Tenoris4Jazz

I found it. 1981 Vanguard won M&M by 0.05 and finished 2nd in drums, brass and GE. BD finished 2nd in M&M and 1st in 8 of 9 subcaptions in brass and GE. SCV got perfect scores in Degree of Excellence for Drums and Drum GE. Devils drum line finishing 9th cost them a title.

Listen/watch to SCV 1983. First time someone ended a championship contending show quietly. I remember hearing people say that raised the stakes going forward. You had to have confidence and guts to go out "P" instead of "FFFFF".

Come to think of it, I don't recall a winner ever NOT winning a caption. Finishing tied or 2nd in a bunch, but never coming up totally empty.

Hmmm... SCV finished a tenth ahead of PR in prelims but the penalty made them even. PR's guard got a perfect score too. Flipped the penalty for finals. I hope she only required therapy. Donnie Moore gave up the home run to Dave Henderson in the '86 ALCS that cost the Angels the series and he committed suicide less than 3 years later.

It's more than theoretical... I'm pretty sure I've got recaps that show it! I'll try and find the one or two I'm thinking of and post a link to them.

Just finished listening to Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops "Stars & Stripes Forever" album. So cool to hear so many marches I knew from DCI that had been charted pretty much note for note from the originals!

I think it's fitting that La Fiesta was the last true concert in DCI. That's one of the most electric charts and performances in drum corps history!

Oh man, Madison's version of Stars & Stripes in '76 was 🔥🔥🔥🔥 Every single part of that chart was killing it!

I was there in Birmingham in 1990 when they finished behind SCV and Star. I turned to my brother and said "If they can finish putting that together before Finals, that show can win."

Brass, Visual and GE. '87 was the year they did Swan Lake and Nutcracker and wore all white uniforms. It was very elegant and very powerful, but something happened Saturday night and it just fell flat. Because of the low finish in '86 they went on before any of the other top 8 corps on Friday, so they blew away everything the judges had seen up to that point in Semis. Cavies went on right before Phantom at Finals and practically won Visual, so Phantom just looked worse by comparison. They fell from 3rd to 6th in GE.

Then there's the mother of all late additions: 1987 Cadets. As I recall, they ended the show all season with the collapsing company front back into a full front sideline park 'n blow... and then at Finals they quietly leave the field while the soprano solo gets drowned out by the crowd screaming. The little extra bit of GE that got them ahead of SCV.

1988 - Madison dominated on Friday and almost got so sloppy Saturday that SCV upset them 2015 - Crown; the solo mic, the visual issues and a general lack of the emotional impact that they had Thursday and Friday doomed them. 1983 - Cadets laid an egg on Friday and came out balls to the wall at Finals; one of the great performances in DCI history 1984 - Cadets/BD/SCV WOW!!!! Any other year all three of these were championship shows. The legend of West Side Story exists though for a reason. 1983 - Sky Ryders did everything to get back into Finals, then just went flat as a pancake on Saturday night 1979 - Guardsmen - barely edged out Troopers and Crossmen for 11th in semis and then blew the doors off the place at Finals. Went from 8th to 3rd in GE brass! 1987 - Phantom was a strong 3rd in prelims and fell off in everything except percussion at Finals to drop back to a distant 5th

I'm amazed no one has mentioned this yet... SCV in '82. Even thought Bottle Dance turned into a nightmare, it was 100 times better than the closer they used all year. I only saw the original show for the first time last year, and I was NOT impressed with the ending.

Interesting, because I had the opposite reaction... "Oh man, what a cheesy gimmick!" I liked BD's show okay, but I LOVED Crown's show so much better. BD just did their thing and nailed the Finals performance and Crown didn't.

Had it been as clean as Friday's show, it would have been enough.

I guess this is where the different preference comes in. I prefer the MM's to be nameless, faceless cogs in the total machine that is the drum corps unit. I don't want it to be "personal." That probably comes from a background in football where we emphasized the team over the individual and no one had their name on their jersey.

Don't know if someone pointed this out already... the distance from the wealthy suburbs of LA to Concord/Santa Clara is about 325 miles. Draw a circle with a 325 mile radius around Rockford, Atlanta, Rock Hill, Rosemont, Canton, Allentown and Boston. That's a TON of talent inside those circles. That's the equivalent of Phantom drawing people from Kansas City/St. Louis/Louisville/Indianapolis/Cincinnati/Columbus/Cleveland/Detroit/Milwaukee/Minneapolis. Geographically speaking, the SF/SJ/Sacramento area is actually isolated from any other population centers other than Reno/Fresno/Bakersfield. Even Vegas is further away from Santa Clara than LA. My point is, there may be a lot of people in Cali, but the population centers are quite a ways apart. If you're not drawing from the Bay area, your members are either driving 4 hours each way or flying in.

I can't remember the exact year (somewhere between 2005 and 2011) but it rained so hard in Atlanta that the noise from the rain pelting the roof at the Ga Dome was louder than the corps on the field. Going back to 1985, my high school went to a competition at the end of fall in Alabama. We drove through the remnants of a hurricane to get there and arrived to find the football field had mudholes in it a foot deep! At least a dozen shoes were lost that day, plenty of flags were ruined, and some band's poor majorettes had to roll around and lay on the ground during their show. White uniforms too!

Speaking as a former sax player, woodwind upkeep is no joke. Broken keys, rotted out pads, a thousand reeds, and yes... water damage. Plus, it takes an entire section to match the volume of a single trumpet. It's just not viable beyond a couple of mic'd up instruments in the pit.

This is the problem. DCI has tried to be all things to all people and that doesn't work. It never does. Right now it's an avant-garde fringe activity that's pushed itself into a corner where it requires more money to run that it can generate on its own. The NFL made concessions for safety, baseball changed the basic rules of the game to attract a younger audience... DCI needs to go where the money is and that's that. If that means indoor orchestra providing the backdrop for a dance troupe... then do it.

If this happens, I will pay for whatever streaming format exists just to see the end of the show... 'cause you KNOW what's coming!!!!

This. My older brother marched in the high school band when I was just learning to play in 6th grade. My first shows were from a tv taping of the 1980 PBS broadcast. I was hooked. Later on I picked up on the original music the DCI shows were arranging from... jazz, swing, classical, all of it. I have an enormously varied music library and I owe it all to DCI.

If this is the case, they'll have to call it something else. Drum corps will be dead the moment it leaves the football field. I know I sound overly dramatic, but football is played on a football field, even if it's 60 yards long and indoors. Basketball is played on a court, even if it's a run at Rucker Park. Soccer is played... well, anywhere there's a ball and something serving as a goal. Drum corps is performed (I hesitate to say "marched" these days) on a parade field or football field, be it NFL, NCAA or high school.

Elon Musk has reported that he's donated 12 million shares of Tesla to charity, including $1.9 billion worth last year. 5% of that would be $95 million, and a "trust fund" for DCI for decades. This is the kind of thing that DCI needs to start looking for.

This isn't new either. North Star wrote shows for Jerry Noonan. Spirit had sop parts from 1978-1985 that weren't "taught", they just had Hunter Moss. The last time I really saw a mass teaching experience was BD in '14 when the entire trumpet line had to learn to triple tongue.