By Chris Rotolo
MIDDLETOWN – In the 1960s and ’70s a Beatles-inspired boom consumed Middletown’s Sylvia Terrace neighborhood. It was the days of emerging garage rock bands like E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt’s The Shadows and Steel Mill, the latter of which included Bruce Springsteen.
A new student-produced film called “Sonic Highways Middletown: A Rock and Roll Story” will be shown Saturday at the Garden State Film Festival.
It tells the story of those bands and describes how the local music explosion helped launch local venues like The Hullabaloo Club and the Clearwater Swim Club, which catered to local teens and the music of the time.
In its second act, the film depicts a thriving DIY punk-rock scene of the ’90s, which forced local musicians to move underground, hosting shows in dingy basements and supportive businesses like Michael’s Restaurant and Pizzeria.
“Kids that we go to school with think it’s impossible to create a music scene for themselves in a place like Middletown,” said Toria Pater, a high school junior who helped edit the film under the guidance of Middletown High School South film and television teacher Christopher Corey.
“With this project we’re trying to show them that this was ‘a thing.’ You can do this. People who were under the age of 18 – with less resources than we have – did it.”
The film is making its debut Saturday night as part of the TeachRock.org Hometown Documentary Series, an initiative fronted by Van Zandt, a Middletown native, and his Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.
Students had a chance to get behind the camera’s eye and conduct interviews with such local luminaries like former E Street band drummer Vini Lopez, band leader Sonny Kenn and Van Zandt.
The film is a few years in the making. Corey’s co-executive producer and fellow South teacher Victor Bayers, a drummer, brought the idea downstairs from his second floor Rock and Roll History class in 2014.
Corey embraced the idea. It was also his story: He was part of the scene on stage and in the audience at those pizza parlor punk shows of the ’90s.
Over the years, students have contributed to the production of the film, handing it off to the next year’s class, trusting in its evolution.
As this film evolved, the narrative transformed into a commentary on modern culture and a call to action.
Courtesy Middletown South
Student editor Keeley Giblin said, “The film does tell the musical history of the town, but what it really does is highlight the contrast between the music community back then and what it looks like now.”
For Giblin, Middletown is devoid of music venues and artistic spaces for local teens to congregate and create, unlike the landscape of previous generations.
“We tried to focus on the evolution of it, and hasn’t been for the better. It’s been for the worse.”
Pater hopes the film will motivate her peers to navigate roadblocks in their way.
“This has been done. It can be done again. And the people in this film are laying out the steps to do it. These are the steps they took. It’s definitely a different time than it was then. But if we just tweak what they did a little bit, we can have something special, if you have the drive, which a lot of our generation doesn’t seem to have,” Pater said.
“Sonic Highways Middletown: A Rock and Roll Story” will be showing at the Garden State Film Festival March 30, Hang Onto Your Shorts Film Fest May 5 and the Middletown Arts Center May 7.
This article was first published in the March 28-April 3, 2019 print edition of The Two River Times.
