Band Geek

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I've been wanting to make a post in the "School Days" community that @galenkp created for a while now. Today I decided I would kill two birds with one stone and pair this with a #threetunetuesday post sponsored by @ablaze.

In the school district where I grew up, towards the end of fifth grade a representative from a music shop would come to our classroom and talk to us about band. Much to my parents chagrin, I decided it might be fun to play the drums. My sister was already in band playing the clarinet, but for some reason my general antsy-ness and ADHD led me towards something lounder. You have to realize, this wasn't a full on drum kit, that might have actually made me cool. No, this was concert band, so it was a single snare drum monotonously droning on over and over and over again. Like I said, my parents loved it.

I'm not going to talk about Middle School (7th to 8th grade) in this post, those are stories for another time, but high school band (9th to 12th grade) were honestly some of the best times of my young life. High school gave us a couple of months outside of concert band where we would march on the football field for pregame and halftime shows. My sister was a couple years older than me, but she retired from band the year I started because she wanted to chase other academic pursuits.

I know it sounds funny, but it's actually true. She is quite smart and she wasn't able to take some of the science classes she wanted without dropping band from her schedule. Thus, I got to be my own person in band class and not live in her shadow (I can't say the same for typing class).

As a freshman, it was pretty intimidating joining the sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the percussion section. There was a single female drummer my freshman year and her long red hair made us freshman guys swoon. She was nice too, unlike some of other seniors. I remember one guy who skipped school probably more than he actually attended. He always had some crazy stories about how he was partying the previous weekend.

When you are playing concert bass drum, you often have to put your leg up on the stand and press your knee against the drum to muffle or mute the sound. He would often come up behind you (unbeknownst to you) and light a cigarette lighter under your raised leg. You would have no clue, but suddenly your leg would be warm, then burning hot. Looking back now, it was a pretty funny trick, but man did it hurt at the time.

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My freshman year, I wasn't quite as skilled as some of the other freshman players, so for marching band I got stuck playing the crash cymbals. I mean someone had to do it anyway, so although it sounds like typical band geek fodder, I made it my own. We had a pretty great band director who kept us well disciplined and had us doing some pretty complex formations on the football field. It wasn't like Ohio State level stuff, but for a small country high school band, it was pretty impressive. I remember one of our songs for the halftime show was the theme from Back To The Future. If you notice, there is a cymbal crash right at the beginning of the song. It was pretty nerve wrecking playing cymbals for this one because if I missed my cue, I screwed up the whole band.

I can still see the look of disappointment on the directors face the handful of times I missed the crash.

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Besides marching on the field, we also played in the stands during the breaks in the football game. One of my favorite songs to play was "Land of 1000 Dances". Despite the cymbal not being the most popular instrument, I did my best to make it my own. I actually taught myself how to flip or spin the cymbals around my hands and by the end of my freshman year, I was pretty adept at making a very basic instrument look quite showy. I remember one instance where on this song in particular, I crashed the cymbals so hard that I actually turned one of them inside out.

Believe it or not, I wasn't really that popular in school. Crazy right?

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By my senior year, I had worked my way from cymbals to the tenor drum (a tom), to the snare drum. For the final football game of the senior year, we always did a special song and the seniors would run around the football field in costumes acting out a story based on the songs we would play. "Walk The Dinosaur" was one of those songs, and my senior year I had the distinct pleasure of dressing up as Fred Flintstone and doing the dinosaur dance in front of all the fans. We didn't have MTV, so I had to learn the dance from the other kids who did.

I'm actually shocked I did it. I must have been a lot braver back then than I am now. Like I said though, still not that popular. I did have a nice group of friends by the time I graduated, but I don't remember being invited to a single party in high school. It's not like I probably would have went even if I had been invited.

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Finally, as a bonus track, I wanted to share this awesome cadence that the drum line did during one of the halftime shows. We practiced it non-stop and we even implemented some pretty cool theatrics in the middle of it. I don't think I could play it today like I could back then, but it was really impressive to watch. Like I said, in between the rhythms, we threw in some stick clicks, spins, and raises that made the whole thing look really theatrical. Still hard to believe I wasn't that popular in school right?

I think I have shared this clip with @steevc before, but coming back to it now, it's crazy how complex some of those patterns are. I can't tell you how intimidating it was to see all these notes strung together for the first time. I thought there was no way we were going to make it into something cohesive, but we did.

So there you go, just a fraction of the stories from a former band geek.

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My Sports Account - @bozz.sports

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced