New VH1 series explores jailhouse rock

Musicians like to brag about the tough crowds they’ve played to, but few can top the intimidating audience Pennsylvania heavy metal band Dark Mischief faces regularly. We’re not talking unruly types who hurl insults -- or even beer bottles -- but thieves, rapists and murderers.

Dark Mischief’s world tour consists of one venue: the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Graterford, a maximum-security prison that allows inmates to play music in their free time.

And talk about performance pressure: If their fellow criminals give Dark Mischief a bad review, the members can lose the privilege of rehearsing and performing for a year.

Dark Mischief is profiled in a new VH1 series, “Music Behind Bars.” Tonight’s premiere is the first of an initial batch of eight episodes on prison music programs around the country.

“My facility is a maximum-security facility, and many of the guys who are involved in the band here are doing life or extensive lengths of time,” says Jeff Merrill, the warden at Maine State Prison in Thomaston, which is featured in a later episode. “For them, it’s a way of coping, a way of expressing themselves and a way of making the time go faster. It reduces the idleness and, as a result, they don’t seem to get in so much trouble. I see it as a win-win all around.”

For VH1, the series lets the cable music channel expand the parameters of its original programming while keeping music central to the equation.

“We have been noodling around with lots of different ways to show how music plays an important role in all our lives,” says VH1’s Rob Weiss, executive producer of the series. “What really struck us here is that one way it can be powerful is in a redemptive way, and in prison, music can have a profoundly positive impact.”

Not that it turns murderers into choirboys.

“One of the main points ... was that in showing the redemptive aspect of music in prisons, we would be showing how these music programs take some of the most violent prisoners and makes good prisoners out of them,” says “Music Behind Bars” producer Arnold Shapiro, best known for his 1979 documentary “Scared Straight.”

“That makes it safer for the correctional officers who work inside these prisons without weapons, as well as the dozens of men and women who go in and out every day: doctors, lawyers, psychologists and the rest.”

Shapiro says the idea wasn’t to celebrate or glorify any of the prisoners, but to present an unvarnished view of their lives and the crimes they committed and allow viewers to see how music soothes these savage breasts.

Many who are involved with the inmates find it a tremendously moving experience.

“A favorite song of theirs is ‘The Rose,’ ” says Anna Willis, who leads the choir at the New Hampshire State Prison for Women in Goffstown. “The first time I heard them sing it, I got out my keyboard and started playing along. I couldn’t believe what I saw and heard. It was like they left that room. They were out the window, through the bars, over the razor wire. It was clear what the role of music was for them: They became free. I just sat there and cried.”

Most prison music programs are merit-based. “To be honest,” Maine warden Merrill says, “the population realizes it’s such a privilege they wouldn’t sacrifice that. To date, nothing bad has happened here. We’ve been very fortunate.”

Do any of these would-be rock stars dream of fame and fortune when they get out?

“Most of them are pretty realistic,” says series co-executive producer Jay Blumenfield. “They’re doing it to get by, they’re enjoying it and it’s helping them on the inside. Some may hold on to the rock ‘n’ roll dream of getting out and making it, and maybe one or two will.”

For most, the reward that music offers is more immediate.

“These guys feel free when they’re playing music,” says Blumenfield, a former member of the band Too Much Joy. “I felt the same way when I was playing, and I wasn’t a prisoner: I felt free and it was unbelievable. For these guys, it’s 4 billion times that. It’s the only moment in their day when they feel anything like that.”

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“Music Behind Bars” premieres at 10 tonight on VH1.