My Least Favorite Marching Band Show
I’m gonna be up front and honest here because I feel like we are all Internet pals.
I was in the marching band for eight years—four in high school, four in college. I’m not ashamed. I’m a proud Auburn High School Marching Band alum. (Tim Reed and I played quads. Called ourselves “Quad Squad.” We made up baseball cards and everything. We also always requested “All 4 Love” during games. I’m pretty sure everyone else hated us for that.) In college, I played cymbals in Mississippi State Famous Maroon Band every year to get my out-of-state fees waived. I was Cymbal Section Leader for two years by default. My band name was “Moses.” Yep, I’m a band geek. That’s me on the right.
Over the course of those eight years, I participated in no less than 10 Disney-themed shows (I can play “A Friend Like Me” on bass drum, tenor drums, and cymbals); five Blood, Sweat, and Tears shows; four Chicago shows; three Kansas shows; and lots and lots of “USA! USA!”-themed performances.
Earlier this week, Dan Gibson wrote a takedown of Kings of Leon member Caleb Followill’s inability to name two actual Motown artists as his favorite (he chose not-Motown perennial white people faves Sam Cooke and Otis Redding). This reminded me of the most shameful halftime show the Famous Maroon Band ever put on. (This includes our disastrous James Bond-themed show, wherein the band just stood there and played because no one could figure out the charts.)
The shameful halftime show in question was touted as a “Motown show,” and we did do a Temptations medley at the beginning. I remember being the arrangement being halfway decent. What wasn’t decent was the fact that it was followed by both Aretha Franklin and James Brown medleys. Yep—not Motown! Aretha recorded for Columbia/Atlantic/Arista and Brown did most of his work with Polydor. Honestly, I didn’t think too much of it at first, but my best friend, Mark (who had the displeasure of being a saxophonist sitting in front of the endless crashing of cymbals), an African-American and amateur musicologist, was fuming.
“So basically all ’60s black artists are the same, and all of them were on Motown?” he asked me. I realized I hadn’t thought about it (and certainly not about the racial implications), but after talking to some other black band members (there weren’t many), I saw this as a big problem. I casually mentioned it to the other drummers, and, of course, they didn’t see what the big deal was. Heck, nobody seemed to care much. I told the band directors about it, and they brushed me off. I got more and more frustrated about it, and when I get angry about things like this, I become a mouth-breathing jerk that everyone ignores.
I let it go, but then, there we were, standing on the field, listening to the announcer talking about how we were going to thrill you with “The Sounds of Motown” and 40,000 people in the stands (mostly white) clapped along and didn’t give a crap. All they would have had to say was “The Sounds of ’60s Soul” or something, and they’d be off the hook. Nope. That would have been too easy. Instead, we all skwonked away to the sounds of racial and cultural homogenization.
