Late at night on New Year’s Eve 2005, Carolyn Satlow, 17, and a group of her friends sneaked into their music school after hours. Her boyfriend had the key; also 17, he taught drums at the school, located in a dingy Philadelphia basement. While the rest of the group drank beers in the main rehearsal area, the couple went upstairs to a small practice room, where they started having sex. It was three in the morning. Suddenly, they heard a knock at the door. They froze, mortified. It was Paul Green, their teacher and the founder of the school.
Beginning in the late 90s, Green had transformed his own failed dreams of stardom into a second career, using the classic-rock canon as the basis for an innovative approach to music education. He called it School of Rock. Carolyn belonged to the outfit’s All-Stars program, a squad of Green’s most elite students. The program was incredibly close-knit—kids practiced most days of the week, and hung out almost exclusively with their fellow All-Stars, as well as with the vulgar, charismatic teacher who structured their lives.
At the time, Green was in his mid-30s, balding and pudgy. His voice—typically pitched between a bellow and a sneer—was instantly recognizable to the couple that night. “If you guys are fucking, I’m not going to be mad,” he allegedly said. “Just tell me that you’re fucking and I’m not going to be upset.” Sheepishly, the couple put their clothes on and left the practice room under their teacher’s smirking gaze. They worried that he might tell their parents, but he didn’t. He seemed almost proud of them.
Much of what took place in the All-Stars program seemed to revolve around sex, one way or another. Green allegedly had an unending curiosity about his students’ love lives, and would grill them for details during rehearsals. “He would have an impish grin on his face. It was really exciting and joyful for him to hear about whatever was going on with these kids, romantically,” one former student tells me. According to several former students, Green always knew which of his students were dating, and he’d ask a couple how far they’d gone in bed, or make crude inquiries about a girl’s supposed preference for oral sex.
Students rarely hesitated to answer his questions, despite the discomfort many of them felt talking about their sex lives in front of their teacher and peers. Their willingness stemmed from the pervasive atmosphere Green established, in which his approval hinged on complete obedience to his whims. He could be cruel and mocking, even violent, to those who didn’t play along. Yet they craved the rare moments when he expressed pride and satisfaction in them, even if it was only because they’d answered a question about blowjobs. “All of our self-worth was linked to what he thought about us,” Satlow says.
Green’s involvement in his students’ sex lives went beyond just asking questions. “He would meddle in everyone’s relationships,” Satlow says, recalling an incident when, she alleges, Green decided that her boyfriend wasn’t right for her. There was another student she should be dating instead, he told her. “At that moment, I was so under the spell of Paul,” she recalls. “I did literally anything to impress him.” So she dumped her boyfriend and began seeing the boy Green preferred.
He was a virgin, and Green decided that had to change. “I can make sure that you guys have a room alone,” he told her.
Green did not respond to air mail’s multiple requests for an interview or comment on former students’ and staffers’ allegations.
“It Felt Authentically Punk Rock”
Paul Green is among the most influential music teachers in America today. Though he’s no longer affiliated with School of Rock, the company he founded now has more than 350 branches around the world. They are located in big cities and suburbs, strip malls and main drags. There are 80 in South America alone.
The notion of teaching kids to play music through a focus on classic rock is now mainstream, but it was practically unheard of in 1998. Green was 25 years old then, studying philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and playing in a rock band he’d started with his wife. What he didn’t have was a steady income, so he started giving guitar lessons to local kids in his living room.
Green’s real innovation, he’d later say, was an emphasis on performance. One weekend, he brought his students to his band practice and invited them to play alongside him. “They were awful. They sounded like ass,” he told The Guardian in 2004. But he kept bringing them. Playing with a band gave them real grounding in how music actually worked, and how to interact with other musicians, which they couldn’t get from practicing alone. When a friend suggested Green’s students perform at an art opening, he put together a setlist with Radiohead and Led Zeppelin. People in the audience were blown away by the spectacle of teenagers expertly covering sophisticated rock.
Word spread. In 2000, Green took out a loan for $7,000 and opened his first brick-and-mortar school, in a former dentist’s office in South Philly across the street from a Church of Scientology. He had 17 students, ages 10-17, paying around $100 a month for lessons. The run-down classrooms had “a very dystopian vibe,” one former student tells me. “That was part of the appeal of it … it felt authentically punk rock.” Green emphasized the music of the 1970s—Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Ramones. Students formed bands and took private lessons once a week with Green and his musician buddies whom he hired as staff.
School of Rock quickly earned a slew of positive press in local papers and rock magazines such as Spin, which sent Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha to profile the school in 2002. By that point, Green had 90 students. His popularity would skyrocket the following year with the release of Richard Linklater’s School of Rock starring Jack Black.
Let’s get this out of the way: Black’s Dewey Finn in the film is Paul Green. Both are rude, crude man-children channeling failed rock-star dreams and preaching the power of riffs, Satan worship, and rawwwwkkkkkk. They share similar rubber-faced mannerisms and a penchant for motivational speeches.
Linklater and Black have always denied basing the character on Green. “Yeah, I heard about this guy,” Black told The Guardian in 2004. “The film’s not based on him.” Green was skeptical. He told interviewers that producers from VH1—whose parent company at the time, Viacom, also owned Paramount, the studio that released School of Rock—visited the school in 2002 and shot footage for a potential documentary, which never aired. Green said he considered suing, but didn’t, ultimately deciding to ride the wave of students flooding in following the film’s release.
As the school expanded, Green no longer taught every class himself. He had started the All-Stars as an elite program where he could focus his efforts. The bar was high; students would often be rejected, either because they played poorly or because Green thought they seemed uncool. “All-Stars is not a democracy,” read a pamphlet Green printed outlining its operation. “It is a benevolent dictatorship.” Acceptance into All-Stars began to take on a mythical status among students at the local schools. Some would audition multiple times over the course of years before they got in. Others never got in.
In 2005, Green finally got his Hollywood moment, when he and the All-Stars were the subject of a documentary called Rock School. The film portrayed Green berating and humiliating his students, while also inspiring them to a high level of musicianship, culminating in an All-Stars performance at a Frank Zappa tribute festival in Germany. (“Mr. Green’s pedagogic style appears predicated on the idea that if you spare the insults, derision and eardrum-piercing assaults, you spoil the child,” wrote Manohla Dargis in her generally positive review for The New York Times.)
Around this time, Green brought in a corporate board and a C.E.O. to professionalize the school and send the franchising program, which had spread to include locations in the Philadelphia suburbs, New Jersey, and Manhattan, into overdrive. By the end of 2005, he had nine schools with over 1,000 students. He sold most of the company to a group of investors in 2009, by which point there were 50 schools nationwide. Green continued to run the All-Stars program until he left in 2010.
Over the years he was involved in the school, Green taught hundreds of students. I spoke with more than 60. Some called him a genius and a legend, the best teacher they ever had, who instilled in them a lifelong love for music. But others described a darkness that hung over their time there, shading their bright memories of playing concerts and hanging out with friends. Today, many are still untangling their relationships with Green and grappling with the impact he had on their lives, almost all of which has not been previously reported.
Some All-Stars went on to successful music careers playing in bands for artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Dr. Dog. Others told me they never played music again. Some can’t even listen to it. “I can’t drive safely…. It sends me into anger,” a former student tells me. “I just start crying. Sometimes I have to pull over because it’s so overwhelming.”
“Nerds, Freaks, and Losers”
“Nerds, freaks and losers” is how Green described his students in a 2005 article in The Guardian. They were archetypal suburban music kids. They wore hoodies, Converse scrawled with pen drawings, and indie-band tees. Most, though not all, were white. They ranged from extremely wealthy to working poor. (One student’s mother worked as a cleaner at another student’s mansion.) Most shared a sense of displacement amid the Abercrombie-clad machismo of the era’s monoculture. Some had fractured relationships with their families. “It was definitely a repository space for disaffected kids, kids that maybe didn’t fit in at school,” a former student named Paco Cathcart tells me. “It was sensitive, vulnerable kids.”
School of Rock offered them a ready-made social group. They hung out together after practice, started bands, dated, broke up, tried drugs, and formed lifelong friendships. Green was their leader, one unlike any they’d encountered. He came across more like a teenager than a teacher—goofy and crude and harboring a deep distaste for pop-culture orthodoxy. He swore at them, wrestled with them, and played games other adults in their lives would have considered dangerous, like making them long-jump over rows of chairs, or, allegedly, looping a microphone cable around a student’s neck and running him up and down the hall like a dog.
Green’s juvenile streak helped him succeed as a teacher, at least at first. “He never behaved like an adult,” says Deanna Stull, a Philadelphia rock-scene veteran who helped Green start the school. “He was able to connect with kids.”
“A lot of School of Rock felt like a secret. That was part of his charisma,” Cathcart says. Green often called the students a family, separate from the one they had at home, where the boring loser grown-ups didn’t understand their problems, let alone the genius of Zappa. “He would say that a lot,” Cathcart recalls, about things that happened at the school: “Don’t tell your parents.”
Two students recall Green comparing School of Rock to the Branch Davidians. He allegedly kept books about the Waco disaster at the school and often talked about it. “He was explaining that it was this compound in Texas, and that there were underage girls that the guy could sleep with,” former student Eric Slick recalls. “He jokingly said, ‘Yeah, Waco is sort of the model for Rock School.’”
One of the key ways that Green differentiated his domain from the adult world outside was his frequent discussion of sex. He’d say things like, “If a girl goes to the bathroom when you’re on a date with her, it means she’s washing her asshole to get ready,” Cathcart recalls. Several former students claim he would share raunchy stories from his own love life; he’d guess the size of boys’ penises and comment on girls’ developing breasts. He allegedly told another staffer: “The cool thing about Rock School is it’s a boob farm.”
Another joke Green allegedly liked to tell: “What do you do to a teen girl after you rape her? You kill her!” He’d chortle, his big face turning red, and the class would laugh along with him.
To some students, the jokes reinforced the feeling that Paul wasn’t like other adults. “It made you feel respected or something,” Cathcart says. “It’s like, Oh, this person is bro-ing out with me.”
Other students were disturbed. T.J., a former student who asked to remain anonymous for this story, was sitting with some friends at a rehearsal at age 14 when, he claims, Green beckoned them over to his computer. “He was like, ‘Guys, want to see something really disgusting?’” T.J. says. Allegedly, Green then pulled up a scat-porn video. “We’re all just shocked,” T.J. says. Most of the students got up and walked out of the room. “We’re just like, ‘What the hell? What the fuck is going on?’” The porn was never mentioned again, and rehearsal continued.
“Being Baptized”
Tom, who also asked to remain anonymous, was among the first six students that Green taught. Classes were taking place in his living room at the time, in 1998. Even then, at 23, Green projected a guru quality. “It was like, he’s the central figure and he’s introducing us to all these new experiences,” Tom says. “There were always rituals.”
Green took his first students with him to Maine to play basketball. The trips became a regular fixture at the school, though only his favorite students scored invites. They would sleep under the stars and go on canoe trips. “You would have to go through this arduous winding river and get out of your canoe and carry your canoe with your partner to the spring that was bubbling, and we would all drink from the spring,” Tom says. It felt like “being baptized,” or perhaps “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Around the campfire, Green would allegedly pass out beers and hold court. He seemed to have all the answers. “He would start from music, but it would go into everything in life,” says T.J., who also started at the School of Rock in its early years. “As a young kid, when you’re hitting 13, 14, like, ‘How am I gonna find a partner in life? How am I gonna have a job? How am I going to figure out who I am?’ Paul knew that that was where the mind would go with kids. He would try to fill all of those boxes.”
But there was an unsettling element to Green’s infinite knowledge; his guidance could turn on a dime. He once told a friend of T.J.’s that “his mind was incapable of any kind of useful thought, and that he would never make anything of himself and that he was bound to be a loser, and a drug addict.”
And there were signs, even in the beginning, of a darker edge to Green’s rambunctiousness. One day in rehearsal, in 1998, “He had this eruption,” Tom alleges. “Flailing his body and pounding the walls, spitting, all this kind of stuff. And I was like, Wow, he’s going to be embarrassed once this is done.” Instead, Green never mentioned the outburst again, “as if it was a non-event,” Tom says.
Green told both girls and boys that they needed to lose weight; several told me that they developed eating disorders. He was a tireless gossip, always sniffing out embarrassing information about his students. When a student named Aaron Sheehan was 16, his father checked himself into an inpatient treatment center after making a suicide attempt. Green allegedly mocked Sheehan constantly with comments about his “crazy dad,” Sheehan says. “‘Did your dad kill himself yet?’ That kind of thing.” In the Rock School documentary, a student named Will O’Connor described being suicidal. Green made up an award for “most likely to kill himself” and gave it to O’Connor.
His rage could be intimidating. Students described being whipped with microphone cables, pushed down stairs, and put in headlocks. Sheehan was practicing the bassline to a Rush song one day when Paul allegedly walked into the rehearsal space, screamed, “No Rush!,” and punched him in the groin.
Green’s temper left colleagues and students on edge. One moment he would be cheerful and laughing; the next, throwing mic stands around the room and screaming obscenities. Deanna Stull, the early staffer, grew unnerved. “When you’re with kids, especially that many, doing rock ’n’ roll, you’ve got to be an authority figure and have rules, and not have it be this total chaotic mayhem.”
Before long, Stull quit the school. “I left because I couldn’t get him to behave like an adult,” she tells me. “He would mess around like how teenage boys mess around, and wrestle and push each other around…. I’m like, ‘Paul, stop it, you can’t do that. Stop touching the kids, stop acting like a kid.’” But he didn’t listen. “That’s when I said, ‘O.K., I’m out, I’m not interested in having kids be treated this way. And I’m not willing to take the risks that are associated with this.’”
“The Most Out-of-Control Teenage Kid”
Green grew up poor, in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia. His father died in a car crash when he was two years old. His mother struggled with mental-health issues. As a teenager, Green hung out with punks in the Philadelphia music scene. He dabbled in drugs and dropped out of high school, moving out of his mom’s house at 15.
He met his first wife, Lisa Green (with whom he later had two children), at 17. He got his G.E.D. and then attended the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, he and Lisa played in a band called Sweet Pussy, which briefly made some waves on the Philly rock scene.
According to Stull, Green could be sensitive and thoughtful. “But the second he got around people, it’s like this character came out,” she says. “And the character was the most out-of-control teenage kid that you had, in any of your classes, the one who you just wanted to say, like, ‘Sit down and shut up!’”
When Michael Morpurgo, a scene regular who was 17 when he met Green, showed up to an early School of Rock show Green was throwing at an art gallery in Philadelphia, he was expecting a “train wreck,” he tells me. “I thought it was stupid. I’m like, I don’t understand this, teaching kids how to play Zappa covers? So I went to this thing, and I was blown away.” A few years later, Green offered Morpurgo the chance to become the first-ever School of Rock franchisee, and he accepted, opening a school in Princeton, New Jersey. Morpurgo now operates five schools in the area.
Looking back, he ties Green’s career arc to their early days together. “I saw Paul as someone that desperately wanted to be a rock star with his own music, had an idea of what that was, and what it took to do that, and was extremely pissed off about it not happening the way he thought it would, or should or could happen,” he says. “When his opportunity came, he not only took it, but took it in this way that he didn’t know how to handle it. What I’ve seen with Paul is, he just doesn’t know how to handle power.”
“Survivor Tonight”
Many of the most memorable times many students experienced at School of Rock came on the All-Star tours, when they spent weeks on the road, playing shows and staying in hotels. Green’s attitude on the tours seemed to offer a license for debauchery, as if “we can really do whatever, you can get crazy,” Cathcart says.
While on tour, Green would often play a game he called Survivor, dozens of former students recall. It would start with a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear: “Survivor tonight.” That evening, the students would gather in the parking lot of the hotel they were staying in. Green would lead them through a series of challenges.
The early rounds were easy enough—run barefoot through the snow, or dig a hole in the dirt with their fingernails. Then they would have to eat or drink something gross. Maybe Green would drop a piece of gum on the ground and pass it around, making every student chew on it. Or he’d have them all spit in a cup and each drink from it. Sometimes he’d hack his own phlegm into the cup, or even vomit into it. He made two girls drink a whole bottle of hot sauce each; both vomited.
But these Survivor rounds always seemed like warm-ups for a challenge Green called “Homo Chicken.” The premise was simple: Green would pick two boys and tell them to make out; whoever chickened out first lost, at least a dozen former students recall.
Homo Chicken wasn’t just for bragging rights—Green would offer money to the winner, and students felt an obligation to participate, knowing that if they didn’t, Green might get mad. “This kid started making out with me, and I didn’t want to do it,” one student, who was 13 at the time, tells me. “But we felt forced to do it.”
“I’m Eric’s First Kiss!”
Everything was a joke with Paul Green. Or was it?
I spoke with a number of male former students who described Green kissing them on the lips. The first time Alex DeSimine (who uses they/them pronouns) met Green, at a show on a cruise ship, DeSimine says Green stuck DeSimine’s head under Green’s shirt and held them there for the length of a song. Green proceeded to push DeSimine on stage, where DeSimine sang the last song of the show, then grabbed their face and kissed them on the lips.
Eric Slick recalls how Green once leaned in and kissed him on the lips, then crowed to the rest of the students in rehearsal, “I’m Eric’s first kiss!” Slick was furious—he felt robbed of a life rite. These moments felt like power plays—Green was demonstrating that he could do whatever he wanted.
The overt joking quality of Green’s antics left students perpetually off-balance. Once, he chased a student named Madi Diaz down the hallway in a “sort of joking way” and then pushed her into the bathroom, she tells me. He turned off the lights and locked the door behind him, she tells me. He started rambling about how “his wife was jealous of me and that she knew that I wanted to fuck him,” she says. Diaz was 15 at the time. “Eventually, the seriousness of it broke and he just turned on the lights, laughed, and left the bathroom.”
Green’s sense of ownership allegedly extended to his students’ sexual encounters with each other. He’d insist on hearing the details, T.J. says: “What base did you get to? Did you see her naked? Did you guys go down on each other?” One female student, then 16, recalls how Green would press her for a play-by-play of her hookups. Then he’d ask the boy in question “how it felt or if I was good,” she tells me. Green would also bring the details up in rehearsal, pointing the student out to the class and allegedly saying: “If you get on her good side, she’ll suck your dick.”
Green would also allegedly tell students to sleep with each other. “He definitely just assigned me,” one female student says. And sometimes, like with Homo Chicken, he introduced financial rewards. At the beginning of one tour, Green “said he’ll give anyone who hooked up with this girl who had just turned 15 $100,” a former student named Jeremy Blessing recalls.
On one Maine trip in 2001, Green brought a number of kids to a motel and bought them a few cases of beer, Blessing says. He remembers Green offering the beers to him and three other students in one of the rooms—another boy and two girls, all between the ages of 13 and 17. Green seemed wasted. They all shared a few beers, and then Green allegedly told the two boys to kiss the girls. One of the boys, Will O’Connor, grew uncomfortable and wandered outside. Green ran after him and screamed at him in the parking lot of the motel to go back inside, and then allegedly punched him in the head.
Their Boys and Girls Were Playing Real Rock Music!
Looking back, many students are still asking themselves how their parents could have allowed them to remain in this environment. One factor is that, for a number of parents and students, the All-Stars program wasn’t just about after-school cultural enrichment—they believed real fame was on the table.
Green’s relationship with Jon Anderson, former lead singer of Yes, and Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, as well as musicians like Gene and Dean Ween and various former Frank Zappa bandmates, helped cement his reputation as a conduit to success. In 2008, Adrian Belew, of King Crimson, hired Eric Slick, recently graduated from the school, to tour with him full-time—a feather in Green’s cap and a legitimization of his methods.
Slick credits the Rock School documentary with sending Green down a darker path, even though it presented him as something of a hero. “They really edited together all of the most horrible things that he was doing, you know, like hitting kids in the head, dragging kids down the hallway, doing … Deer Hunter re-enactments,” he says. “I think … he realized, ‘Oh, this is sellable. This is marketable. This is who I am.’” Sitting next to Green at the film’s premiere, Slick felt he was watching the shift occur in real time. “I saw in his eyes that he was simultaneously terrified of himself, but then also realizing, ‘Oh, this is me now. This is now my personality. I’ve created Paul Green.’”
Over time, Green’s connections in the music world and his school’s growing nationwide footprint gave him an increasing sense of gravitas. “The way that the parents talked about him and the way that the other teachers talked about him,” says a former staffer, “just being in his presence felt like being with someone famous.”
And many parents ate up his act. After all, Green was introducing their kids to the same musicians they’d grown up idolizing. Their boys and girls were playing real rock music! Wasn’t that supposed to be dead? One mom paid to have T-shirts printed with a photo of Green’s face and captioned Der Uberlord, the screen name he used on School of Rock forums. In a 2005 blog post, Slick’s mother, Robin, wrote about watching her son and daughter back up Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder at a show Green arranged in Seattle. She praised “our Uberlord and man responsible for the best three days of my life, Paul Green.”
This parental affection helped Green out of some jams. In 2004, an All-Stars tour was making its way down the West Coast. One night, some of the students were hanging out in a hotel room smoking weed. Suddenly, the door opened. Green allegedly burst in and punched one of the kids in the face, in full view of 10 of his friends.
Given there were parent chaperones on the trip, students figured this would be hard to explain away, even for Green. But the next day, on the tour bus, with a captive audience, he gave it his best shot. He pulled out a worn copy of the Bhagavad Gita and began reading passages from it. He preached a message of peace—he explained that he was just trying to help the student by applying a little discipline. Somehow, the parents bought it, and he suffered no repercussions.
This dynamic extended to sexual transgressions. T.J. described how, when he and his peers would tell their parents about Green’s behavior, “parents of kids who liked him would be like, ‘No, he just really likes hanging out with kids and just playing music.’”
Slick told me that parents were sometimes present for Homo Chicken. “The question would be to [ask], like, ‘How the fuck were the parents O.K. with this?,’” Slick says. “The answer is just that Paul has the charm of a sociopath.”
“Him Paying Attention to Me Felt Very Special”
Carolyn Satlow never felt like Green was particularly fond of her during her years as a School of Rock student. He would mock her, calling her untalented. He told her she was only in All-Stars because her boyfriend at the time was one of his favorites. “I remember feeling constantly that I was never good enough,” she tells me. “Paul used to really tear me down a lot.”
That changed when she turned 18 and graduated from the school. Suddenly, Green warmed up. He asked her to start working as a chaperone on All-Stars tours. One night, he invited her and another recent graduate to visit him in New York City. He allegedly bought the two 18-year-old girls alcohol. As they sat around drinking beers, Green, then married and in his mid-30s, brought up the concept of “kissing and hooking up with older people,” the friend recalls, and dared Satlow to kiss him. She felt embarrassed yet compelled by her desire for Green’s approval to play along. “I remember going in for a closed-mouth kiss, and then there was tongue in my mouth,” Satlow says.
A few months later, Green initiated a sexual relationship. “When we started sleeping together, I thought, ‘Finally, he likes me,’” she says.
Green was proud of relationships like these, some former students and employees claim. One former staffer recalls Green coming on to her when she was 23. When she rejected him, he told her that he didn’t care, since she was too old for him anyway. He could sleep with younger girls he knew from the school, he bragged. Incredulous, the staffer asked: “Haven’t you known them since they were 10 years old?”
He allegedly shot back: “I wait until they’re 18.”
The New Motown
Over the course of the 2000s, Green aggressively expanded the School of Rock, jetting across the country to seek out franchising opportunities. According to a number of students, he seemed to be spiraling off the rails by the end of the decade. Former staffers recall him allegedly keeping a stash of drugs in a room at the New York school, and dipping in for a quick bump between lessons. During one lesson, he drew a pentagram on the floor and tried to light it on fire. In another, he allegedly grew so frustrated by a student’s performance of “Whores,” by Jane’s Addiction—he yelled that the student must be a virgin, since she couldn’t sing with conviction—that he melted down, smashed a bunch of equipment, and stormed out of the room with no shirt on.
Meanwhile, there was increasing pressure from the corporate board Green had installed in 2005 to professionalize the company. In 2009, an education-focused investment fund called Sterling Partners purchased a majority stake in School of Rock, which up until that point had been called the Paul Green School of Rock Music, in a deal valued at $10 million.
This had always been Green’s goal, according to Morpurgo. Still, he wasn’t ready to give up entirely: he wanted to stay on and run All-Stars, but eventually he left in early 2010.
Green’s departure from the company caused an uproar among many of his devoted students. So a number of them were interested in following him to a new venture he had announced in 2009 called Studio House.
(The current president of School of Rock would not comment on Green or his tenure at the company.)
Green had taken some of the money he’d earned from selling School of Rock and rented a massive house in the middle of nowhere: Ronkonkoma, Long Island. He’d filled it with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of high-end recording equipment. It would be both a fully operational recording studio and a place where kids could receive an education in engineering.
He pitched the school to former students, saying it would be the new Motown, a place where the seeds of talent he’d planted at School of Rock would now blossom into a thriving musical community. He urged them to forgo college; this would be a better musical education than they could get anywhere else. Believing in his genius as a teacher, and hooked on his attention, a number of former students signed on and moved in.
Early on, Green seemed to have an inkling that Studio House was destined for chaos. “You guys are the natives, and I’m Fitzcarraldo,” he allegedly said once. Yet students continued living at the house, a rotating cast of dozens. It continued for two years.
While it was supposed to be 18 and up, several younger kids allegedly stayed there, too. And without adult supervision, several former students and residents of Studio House recall, it became a party house, interspersed with lackadaisical attempts at recording music. Kids were drinking and doing drugs, and sleeping on couches all day. One time, a student was taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Other students got into hard drugs—including heroin.
Paco Cathcart never lived there, but he dropped by a few times. “I had an outsider’s perspective: it was like, ‘This is fucking crazy,’” he says. “We didn’t really get any recording done. Kids were hooked on drugs. It just felt like a dream.” He was disturbed by the fact that his friends had put their lives on hold for Green’s fantasy of turning a suburban house full of teenagers into the new Motown. “You’re in this moment of your life when you should be going to college or still living at home,” Cathcart says. “You’re still very much a kid, and you’re living out in Long Island in this giant house, not really doing anything. It felt like, does this place even exist? Is this even real?”
When Green dropped by, he seemed erratic. Many students suspected that he was using the house as an escape from his family—he was still married and raising a child at the time—and a place to take drugs. (According to several former students, he was ostensibly sober at that point.) Allegedly, he would come barreling into the house at three in the morning and grab dishes from the cabinet, smashing them on the floor and throwing them off the balcony.
Once, Green was in the kitchen with two students who were making rude jokes about each other’s mothers. Green turned around, enraged. “This was when I was really, really skinny, on heroin,” one of the two students alleges. “He picked me up by my neck, off the ground, and choked me, and I got tunnel vision. And I couldn’t breathe. Like, am I gonna die? Then he dropped me, and he’s like, ‘Don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again.’”
Another evening, Green allegedly decided everyone would take acid. Several former students recall Green asking them to come into his office and kneel down, and telling them that he’d be giving them the drug “Communion–style.”
After two years of chaos, Studio House wound down. Students began to leave, and Green allegedly stopped paying the heating bills. By the end, the remaining students “were using hair dryers to stay warm.”
That was the last time most of the students who were there ever saw Green. Over the next few years, he bounced around: he attempted to start a college program in Woodstock, then decamped to Philadelphia, where he got his law degree.
In 2018, he launched a new venture: the Paul Green Rock Academy. It would follow the exact same playbook as the School of Rock—hands-on instruction from Green and experience backing up aging rockers on tour. Thus far, the school has locations in Philadelphia, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, with a location opening soon in San Francisco. The students have played with many of the same acts from the prior era: Gibby Haynes, Jon Anderson, various Frank Zappa alumni.
In 2019, Green reached out to a former student and invited her to a Sixers game in order to make amends, she says. She listened as he told her that during the School of Rock days he was “being selfish and dishonest.” He didn’t go into detail. In the moment, she accepted his vague apologies, but looking back, she wished she’d pressed him further on the specifics of what he was apologizing for. “I didn’t put his feet to the fire,” she says.
In 2023, Green married Kim France, the founder of Lucky magazine, after a whirlwind romance, in a ceremony that was covered in The New York Times. Several current students were in attendance.
“Schedule your audition and find out more about the best music program I could imagine being a part of,” Green wrote on Instagram recently.
Ezra Marcus is a New York-based journalist
