Marching Band preformances

[Hawkwings]

Oh my god... Tetris drill?

That's possibly the most awesome concept I've ever heard of.

[Fleet Admiral JD]

Our arrangement is not online, for much the same reason as Maya's Ninty show was not performed. However, I'm sure a video will pop up online sometime.

[Mayabird]

I went to Georgia Tech, so the band known officially as the "Georgia Tech Marching Band" or something and unofficially and actually known as "The $1.98 Noise of the Southland." (Cookies to the first person to say what two bands are getting parodied there.) No official web site to show off the true awesomeness, but I know the band alumni association is publishing a book for the band's centennial next year.

A quick search of Youtube found one show fragment where I couldn't hear a thing over the noise of the student section. But I did find one (admittedly crappy quality) video of the band playing The Budweiser Song outside the library before a game (it's a signature song, and we do actually have permission to play it - the company gave the band a legal certificate thing to be able to play it perpetually, one of those $1 deals. It's framed and up on the wall in the building somewhere). Also one little snippet of the band playing something loudly.

I guess one of these days I'll have to post my video of the clarinet section doing our own little Super Mario medley to Youtube.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I was in the UC Davis Cal-Aggie High-stepping Band-UH!... for about 4 weeks, until the obsessive drinking, partying, and hazing made me want to quit.

Some people like music, some people love music, and some people love band-uh! The third group doesn't necessarily overlap with the other 2, sadly.

[Mayabird]

High stepping band? So are they really into the actual band experience and being elite, or something else?

My college experiences were more that the "band experience" was really a great excuse to have a lot of fun and be crazy. People who observed our practices usually say, "It was so boring! All you people did was socialize until your band director yelled at you."

But since this thread is about band performances, another story:

The worst halftime show I ever performed wasn't even really a halftime show. It was between the second and third periods of a hockey game. It was totally impromptus. The other team was late arriving, so the manager told us, "Hey, why don't you give us a little show in our break?" So while the team waited for the other team to show up, we put together a show. On the ice. In about fifteen minutes, with one sorta run-through.

Now, a little explanation about hockey pep band. We don't actually have an official school hockey team. It's a club sport, always has been. Thus, the band is unregulated, too. It's totally unofficial. Technically, the hockey band calls itself "a random group of Tech students who just so happen to know how to play band instruments, have band instruments in their possession, and know all the cheers and songs, but are completely unaffiliated with the Georgia Tech band." Because of that, the instrumentation can be very hit-and-miss, depending on who can come to the games and what else is going on. On that day, there were ten saxes, ten trombones, and ten other assorted instruments, and I think five of them were clarinets. With such a lousy assortment, the only halfway song we could play that would actually sorta work would be Louis Louis, and only because the clarinets could also cover the trumpet part.

So yeah, the other team comes, the game gets played (that poor team was getting beaten down), and the break comes. We go out on the ice to play our show. Oh yeah, did I mention that ice is slippery? So not only are we playing a crappy rendition of Louis Louis, we're also slipping and sliding on the ice. Our attempted picture looks horrible because we're all trying not to bust our butts while moving. A few people fall over anyway. Acoustics in hockey rinks tend to be horrible anyway. Everybody leaves the rink to go to the lobby so as to not have to listen to us anymore. So we decide not to do the rest of it, and just skip ahead to the Bud Song. Then everybody came back in to bob up and down to the music and sing along, even though it sounded just as bad.

Worst show ever.

[Lord Relvenous]

Personally if i was in the stands, I would've enjoyed watching you slam your ass down on ice while trying to play an instrument. Much better than watching hockey anyway.

[Mayabird]

It just occurred to me that although that show was probably the crappiest ever, it wasn't the worst performance ever, since it was actually pretty funny.
That dishonor goes to the game called the Monsoon Bowl.

We're playing Clemson. That's Clemson University, South Carolina. It is as redneck as you can get without warping time and space. Their football stadium is the ugliest thing you ever saw, this concrete monstrosity called Death Valley. And that's before it gets filled with 80,000 South Carolinian rednecks in orange overalls.

Clemson is always a fun trip, for certain definitions of fun that include "being electroshocked" and "being punched repeatedly in the kidneys." It's often the first away game for all the RATs (that means Recruit At Tech, the band rookies for these purposes) and the ones not from the south are often amused the first time they see a beaten-up pickup truck waving a massive Confederate flag from their tailgate. (At flag number 2, they start getting worried. At flag number 3, they get scared.) And once we get there, we get to enjoy the supreme pleasure of having Clemson parents send their seven year olds to wherever we're holed up to flip us off and cuss us out. The little kids, and sometimes also their parents, cousins, buddies, grandparents, and siblings, who may all be the same person, will also try to steal things from us. "Things" in this case may include small people. It's one of two stadiums we go to where we always march in and then stay in a defensive formation, rather than any sort of musically-decided instrumentation formation. Tubas, drums, trombones, and generally large people on the outside. Small people, RATs, and females in general on the inside, especially piccolos and the color guard. (Note: while you could be on the outside if you're a large woman without a defensive large instrument, it's not really recommended, because the bastards selectively go after women. Clemson is not the time to try to make a statement for feminism.)

So we defensively sneak into the stadium and take over our little corner, again in a defensive block with the drums and tubas on the outside. Once there, we organize expeditions for people to go to the bathroom in a large group, because once the game starts, there's no leaving the band section, unless you have to beat up the Clemson tiger* or it's halftime.

Oh yeah, and before the game they have a prayer. This is the point where we all glance at each other and say, "Isn't this place supposed to be a public school?" The prayer also always manages to suck totally. Ten minutes of nonsensical rambling, at which point even the pious band members get tired of playing lip-service to respecting religion and start muttering things like, "Isn't there this thing called the Establishment Clause?"

And mind you, this is all normal stuff. This game became much worse than all the others because along with all the normal stuff, the moment we got in the stadium, with all the 80,000 overall-wearing rednecks and the ugliness and the noise and little bastard inbred children and everything else, it started raining. Hard. Very, very hard.

The weather reports had said that there was a chance of showers. In case of rain, we woodwinds had brought along our instrument cases (also, note to all saxophone players: sax cases can be used as riot gear - I know from experience). If it started raining hard enough that we couldn't play, we could put our instruments away temporarily, because usually rain doesn't just keep pouring. We put our instruments away, and the rain kept pouring, and pouring, and pouring. The tubas warned everyone before they had to dump out the water from their horns, which they had to do every half-hour or so, and a gallon of blue-green nasty water gushed out. And then it kept raining.

We were hoping that it would keep raining hard through halftime at least so we wouldn't have to play, but NOOOOOOO. After all that suckitude (and some extremely stupid plays by the football team - I mean come on, no one else was around and the ball was rolling towards the end zone. You stop the ball at the ONE YARD LINE not the end zone. Dumbass. How did you manage to get into Tech, anyway?) the rain suddenly stops, like someone shutting off the faucet, about five minutes before halftime, which is just enough time for us to get our instruments and go to the field.

Mind you, we're not even going to play our actual halftime show. It was mid-September, so someone had the brilliant idea that the Clemson band and our band should play together in a Patriotic Salute to America Show in Honor of the Heroes of 9/11. Both our bands are soaked, out of tune, cold, miserable, and the Clemson band manages to be less good than our band (they have music majors, we have tech geeks - I still don't understand how that happens). But we still march out there in one gigantic-ass block while the announcer makes really obnoxious overblown statements.

The field is torn up and muddy. There wasn't a single bolt of lightning to delay or cancel the game. It's hard to walk in the mud. My uniform manages to get absolutely filthy in addition to being soaked, because the ponchos we got managed to do nothing to keep water out, but kept sweat in, even though we were all cold. None of us want to do this stupid thing. And then the announcer calls us the Georgia Tech University band.

I sometimes wonder if these people really are illiterate or if they're just stupid. This happens so much. All the information says that we're the Georgia Institute of (motherfucking) Technology, not yet another university. We're institutionalized, dammit, like CalTech and MIT. So how the hell do all these idiots mess that up? (Granted, he could've called us the University of Georgia Tech, as one Clemson announcer of years past used to say every damn game. Ugh. *shudders*) Anyway, we're all cold, pissed off, and now some idiot can't even name our school properly, so we don't care that it's some Patriotic Salute crap show. We start booing and screaming at the announcer right there on the field.

Our band director probably says "oh fuck" right about here and gets five new gray hairs. He shaves his head now, incidentally.

The drum majors start waving frantically to shut us up before the rednecks descend upon the field and eat us, and fortunately they're able to get us just quiet enough to notice that the music's about to start and we start playing. Fucking Sousa marches. I hate Sousa. The marches are trite and I've played them too many times. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Of course, my clarinet couldn't even make sounds, and all the music sounded like crap anyway. At least, crappier than Sousa marches usually sound.

Not that it made any difference, because we had this thing we call the Secret Weapon. I'm pretty sure most bands avail themselves of this when in a desperate situation. It's a giant American flag that needs ten people to hold it. When the show is so bad that you're in danger of getting yourself killed because of it, whip out a flag, and everyone starts applauding and yelling "YAY AMERICA!" without realizing why they're doing it, and they're so busy doing that that they fail to realize that a terrible halftime show is going on. So not only are we filthy, but we kinda feel dirty too. Also it was pretty easy to extrapolate from the way we were so easily and cynically manipulating everyone patriotic feelings to what people with the media on their side, power, influence, etc could do with it.

And so once the show ends the Clemson fans go right back to screaming profanities at us, since we're the GT band, and sometimes throwing things while the security winks and nods, and we scurry back through the mud, dodging football players, who decided to come out before the show was finished, back to the stands. At which point it started raining again at the same ridiculous rate.

Because of the rain, most of the band the next day was sick, including me. Also we lost the game.

And that is the story of the Monsoon Bowl. Worst game ever.

*That's a very funny story.

[CaptainChewbacca]

That sounds like the worst marching experience possible without including fire. My appologies.

The hockey one, though... If someone told me to march my $2,000 horn on ice without turf shoes, I'd tell them to shove it.

[Fleet Admiral JD]

That monsoon bowl, Maya. . . holy shit. I don't think I could have handled that--kudos to your DMs.

Thanks for the tip on sax cases; I'll keep it in mind at our big arch-rival game on Thanksgiving.

Also, a question for marching band-ites and ex marching band-ites: do/does your drum major(s) use a mace? Our band director at my high school hates maces, thinks they're out of date. However, the band owns one and I've gotten to be pretty good with it. I can throw a four and catch it fairly reliably. So, any of you have experience with those bad boys?

[CaptainChewbacca]

I used a Mace in highschool, can't remember what the college band used. They're not out of date, they're just an elegant timekeeping tool from a more civilized age.

If you're good with a Mace, you'll win every time.

[Mayabird]

One of my drum majors had a mace. He'd used it in high school, and the directors were impressed by how well he could swing the thing and do fancy tricks, so they let him use it for our band (when applicable). The other drum majors didn't have a mace, and no one really cared one way or the other.

Story time!

The drum major that had the mace had come from a really strict military-style high school band. During his senior year, he was traveling to different colleges to check them and their bands out. And so, while checking out GT, he went to the band practice.

When the band does a horns up, everyone goes, "Whooooop!" like a cartoon where something shoots out or comes up from nowhere, and the horns come up. If we did a horns down, we'd make a deflating, "Wheeeeew" sound.

He thought it was the coolest thing he'd ever heard, but because he was in such a strict band, he dared not tell everyone about it. The only person he told was the drum captain.

The drum captain, being a drummer, naturally told everyone else.

So at the next practice, he did their band's horns up. The whole band, with a grin, went, "Whoooop!"

The director went ballistic. "WHO TOLD YOU TO DO THAT? WHERE DID YOU GET THAT IDEA?"

The band starts screaming in panic, "MAJOR MADE US DO IT! IT WAS MAJOR!"


To make up for that, once he became one of the college drum majors, he'd sometimes do a horns up and horns down two or three times in a row just for the sound effects.

[Hawkwings]

so it was a slow horns up/down? Because I don't see how that would work with horn snaps.

[Mayabird]

It's about a one second horns up/down, which is enough time to do a quick cartoon, rising "Whooop!" sound. We have to pay attention to make sure we're actually able to do it without being late or looking/sounding like an idiot, which is one reason why the directors don't actively try to purge it. If we're watching for the horns up so we can make the sound, well, it means we're actually watching for the horns up, rather than doing something else.

For a similar reason, that's why we were allowed to play Rocky Horror Picture Show type games with everything. If we were paying attention to an announcement, even if just so we could all yell "ANGLE!" in unison after the director, well, at least we were paying attention ("GO TECH!" - that was one of the other things, since that was our attention call, but every time we heard the word we'd yell it. Absolutely hilarious on flying trips. "This is your captain speaking. May I have your attention pl-" "GO TECH!" "...Okay, that was weird.")

[Hawkwings]

Oh man, that'd be hilarious. Was it planned? Or did it just sort of happen, like an instinct? How did the rest of the passengers react?

[Lord Relvenous]

Fleet Admiral JD

Seeing as how I've never heard of a mace, I can confidently say that our DMs do not use them.

Mayabird
Hawkwings
Our band yells ONE at the top of our lungs as the vocalization of attention. We do it at the beginning of performances, whenever the directors needs to speak, when we're being to loud, you know pretty much all the time. The drums play a roll off to cue us. If, during marching season, you do that drum roll of with two pencils on a desk in a classroom with band students in it, many of them will yell one out of sheer reflex.

Note: You can hear the roll off and the ONE at the beginning of the video i posted in the OP.

[Mayabird]

That happened all the time, and I admit that I accidentally did it a couple times too. The professor is drawing a diagram on the board, and mentions something about the angle, and band people in the class suddenly and reflexively blurt out, "ANGLE!" and then try to vanish into the backs of their desks. A lot of them are used to it and hardly even glance up anymore.

On the planes, now, that's mostly intentional. The rest of the passengers usually have a good laugh over it, because it's really funny, especially the way we skewer the preflight safety videos.

When the video comes on, we would all unbuckle our seat belts, so at the beginning when the video demonstrates how to fasten them while the flight attendants demonstrate, everyone goes, "Ohhhhhhhh!" like we've just been enlightened, and buckles as loudly as possible.

(One time, the video was broken, sound but no picture. They started with the buckling, and we went, "Ohhhh!" and buckled, but they shut it off and said, "We're going to try this again with the video," so we all quickly unbuckled. Again, sound but not picture, but we all did it again. The flight attendants were barely able to stand, they were laughing so hard, and one managed to say over the intercom that they would try one more time, so we all quickly unbuckled again. Once more, sound but no video, but we did the loudest "OHHHHHH!" ever. The entire plane was cracking up. The head attendant stopped the sound just long enough to say, "Forgive the children; they're in special ed," before they gave up on the video and just had someone demonstrate without it.)

Delta used to have this scene in its safety videos where the guy is putting on the life jacket from under the seat and blows into the tubes on the sides to inflate it. Somehow, it just came out incredibly dirty, like he was sucking face with the life preserver. As we approached this part, the moment the life jacket was mentioned, we'd start saying, in unison, "Wait for it...waaaaait for it..." And the moment he started making out with the life jacket, we'd sing out a chorus of, "OB-SCENE! OB-SCENE! OB-SCENE!" This was usually followed by random passengers yelling, "Oh my god that IS obscene!" and flight attendants telling us, "I've seen that thing several hundred times and I never realized how dirty it was!"

Delta has since changed that one scene, probably because several dozen flight attendants could never watch it with a straight face ever again and were spreading the corruption to other crews.

Also during takeoff we'd all raise our arms up like we're riding a roller coaster and start a low, "Goooooooooo-" until we felt the plane leave the ground, at which point we'd all yell, "-Jackets, sting 'em!" Usually after that everyone would fall asleep until the plane landed.


I have so hijacked this thread. Sorry.

[Hawkwings]

To bring this slightly more on-topic...

Southridge HS won 1st place at the NWMBC Championships. They dethroned Evergreen HS, sho had won for the past 3 years. Southridge's show wasn't that great, though, in my opinion. Way too many cheap effects that did nothing but boost their GE score. And I didn't like the music either. But they were clean and together, so they won. I'll have some pictures of them soon.

In the meantime, may I present the Anaheim Kingsmen Alumni Corps!

Wow.