Ten years of sharing music

Abbey Nutter, The Lebanon Democrat, Tenn.
·2 min read

Apr. 17—Rock Zone School of Music in Mt. Juliet is celebrating 10 years of teaching.

In 2014, co-founder Johnny Juarez wanted to enroll his daughters, who were six and

12 at the time, into a rock

school to experience making music with other people. Inspired by the movie "School of Rock," Juarez helped start Rock Zone that year.

"At the beginning, when I was signing the lease, the person said, 'How many customers do you have?' " Juarez said. "I said 'Well, two, because it's my two girls.' We opened up, and slowly people started enrolling, doing private lessons and trying out the band kind of format."

The program grew to 40 kids, and when school let out in May, Rock Zone put on its first summer camp.

"We have a ton of kids from local schools who were interested in doing music and so what we

will do is teach them how to play an instrument — even if they have no experience — in one week and have them a rock show for friends and family."

From there, a parent asked if Rock Zone would consider doing an after-school program.

"We decided to put it out there and there were people that were interested in it," Juarez said. "We started doing our after-school program, which involves transporting kids from local schools, giving them a snack, helping them with their homework, teaching them some music and doing some arts and crafts and activities like that."

While it expanded to Donelson at one point, that location was open for just one year before the school decided to focus on Mt. Juliet. Instead of having two locations, the owners decided to expand the current location: Midway Plaza on Lebanon Road.

"We went from one storefront to three storefronts," Juarez said.

Rock Zone has also had the opportunity to take its students to perform at places like the HardRock Cafe, Bluebird Cafe, and different events like festivals.

"The best part of this is that my girls were part of it," Juarez said. "They were growing up in that kind of environment of constantly doing music and writing songs and performing and recording and things like that."

After teaching for 10 years, Juarez now runs into people he taught as children.

"In my mind, they're still little kids but they've grown up," Juarez said. "Whoever was 11, 10 years ago, is 21 now."

After the COVID-19 pandemic, Rock Zone founders also opened Tico's Crayon Shack next door, which is an after-school program that focuses on arts and crafts.

"It's been quite an adventure the last 10 years, lots of ups and some downs but overall, it's been fun," Juarez said.