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photo by Colin Malakie

Ted DeMille & Randall Morabito

"I can play in front of a thousand people, and I'm not as nervous, sometimes, [as] when I'm playing in front of a small group of kids, because I know I could have an impact on them. "

If you're looking to see the Good Rockin' Daddies in concert, don't go searching the clubs. Ted DeMille, a kindergarten teacher in Cape Elizabeth, and Randall Morabito, a Portland audio engineer, perform their rock 'n roll for swooning crowds of 5- to 8-year-olds.

So tell me how it all began.

Randall: We started in 1991, Ted and I, as the Old Kids on the Block. Ted's a schoolteacher. We went in as a duo and did a couple of gigs, right?

Ted: One of the big reasons we got together was because we heard all of our favorite songs being used in commercials, and we didn't want kids to be introduced to rock 'n roll in that way.

Randall: I was playing in a band in upstate Maine, and we'd just played a song, and a kid yelled, "Play some rock 'n roll!" And we'd just played a Carl Perkins song, and I said, "Define rock and roll," and he said, "Ozzy! Metallica!". I realized that age doesn't really know what rock 'n roll is as a defined art form.

Ted: When we started, we really didn't have any music to play, so it forced us to, um, we weren't sure the kids would respond to rock 'n roll with the lyrics that exist, you know . We ended up taking those grooves out of the roots music and putting lyrics to it that kids could respond to.

Give me an example.

Ted: We took an old rock 'n roll song that I heard Randall do at Raoul's, at open mic, called 'Seven Nights to Rock,' and we changed it to 'Seven Nights to Read.' We took a politically incorrect song about being out with a different girl every night and turned into a different book every night.

Do you ever feel what you're doing is a bit antiseptic?

Ted: Well, I can see where you would think that, but one of our goals is to provide kids' music with a little bit of an edge. Because a lot of children's music is what you're saying, it's incredibly antiseptic. What we're trying to do is provide an alternative to that.

I imagine your groupies as pack of single mothers waiting for you outside the classroom. Like, "Please! Autograph this baby bottle!"

Randall: Our groupies are kids.

Interview by Allen Dammann; photo by Colin Malakie