FTNK

I think we have to look at the justifications that are always brought out for drum corps' existence. Every corps and DCI constantly recites the same platitudes and mission statements; "All the good drum corps does," as Sutasaurus calls it. Drum corps teaches life lessons. Drum corps provides an incredible experience. Drum corps is youth arts education. Drum corps builds character. Drum corps teaches teamwork and work ethic. Drum corps builds incredible young human beings. All of this vague stuff gets constantly, almost reflexively brought up to justify the continued existence of drum corps. Maybe if the very nature of the activity (mix of ages, extreme power differentials, constant travel etc etc etc) is literally a recipe for abuse, maybe drum corps doesn't deserve to exist anymore. Maybe the culture and what is considered acceptable have gone so far beyond the bounds of sanity that it can't be fixed. I know, it was fun to wear knee-high boots and spin a flag in 1978. I know, good drill looks pretty cool. I know, loud noises. But maybe it's time to let it die. I did 3 years of marching corps, all of them sitting in the FRONT of the bus. 2 in a semifinalist, 1 in a legendary corps which was defending champ that year. I saw: A 23 yr old tech (staff) having a relationship with a 19 yr old member. A 23 yr old volunteer having sex with a 17 yr old member in a school auditorium. Staff using extremely offensive and sexually linked language (C - U - N -) during the very first visual block of the first camp. The guard staff using extremely sexually explicity music for daily "stretch and run" block because they thought it was funny. My seat partner putting his hand down my pants when he thought I was sleeping. Rumors of ongoing sexual acts between multiple members of the drum line and a 16 yr old member. Rumors of a sexual relationship between the brass caption head and horn sargeant (member). The corps getting permanently banned from the hotel which hosted their banquet because of several incidents, including one member having alcohol poisoning. Also it turns out one year the director (George Hopkins) had raped the assistant director before the season started. All but the last three were considered, by the members, fairly unremarkable. That's JUST the sexual stuff I could come up with off the top of my head - not the transportation, safety, food, etc issues.

Yep.

In my rookie season (2004) a member of my section was physically assaulted in the gym by a group of vets after lights out. The next day, one of our staff “chewed out” the entire corps. But one statement in that speech has alway stood out: “If this were the real world, you would be in jail.”If this were the real world. Nothing has changed.

This is bad!

Wasn’t Cadets 1992 all Holsinger?

No highly successful person in the marching arts has ever done anything wrong!

Thanks for the info, Denise!

Wow what a wonderful culture and community drum corps is……. 🙄

There are a lot more things to do with your summers and $ than marching band.

Remember when it was all “this is an amazing choice to lead The Cadets”? Will this affect that? Seems bad idk

^ Me seeing the props in the parking lot before Whitewater in 2019. Something needs to be done, for both safety and member experience. Hauling around props drains the energy you would otherwise put into a performance, and also just generally sucks. Someone was talking about professional Broadway-level people working on the props, but let's be real - how many corps have that? 2? 3? The first drum corps show I marched with a prop, our program coordinator spent half the season trying to repair it with a hammer and an electric drill... Not that that formal "props" alone are the only problem, as someone noted the DM podiums and staff scaffoldings are terrible... a metal pipe from our scaffolding fell on one of our baritones in 2006 and cut his forehead open, Hop had to tie his t-shirt around his head to stop the bleeding... Memories!

A pretty damning indictment of the whole thing, isn't it?

Which I have also witnessed in drum corps

File this in the ever-expanding "maybe drum corps culture is fundamentally irredeemable" column.

Seems like for over 20 years there has been about a 50/50 chance of having a good year, or a really bad year with an embarassing show. Lack of consistency in member experience. Why not go to BD if you can?

I think Cadets are a spent force in terms of competing at the top of DCI. I think they are at the point where they can either design good shows for the bottom half of finals, or do "tradition" and be like the Troopers were 15 years ago.

Here is the list of drum corps shows that have used West Side Story. It's 19 pages and goes back to 1959. http://www.dcxmuseum.org/index.cfm?view=search&song=West Side Story Plus every HS has probably done it 3 or 4 times. I did my freshman year. I think it's time to move on.

A surefire ticket out of finals. Seriously, the idea that we should keep rehashing stuff from 40 years ago, that has already been rehashed twice - terrible. Why not bring some new and unique music and programming to the field, like SCV...and BD...and Crown...and Boston...

Honest question - as someone who Knew People, what did you do to fix it in 30 years?

I think I may have emptied my brain LoL

My girlfriend at the time took these videos. She told me she had uploaded them to YouTube, to which I said, "What is YouTube?" 😅 Hope I illuminated some of the design and behind the scenes elements of the show.

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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

The first show with tweaked Rabbit was supposed to be Lincoln, NE. I distinctly remember being in the middle of ensemble, and feeling like someone had opened a refridgerator next to me. Enormous Great Plains thunderstorm - we almost got hit by lightning during horn warmups and had to take shelter (#### the uniform ettiquette, RUN!). The stands were a waterfall and the whole show was canceled. Around this time I developed a large boil just above my butt crack. The athletic trainer drained it as I lay across some seats on the bus (we had no medical staff). Another guy in the section got a cyst in his armpit. The next show was Denver, at Mile High where the awesome 2004 finals had been. It was a bit of a struggle with the dry air and altitude. We got destroyed by The Cavaliers. This was the turning point of the season. The next day, we had a free day. We met in the music room of our housing site and had a little talk, mostly with Marc Sylvester. He asked, "Who thinks we can still win this year?" I was the only person who raised their hand. We came from behind in '92, right? I was still trying to be the perfect Cadet. Sully actually cried during the little talk and told us "You're better than the show you've been given." The rest of the season was basically a salvage mission. "History Repeating" was cut completely. It turns out that a whole corps marching at 192 bpm while the pit plays at 144 is impossible. Worse, the judges took one look at us marching a different tempo than the music and said "really bad phasing." In its place, they slotted in the intro from 2005. As one of our snares said, "You unlock this door... because the design staff has run out of ideas. Next stop... 4th place." The new ending was musically largely just the old ending extended, and the drill is pretty cool, but also extremely hard. The last move for the tubas was a stop and go with a hip switch into a jazz run. Our vets were breaking down. On the long bus rides out West, some people who had marched Cadets 3 or 4 years had priority to lay down in the aisles to get some relief. We got some people who had marched in 2005 to "come out of retirement" to fill some holes. Our first show of the year with a full hornline all on the field was Allentown, 8 days before finals. There were some conflicts between vets and rookies on the bus. The tuba section had been a bit of a train wreck in terms of discipline. Unrelated, but at some point one of us had a season-ending hernia. We eventually filled that hole with a mellophone player who didn't play a single note [aged out on mello the next year]. Alumni who came to the Broken Arrow show told us we were the worst section (not just tuba section, any section) the corps had in 20 years. Recall that this was when Cadets hadn't been lower than 4th since 1991. We finally threw in the new ending around San Antonio. At that show, Hop harangued us that we were "scared" of other corps and we had to realize that our show was actually harder and better than everyone else. So, he had the entire corps go back into the Alamodome in uniform and watch the rest of the show from the endzone. The vets were furious. A week or so later, Masters of the Summer Music Games happened. Well, it actually didn't happen. Middle Tennessee was doing stadium renovations, so we were at a different venue (in Cookeville). We had a rehearsal day the day before in the show stadium, which was one of the last holdouts of old-school Astroturf--no squishy Field Turf. It was actually a really nice and productive rehearsal day, and we were feeling pretty good about things. We spent a lot of time breaking down drill and using tape to mark our dots. When we came onto the field for the show, we realized.... the tape had left residue. We could still see our dots! The show felt really good, everything was progressing well.... then it started pouring during the Mad Tea Party. The show was stopped after the drum break, but not before dozens of people ran up and flipped off wet pink benches. It was just weird, confusing and a huge letdown to just stop in the middle of a good run (of course it was the right thing to do for safety- the guard still had to do a lot of climbing on those benches in the ballad). There's video! It's probably the best capture of what all was happening during that part.

[Important but forgotten - in Harrisburg, about a week before the first show, they unveiled the costumes for the main characters. Alice (60s mod outfit with a miniskirt and belt), the Red Queen (an uber tight red satin dominatrix type thing), Mad Hatter and White Rabbit (a white jumpsuit, white face paint and big bunny ears). I almost quit that day] I mention George Hopkins a lot in my posts because he was The Cadets. Everything in the organization and member experience revolved around him personally. He would often wake us up, always tell us the plan at the morning "day meeting," always talk to us after rehearsal, right before the show, right after the show, and then there were the Hop Talks. You know how he would do those long, meandering Facebook Vlogs where he was unkempt, grumpy and complaining that the judges "just don't get it"? His personality was basically that for three months. He was very negative about everything. Love drum corps? Well, it's not going to be around for much longer. Love J Birney Crum stadium? Well, they'll probably tear it down and move that show to Giants Stadium. Love the classic uniform? It's silly and outdated. The central tenet of The Cadets Philosophy was "Choose your attitude." That is, if something is bad, don't complain about it - you are in control of how you approach any situation, and it's your responsibility to be positive. This, combined with a standing rule of "don't complain to someone who can't fix the problem," was a good way of emotionally manipulating people into accepting things which should have been better. [It's also literally cult leader stuff] We had a free day (morning rehearsal block and 6 hours in downtown Boston), and I ate a lobster, which was nice. Early July was when the wheels started falling off. On June 30 in Maryland, we outscored PR by over 2 points. By Phantom's home show 9 days later, we were down two tenths to them. We listened to the judges' tapes with Hop, which clearly indicated that there was "too much going on" - it was a maximalist show with a ton of stuff (literally and figuratively) thrown on the field, but without the staging and defined moments of effect that you would find in, say, a modern Blue Devils show. Hop explained how the judges just didn't understand the utter brilliance of it all, and their critiques were nonsensical: "You don't go to the beach and say, 'what do I watch, the ocean? The sky? The sand? The birds? Where should I look?' " We had a couple of rehearsal days in a row in Iowa, in which we shortened White Rabbit and started learning the new ending drill. Previously, it had taken about 3 1/2 minutes to get to a brass impact point (Cadets shows often have pacing issues. Remember 2016?) One memorable and frightening incident involved one of our Japanese members. He was a baritone player, and was extremely hard-working and dedicated. He caught bronchitis, but didn't tell anyone because he didn't want to hold the corps back. In the middle of learning new closer drill, he simply couldn't get enough breath and collapsed face-first on the field. One of our Japanese guard members had to go to the hospital with him to translate.