Band Stories Etc

My name's Will, and I do a lot of traveling for band, drum corps, and music in general. Some of these are my stories. Send me yours and I'll feature them!

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June 20, 2018 Washington Middle School Sanger, California

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August 2, 2016 Fort Wayne, Indiana “West Coast Lanes”      I felt like I was living some sort of sitcom that day. It was called “Drum Corps Dorm”. The wacky premise was that 7th Regiment, Music City, Raiders, and Les Stentors were all put up in the same dorm at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, IN.      This is the story of the second worst day of my drum corps career.     We got to the college at about 2 AM, but weren’t able to move into the dorms until about 3, when we were all handed keys. I think I was the last person in so I took a room to myself. The only bed was on the top bunk so I jumped up on it, when the frame slid off and down onto my foot, since I had failed to realize that the beds were not held together by pegs. And this was only 4 AM!     Wake up was at 7, and we hopped on buses to take us to the rehearsal site. And when I say this rehearsal site was just a field across the street from a dead bowling alley (pictured, along with 2016 baritone Tom “West Coast”), I mean it in the most sincere way possible. It was about 92 and humid that day and the staff was just going nuts on us. There must have been so few rehearsal sites in Fort Wayne that Raiders were sharing the field with us down on the other end, so there were two rehearsals going on at once. I tried to tune into 7th, but Raiders were doing my favorite classical piece, “Fearful Symmetries” by John Adams, and I wanted to hear how they did it. I think rehearsal was so tough that everyone kind of formed support circles at lunch after it.     I was determined to have the best run of my life that night, that no matter what happened during the day, whether it be the hard PT, getting hit in the head by a trumpet, or getting into an argument with a tuba player about some small thing (hey, it was a looooooong day and everything was getting to everyone), I would have an amazing show. Things went well, until the helix in the closer. Wouldn’t you know, I ran into that same tuba player, and my mouthpiece went flying out and my leadpipe bent. I couldn’t necessarily go back for it, so I just finished out the show with no mouthpiece. I was incredibly disappointed in myself, but after a chat with the baritone tech and making good terms with the tuba player, everything turned out well in the end. The dorm stuff afterwards was cool too, we basically went room to room having random glowstick dance parties.    Band and Drum Corps are funny though, in that these are the days you’ll remember the most.

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June 21, 2017 Santa Paula, California “California Sunrise on the First Day of Summer”      I think we got to Isbell Middle School in Santa Paula around 5:30 AM that morning. It was about 45 minutes before the rest of the corps arrived so we had time to explore the housing site and put our bags in the admin staff room. I walked through the front gates of the school, and, to my amazement, the entire school was outside. Being from Connecticut and touring the Midwest with 7th, all the schools I had visited were inside. I probably seemed like the biggest newbie to all the admin and media team vets, who had seen all this in previous years. But for me, this being my first experience at a California school, it was quite stunning. I thought about my friends from LA and how normal this all probably was to them. I think I immediately snapchatted them my excited East Coast confusion.      Then the sun came up. That’s when I took this picture, and when it finally hit me that I was 2,500 miles away from home. I could see the hills and palm trees in the distance. This was also the first California sunrise I had ever witnessed, and it was nothing short of poetic. I was still by myself, as the other admins were doing their jobs and I was waiting for the buses to arrive so I could collect the walkie talkies. I decided to stand there for a while and watch the sun come up over the mountains with my earbuds in. The soundtrack was Best Coast and Dum Dum Girls, the most SoCal soundtrack I could possibly imagine at the time. I reflected on the adventure that was to come, and I felt excited that this was only the tip of the iceberg that I thought I would have seen that summer.      At about 6:15 the buses rolled in, so I was busy for the next 30 minutes collecting the radios from the bus, truck, and van drivers. It was about 7 AM when I went back to the admin room and slept for the next four hours, but not before stopping to look out and enjoy the first summer morning of 2017.     --WS