From the editor: Sudden Impact – The transformers

I’m sitting in the front row for the Baton Rouge Blues Festival Lagniappe, listening to teenager Ben Booth’s fingers fly across the fret, bringing a slice of Cream-era Eric Clapton to a scorching rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” and all I can think about is Julius Caesar.

See, years ago the assignment was straightforward: produce a work of art inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

Our 8th Grade English class had studied the Bard’s Julius Caesar just prior to picking our way through his most tragic of love stories, and I thought, Let’s mix the two? Bill won’t mind.

So I set about making a film that cast Romeo as a Caesar-like figure, a revolutionary rising within his own family and poised to unite the Montagues and the Capulets and end years of strife with one swift stroke: his marriage to Juliet.

Romeo’s family—cast, essentially, from the front line of my basketball team—were fearful of being dominated in a familial merger with the Capulets, and so plotted, like the Roman Senators wary of Caesar’s ambitions, to murder Romeo on his way to the wedding.

Spilling out of a few 13-year-old brains, it was fun in its own ambitiously ramshackle way, but as a movie experience, it was not all that great. Our B must have been based on charm alone.

And yet, that project was the first time I felt I was truly able to get my hands on something great, to wrestle with it, to bring my own creativity to it, and to try and even fail with it—come what may.

The creative youth subjects found in this month’s cover story are doing very much the same thing, but like Booth, much more successfully. With her upright bass, Caroline Samuels spends her spare time shaking off her eye-raising classical talent to re-arrange Beatles songs. With six strings on fire, guitarist Alex Abel rips the “James Bond Theme” to shreds.

This process of copying, then combining and transforming past works into something new is essential to any creative evolution. The debut from Bob Dylan—later dubbed “The Voice of His Generation”—was filled with covers.

But the real excitement hits when mimicry becomes malleable and devotion leads to discovery; when artists, to borrow from Dylan, “go electric.” Natural ability is essential, for sure, but mentors also play a crucial role in shepherding artists from to unique creations.

We have a double-edged relationship with our mentors. In pop culture they are craved and revered. How often are the likes of Gandalf, Yoda and Mr. Miyagi quoted on social media? In our day-to-day, they get fractions of the credit they deserve. Chris Thomas King with the Tipitina’s Foundation and Doug Gay with Baton Rouge Music Studios are just two examples. At LSU, some of our city’s most experienced artistic mentors are toiling in lackluster facilities and demanding for more support to give their apprentices the educational environment young talent deserves. These are groups that should be defended and championed, because they are the transformers passing knowledge and a love of learning to a new generation. They are the faces of change.

In my Romeo remix, his closest confidant, Benvolio, had his own Brutus moment, driving the final knife, ever reluctantly, into his cousin’s body, making the story tragic not because it ended a passionate romance but because it violently upheld the status quo.