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DCI please come to Atlanta! Please , please, please...

Figures. The one year I really enjoyed nearly every corps top to bottom and would have gladly paid to have the audio at least in my car.

Well re-load and give us more! 🙂 That was great stuff.

Without naming names, I can tell you that some corps in neighboring NY state ran hugely profitable bingo operations. However, there were some problems (that I will not go into here) which ended up hurting them badly, because it was their primary income source, and then suddenly gone. Still, as you see later in the responses, there are some major corps who run HUGE bingo operations. Bingo did happen, at a lower level, for corps in NJ.......but the corps gave up when the State made it far more difficult and far less profitable. This does look like an olive branch by the state in lifting things and making it possible.....for drum corps and other non-profits......to perhaps make it work....... I am pretty sure that drinking was allowed in NY State (not certain, though). It's a moot point, even if allowed, as the cost of a liquor license in NJ is staggering.......I don't think that it would take liquor, smoking, etc......to run a successful operation.....just a fun place that people would come back to on a regular basis............and can generate some income for corps............

This is a great recap of your year! I would not be able to sum up my 1979 year with anywhere near this level of detail. I do remember that George Zingali yelled at me to stop ####### up his drill. 😂

Any updates for 2021 Indy CDs? Sad they're not producing Blu-rays, but understand.

A memorable day was a show near St. Louis, before Tennessee. I had pulled my hamstring repping the percussion feature dance the day before in Enid, OK. I could have sat out, but I didn't. To show you the mood of the corps at this point - during basics block, the staff was really hammering us. Continuous box drill at 196 bpm. One of our 4 year vets put his horn down and said "This is ####### stupid!" in the middle of the exercise. I ended up taking some perscription painkillers another guy in the section had, and powering through. That night's show was the first time I did the new ending drill right, and seeing my tech jump for joy on the track gave me a huge sense of accomplishment. At Atlanta, we were getting ready to go on - Crown or BK were performing - and the Georgia Dome broke! Anyone remember this? The end of the season was really sour. I got in a fight with my section because some of them were catcalling a high school girl as we walked back to the buses in uniform. Hop got into a screaming match with a trumpet player in the shower before the Massillon show. The next day in Allentown, he and Marc Sylvester had it out, yelling at each other behind the food truck. That day was also a full rehearsal day in J Birney Crum, and I sweated more than any time in my life - Allentown in early August. It was so humid that night that the air was a haze, we couldn't see the press box from the field. It was the first time I really felt like I did everything right in the show, and it was a massive feeling of accomplishment. The constant of the last few weeks of the season was Hop telling us that we weren't trying enough, that we were "giving up out there," and we just needed to perform better. Even though Hop said we rehearsed like crap and weren't trying, Giants Stadium was a good show. Music is Cool and it being the home show gave us bit more time, which I used to shovel brisket and sweet potatoes into my body (one of Hop's wonderful chums from the YEA board made some great food). I realized that the quality of my performance was mainly based on how much I could manage to eat that day. I had gone from 185 pounds to 150 in 2 1/2 months. Madison was fine. Our housing site was way west of Baraboo, so it was a long ride to the stadium. We rehearsed until 11pm in the rain the night before quarterfinals, for some reason. Quarterfinals was bad, Semifinals was good. Zero crowd response. People said ###### things to my mom in the stands because she had a Cadets shirt and they didn't like our show. On finals day, Hop told us he would take the "Mad Tea Party" and ballad of our show over any other drum corps show ever. Okay. Bluecoats beat us in finals by a tenth. No one really cared. Coats were jerks about it. I didn't march my age out. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk

I didn’t want this takedown to get lost amongst your informative post. So brutal. So deserved.

The winter was kinda weird. There seeemed to be a lack of focus. The design "evolved," but a lot of it was wild ideas that were total dead ends. For example, at one point the lot warmup was supposed to be an integral part of the show. Another camp, we were given brass parts to go with the percussion feature, which we learned, cleaned, and then never talked about again. We spent an enormous amount of time working on encore/extra tunes (Back to the Future theme, Flintstones theme, Sing Sing Sing, some Beatles medley). Hop and Marc Sylvester explained the show, but it really did come across like a bunch of weird ideas rather than a coherent package. We were told we would not be wearing the traditional uniform, and also told that it was dumb to want to wear it. In general, George was dismissive of almost all traditions. We also spent a few nights at winter camps doing the famous "Hop Talks" late into the night. I believe a fuller accounting of Hopkins' activities that offseason can be found in the Lehigh County court records. We did Spring Training at West Virginia Wesleyan University, which is really in the middle of nowhere. It was okay, but the quality of the fields was poor, and the 20 minute walk between the food truck and fields really cut into productivity. Time wasn't spent efficiently - We once spent an entire evening block learning and practicing a more balletic, toe-first movement style... and never talked about it again. We also had events such as a local parade, the Bunker Hill parade in Boston, and a YEA concert in Allentown (the video posted earlier with us on a stage is from that). One thing that started happening, and didn't really ever stop happening, was injuries. I remember one veteran trumpet player whose knee swelled up so badly it had to be drained with a needle at a hospital (he did not complete spring training). Hop's response to injuries was to blame us for getting fat in the offseason. In general, there was a lack of urgency in spring training. Half the hornline hadn't memorized the music before coming. There was increasing tension between veterans and rookies, and a bit of a culture clash with the large contingent of members who had come from Magic of Orlando. We got fitted in our uniforms, but the psychedlic-patterned panels for our backs were delayed. They ended up being the exact same uniform backs from 2005 with the psychedelic patterns sewn over them, which made them attach to the velcro poorly and look bad (worse than they already did).

The next part of the show was when everything got stupid, or at least "cringey." In addition to Amy and Alice (Katie Hopkins), there was a Red Queen, a Mad Hatter, and a White Rabbit. They were easy enough to overlook in the opener, but now took center stage. As the pit played alone, the hornline filed through some neat moving-column type drill to pick up our pink benches. The show had pink benches. (The turn to the back at the end of The Garden is when we revealed the back of our uniforms, which had psychedelic patterns to match the guard and giant back panels.) In total there were I believe 28 props - 16 pink benches, 10 giant backfield screens, the door, and the "mad tea party table." [Edit: there were TWENTY of those #### backfield panels] Standard equipment nowadays, but having your hornline just carry junk around for 3 minutes straight was pretty radical for the time. As this happened, the live vocals started with Amy - "It's a great pleasure... it's a great great pleasure... it's a great pleasure to have all of you here today." The drums carried out the big tea party table, and the percussion did their feature as the characters jumped around on the table and said embarassing things. At the end of the feature, there was a stick trick which rarely worked (that Hop saw once in the 70s and thought was cool). During all this, the hornline was in "pods" of 4, crabstepping while each holding a corner of a bench. There was a bunch of guard stuff and eventually a dance here, but I'll get into it later. End of the Mad Tea Party, percussion fades out marching toward the back, and the horns came in again for "Sanvean," our ballad. Hop saw Amy perform this with her HS band in Texas, and decided to just take both the song and the singer. It's a good ballad. Amy had vocals which were not words. As we played this, the drill was again representational. The whole movement was supposed to be Alice remembering her past experiences in The Zone; we made a hammer (2005 perc feature) an umbrella (2005 Liquid) and a crown (2005 Dancer in the Dark). The drill intentionally didn't line up with the phrase structure (you might have 16 bars divided up into moves of 6, 2, 3, and 5) to again give a dreamlike, cinematic feeling. This was very hard, and as it turns out, generated about zero General Effect. The guard was doing stuff with the benches behind us during this, more on it later. A huge problem for the ballad was getting the mic/monitor etc situation right so that she could actually hear herself, and we spent a ton of time on that. Infancy of A&E. Last piece -- horns fade out on Sanvean and drums fade in, and we're into the closer, which ended up being "Diaspora Dances" from Bernstein's Concerto for Orchestra (1989). It's a wild chart and really nice to do Bernstein without dragging out West Side Story or Candide. It also had a lot of syncopation, time signature and tempo changes, and exposed entrances right after turning frontfield. So, you would have, say, the mellos in a block marching facing backfield at 192 bpm, turning while bringing horns up and breathing, and coming in on the move with a technical and syncopated part. This was very hard to do cleanly. Eventually, the piece builds to the "Medea Chords" - you know, the loud doodoo doodoo....doodoodoodoo from Star 1993 (which was also Cadets 2005 closer, in another "we are redefining drum corps" message). We switched to 204 bpm on those hits, and the rest of the show was basically musically the same as 2005. Alice exits her mind-blowing experience, etc. So how did the season go?

I marched Cadets in 2006, if the last posts didn't make that clear. "Sometimes you learn more from a bad year than a good one." -George Hopkins "You've all heard the horror stories about The Cadets. You've probably realized now that many of them are true." -Our horn sargeant It was definitely a weird year. Weird doesn't always mean bad, but you can be weird and bad at the same time! The year before, I had marched Capital Regiment (see my posts in the 2004 and 2005 threads). Cap Reg was basically trying to be Cadets on a budget (emphasis on budget), with Jay Bocook arrangements, Jeff Sacktig drill, and our brass and most of the visual staff were Cadets alums. When I got absolutely sick of Cap Reg, about in the middle of the season, I decided to march either Cadets or Phantom. As one of our visual techs said to the whole corps right after our semifinals show, "If you can survive this, you can march anywhere." There were 5 or 6 of us from the hornline who went to Cadets auditions. I absolutely aced the marching portion of the audition, but I got really nervous and did a terrible job on my music audition for Gino Cipriani. I am a bassoonist, not a tuba player. Fortunately, the 2004 Cap Reg brass caption head, Chad Pence, was the tuba tech, so he knew that I would stick it out and I got a contract the first camp. Gino told me at the end of the camp that I would get a contract, and asked if I was "committed." I said, "Yes, I can make the financial commitment," to which he replied, "No, I mean spiritually." That was that, I didn't even go to the Phantom auditions. The YEA combined Cadets/Crossmen audition camp was kindof odd - maybe 70 brass total showed up. You would assume that after 2005, people would be flocking to Cadets, but if anything the opposite seemed true. Something very important to understand about 2005 Cadets was that they were extremely stacked in terms of experience - a lot of 3 or 4 year vets. Many many of them aged out, and some just elected to end their marching careers at the top - who can blame them? We had about 70 rookies (some with experience at different corps). For a comparison, the 2005 tuba section had 7 Cadets vets out of 10; 2006 had 2. The whole winter was a revolving door in our section; I think maybe 5-6 of us went to every camp. From a design standpoint, the 2006 Cadets show - especially as originally conceived - was a stunning monument to hubris. The opening music was "History Repeating," by The Propellorheads, which was sung by Amy, our special vocalist. As the pit and Amy played History Repeating, the hornline marched the END of the 2005 show, silently, at 192 bpm. The pit was playing at 144 bpm, so for every 2 beats for the pit there were 3 for us (I think?). We went off the DM's hands and designated "dut-ers" only. If that sounds very hard, it is! The idea, as Marc Sylvester explained, was for it to be cinematic, like credits music over a "Last time on... The Zone" recap of the end of 2005, before we plunged back into the madness. The message, as explained to us, was "In 1983, we redefined the whole activity of drum corps. Now, we're doing it again. History repeating." Did you get that from the show as audience members? Then, you have "White Rabbit," as the girl from 2005 is transformed into Alice in wonderland. That piece melded into music from the "Pollock" soundtrack, and then another accelerando into the opener proper, which we called "The Garden," supposed to be Alice discovering the psychedelic wonderland. Pollock had very exposed antiphonal entrances that took forever to clean. As The Garden began, giant black screens arranged into an arc behind the back hash turned in a ripple to reveal psychedelic designs. As far as the hornline was concerned, the rest of the opener was good ol' run and gun. Physically, it was pretty brutal - we did the end of 2005 drill silently, waited for Alice to ring the doorbell, and then it was constant drill for White Rabbit, Pollock, and The Garden. If you compare 2005 to 2006, Liquid in 2005 was, as the name suggests, very flowing drill, while The Garden had a ton of very sharp and hard direction changes. Difficulty was high. There were a lot of what I would call "representational" drill forms, carrying over from 2005 - remember the umbrella, faucet, and fish in Liquid? At the end of The Garden we made a big eyeball that morphed into a keyhole (for the door, you see). Another departure from orthodoxy, which has now become commonplace, was that the music and movement in the entire show never stopped, but blended into the next piece. We never ran around, stopped, played a long chord, put our horns down and enjoyed the crowd reaction - at the end of The Garden, we played a closing chord, then turned backfield to "fade out" as the pit came in. This is like really long

No more easy shows. No more nostalgia. They need to be aggressive and competitive with NEW music.