Hup234

Exactly. The Royal-Airs epitomize the great Golden Age of D&BC and the Midwest cannot afford to lose them. They are all we have in this area to disprove the ongoing myths spread by the New Age revisionists that life before DCI wasn't worth living.

Again: there ARE no available 1960s videotapes I'm aware of, only audiotapes and records. In 1969 Larry McCormick had a primitive black-and-white videorecorder, but to my knowledge his recordings were never made public. Were they?Look, anyone can theorize ad infinitum about what few people want to do or not do, but the brutal facts are this: drum corps attendance, membership and interest has dropped about 90% since the 1960s. I keep reading how the activity is now "run like a business", unlike during the free-for-all-but-wildly-successful Golden Age. If it indeed was run like a business, there would long ago have been summit meetings and consultants and studies galore as to why the "business" has shrunken precipitously and what can be done to reverse the decline. That's what businesses do - or if they don't, if they blindly ignore obvious downward trends, they fail. I'm just the messenger.

Somehow I don't think that will be a concern.

Right on. I think it's important for people to stand up for what they're not really sure they believe.

You wouldn't get taken seriously, because the numbers would prove you otherwise. Compared to now, there were 90% more corps and countless more contests and hardcore fans in the Golden Age. My reaction is: How would you know? Videotape was in its infancy in the Golden Age. You can't judge unless you were there. Were you? What kind of responses would I get if I said "older uniforms look frumpy and amature"?No comment on your spelling, but on the uniforms: the majority of Golden Age uniforms were a form of West Point style, which are designed to fit properly and are anything but frumpy. And amateur.

Wrong. That's a hackneyed phrase without validity. Of course we can return to our past and survive, and thrive. Look at Ford's wildly-popular new 1970ish Mustang. People love Retro. New houses are all Victorian with old-fashioned front porches and chandeliers, radios look 1930s-1950s, and the airwaves are filled with Oldies. Tourists flock to Disneyland to see 1900 storefronts and medieval castles. They seek out old trains to ride and old buildings to visit. Meanwhile, revisionist/modernist DCI continues to shrink, and no one is pushing the panic button. I apologize for the caps, but I was the easiest way I knew to categorically respond to the comments above. Thanks.

Check your old DCWs and DCNs. 40,000+- attendance was commonplace in the Golden Age, and not only at all the Nationals.

Excuse my method of replying, as I found it easier. Thanks

It's always been 'corps', and I assume MikeBob is making some kind of an in-joke by saying otherwise.

A lot of people are still crying over the financial ruin they personally experienced over the years through their involvement in drum corps. When the pressures grew to buy ever more and more high-priced equipment in order to "stay competitive", a lot of corps asked parents. members and staff to sign personal loans, even mortgage notes on their homes, to fund this or that purchase which was "needed immediately". Trouble was, most of those corps were on the verge of disbanding, and when they did vanish soon afterward, the loan payments did not vanish. In the worst cases, homes and life savings were lost in the hope of keeping some corps or another alive and competitive.

Not entirely. There was a time back when corps were plentiful and widespread, when the priority of many corps was just to provide a good activity to offer their members and their communities. Winning or placing was great, but corps didn't live or die upon their contest results. Golden Age drum corps didn't just rush madly from show to show, they offered a whole year-round social program beyond competitions, and that complete drum corps experience is what those who lived and enjoyed that era remember so fondly today, and will throughout their lifetimes. The reality is that the people who lived and marched the Golden Age largely avoid the current activity and therefore don't share their experiences and constructive comments. As a result, those active today don't have any grasp of what the great Golden Age was really like. That, of course, opens the doors to today's "experts" who'd have you think that the Golden Age was a primitive, crude era with scores of khaki-uniformed corps parading around stadiums playing "You're In The Army Now" on open bugles. Don't believe it for a second. Ask to see the black-and-white videotapes they made at the end of the Golden Age for what we once had, and lost.

Exactly, and this damaging elitist trend began with the Combine, and no one stepped forth to stop them. And when the activity began to shrink, no summit conferences were held to study the reasons and attempt to correct the reverses. It was business as usual. Any major business facing upheaval - the domestic auto industry, for example - will quickly and closely examine the trends and restructure its product and how that product is produced. But even today, after all the decades of decline in this activity, very few voices are being raised in alarm - and when one does occasionally surface, we see the replies are almost without exception defensive shouts of sheer denial which far outweigh any rational dialogue that could and should ensue. No, productive examination is not in the forecast here.

In the 1970s, when Drum Corps was slowly getting away from its tradtional beginnings of simpler music played on inexpensive bugles and drums so that even beginners could join and move up through the ranks - and, therefore, when drum corps began to forget that you have to walk before you can run - and also, when volunteerism began to lose out to high-priced staff, and when nearby contests were plentiful and each contest was special, a weekend adventure which included a parade, barnstorming, sightseeing and inter-corps socializing along with the actual contest itself, the highlight of the whole weekend - at that point Drum and Bugle Corps as the world knew and loved it began to lose its soul.

DCI in 2090 will be just a minor, long-forgotten footnote in M&M history, just as the All-American Drum & Bugle Corps and Band Association and the American Legion Uniformed Groups Congress are today. A better topic would be the status of marching units in 2090 or, preferably, 2016.

It hasn't been "about the kids" since 1970.

Come on, now, Maed, no "about the kids" copouts, okay? If it really WAS about the kids, they'd make it easy to join and belong to, like it was during the Golden Age. They do the Groucho Step and wear silly costumes and play off-the-wall music because that's what the curret Powers That Be make them do, or they don't join. It hasn't been about kids since the '70s.

I find this debate to be quite the study of the human condition. After all these past 34 years of wild spending on all kinds of ephemeral fad-of-the-year equipment, and the unchallenged headlong rush towards the erosion and/or elimination of nearly every classic drum corps tradition of the late lamented Golden Age of Drum Corps when perhaps 500 or so corps trod the stadium turfs each summer -- suddenly it's the issue of *Amplification* that finally elicits feelings of nostalgia and economy among those in the remaining two dozen or so upper-level competing junior units? Isn't that a bit like locking the barn door after the horses have all run off? If only some of these newly-indignant voices had been raised in the early 1970s. There might still even have been time in the 1980s. Talking about tradition now, in 2006, is like lamenting over a long-lost love.

Of course there would have been many more corps without DCI, hundreds more. DCI's elitist cadre took over from the original governing bodies, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars Uniformed Groups Councils, which were a moderating influence. They proceeded to price D&BC instrumentation out of reach of the majority of the then-hundreds of corps, and the smaller, weaker corps, the lifeblood of D&BC, began to die. (Two-valve bugles were cheap to buy and easy to learn on.) The remaining corps then came under pressure to spend more and travel more, further weakening their financial strength, and more corps gave up. Corps used to depend on walk-in talent, but the new three-valve "bugles" alienated rookie beginners, so fewer inexperienced youths joined corps, and still more corps died for lack of members. As drills became more complicated, that also discouraged rookie youths. And then the audience was forgotten as instructors concentrated on "playing to the judges" with ultra-sophisticated music that further distanced the mom-and-pop audiences and scared off rookie recruits. Contest sponsors found growing financial risks with huge money guarantees, with a shrinking list of available corps at the same time. And finally, right at the time when strong masculine superheroes began to rule the movie screens, video games and Saturday-morning cartoons, drum corps made the supremely untimely mistake of changing what had been its macho image of Knights, Marauders, Raiders, Imperials and Crusaders into a warm and fuzzy melange of various names of Clouds, Breezes, Waters and various unidentified other "nonoffensive, nonagressive" mishmashes to match their similarly-undefined amoeba drills/music . (Professional sports teams still know where their bread is buttered, and you'll never see a football or soccer team adopting that kind of image.)

= It would appear that your site's arrogance in forcing those poll voters whose opinion is that true D&BC is indeed dead to simultaneously be the butt of your 'dinosaur' joke may not have stopped as many people as perhaps you'd hoped from voting the 'dead' option anyway, and that's a good thing. "The opposite of cowardice is not bravery, but conformity." -Robert Anthony