By Don Bradley
A boy in Alabama pushes the start button on a cassette tape and 30 years later a bunch of kids in Grandview get free guitar lessons.
Sort of like a delayed butterfly effect. But this is better than a hurricane and it has a Pearl Jam beat.
That Alabama boy was Josh Scott, who along with his wife, Alice, opened Art House 808 last year in downtown Grandview. It’s a place for musicians, artists, theater people, poets and writers to come together, learn and share their passions.
Young and old, seasoned and beginners.
Last December, Josh Scott posted an essay on Substack called “How Guitar Changed My Life,” which included the story of being at his brother’s house in the mid-90s in Muscle Shoals, Ala. when he was 14, turning on that cassette player and hearing the guitar solo in Pearl Jam’s “Alive.”
“It was magical, and I knew I had to have an electric guitar and I asked my mom for one,” Josh said last week at Art House. “We didn’t have money for things like that, but she scraped it together somehow and got me one (from Sam’s Club) and my life was never the same after that.”
The purpose of the Substack post was to tell people what he was trying to do in Grandview and raise some money to help pay for free music lessons for kids at Art House 808, which operates as a non-profit.
In the piece, he wrote: “A kid should be able to walk into a building in their own town and learn to play a song. For free. No gatekeeping. No tuition. No story about why they don’t belong in the room. Everyone should get the chance that I got.”
Somebody out there in the social media world, a guy named Bill, saw the post and forwarded it to Pearl Jam. In April, the band’s Vitalogy Foundation selected Art House 808 as a recipient of a “Future Days Fund.”
For the un-grunged, Pearl Jam is one of the biggest selling bands in music history, a Grammy winner and 2017 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The $2,500 was nice but having the Art House story and plea for help– along with a photo of a young Grandview guitar student–go out to the band’s 3.8 million Instagram followers, a fine endorsement indeed, was probably nicer.
As Josh says, good things happen with a lot of littles.
“The band that made me pick up a guitar is now helping me put guitars in the hands of other kids,” Josh said. “The song that changed me as a teenager is the reason any of this exists, and now the people who made that song are paying for kids in Grandview to learn their first song.”
There are currently 32 students in the Guitar for Kids program. Josh and Alice want more.
Life is good at Art House 808. Good enough to open a second location a few doors down on Grandview’s Main Street.
Lessons, shows, exhibits, classes, concerts. The calendars are full. Grammy-nominated artists have performed. Shows fill the house.
On a whim not long ago, Alice decided to do a line dancing event.
“I thought I might get 20,” she said. “We had over 60. From teens to seniors.”
Her field is theater and writing. In 2024, she directed “Beauty and the Beast” at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. (She recently directed Art House’s debut performance of “The Curious Savage” to a sell-out audience.)
Josh is the music guy. From that first guitar experience back in Muscle Shoals, he not only learned to play the guitar, he also started JHS Pedals, a Kansas City-based company known for guitar effects pedals used by John Mayer and other well-known artists.
Josh and Alice self-funded the Art House launch, which included not only free guitar lessons but students also got a new guitar.
Josh said a $45 donation covers guitar or piano lessons for one child for one month. Every grant, every donation, every subscription, every dollar goes directly into those programs.
“A kid whose family can’t afford lessons still gets lessons,” Josh said. “A kid who shows up with a pawn shop guitar that won’t stay in tune can walk out with a guitar that does.”
“Forty-five dollars. That’s one kid, one month, no tuition, no barrier, no story about why they can’t be there.”
For more information about Art House 808, go to arthousegrandview.com
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