MikeD

Garfield started forming a Peace Sign in 1970 and continued for a number of years. We did all 3 of my years. 70 to “White Rabbit” with Ironlips great brass ending to the John Sasso chart. 71 to “Battle Hymn” as part of our America, the Brave show. 72 to a couple of tunes. Formed it to “A Mighty Fortress is our God” and moved it to Mahler’s 3rd as part of our No More War show.

Absolutely! Don Angelica was personnel director of the Bergenfield school system at the time, and he used that to hire people all the time. Hiring Fred was, of course, a no brainer. He was a great teacher and a wonderful person, as I found out later. Those three percussionists was amazing. I used to walk to the Robin Hood Inn near Montclair State, where I went to college, to see George play drums in a great jazz trio. Good times! He also brought me in to work with the Glen Ridge marching band, where your brass assistant Larry Schilings was band director. I taught them in 71, 72 and 73, as it was an easy bus ride from Montclair State to Glen Ridge. I also worked with his concert band percussionists, and I got to play some of the harder mallet parts his kids just could not play.

Oh, what we ended up with was great, especially with a new snare line, as you said. Sorry if I implied otherwise. I still think if the exodus had not happened after 71, both staff and members, we might have been even better in 72. I mean, I came back in February 72, and with zero horn training I was one of the better 3rd baritones. 😀 Without the overtime penalty at prelims, we would have made finals, in actually 10th. Our staff really hurt us late season, adding and adding without removing anything, so we had a huge overtime penalty. You could tell that we were not the staff priority. Oh well...the show was actually amazing. "No More War" theme.

Absolutely. When Garfield let him go fter the 71 season, a good part of the drumline quit and joined the Hawthorne Caballeros DCA corps where George was already teaching, Hawthorne being close to Garfield. I decided to rejoin Garfield, but I decided to play baritone and not drums. I mean, why would I want to play for another drum instructor...Fred Sanford! 🤪 OTOH, I did get to play horn under Don Angelica in 72, plus I had brass class coming up at college, where I was a music ed major. Garfield membership was very young in 71. I sometimes wonder how good we might have been in 72 if George had remained on drums and Ironlips had remained on horn. We would not have lost the drumline for sure.

I think one of the big changes was the end of the show. Our closer was "Profiles in Courage" with a reprise of "Yankee Doodle" as we marched into the sunset and left the field. No standard big finale. We eventually had a standstill big finale added of a bit of "America, the Beautiful" to close the show in a more standard manner. Being just a kid in the corps, I don't really know all of went on behind the scenes. I kind of liked just marching off, but the finale is decent too on the video I have of the World Open.

The Shriners was a great show for us. A bunch of us were graduating from HS the day the corps drove to Toronto. The corps left early on a Friday to go from Garfield to Toronto. Those of us who had HS graduations met at Garfield HS around 9:00 PM. Must have been 10-12 of us. Corps adults had cars ready to go to drive us to Toronto all night. Must been 3 or 4 carloads of us. We got in early Saturday morning. As for the recording, I have the LP, and you are right. The quality is wonderful. I met Ironlips for dinner a long time ago when I was on a business trip to the San Fran area. He told me that the company that made the recording used a much different approach than Fleetwood, who did most of the recording at the time. Yes, George hosed the drum book by Nats. The original tri-tom part was amazing when we learned it. But, we made a bunch of revisions by Nats, and it was a shell of what it was. One of the big changes was when the Brits were playing a 3/4 minuet at the same time the American were playing a 2/4 hoedown, complete with dances. Originally, the drumline split in half to support both sets of music. We actually had different drills that separated us on the field. I was in the half that supported the British, so my drill was to be near them. The other half marched with the Americans doing the hoedown. Drum judges had no idea how to judge the two simultaneous parts, and they gave us little credit for what we did. By midseason George gave up, and we ended up doing a time-keeping part in mid-field.

I recall some of the judges used to tick the cannon shot, as George had the biggest bass play the BOOM with the small rudi doing the smaller boom as an echo. They would hit it for "Not Playing Together". George was waaay ahead of his time, for sure, as was Jerry of course. The original drum book for the 71 America, the Brave show was amazing for its day.

IThe music from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" would make a great show. Written by Tan Dun, the film features Yo Yo Ma throughout. Gorgeous ballad. It is being released in theaters again, as one of the stars, Michelle Yeoh, is now a huge star. Also starts Chow Yun Fat and Zhang Ziyi. I arranged music from it for the marching band I taught, back around 2010. It worked well, esp the amazing cellist we featured.

In the 60’s I recall corps having a large bass for the real deep sound, and maybe a smaller one. They were not tuned in the sense of what happened in the 70’s. Also small and wider rudi basses were popular. Blessed Sac’s duo in the late 60’s were amazing players. They actually did tune those to create different pitches in 69 for one of their drum solos. Flat basses were created to provide a timpani style sound. Some corps just attached two standard basses together and left off the bottom heads to get a more resonant sound. I played one of those in Garden State Circuit corps in 69. Manufacturers built a variety as well with 2 or 3 drums. St Lucy’s from Newark attached metal rings to theirs one year. Called them the “garbage cans”, as that is what they looked like. The addition of marching timps replaced those. Truly tonal bass drums took off in the 70’s. Before that “regular” straight basses did not march sideways.

The last band I taught from 1994 thru 2017 had a number of corps members in the late 80's that came back from tour and basically tore the band apart. It took the director a few years to build it back up. After that experience he never suggested any of the kids march while in HS. Some did after their HS careers ended. A lot of the students in our district did other things in the summer, between activities and family trips, so having a blanket rule about band camp being mandatory would have kept kids form marching even if they wanted. Our music arranger through the 2002 season used to try and get the director to suggest DCA to the kids, but again, the heaviest part of the DCA season would have been during band camp. Some went on the DCA after they graduated, with the director's blessing.

Riversiders were great then. The Wynn Center Toppers were good too. There was a corps from Newark in the GSC, St Martin's Troubadors. Their unis and my corps (Livingston Imperial Guardsmen) unis were almost identical. We were pretty close competitively in 68 and 69, around the middle of the circuit.

The Troopers were created by Jim Jones, another wealthy guy, in the late 50's and onward.

Going way back, there was a senior corps called the Ballentine Brewers. Also a junior corps the New York Islanders, sponsored by a 7-UP location on Long Island.. Their unis were 7-UP green and orange. They wore a 7-UP patch on their shoulder and a bass drum head had the 7-UP logo, if I recall.

In addition, many bands do some amount of summer rehearsals to prepare for fall marching band, including full band camp to learn the show, at least in my experience.

That situation was common for class 'B' corps in my era as well, here in NJ. I competed in the Garden State Circuit in 68/69, taught there in the mid-70's, and judged from mid-70's to early 80's. MANY of our shows had just about zero audience.

Interesting show, held after Nationals close to Labor Day. A lot of the class 'A' corps looked like swiss cheese at that show, as many members had left for college by that time. The show was sponsored by the Boonton Harmony parade corps. They used band brass, not bugles, at least in my era at that show, 1970-71. They also had a glock section.

Except that for many HS bands, competitive and non-competitive, the fall football season is the primary reason the marching band exists, at least in the eyes of the administration.

There are somewhere around 25,000 HS bands in the US, so you will find just about every possibility when you are analyzing that many band programs. With that many, maybe you would find some to compete in the summer. Even 1% is 250 bands, when you look at the totality. I don't think summer competitive band was ever the 'norm', actually. There were a handful that did it, and some of them were not scholastic bands, but local community ensembles, like the old style local corps. The BOA calendar is not the driver for most of the competitive bands, actually. Numerically speaking, very few actually compete in BOA. Local circuits like USBands, TOB, NYSFBC, etc here in the mid-Atlantic area provide that more casual and low cost option for the vast majority of competitive bands. I did do some high level research a number of years ago on my area here in the mid-Atlantic area, looking at the primary local circuits like USBands, TOB, NYSFBC, NESBA, PMBA, Cavalcade of Bands, etc, and saw about 1300 bands on their collective websites. That covered bands from parts of the South through New England. Some bands would be on multiple lists, of course. As I said, a high level research effort. Marching bands compete in the fall, as that is football season for schools. I just do not see that there would be much interest in summer competitions, though based on the first paragraph you may find some. For most band directors I have known since the early 70's, marching band is the tail, and concert band the dog...and most want the tail to be as small as possible.

I love your post, except for this piece. There are probably some number of school band directors that might like that, but just the thought of marching band in the summer AND fall will cause many band directors to start shaking and twitching all over. 😀 To have a summer marching band means that the band had to start in the spring. With programs like concert band, jazz ensemble, spring musical pit orchestra, etc....I doubt that idea would receive much of a positive view.

In 71 they already had a coed horn line, when most corps in the east were only males playing instruments (outside of all-girl corps, of course). I hung with a couple of horn gals when we were at shows with them. Their hornline was amazing. SO far ahead of its time.

Yes, it did for me. We were told to make it obvious that we heard the gun to stop execution judging. Lifting the clipboard was one way we did it. Depending on where we were on the field, it might not be easy to hear the gun, so the timing judges wanted to know for sure we heard the gun. They would run after judges who did not hear it and kept judging.

I once zeroed a corps in drums when I judged in the GSC in the late 70’s. I felt terrible…that I had failed them. Kids did not deserve zeroes IMO.

In my era the shows were 11 1/2 - 13 minutes. Execution stopped at about 11 minutes. In the World Open finals video I posted above, you hear a gun at about 11 min, 10 seconds. That signaled the end of execution for us.

Prelim rules at some of the big events, such as VFW Nats, mandated that there be no stopping at all. You would receive a penalty if the corps stopped. I think prelims shows were 7 1/2 to 8 min in my era. We had to really practice NOT stopping at all when we rehearsed prelims shows, as there were often halts built into the regular show. Getting everybody to keep marking time in a spot that was normally a halt was tough. So much rehearsal time was put into the regular show with the stops that getting everybody to keep moving was not easy...all that muscle memory! Here is an example....Garfield 1971. 1971 VFW Prelims This is some film from the VFW prelims in Dallas that Roy Perez worked on and posted. At about 1:20 in this video, when we formed the Peace Sign in the prelims show we had to keep marking time and not stop. Note...Roy put our show music to the film, but it is in no way synched. It was silent Super-8 film or something. Here is the World Open finals video recorded by the Haas family. World Open Finals We start to form the Peace Sign at about 9:10 of the video. As can be seen, we do not mark time at all. We are at a halt unless we are moving to our spots before the hit to the stands. This is after concert and is our color pre.

I know circuits had various release processes back then, some stricter than others. That does not surprise me at all.