You Should Join The Beacon Music Factory

By Shelley Simmons-Bloom / April 9, 2026

By John Blesso, Author And Performer

BEACON LOVE BITES

Beacon Music Factory illuminated square sign with white text and red background. Red fairy lights sit above it in the dark. — Beacon Music Factory and Lucky Dog, 333 Fishkill Avenue

Back in 2014, on my first Saturday night as a Beacon resident, I walked into Dogwood and fell into conversation with Rob Penner, to whom I ultimately confessed my life-long fantasy of being in a band.

“You should join The Beacon Music Factory,” Rob said.

After learning about BMF’s “adult rock band boot camps,” in which bands meet weekly with an instructor to learn a set of cover songs that they then perform in one of the bars, I thought this sounded too good to be true.

But the following week, feeling as nervous and tentative as a new kid on the first day of school, I walked into a rehearsal room where I met my first-ever bandmates for BMF’s Ramones bootcamp.

Fifteen minutes later, my out-of-practice left hand was hurting from trying to keep up with the power-chord changes in “Rockaway Beach,” but finally, at forty-three, I was doing it, and I felt like an abandoned building whose lights had been switched on all at once.