“That Kingsmen ’72 show with “When Johnny Comes Marching In” is probably THE greatest DCI show ever.”
“Wait, I thought you said that ’73 Santa Clara Vanguard show where they do the Bottle Dance was the best?”
“Have you heard the ’72 Kingsmen show?’
“I’m just saying, you said..”
“Don’t put words in my mouth…”
“But you did say…”
Even before he turned 14 and became an official member of Cedar Rapids’ own Emerald Knights Drum and Bugle Corps, my older brother Derek had already collected scores of legendary drum corps performances on cassette tapes – professionally recorded each year at the season finale DCI (Drum Corps International) tournament and endlessly bootlegged down through the ranks of the nation’s drum corps faithful. Nevermind that by the time the tapes were in Derek’s hands, the recorded performances sounded as if they were being transmitted through the speaker imbedded in the chest of a GI Joe doll. Still, one of the first things Derek and I, his aimless putz-of-an-8-year-old brother, ever bonded over was playing and listening to these tapes in our big corner bedroom, often acting out the part of the drum major, over-dramatically pretending to conduct these brass, wall-of-sound masterpieces and endlessly ranking and re-ranking our favorite performances like a couple of band nerd Deadheads:
“All I’m saying is, have you heard the ’72 Kingsmen show?”
“How is it better than the Vanguard Bottle Dance…And what about that Muchachos prelim show before they got disqualified, when the soprano player hits a double high C??”
“Okay that was cool. But I think they got disqualified because that soprano was like 25 but still the Kingsmen show in ’72 was better anyway.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Wait shut up, did I tell you what song we’re learning for Emerald Knights?”
“What?”
“It’s gonna be the first song of the shows we’re doing this summer. Guess.”
“Bottle Dance?”
“That’s what the Vanguard does. Nobody else can touch that. Guess what Emerald Knights are doing, dummy.”
“A Kingsmen song?”
“Theme from Sanford and Son.”
“No way! NO WAY!
We all had music in our blood for some reason. If not necessarily the greatest ability to play it, a desperate need to listen to it and an ease with which we each enjoyed it. Maybe it was my dad’s fault. Ever since I could remember, he’d been the choir director at our church, Calvin Sinclair Presbyterian, up on Dalewood Avenue and 38th Street. This required him to develop a program of songs each week, working hand-in-hand with Reverend Huebner to parallel the message he’d be delivering with the sermon, not that anyone noticed, and work it out with the choir on Wednesday night and Sunday morning prior to church. In service of this critical duty, Dad would constantly plink around on our ramshackle upright piano, warbling through a few hymns, figuring out which tunes best suited that Sunday’s theme as well as the questionable vocal abilities of his vitality-challenged choir members.
That ramshackle piano, ancient and bathed in crackling bone-white paint, musical notes written on Scotch tape and adhered to the white keys, was a defining feature of our home – not just because I’m positive it was holding up one of the dining room walls, but because it forever served as a musical way station for anyone passing through that room on their way to the kitchen, or vice versa – the most heavily traveled route in whole house. I always listened with cringy delight as Dad hammered (literally) out his programs on the thing, but I could hardly wait for my turn. And I always attacked it with all the verve and passion of someone who has no idea what they’re doing. Same with my siblings. The noise was insufferable. And although the virtuosity never really rose above “Chopsticks” or “Heart and Soul,” I believe that piano was the wellspring of our musical curiosity.
Around the time I was 8 or 9, circa 1974, my two older brothers Dana and Craig, had taught themselves how to play guitar a little, and they were thinking about starting a rock band. To that end, they began practicing with a few bandmates every Wednesday night while me and my parents were at choir practice, crowding the main room in our basement with drums, amps, guitars and pot smoke. My mom, noticing my interest in driving people away with my piano skills, was gently prodding me towards lessons with Julie Pokorny, the church organist. She was as sweet as a Sara Lee’s frozen cherry cheesecake and just about the same height, with cat eye glasses and a mousy bouffant hairdo, but the relationship was short-lived. I was done after 2 or 3 lessons, probably due in large part to my profound anti-lesson stance, but also because Mrs. Pokorny had all the dynamic instructional presence of a quiet fart.
Derek, meanwhile, was chomping at the bit to join the exalted ranks of the Emerald Knights. And why wouldn’t he be? Their songs were cool. Their uniforms were cool. And what could be cooler than spending the entire summer doing more band stuff? Of course, having my usual dearth of extracurricular activities since the Pokorny Sessions, I was equally fascinated and giddy about being closely related to a future Emerald Knight.
As it turned out, through Derek’s years long membership in the corps, Mom and Dad and I became as deeply enmeshed in Emerald Knights and drum corps culture as he did. For a few critical years, it provided our little corner of the family with a social life – something my parents hadn’t really experienced until that point. And I look back on it now as a defining, instructional period of my childhood – a place where I was able to observe from a distance how teenagers (albeit slightly offbeat band kid teenagers) interact with one another – what worked and what didn’t, social hierarchies, and the best places to look for half-smoked cigarette butts.
Today, a typical drum corps show is as much about over the top stagecraft as it is about the music. I’ve seen bits and pieces of recent shows and they look like David Copperfield productions of professional ballroom dancers pretending to be marching bands, if you can picture it. Back in the 70’s, the concept was much simpler: a drum corps was just like a marching band, but without woodwinds, trombones and provocative baton twirlers. There was a drum section, a color guard section featuring “rifle” and flag carriers, and a horn section comprised of a variety of sizes of bugles. Bugles mirrored typical band horns with one crucial difference: all bugles had two keys rather than three. For some reason, this was better, if only because it allowed these organizations to be called “drum and bugle corps” instead of the dork-adjacent “marching bands”. It also meant the horn parts were specifically written for instruments with two keys. So perhaps the whole endeavor was secretly funded and steered by the shadowy puppetmastery of Big Sheet Music.
Unlike marching bands, which mainly function as a performing arm of a high school or college’s music program by playing in parades and football halftime shows, drum corps existed in large part to compete with other drums corps. You heard right: these were 14 to 21-year-old band geeks looking to kick other band geeks’ asses with a nasty dual threat of musical precision and showmanship. These competitions, or “tournaments,” unfolded (and still do) most every weekend throughout the summer months in high school or college football stadiums across the nation. Most, like Cedar Rapids’ own Emerald Knights-hosted Tournament of Drums, were semi-local affairs – drawing 6 to 8 drum corps from the surrounding states, parents and family of the drum corps members, and literally no one else.
Each corps performed a 4 to 5 song set of choreographed arrangements fine-tuned during regularly scheduled practices which began over the winter months and increased in frequency and intensity during the spring and summer (I recall a great deal of screaming, sweating and underage smoking). Ultimately, the performances were evaluated and scored on both musical and visual execution by up to 8 judges who spent their summer Saturday nights judging drum and bugle corps, so you be the judge. At the end of the evening the scores were tallied, and all the corps marched back onto the field and lined up side-by-side, waiting with baited breath. As the drum majors stood elbow to elbow along the sideline, the winners were announced in ascending order. This created a dramatic Miss America moment at the end of each tournament, but without flowers, evening gowns or viewers. Upon their name being announced, each drum major took one step forward and executed a signature salute to the house, usually involving a complex series of snappy head and arm movements before the actual salute comes. The more complicated, the better. It was, in a word, breathtaking.
Soon, we – our family – would be a proud, honored part of all of this. It would be like a badge of honor, but dorkier. Because I would soon began collecting buttons from all of my favorite corps and wearing them. All at once. In public. On my Emerald Knights windbreaker. I was not to be messed with, which was fine, because no one bothered.
City of Five Smells 