For boomer garage-band set, a chance for small-scale stardom

Andy Hewett keeps the cellphone conversation brief. It's noisy at his end – daughter's first day of kindergarten – and this road-warrior management consultant from Mountain View, Calif., is in active "dad mode."

On weekends, Mr. Hewett, a bass and keyboard player, likes to compose music with his kids. Last year his son, Isaac, backpacked copies of his own home-mastered CD to first grade.

Thursday nights, however, Hewett keeps for himself. That's when his band, Evolution Eden, gathers to rehearse and record original songs in his home studio. Their first CD, "Story Road," achieved international radio airplay through an online distributor.

"Last summer we had the No. 9 song on the Australian world-indie chart," Hewett says. And this spring – April 1, of all days – the band got a call from Interscope Records cofounder Beau Hill about putting together a second CD.

Score another one for the boomer-garage-band set. Plenty of youthful acts break up after high school, some sputter along until their members hit middle age, re-forming around corporate colleagues to play covers or just jam. Now – spurred by low-cost recording software, as well as digital-music distribution and networking sites – an emerging subset is turning a creative outlet into a viable sideline gig. A little audio self-publishing can be as fulfilling as a record contract.

Jay Dougherty, a copyright law expert and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has played guitar and sung in rock bands since the mid-1960s, even appearing on bills with The Ramones and the Talking Heads at New York's CBGB during a brief period as a full-time musician. A CBS Records deal dematerialized back then when his band fell apart in the year it took to get studio time.

Today, at "a young 57," Mr. Dougherty exhibits eclectic taste. He exults in the fact that he has just picked up White Stripes tickets. And Dougherty also plays in a funk band made up of lawyer friends, and a harmonizing cover band – "doo-wop to The Beatles to The Eagles, big four- and five-part harmonies.

"[But] my favorite project is my original music," says Dougherty. He records digitally, in 16 tracks. With little time to self-market, he hoists up MP3s online and hopes they get noticed, that maybe they'll become part of a film soundtrack. The process can also be cathartic.

"I find elements of my life now that I can fit into a song," he says. "This past spring my mother passed away – that's something we boomers are going through – and the last verse of the song, one I had begun writing years ago, had to do with her and her relationship to my estranged brother."

"Lyrical content becomes a lot more important," says Doug Kolmar, a guitarist who has released three CDs in the past 30 years and has a New England songwriting award to his credit. "Some of that has to do with age and the feeling that there are certain things you need to get across."

A changing game

Nostalgia and technology make for a potent cocktail. With their identity very much tied up in music and self-expression – and with many long-touring role models – boomers are ripe for a musical resurgence, says Steve Slon, editor of AARP the Magazine.

"It's not the demographic that grew up with computers at their fingertips, learning programming," he says. "Nonetheless, it's a group that really defines itself by its eagerness to reinvent itself and to discover and to learn." There's incentive along with opportunity.

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