Corps Values

I spent the weekend watching halftime shows.

Fourteen-plus hours of halftime shows. OK, so it wasn't halftime shows. But it was Drum Corps. Close enough to halftime shows that they both share the same fields. I was hired to work an international Drum Corps competition, held here in Smugtown. It was supposed to be a big feather in the cap (or, perhaps more appropriately, the shako) of our new stadium. A way to show how versatile it really is. A chance to show off the big high-def screen, and prove that we can cover anything. My job was just to roll tape and burn DVD's. A real cushy job.

Yeah, right.

I spent most of the weekend running around fixing problems. I'm not an engineer, but I've been around video and multi-camera productions enough that I've learned quite a few tricks.

They're all quick and dirty, and they usually make maintenance engineers cringe, but a maintenance engineer would fix a camera's backfocus problem by taking it into the shop and setting it up to a registration chart. They certainly would never attempt to do such a thing while standing on a ledge thirty feet in the air while the camera's attatched to a jib arm.* In a storm.

I did.

Boo-yah.

Needless to say, I didn't actually watch much Drum and Bugle Competition this weekend. But I did spend a lot of time running around the stadium. So, what I missed in pageantry was made up by watching the watchers: The hard-core Drum and Bugle corps fans. And I came to the following conclusion:

Drum Corps fans are conservative Deadheads.

I'm serious. The stadium was packed, completely sold out, and I'd guess that the vast majority of the people in the stadium were from out of town. From St. Catherines, Ontario, to San Diego, California, from Houston, Texas, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and everywhere in between they came, following the bands. Instead of tie dye and 'Steal your face' they wore satin jackets emblazoned with the logos of their favorite Corps. And there were drugs. Beer and cigarettes replaced dope and...well, more dope.** And they had the same respect for the law. The stadium--in fact the entire county--has very strict anti-smoking laws. Not that you'd know it this weekend. And there were side industries that traveled along with the competition. Photographers, vendors, instrument repairmen--hell, even the folks that hired me.***

You get the idea.

And then it occurred to me that, really, there was very little difference between these Drum Corps fans and fans of just about any other event.

Take football, for instance. There's thousands of fans who will travel to see their teams all over the country. They wear their team colors, they know the players, and they have arcane knowledge of the minutiae of the game so much that they will cheer wildly over things that someone who's not as committed would never understand.

I know that feeling. At the end of the competition, the winning Corps got to do an encore (encorp?), and I sat in the stands and watched. It was beautiful. They marched in intricate patterns, while simultaneously playing some challenging music near-flawlessly. At the same time, dancers, flag- rifle- and saber-twirlers snaked around them, moving to the music. Down at the sideline (the pit), a phalanx of percussionists ran around playing xylophones, marimbas, bells and cymbals, all coordinated by a drum-major and two captains, who kept time and directed traffic.

It was incredible, and incredibly difficult. I was, for a very brief time, a lead soprano bugler in a drum corps. I left because of the commitment, both financial and time, and also because I thought I could get more chicks playing in a fusion (jazz-funk-rock) band****

So, I knew a little bit about what was going on. But not enough. It was evident to all the people in the stands when something extraordinary happened. To me, it was just one really neat thing after another. I tried asking a person next to me what had just happened.

She looked at me like I was from another planet. She said something that sounded like "A syncopated ten-by-four reverse cross," but I wasn't sure. I knew that if I asked her to explain it, I'd be there all evening.

I considered telling her about setting a backfocus on a camera on a thirty-foot jib, but I realized we didn't speak the same language.

Yeharr
*Actually, it was thirty feet above the jib-arm base, which itself was on the second landing of the stadium, about forty feet above the ground.
**There was pot there, too. But mostly it stayed in the trumpet section. That, at least has never changed. The horn section always has the best dope. Stay in school, kids!
***The guy had a bunch of DVD burners and duplicators set up. He directed a multi cam production and burned it directly to DVD's, which were then put into duplicators, and burned onto pre-labeled DVD's. The bands could get multiple broadcast-quality copies of their performances 45 minutes after they were off the field.
****I was wrong.