Joe Rathbone, a 33-year-old resident of Jersey City, lives a double life. By day, he is the somewhat mild mannered music teacher at Clarendon Elementary School, and at night, he is a soulful, poetic, even sometimes-jazzy musician with two CDs and dreams of making himself better known in the music industry.
In school, his students know him by his birth name of Joseph Hurowitz, although even with this altered identity, students will tell you, he still loves to sing.
Rathbone has been described as an accomplished musician with a poet’s sensibility and a rough-hewn vocal style and guitar-playing that is melodic at times and at other times edgy.
In 1999, Rathbone played 100 dates in venues up and down the East Coast and continues this schedule into the year 2000, playing places such as the Blue Bird Cafe in Nashville, Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta and Juanita’s in Little Rock, Arkansas. Locally, he can be found playing the Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, or The Living Room and CB’s in New York City. People have called him “a dreamscape troubadour,” partly because his music contains remarkable metaphors that often seem surreal when taken out of context.
“I sort of like the fact people think of me that way,” Rathbone said during an interview two weeks ago. His music seems to convey real things behind the spacey images.
“You might say it serves a purpose,” he said.
Rathbone calls his works “dreamscapes.” They are full of ideas and images that are disjointed but still somehow fit together. Many of his works are metaphors that somehow tell stories, although these often can’t be described in ordinary ways. They are something like impressionistic paintings, which distance and frequent listening seem to make sense of. He has described his own music as a kind of stream of conscious narration, where the pieces of the story fit together, but often in very odd ways.
He escaped Philadelphia
Rathbone, who currently lives in Jersey City, was born and raised in Philadelphia. Music was not something he initially thought he would pursue when he grew up.
“I thought I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young,” he said, chuckling. “But I really never knew what I wanted to be until I discovered music. I never thought I would be able to do it.”
He started playing guitar when he was 15 years old. He had been listening to pop giants like the Beatles and David Bowie. He said he finally managed his escape from the City of Brotherly Love about two years ago, saying he agreed with W.C. Field’s sentiments about the city, whose gravestone reads: “Better here than in Philadelphia.”
Philadelphia, Rathbone said, is a city with many musicians, but few places for them to go. For a time he played in a Philadelphia rock band called The Loons. Later, he kicked around for a while, playing a lot of cities, including oddball sites such a Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, where he performed as a roving banjo player with a Dixieland band.
Rathbone’s education consisted of four years at Temple University, where he majored in history, and two more years at Chestnut Hill College in Germantown, Penn., where he majored in education – something he figured he could fall back on if his musical career didn’t pan out the way he wanted.
Meanwhile his career took numerous additional twists and turns, until he found himself trying to live off of playing his guitar in a wedding band. Someone warned him that if had any talent at all, he should get out of that kind of band.
“I didn’t know exactly what he meant at the time, but I’ve come to realize it,” he said.
Playing wedding band music left a bad taste in his mouth, although he admits that it allowed him to hone his skills as a musician. The problem was, playing the same music over and over leads musicians to treat performances the way they might a 40-hour-a-week job, something they have to endure, but rarely love to do. While Rathbone could make good money playing cover tunes, he finds much more personal satisfaction playing original music.
Rathbone is often associated with the more traditional folk-type performers because he plays similar venues such as coffeehouses. But he calls himself a rocker. He has just finished recording his second CD, “Welcome to Your New Life,” and his first CD, “Sweet Relief,” got significant airplay across the United States and Canada.
Although he dislikes getting himself tagged as old fashioned, he admits his music is strongly influenced by the-1973-to-1980 era, from Neil Young to the Police. He said there was a great deal going on in the music scene of the 1970s.
“It isn’t the same today,” he said. “I don’t think young cats understand what they’ve missed.”
How he came to the Secaucus schools
Rathbone was working a job in a band in Greenwich Village. The drummer of the band happened to be Sean Sonet, the director for the Secaucus High School Marching Band.
“We struck up a friendship, and he told me that a number of teachers were retiring in Secaucus and that I should apply,” Rathbone said.
This is Rathbone’s third school year in a district in which he teaches kids from kindergarten to sixth grade. Aside from Clarendon, he has also taught at the Huber Street School. He said the principals of the schools have been very good to him, and that essentially, when teaching the kids, he lets them have fun.
“Classroom music is mandated by the state,” he said, noting that the music he teaches can range from Sir Duke to Stevie Wonder, from traditional music to jazz. He said he likes to see the kids light up when he introduces them to various types of music, and that he is on a mission with the kids to get them to become music lovers and teach them how to listen. Rathbone also plays songs for kids.
“They’re big on the guitar,” he said.
Different musical lives
While his two careers may seem connected, this is only superficially so, he said.
School is a day job, something he works five days a week, and, though he loves working with the kids, it is a job that pays the rent.
Three to five nights a week, he is on the road, traveling to clubs as far as he can drive. He has traveled as far as Atlanta and throughout New England. On weekends, he can travel as far as Maine, West Virginia or even Michigan. Over last summer, he did a tour of the East Coast driving his car.
He said this part of his life has “a certain Zen” that he doesn’t experience in the straight daytime job. From time to time, he even plays a jazz gig in places like the Iron Monkey in Jersey City under his real name, or a Sunday brunch.
Yet he gets something from the kids he teachers: a sense of raw energy that he feels is lost in most adults.
“The older I get the less I have it,” he said. “Yet it is not about age, it’s a feeling about life. An 8-year-old can seem like a 50-year-old man. These kids keep me light on my feet and make me look at everything in a different way. I hope that never changes. I hope I can always stay young at heart.”