Big Red Band

You Always Remember Your First Time

~ allenappel ~ 1 Comment

allen band uniform 1

Part of our regular band uniform was the pair of white buck shoes that you had to buy. Even Sears sold the same brand that everyone bought, so I was OK there. They were blinding white “buckskin” with red rubber soles. No one would ever buy a pair of white bucks unless it was part of the band uniform as they were considered totally dorkey, at least on guys. Pat Boone wore white bucks, which gives you some idea about how stupid they were. (I can’t remember if we had the word “dorkey” back then. Wikipedia says it was in popular parlance in the mid fifties, so maybe we did. I can’t remember what else we would have said. Nerdy? I don’t think that word was in use then either.) I should amend the above paragraph to read, “no one would ever buy and wear a pair of white bucks except me.” If you scroll down to an earlier entry where the picture is of me wearing The World’s Worst Sport Coat you will see I am indeed wearing white bucks. And I’m not even in my band uniform. They make my feet look about the size of your average clown shoe.

It was mandatory that we kept our band white bucks in pristine condition. Since we only wore them once a week when we were in uniform, this wasn’t really a problem. The way you touched them up was by using an accessory that came with the shoes, a small white bag of powder, called a “bunny bag,” that you used to pat on any scuff marks to cover them up. Losing your bunny bag or having scuffed bucks could get you a kick in the ass, so we were all careful about that.

The band usually traveled to the away football games on busses. We’ll get to the special trains at the end of this blog. (Not the end of this entry, but the end of the blog itself. That’s probably a couple of months down the road.) It took two busses to get the band to games, (didn’t it? I can’t remember.) but these trips were a lot of fun. The older guys played poker and strummed guitars while the younger guys just goofed around. One of the fun activities was setting yourself on fire. We wore heavy white wool socks with our uniforms and if you touched these socks with the open flame of a butane lighter they would catch fire and burn with a slow-moving, eerie blue glow. The trick was to slap out the fire before it took serious hold. There was plenty of burned leg hair until you got the hang of it. The other use for butane lighters was lighting farts. Anyone who felt one coming on would grab a lighter, hoist a leg, flick on the flame in close proximity to your butt and let ‘er rip. The methane gas would ignite and flame would jet out as much as six or eight inches. To the general hilarity of anyone watching. Fun days. Rampant stupidity.

Summer band practice had taught us new guys the basics and we were ready to learn the drill for the first football game of the season. The weather had cooled, and we were no longer sweating through August heat. We would hit the field after school for an hour or so, then head home for dinner. We had band practice a couple of hours during the week during the school day when other kids were going to the library or having homeroom. We would assemble in our homeroom and then be dismissed to go to the band room, behind the school underneath the football stadium.

After several weeks we had the music memorized and the drill down to perfection. Soon the big day, or night, came. I put my uniform on, and my parents took my picture standing in the living room in front of the mantel, where we took all our pictures. (See above.) When I came out to get in the car, the neighbors sitting on their porches clapped their hands and cheered. I waved, modestly. The power of the Big Red Band.

In the band room, we sat in our usual chairs while Frank gave us some last minute advice that no one paid any attention to. We tuned our instruments. This was accomplished by Frank telling the first chair flute/piccolo to play an A note, whereupon the rest of the band tuned on this note. Just another of the godlike responsibilities of being a piccolo player. Because I did this for so many years, to this day I can hum a perfect A. Then we sat around and joked until Frank finally said to form up and head into the stadium.

The opening drill, which we had practiced many times, was very simple: The spectators would be in their bleacher seats and the two football teams were on benches along the sidelines. The band would form up outside the stadium, march in quietly, and stand in the end zone in 12 rows of eight players. When the head drum major gave the signal on his whistle, we would break into the first march and after a few bars head off down the field in perfect step, march to the other end of the field, stop in front of the goal post and wait while the US flag was raised up the flagpole. When it hit the top, we would play the Star Spangles Banner. When this was finished, we would march off the field, playing, and head back to our seats – folding metal chairs — on the sidelines. As I said, simple. Just like we had practiced a hundred times before.

On the night of our first game and performance, right before we started to march into the stadium, our lead guy down at the far end of our row looked over at us and said, just loud enough for us to hear, “Listen. When you get out there, no matter what happens, Keep playing!” I could hear this advice being repeated up and down the ranks: Keep playing! Keep playing!

What was he talking about? What else was I going to do? I’d been practicing this moment for weeks; I knew the music, I knew the drill, I was nervous but pretty damn confident.

We started off, the drummers playing “on the rim,” which means they were not using the head of the drum, but just quietly drumming on the rim, just loud enough for us to hear and march to.

We formed up in the end zone and straightened our lines. The night was clear; clouds of insects dive-bombed the towering stadium lights. The audience in the bleachers was on their feet, completely silent.

The drum major raised his long baton, blew a piercing blast on his whistle, lowered the baton and we broke into whatever march we had been assigned. A few bars into it, the drum major blew his whistle again and we stepped off as one, out onto the field. A few bars after that, about the time we hit the exact middle of the football field, all ten thousand spectators began cheering and clapping and stomping their feet.

It was the loudest sound I had ever heard in my life.

I was stunned.

I immediately stopped playing.

Which I knew was wrong.

Keep playing!

I could see some of the other first-year guys, and they were as shocked as I was. Really, no one told us about this. Even if they had, we wouldn’t have believed how loud the crowd sound was down on the field. The veterans were playing, covering up the fact that we new guys were struggling to get back into synch with the rest of the band.

I began playing, a kind of feeble tweeting noise that only vaguely resembled the notes I should have been playing. I was gasping for breath, trying to get back some semblance of control. At least I had the presence of mind to see where I was, where I was approaching, and to hit my “mark” and stop moving forward. I regained enough control to play the notes of the march, which finally ended, thank God.

We stood in silence. Except for the thudding of my heart.

The head drum major whistled us into the opening bars of the Star Spangled Banner. I got it together and played my part. We finished, there was a moment of silence, then the crowd broke into cheers and stomps again. We started into another march, about-faced, and marched back down the field and over to where our seats were.

It was the most exciting moment of my life.

Arf Arf!

~ allenappel ~ 3 Comments

For those who have written asking whatever happened to the parts about the Big Red Band, I’ll get back there shortly. Those of you who know me and my writing understand that I tend to wander around a lot on the page

Where was I? Oh, yes, many pages ago I was buying a flute, which meant a trip to the music store in downtown Parkersburg to look at a catalogue. As those of you have kindly pointed out, I got all the info about the music store wrong in an earlier entry. It seems the name of the store was Shroeder’s, (no relation to our esteemed band leader, Frank Shroeder). One of the pleasures of writing this memoir is knowing that my West Virginia friends out there will correct all the parts I get wrong. Thanks to everyone who is helping me.

The music store downtown… But first, allow me one of my digressions. For some reason, I remember that this store always reminded me, when I walked in the door, of the country store we used to hike to in Walker, and other West Virginia country stores of that time. I’ll bet many of you remember these stores. Old places built of, on the outside, grey, weathered wood. Inside they smelled of wooden floors, wooden counters and shelves, and dust, usually something fruity, maybe a barrel of apples or bushel of peaches, depending on the season. There was often a giant wheel of cheddar cheese, sometimes covered with cheesecloth. The cheese would sweat small beads of oil, and you could order a slice, which would be wrapped in butchers paper and tied with a string and it was delicious. The soda was in a large cooler, bottles jammed down in drifts of ice: orange crush, grape or other fruits that you never see any more, Cokes and Pepsis. You could buy about anything in those stores, and the old ladies and gents behind the counter were always nice to us kids with our nickels and dimes clutched in our grimy little fists.

The music store didn’t sell produce or cheese, but I remember it having long wooden floors, wooden shelves and wooden counters that had their own comfortable smell of age. They sold instruments, mostly guitars, in the front, records in the middle and in the back were glass booths where you could play records and make a decision on which you wanted to buy. No one seemed to care that you would go in a booth and spend an hour listening to records and come out and not buy anything.

Music was in the air much of the day around our house. My mother kept the radio on, a small, white plastic model that sat on a shelf in the kitchen, while she worked around the house. When my dad was home on the weekends, it was tuned to big band music; during the week my mother listened to a local, top-ten station. Some of the songs I remember clearly, many of which are still played today, were Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, A Teenager in Love, Lonely Boy and Lipstick On Your Collar. Well, maybe they don’t play them much anymore other than on oldies stations.

It was around this time, seventh or eighth grade, when my passion for classical music was born. It must have been a hot Saturday in the summer. Saturday, because my dad was home. We – my sister, mom and dad and I — were all in the kitchen. My dad was sitting at the white metal/porcelain kitchen table. He had on his weekend pants and a no-sleeve undershirt, what we now refer to as a wife-beater. We were kidding around, and the radio was playing a big-band show. The announcer said they were going to have a contest. He would play an old big-band tune, and the first person to call in and name the band would win a prize, which was an LP — a long playing record — and a case of soda. The tune started and my dad immediately said, Tommy Dorsey; I called the station and told them, and we won.

This was astounding. As far as I know, we had never won anything. The radio people took the information and sent us the paperwork. The next weekend, my dad drove to the grocery store and picked up the soda, a case of coke, and dropped me off at the store to pick out a record. And why did he drop me off? The store involved in the contest was our nemesis, J.C. Penny. Thank God it wasn’t Monkey Wards. Dad wouldn’t go in, but he figured that we would take the free record because giving it away would probably harm Penny’s and make them more vulnerable in the ongoing war that was Sears against Penny’s and Wards. (See earlier entries for more on Sears Roebuck.)

I had to ask directions to the record section because it was hidden away at the very back of the second floor of the store, behind the lady’s underwear section, which was mortifying, but oddly fascinating to walk through. I fought to keep my eyes straight ahead as I made my way through ranks of bras and underpants. Two bins held around fifty records, divided up into a popular music section and a much smaller selection of classical music. For some reason, I was seized with the notion of buying a classical record. I knew what classical music was, I had seen orchestras, dimly, on the neighbor’s television, and I had heard orchestras on the radio. Many cartoons of the time showed orchestras. I knew it was music that smart people listened to, rather than popular songs like How Much Was that Doggy in the Window. I thought if I listened to classical music, I too would become a smart person. I pictured myself sitting in a fancy living room, maybe smoking a pipe (I was an adult in this image) reading a book and listening to this type of music. Off to the side, sitting on the sofa would be my lovely imaginary wife, dressed only in a bra and panties.

No! That was a joke! I didn’t think that at all!

But how would I know what record to buy? For some reason, I decided that the best classical composers would be the ones with the longest, most foreign-sounding names. It turns out that this was not a bad way to choose, as I left the store with Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto #2 in C minor, one of the world’s great romantic pieces.

At home, my sister was disappointed by my selection. And it was then that we faced the next hurdle: we didn’t own a record player. Or at least we didn’t as far as I knew. Dad took us into the living room.

There was a large piece of furniture that I assumed was there mostly to hold a lamp and a couple of vases. I knew there was a radio in there, but we hadn’t listened to it for years, not since we got the small white plastic one. This was the sort of radio that when you turned it on it took some time to warm up. The sort of radio you could smell as it emitted a familiar (and somehow comforting) odor of dust and hot tubes. Dad opened the radio part, then from underneath he rolled out a regular turntable. I didn’t even know it was in there. We didn’t own any records other than the new one I had just bought. Well, actually we did, we had a half-dozen Disney records that we listened to when we were smaller. What did we play these on? I don’t remember.

Dad turned everything on, and we sat down to listen. Those first, brooding chords of the Rachmaninoff began and in seconds I was enthralled. I have no recollection of what anyone’s else’s reaction was, but I felt an entire world opening, a world that, like the record turntable, I had not known existed.

The next Saturday we won again. This time we picked up a case of orange soda, and my sister got to choose the record. She went with Frank Sinatra, which I didn’t have any interest in, you could hear him anytime on the radio, but I have a feeling the rest of the family was pleased with the choice.

The next week we won again and were permanently banned by the radio station from ever entering the contest again. This time the soda was root beer, and I was back at Penny’s facing the record bin. I employed my tried and true method and came home with Shostakovich’s (the longest foreign name in the bin) Preludes and Fugues. I put the record on, expecting Rachmaninoff, which is not what I got. The pianist started off innocently enough, but soon was hitting what even I knew were “wrong notes.” The rest of the record was the same and after listening to both sides, I was completely confused. I know now that this was the first time I had encountered dissonance in music, but I didn’t know that word and neither did anyone else in my family, at least when it was used as a musical term. I asked my father, who understood what I was talking about. He explained that once, years before, he had attended an Erroll Garner concert, a black jazz pianist who played in somewhat the same way. Dad said Garner was the man “who played the right wrong notes.” Making music that might sound wrong, but who, after awhile, made those wrong notes work. This was jazz, my father said, but the idea was the same with the Shostakovich. Give it time, listen and learn.

I wish I could say that I sat back down and listened to the Shostakovich again and the scales fell from my eyes, and ears, but it wasn’t so. I wore out the Rachmaninoff record, but the Shostakovich, not so much. I think I learned to appreciate it, and came to somewhat understand modern classical music, but it didn’t fill me with the same yearning that Rachmaninoff and other romantic composers did.

We ended up giving most of the sodas away. We almost never drank soda at home. I don’t know if it was because we were too poor to afford it, or that my mother didn’t think it was good for us. My parents didn’t drink any of it, and after a half dozen bottles of the various flavors my sister and I had no interest in it either. For some reason this was vastly different from those rare sodas we drank after walking miles down a dirt road, the sodas from the old country stores. There was so much of it, three cases stacked one atop the other in our kitchen, and it was so sweet to us that I remember drinking a couple of bottles, the way I’d seen other people drink them, and then feeling sick. I’ve hardly ever consumed a commercial soda since. Thank you, radio station. You turned me into a classical music lover and made a big contribution to my health all at the same time by teaching me to dislike soft drinks.

And because I love to get songs stuck in other people’s heads, here are the lyrics to How Much Is That Doggie in the Window. You remember the tune. Sing along to it, and make sure you add the “arf arf” at the end of the chorus.

How much is that doggie in the window?

The one with the waggly tail

How much is that doggie in the window?

I do hope that doggie’s for sale

I must take a trip to California

And leave my poor sweetheart alone

If he has a dog, he won’t be lonesome

And the doggie will have a good home

How much is that doggie in the window?

The one with the waggly tail

How much is that doggie in the window?

I do hope that doggie’s for sale

I read in the papers there are robbers

With flashlights that shine in the dark

My love needs a doggie to protect him

And scare them away with one bark

I don’t want a bunny or a kitty

I don’t want a parrot that talks

I don’t want a bowl of little fishies

He can’t take a goldfish for a walk

Arf! Arf!

Beginnings 4

~ allenappel ~ 2 Comments

silver dollar

Before beginning today’s story, I’d like to comment on some of the questions folks have been sending in, particularly why I am changing the names of people. Coach Eber in particular. I could look up his real name, but it pains me to call him a dope, though back then I thought he was, publicly, so I’m taking the coward’s way out and giving him a pseudonym. I’m sure there are many Big Red football players who revered the man as a God, which is fine, let them write their own stories. And while it seems silly even to me to change my friend’s names, I have learned over the years as a writer you can never know what someone is going to consider an insult. I might think a funny story about someone is completely innocent and have them, to my surprise, howl with indignation at being portrayed thusly. So everyone’s name gets changed, across the board. Except Frank.

Onward.

As I said some time ago, it all began with Uncle Oke…

One summer day, we, Oke and I, were on the front porch of our house, alone, sitting on the green and white metal glider. Oke, looking far more serious than he usually did, pulled out a silver dollar and handed it to me. I could not have been more than eight years old. Oke said, “This is for you, but you have to promise me one thing.” I took the coin, which was to me a magnificent object: heavy and bright. I looked up at Oke, and he said, “ You have to promise that when you get to high school you’ll be in the Big Red Band.”

I promised.

The next year, in fourth grade, I started taking music lessons.

To make the Big Red Band you had to try out in front of Frank. This would happen the summer after you graduated from what they now call middle school but was then called junior high. Your parents took you to the band room, dropped you off, you went in and played something for Frank, and he told you if you were in. I was pretty good, so I wasn’t really worried. I played something, I don’t remember what, Frank said I was in, I was back outside in the car ready to ride home in ten minutes. I can’t remember if my parents were happy about this, but I assume they were. Actually, the trying out for Frank scene, now that I’ve written it, sounds like I imagined rather than remembered it. I have been trying to be careful to not do that. When I’m unsure, I’ll point it out. Maybe we were just shunted along through music class until we reached high school and were recommended to Frank. At any rate, for me it was a forgone conclusion since everyone had been telling me that was what was in store for me ever since I began playing my piccolo in the fourth grade. Eventually I’ll get to why I chose the piccolo as my instrument.

Back then, the summer before beginning my freshman year, our vacation was three months long, and the band practiced two times a day every weekday for the entire month of August. You did not go on vacations during August; there were no exceptions. You went to practice every day unless you contracted infantile paralysis or some other dread disease of the day. So the first week in August I was dropped off at the band room. I went in with all the other guys, a few of whom I knew from junior high, and Frank got us seated in the right places. Different sections of instruments sat together. The clarinets sat on my right, up front, trumpets on the left, the flutes/piccolos in the center in the first row and the rest of the band behind us. The best player in each section sat in the First Chair, the second best in the Second Chair, the third in Third and all the rest in unnamed descending order in accordance with their ability. The First Flute, my section, was a tall, lanky senior with an extremely pale, acne-riddled face. We’ll call him Boris because I can’t remember his name, and he reminded me of Boris Karloff. He didn’t talk much, and in fact was consistently distant to the point of unfriendliness to anyone he considered beneath him, which was everyone except the First Trumpet, John Green and the First Clarinet, Roddy Glenmeyer.

We were four flutes, or rather piccolos, (we only played flutes during concert season) in our section: Boris first; a junior named Bobby, second; me, third, and a kid named Bert at the end of the section on my right. Bert lived up the street from me, though he was never really one of the regulars on Maxwell Avenue. On the first day of school, in the first grade, Bert walked to school in the morning with us, but he did not walk home with our gang. My mother loved to tell the story of standing at the front window, looking outside while we kids ate our after-school snack. There came Bert, slowly waddling up the sidewalk in front of our house, headed home, crying, with a giant load of shit in his pants. This happened every day for the entire first week of school.

That summer before starting our freshman year, in the band, Bert made it through two weeks of ass kicking until he couldn’t take it any more. What came to be his last day of practice, he showed up with a book stuffed down the back of his pants, a trick he probably picked up from reading Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer or a comic book, as if he thought no one would notice. Of course he got kicked repeatedly that day because of the book, until Frank must have decided he was going to get killed and told him his days in the Big Red Band were over. Bert was a terrible player anyway, so it was no loss to the band. Shortly after this we were setting up for practice in the band room and I could see Frank having a meeting with the junior high music teacher who had sent Bert to the band. Frank’s office was right in front of where I sat, and I could hear him shouting about Bert, “You didn’t send me a flute player, you sent me a boy with a flute!” Which at the time struck me as the epitome of sarcastic humor.

The fellow who sat on my left, Robby, was nice. He was an effeminate kid, though we didn’t know or use that word — effeminate — back then. All I knew was he never kicked my ass, or anyone else’s, and I was grateful for that. Boris, the first chair, on the other hand, seemed to take great pleasure in kicking any Scum who he saw doing anything wrong. Since I sat and marched about five feet away from him every day, he kicked me plenty of times, always putting everything he had into it. I hated him. There was a cruelty about him, enjoyment at the pain he caused, an attitude I had never really experienced before.

As I said, in August we practiced twice a day, two hours each session, morning and evening, marching up and down the campus if front of the school, learning the basics of military drill. Those days were tough. Some days I, and plenty of other guys, could hardly walk after practice. One night my mom said to me after dinner, “I was doing the wash today; there’s blood in your underpants and on your sheets. Do you want to show me?” Face burning, head hanging, we went upstairs to my room, and I turned around and dropped my pants and my underpants. She didn’t gasp, didn’t say a word. She went to the bathroom, came back with a tube of ointment and handed it to me. “Put this on, it should help.” She left the room and never mentioned it again. I assume she told my father, though he didn’t mention it either. I was bruised and bloody, but everyone understood it was going to be tough, no one complained. Today, Frank probably would have gotten a couple of years in the state penitentiary for allowing the hazing. A bunch of kids dropped out, along with Bert, and no one blamed them.

It was just the price you paid to be in the band.