David G. Hill
From DrumCorpsWiki
(Taken from Field&Floor/ABOUT)
BOAZ, Ala. -- An eight millimeter black and white film titled “Here Come the Troopers” was my introduction to drum and bugle corps. My high school band director had obtained the film and was showing it to the rising senior section leaders in the summer of 1971 with the notion: “Let’s do like this.” We were enthralled, all of us; I was bitten and smitten, an immediate convert to the medium.
Our marching season was a trophy-filled success … well, except for the majorettes, an otherwise state championship-caliber squad of Southern beauties who just couldn’t fit into our drum and bugle corps-style show. At our final judged contest of the year, we paid special attention to our concert number “California Dreamin’,” their spotlight piece, and the girls finally got a Number One rating and a trophy to go with the shelves of gold-painted hardware our 80-member band had garnered.
THE KISS OF DRUM CORPS
The following summer, on a fateful Friday at 2 a.m., three band friends, next door neighbors, piled into Sally’s red 1965 Ford Mustang and headed north to Lexington, Kentucky for “Bluegrass Nationals.” I was headed, it turns out, for a life in the stands at drum and bugle corps competitions.
The line-up took my breath away: Anaheim Kingsmen, 27th Lancers, Madison Scouts, Racine Kilties, First Federal Blue Stars, Black Knights, Stockton Commodores, Chicago Cavaliers, even Alabama’s Charioteers, and the first corps in competition – the first live performance of a drum and bugle corps I would ever see – the Des Plaines Vanguard with its presentation of music from “The Planets” and “West Side Story.” It was a sobering moment.
The uniforms were uniform, the line-up was militaristic as I had anticipated, the corps looked larger than the requisite 128 members I had already heard all about – the total number that can travel on three buses. But when the corps members all lay down on the field to begin the show, my drum and bugle corps fantasies were dashed. I apologized to my friends, I wanted to leave, I was mortified; this was not the kind of drum and bugle corps that I seen the Troopers parlay on the film. The announcer presented the corps, the drum major stood up to salute, then the show began; at least, that’s what I thought was supposed to happen. One by one the members rose, a soloist began playing and one by one the sound of bugles filled the air, and in some sort of play-acting, the color guard members got up, picked up their flags and … if I had only known then what I know now of “characterization” and color guard, I might have appreciated it. Probably not, but you get the idea.
My mortification was short-lived. By the end of the Vanguard’s color presentation, concert number, percussion feature, the exit number, and that year’s design wrinkle, the re-entry, which had all been presented in fine, if misunderstood-by-me form, my life in drum and bugle corps had begun.
The First Federal Blue Stars, leaders throughout Drum Corps International’s inaugural season, but who on the night of finals were edged out for the first trophy by the razor-sharp Anaheim Kingsmen, blew through the contest and won easily. The Kingsmen, the first drum and bugle corps that I fell in love with live – the Troopers will always be my puppy love – placed an inexplicable-to-me sixth. The color guard drill down the 50 for the opening, “English Folk Song Suite,” the sound of the corps’ feet marching – marching! – together, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” for the color presentation, “Stan Kenton” in soaring concert, “Sing, Sing, Sing” out of concert, and that unforgettable re-entry to “Exodus” was rhapsodic, thrilling, and yes, oh yes, chill bump-inducing throughout. How anything could possibly be better than that, I complained, already flexing my drum corps fan’s prerogative to question the judging.
I was treated to the beginnings of the famous “Madison Sound,” complete with “Ballet in Brass” and the tear-jerking “Brian’s Song.” I didn’t realize that I was seeing the final year of color presentations from every unit, including the heart stopping “My Country ‘tis of Thee” from the all-male Racine Kilties. Revere’s 27th Lancers parlayed four drum majors and a plethora of auxiliary units, each in authentic uniform, for the evening’s visual stereo, while the Black Knights rocked with Tower of Power’s “Get it On,” and Argonne’s Rebels bugles just rocked the house.
My other personal favorite in that first show of shows, in my baptism to the world of higher pageantry, was a California corps that would advance to national finals only once, but that would be as good an indication of the range of styles that was then presented as any. The Stockton Commodores, replete in red, white, and blue sailor’s uniforms, sailed off the line to “Russian Sailor’s Dance,” and in ship-shape order presented “Navy Hymn,” “Sailor's Hornpipe,” “Anchors Aweigh,” the sentimental “Rainy Days and Mondays” in concert, “Popeye the Sailor Man,” out of concert, “My Way” as the exit, then a reprise of “Russian Sailor’s Dance” for the re-entry.
THE EFFECT OF DRUM CORPS
It would be six years before I attended another live drum and bugle corps show, but buying DCI championship records and watching the annual public television marathon with my band director – remember Gene and Helen Rayburn as the worst guest hosts ever? -- aptly filled the gap and gave us both *IDEAS* for my high school marching band’s fall show. Stereotypically, I taught the color guard.
After I graduated from college, moved to Birmingham, Ala. and began my public relations career, I read in DCI’s Contest Guild that a drum and bugle corps competition was planned for Legion Field in the summer of 1978. Still awed by the prospect of what seemed to me as (in all caps bold, the vaunted) DRUM AND BUGLE CORPS, I wrote a letter to the Drum Corps International office, to Public Relations Director Don Whiteley, asking if they ever needed volunteers to work with the media.
The letter, and the telephone call from Doris Whetland just two days later, became one of my life’s prophetic moments. Yes, indeed we do … always … what can you do, who do you know … when can we come meet you … can you write and distribute press releases: my head reeled with the weight of what I had imagined was a novice fan’s pipe dream.
THE DREAM SEASONS
From 1978-1989 the dream that I expressed in that letter became work: satisfying, taxing, career-shaping, volunteer work with the public relations functions of Drum Corps International. In addition, for six of those years, I also headed a team of Birmingham-based volunteers who staged the DCI South Championship. Although I always considered myself the unknowledgeable outsider, because I never “marched drum corps,” I helped handle a function that was then vital to the activity. It became increasingly clear with each passing year, and with each new task, that I was doing something that had become vital to my professional education and to my life, as well.
The Whetland effect bled over into winter color guard; I assumed the public relations post upon her retirement from the activity. Those years provided a much closer, personal view of the inner workings of pageantry, which became yet another career-shaping classroom. It also fostered my fondness for color guard as an entertainment, with a broad canvas on which to paint its images, to present its proficiencies, and to evoke its emotions.
THE PERSONAL EFFECT AND AFFECT
My personal RAMD-style rantings began pre-Internet, and took the form of a ‘zine. Online, my comments morphed into something else entirely, an “else” that has assumed mythic perceptions in the current cyber culture: Field&Floor is what’s called a blog.
Criticism is part of its editorial content, because any venture that goes unchecked is rife for problems. While the axiom: “a wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic," I now choose to dwell on excellence, to discover the concealed beauty and communicate to the world such things as are worth observation.
THE CHALLENGE OF CRITICISM
While the writings of such luminaries as Pauline Kael, Dorothy Parker, John Simon, John Lahr, Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia, and Andrew Sarris inspire and inform me here and in my otherwise professional writing career, these pageantry mediums are of another ilk. The awkward blending of pageantry, marching, horn playing, and color guard equipment handling with notions of dance and theatre preclude an invitation to ask legitimate reviewers of music, dance, and theatre to comment. With students as the performers, inviting outside voices and opinions into the mix becomes an uneasy proposition: context is vital.
Critical viewing and writing of both mediums confuses everyone. No one wants to be overly negative about activities that foster leadership and team-building skills in young people, a valiant and wholly selfless act in today's society. But the leaders of these programs often dismiss programmatic and competitive criticism under a variety of guises: the reviewer does not understand the intent, it's just "kids" doing this for heavens sake, or the best is being done with what we have to do with.
I value the first argument; I balk at the second, and I will as long as even one adult attempts to hide behind the young people for their personal lack of skills, or for their brazen disregard for the real process of youth development. As to the competition, that is the overarching "carrot" that drives the processes. We win and we lose, each of us, every day. These forms of pageantry are competition by invitation.
Nonetheless, "dwelling upon excellence" is my mission, "communicating to the world such things as are worth observation," my passion. Ultimately, it is my “lazy pageantry eye,” that precious piece of real estate in my mind that can recall the summer of 69, and every year since, that looks upon this wondrous world we share, and that knows it is worthy of all eyes, everywhere, in the world, and on this blog.
