Expand revenue, create customers: how Middle C Music's immensely popular rock 'n' roll camp fires up sales during the slow summer months.

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If the kids are tired, Mark Noone doesn't want to hear about it. Noone made his name with Washington D.C.'s The Slicky Boys, one of the first real garage bands; now he spends summer days teaching D.C. kids how to rock at Middle C Music's Summer Rock Band Camp. Camp runs from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. every day for a week, and he works them nearly the whole time. Some of the kids say they never knew how heavy a guitar feels after four hours. Noone says, "Too bad. This is rock 'n' roll. Keep playing."

"Mark Noone is a rock 'n' roll god," says Myrna Sislen, owner of D.C.'s Middle C Music where the rock camp takes over the store for three weeks every July. "It's just astonishing what he does. He works miracles with these kids."

Business was slow at Middle C four summers ago when Sislen--having owned the store for just a year--turned to one of her assistants and said, "Let's have a rock 'n' roll band camp!" It was "kind of Mickey Rooney-ish--like, 'Let's have a show!'" she remembers now, thinking of the old productions where a word from Rooney would transform an old barn into a full-fledged theater with lights and an audience. "I want to do something with my store during a time when there aren't any customers," says Sislen. "I'm a community store so there's a lot of community outreach, and I want to give the kids a chance to be in a band."

The first year the camp was only one week long. The next year Noone came aboard and it expanded to two separate week-long sessions. For the past two years it's been three weeks, and kids can either sign up for just one session or come back for more. "The parents say, 'My child is loving this,'" Sislen says. "They say, 'I'm going to tell everybody about you and your store and what you're doing.' This is positive, positive, more positive, the best positive. There is not a single negative to this."

The camp costs Sislen next to nothing to run. She charges the participants $400 per week and feeds them peanut butter sandwiches and Capri Sun drinks at midday. The payoff comes back "in every single area that you can think of." Kids who rented instruments for camp often return to buy them, along with the method books they need to keep playing. Every summer brings new publicity as the camp is covered by one media outlet or another. Last year Washington's WTOP radio followed one group from the first day of camp through their performance of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at the last-day concert, where campers play one song of their choosing, one of Noone's choosing, and one they write themselves. Everyone gets a concert CD to remember it by.

"It's the magic of theater how it comes together in just a week," says Sislen. "It's a miracle. It just happens."

Camp starts the first Monday after the Fourth of July. The instrumentation is whatever walks in the door: "any kid, any instrument, any ability level," all the way up to the classical cellist who played with the second group last summer. For anyone who wants to play guitar or bass, "we can teach you how to do those," says Sislen. "If you play another instrument, you've got to be able to play it a little bit."

Noone always says he's not there to teach the kids how to play an instrument; he's there to teach them how to be in a band.

"The best thing about this is that the music helps these kids just transform," says Sislen. "They don't all start out 'cool.' They come in just little regular kids and in the course of a week they morph into heavy metal rockers. And they're all expressing themselves where they weren't before. The shy ones--it takes time for them to do that."

They play under band names like "Shockwave," "Thundering Llamas," and "Azbestosis," which narrowly beat out "Toxic Hairspray" in a vote among Sislen's first-week campers. Sislen says her personal favorite still comes from one of last year's groups, the "Dirty Little Ingrates."

"I thought, how appropriate!" Sislen chuckled. "I let them take over the store, and in taking over the store, they're really, really loud. The other thing I enjoy is when they stop. The silence is delicious. You don't appreciate silence until you're in a rock 'n' roll band or you have rock 'n' roll in your store."

Middle C is the only full-line music store left in the District of Columbia. Years ago there were others, but they've all moved out to the suburbs--Rockville, Silver Spring, Falls Church. "Why aren't there more? I don't know the answer," says Sislen. "You'd think an area that large could support more than one. But I'm okay being the only one! It's all right with me!"

Five years ago Sislen, then a classical guitarist with no retail experience, bought Middle C Music to keep it from closing down too. "My instinct was, if the store closed, nobody would open it again," she says. "It would be too hard, too expensive, and it would become another mattress store, or a Cingular cell phone store." It was a Thursday and she'd just gotten out of a kickboxing class at the health club across the street when a fellow musician caught up with her to tell her the store was closing. "He said, 'You know what she's asking for it?'" Sislen recalls. "He told me and we looked at each other and said, 'My God, we could write a check for that.' She was essentially giving it away."

Later that morning Sislen confirmed the price with Middle C's then-owner, Pam Johnson. By mid-afternoon, Johnson had called to recommend a business partner, a man who had walked in to inquire about the store within hours of Sislen's visit. "She said, 'The two of you would be my dream team for having a store; call him.'" Sislen called him. The two were "corporately married" the following Tuesday. On Friday, they signed the papers on the store.

But Sislen's business partner "didn't last. It seemed too good to be true and it was." He was gone after the first year, and she's been running the store on her own ever since. In a way, she says, it was good she came to the store with no experience--"because I didn't know what I couldn't do." She's still the only retailer she knows to produce albums for the teachers at her store, which now gives lessons to upwards of 300 students. She believes in mixing art and music, opening her store to jazz concerts and lectures from artists playing at the Smithsonian, drawing Washington's political crowd to the store with a recent exhibit by the mayor's photographer.

Yet on the days when her store is overrun by a clan of teens and preteens who've just learned how to rock, most of her customers take it in stride. "I would say that mostly everybody says, 'Good going; I'll come back later,'" Sislen says. "For the couple of people who complain: Get a life. Look at what's happening here. I would say most people are very, very good about" it."