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Tales From the Marching Band Field
Captain K
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Come out from your hiding places, I know a ton of you fuckers have done marching band or something similar. High school marching band, college marching band, colorguard, drum corps, winterguard, indoor drumline--however you did it, you've got some entertaining stories.
Talking about band in general is pretty fucking boring, it's true. But for some reason this activity always breeds hilarious anecdotes.
I did high school marching band, marched four seasons of drum & bugle corps, lasted for about a month and a half in a college band, taught a season of drum corps, and am currently in my eighth season of teaching high school marching band, so I've certainly got a lot of stories myself. Here's an example from another thread:
Now it's your turn. Let's hear some goofy shit.
Talking about band in general is pretty fucking boring, it's true. But for some reason this activity always breeds hilarious anecdotes.
I did high school marching band, marched four seasons of drum & bugle corps, lasted for about a month and a half in a college band, taught a season of drum corps, and am currently in my eighth season of teaching high school marching band, so I've certainly got a lot of stories myself. Here's an example from another thread:
I was just vamping on the mic while the kids were "resetting" (i.e. running back to the beginning of the chunk we were rehearsing) and saying some cliched shit like "what's really lacking here is the marching technique, you need scissors for legs in this section" and she said it kinda quietly next to me up in the bleachers (it was our "dress rehearsal" with all the kids in full uniform and a bunch of parents there).
And I had no idea what it meant, I thought she was just saying something goofy and it sounded funny/dumb like the other crap I was intentionally saying, so I added "yeah that's it, 'scissor me timbers' says Anne". And suddenly there were like 40 kids and even a few parents just going "OHHHHHHHH" and I had no fucking idea why.
So I looked around at the rest of the instructional staff and basically every single one of them had turned beet red, especially Anne, who looked like she was about to shit her pants. A few of them were snickering and/or covering their faces with their hands. I'm going "what? does that actually mean something?" and the band director is all "just keep talking. just move on.".
whoooooooops
YOU ARE AWESOME
That's not even the worst shit I've ever said while teaching band.
Something like 6 years ago (and therefore only a couple of years into my experience teaching high school marching band) I was teaching a marching fundamentals exercise that works on direction changes and specifically foot placements for direction changes, called the Figure 8. One of the foot placements was kind of weird--imagine one foot pointed straight forward and the other pointed inward at a 45-degree angle. Kind of a pigeon-toed thing going on there.
Anyway, I was in the groove and cruising along, teaching them the counts for the exercise and everything, and I got to this part and without really thinking at all, I said "this one is the retard placement". And suddenly every single kid out there with me (60-70) was going "OHHHHHH WHAT WHAT NO WAY BOOOO".
I had to completely stop the rehearsal and do the equivalent of a fucking press conference: "That was extremely inappropriate and unprofessional. I am sorry." or something like that. I felt like the biggest asshole.
At least the shit I did this past Friday was somebody else's fault!
Now it's your turn. Let's hear some goofy shit.
Captain K on
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shit was pretty boring looking, i guess.
Hi five boner buddy.
GW2: Hurindar
Are you familiar with "the Rusty Trombone" maneuver?
it's the trump card
that shit is so kindergarten compared to stuff that actually goes on
Admittedly, all the crazy x-rated shit usually happens in drum corps. The environment is so uniquely insane that it really fosters outrageous hazing and other crap like that.
(do I need to explain what drum & bugle corps is? I know the average person has no context whatsoever for drum corps stories)
We do not need marching band(s)
GW2: Hurindar
Actually you have to pay to do it. How much depends on the corps, but member fees range anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand bucks for a season.
Yea i remember that part and the costs of uniform and cleaning etc. etc.. point being, why would you do it? Are there some kind of benefits I don't know about?
GW2: Hurindar
Because it's a total blast? an unforgettable, life-changing, formative experience?
I mean that sounds cliche and all but it's completely true.
College Experience necessary? I coulden't imagine graduating from college with all them student loans and then go spend more money on some experience.
Edit: just ignore me i'm not even plaiyng an instrument anymore, eventhough your really making me want to again. (can't in this uni because of some stupid program i'm in). If i were to transfer to a college with a football team going in as a sophmore, would I be able to try out for the band?
GW2: Hurindar
He hit me in the balls with a bass drum mallet.
Boy I bet your face was red.
I would have quit two weeks in if it weren't for the fact that some of the other band kids (mostly the percussionists and the few other tubas) were a really cool group of people, some of whom eventually became some of my closest friends
our director was so unrelentingly stupid that it was the best 4-year bonding experience possible
I'm glad I did it, but at the same time
god, sometimes it was so terrible
I didn't like it so much in high school. In marching season, we were regularly showed up by the same junior high that I graduated from. In concert season, we'd play a variety of crap. He really focused on marching season, it was all he cared about. He even pushed back concert season to accommodate it. He didn't really have any idea what he was doing, though. He really liked shapes, but he'd always do stuff way to complex. We couldn't even tell what it was on the sheets, with everything laid out all perfect. He was also a major downer. Everything had to be all professional and serious, even though we couldn't pull off professional and serious at all. By the time concert season rolled around, he just didn't care.
Orchestra was a little better. Horns get better parts in orchestra the band, too. It was an extracurricular, though, not a class, and the season was only a couple months. The rest of the time, orchestra was strings only.
then I transferred to a public school and holy shit
band girls are totally gross
Easy band girls are always relevant. They provide a valuable public service by giving young men the confidence and experience to move beyond easy band girls.
She played baritone. The higher bands were desperate for baritone, but she stayed in Varsity (the lowest) because she couldn't actually play.
I tried to help her once. People had been hazing her again. She would shine, get upset, and say something stupid and amusing. The more upset she got, the more amusing she would get. I tried to tell her that this was shy they did it. She got yelled at me, something about her being a unique and beautiful snowflake or some other happy puppy bullshit people are always feeding kids.
When she was a sophomore, someone called he a homosapien. She started crying, and yelled "No I'm not!".
She would always get double fries with lunch, and just shovel them in, two fists at a time. She alwasy got a table to herself because no one, not even her sister, could watch her eat and keep their own food down.
There was this one parade we did every year. It was really short and easy. She decided right at the beginning that it was too hot, so she took off half her uniform and started waling on the sidewalk, in the shade.
She tried to get nurses passes whenever possible, in every class. The nurses always let her stay as long as she wanted. One day, she tried to get one in band because her knee hurt. It was concert season, so she was sitting. Baritone rests on the thigh, but the one opposite the knee she was complaining about. She was denied a pass. A little later, she took the bathroom pass and went to the nurse's office the rest of the period.
There's this pseudo-legendary aspect of drum corps called "Rookie Talent" or "Rookie Talent Night" which basically functioned as an opt-in hazing ritual for the new members of a drum corps. Pretty much every serious corps had this tradition at some point in the past; a few of them still do, but generally the administration/staff of every corps has come down on it with zero-tolerance.
The idea is generally thus: the drum corps season starts out with a period of several weeks of continuous "rehearsal days" (generally from two to four weeks, depending on how hardcore the group is) which they call "spring training" or "everydays" (again, depends on the group). Once spring training wraps up, "tour" begins--everybody moves into a seat on a tour bus and you spend the next couple of months driving from place to place, sleeping on the bus and on high school gym floors.
By the end of spring training everybody's personality has had a chance to express itself, and Rookie Talent Night usually happened on the first bus ride of the season, or at least one of the early ones. It was a chance for the rookies (first-year members) on each bus to do something ridiculous to gain the respect of the veteran members ("vets").
Some corps would move all the rookies to the front of the bus and the all the vets to the back of the bus and put up a sheet or blanket or something to act as a curtain, so every Rookie Talent was a private performance for the vets. Other corps would just send each Rookie to the front of the bus to perform for everybody. The ultimate goal was to come up with the "best" Rookie Talent and impress the vets more than anybody else. Pretty much anything you can imagine was done at one time or another. Drumstick-->Butthole insertion is the stereotypical Rookie Talent but it could get way more ridiculous than that.
I marched with Carolina Crown in 2000, and at that point the hornline bus was still doing Rookie Talent Night. It got postponed until the night of July 4th for some reason, and my plan was to go up to the front of the bus totally naked and jerk off while singing the Star Spangled Banner, blowing my load when I got to "the home of the brave". I didn't manage to shoot off but people still applauded.
However, I totally got one-upped by this complete lunatic of a mellophone player named Chris Brown, a nutjob who ended up aging out at Blue Devils--absolutely the corps where he belonged. For his Rookie Talent, he coated his erect penis in Vaseline and then a thin layer of butane lighter fluid and then he fucking set his cock on fire. He became an immediate superstar.
He especially like references to Titania
Granted I was in the drumline so I didn't really need to learn music, but you know what I mean.
Coran Attack!
Small high schools are great.
I had a graduating class of 65, aside from the really, really weird kid who never showered and always smelled like bacon grease, we were a pretty close group. By the end, no real cliques.
It made my high school experience a lot more bearable than it otherwise might have been.
He should have been all
"And the rockets red glare!"
If you get any two drum corps guys together, that is all they will talk about.
I'm looking at you K/Nap.