Black hit "School of Rock." But how many shows get to play with Simmons' infamous elongated tongue? I just hope he's careful how he uses that thing in a boarding school.
   "Rock School" is what NBC's "Tommy Lee Goes to College" (which I reviewed earlier this week) tries to be but isn't, because Lee is too polite for TV.
   To set up the series, producers somehow discovered a boarding school naive enough to allow the series to be made there: Christ's School just outside London, a stuffy 450-year-old institution for teens that specializes in the study of classical music.
   In the premiere, Simmons - outfitted in a long, black leather overcoat - arrives at the school in a limo with a bevy of beauties and waltzes through the students' marching procession before being introduced to the school's headmaster and deputy headmaster.
   It's clear the headmaster has no idea what he's gotten his school into.
   "I'm afraid I have no knowledge of Gene Simmons," he said. "I know he is a pop singer and I know he is an influential member of a famous band."
   The guy's obviously been listening to too much Johann Strauss.
   In a funny introduction, Simmons heads to class and growls at the kids for amusement, watching their prim and proper little faces recoil in horror.
   He then gets down to business and begins auditioning kids for the lead singer of a band he wants to form, which will open for Motorhead at the end of the show.
   That's where the series turns sweet as it introduces the apple-cheeked children who must go from flutes to Fender guitars. One of them, Josh, aka "Emperor" (all the kids are asked to come up with cool-sounding nicknames), is the nerdy outcast with a horrible voice (though he says he does speak Elvish).
   "He's a bit of a weirdo," one of his classmates says about him.
   But Josh has plenty of rock attitude, and when he hams it up for the video camera while singing along to a rock song, he has the same sweet geeky innocence as the "Star Wars Kid," the Internet sensation who was caught on camera swinging his broom handle like a light saber.
   Despite Simmons' antics (which lead the deputy headmaster to scold him), the rocker comes off as a guy who just wants students to have fun while they learn something about a musical genre to which they've never been exposed.
   "Gene Simmons' Rock School" is a hilarious, punchy good time as we watch well-groomed, soon-to-be socialites get a rude awakening - rock 'n' roll style.
   I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when he first flashes them his bloody tongue.

Simmons' 'Rock School'
passes test of metal