The Boy Who Rocked

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There are a lot of those people. To date, Paul and Joe have played more than 500 shows in 49 states. (Give it up, Hawaii!) Paul (on guitar) and Joe (keyboards) dress in white shirts and orange-and-red-striped Gryffindor ties. They have a rotating cast of drummers, à la Spinal Tap, and are occasionally joined onstage by the giant squid that lives in the Hogwarts lake. Their hits include "Save Ginny Weasley," "Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock!" and "The Weapon We Have Is Love":

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I'm glad we've got our army
And we're gonna take down the dark lord's crew
The Death Eaters will all be running from me
And you, and you, and you, and you, and you ...

The themes of their music are the themes of the books: love and friendship, angst and struggle. "We think, What does Harry Potter go through?" Paul says. "If I was a teenager, and I was going through this, what kind of songs would I be writing? So when Harry's love life goes sour after a date with Cho Chang, you write a song about that. Or he discovers this awesome potions book with all these secrets in it, and he's totally pumped. You write a song about that."

Harry and the Potters' abiding aesthetic is punk rock: technical polish and production values take a backseat to raw volume and raw emotion. "It can be poorly recorded and sloppily performed as anything," Paul says. "It's all about investing yourself in it." This DIY attitude is an integral part of what makes wizard rock spread. It's the musical equivalent of fan fiction: fans hear about the band or see it live, and they don't want to just listen; they want to play. "There's a quote about the Velvet Underground," Paul says. "Nobody ever bought their records, but for every 10 people who saw them play, four of them started a band. It's almost like that with us."

Not all wrock is punk wrock. There's plenty of stylistic diversity in the scene, which ranges from the electric girl pop of the Parselmouths to the darkly gleaming hip-hop of Swish and Flick. But if you're trying to get your head around wizard rock, punk is a good place to start. Like punk, this is a subculture in which the fundamental poles of popular culture, cool and uncool, have no meaning. Nerds tend to be very comfortable with powerful, unironized emotion--Harry and the Potters' 2008 tour was titled Unlimited Enthusiasm. As the poet said, they're too busy singing to put anybody down.

Though after seven years on the road, the DeGeorge brothers are starting to slow down. "We've kind of come to a place where we used to be playing 120 shows a year. Now we're playing 15 to 20," Paul says. After all, he's 30 now, and he's done far more than he ever thought he would. "Our beginnings were so inauspicious, playing in a shed in our parents' backyard. All of our early shows were in bookstores and libraries. And that was all we ever wanted from it, you know? The chance to play a loud rock-'n'-roll show in a library." Mischief managed.

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