Jamming With Junior

By Amanda Bower

Laurie Berkner has wanted to be a rock star ever since she was in high school. But when she dreamed of headlining a sellout touring festival, with fans dancing in the aisles of places like the Rosemont Theatre--a venue outside Chicago that has been host to Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie--this gig was not what she had in mind. At 36, Berkner is playing the Rosemont all right, but there are face painters in the lobby and changing tables in the rest rooms, and most of her fans--2,500 of them at this show alone--come up only to her hips. "I planned to be a rock star, but I didn't think I'd be doing this," she says, surrounded by awestruck children backstage at the third show of Jamarama Live!, the first ever preschool-music festival to tour nationally. "I thought I was going to be carrying amps up a flight of stairs at 5 in the morning." Instead her show is over by nap time.

But don't feel bad for Berkner. It's cool to play preschool. Deborah Harry of Blondie has a Disney-label duet with Perry Farrell, who is better known for his not-so-Disney work with the bands Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros. Dan Zanes, former front man of the Del Fuegos, now makes albums with little gold PARENTS' CHOICE AWARD stickers on the covers. They Might Be Giants, whose adult tunes have titles like Your Racist Friend, now has an album about the alphabet. And with Jamarama, little ones even have their own Lollapalooza--a traveling music festival with sippy cups instead of beer cups.

The tour started in New Jersey in October with Milkshake and the Ohmies, a band based in Baltimore, Md., that introduces kids to world music and yoga at the same time. The first five shows were designed, says producer Dana DuFine, as a proof of concept, before a bigger run this spring, and all sold out. (Scalpers were reportedly asking up to $350 for the $25 tickets.) The next leg kicks off in early March in California, with Zanes headlining. By the end of the year, DuFine hopes to have staged around 60 Jamarama shows across the country.

It took two bright sparks in the music industry to realize the business opportunities presented by a generation of hipster parents who came of age going to touring music festivals like Lollapalooza, Warped and Ozzfest and who would be willing to pay to give their kids the same sort of experience. DuFine, a former Polygram executive who started her career at MTV, and her business partner, David Codikow, manage the rock band Velvet Revolver and helped put together the first two Down from the Mountain bluegrass and country-music tours. But it was DuFine's toddler daughter who planted the seed of Jamarama, innocently asking why she couldn't see all her favorite bands at the same time. "I instantly picked up the phone and called David," says DuFine. Weeks later, they inked a deal with Creative Artists Agency, which had created Warped and was involved with Ozzfest.

The kiddie festival is being promoted by partners like XM radio, which has a preschool music station, and Noggin, the commercial-free preschool spin-off of Nickelodeon that launched a music-video show last fall featuring Berkner, Milkshake and other Jamarama artists. (The bands say album sales have skyrocketed with the exposure.) "There's a national marketing and business engine behind adult music, but preschool music is more fractured," says Noggin's Angela Leaney. "The Sippy Cups are big in San Francisco. In Chicago it's Ralph's World. Someone needed to pull together a national business plan, take a deep breath and jump."

DuFine and Codikow haven't exhaled just yet, but they expect Jamarama to be an ongoing event and start making money next year. For now, it has no real competition in the baby's-first-festival market. A Kidzapalooza section made its debut at Lollapalooza last summer, but the latter is now held in only one city each year.

Still, Rob Light, head of music and a managing partner at Creative Artists Agency, has no doubt that other producers will try to emulate Jamarama. "When I was a kid, my parents would say, 'Run outside and play with your friends. I'll see you in four or five hours,'" he says. "That doesn't happen anymore in America. We've become a society that has to create environments in which kids can play." They certainly play hard at Jamarama, running from one sponsor-branded activity to another in the lobby and dancing in the aisles. "By the time you turn on the engine in the car, they've passed out," says DuFine. For many parents, that alone is worth the price of admission.

With reporting by Eric Ferkenhoff/ Rosemont