Why I was always a band rat

I'm from New Orleans. It will always be my home even though I haven't technically lived in the city since 1958. My parents and I lived in Ruston, Louisiana and then Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans between 1959 and 1970. I attended LSUNO/UNO for four years to maintain my draft deferment and to try to figure who I was and what I should be doing. I wasn't ready for much else at 17. 

By late 1969 I was out of school, better educated but not altogether sure who I was. The good news was I was no longer 17 and was not an immediate hazard to myself or others (when I wasn't drinking). What wise professors did teach me, however, was how little I knew and how far I was from achieving it. What I would be doing was then decided by outside forces. Leaving school meant I was no longer draft deferred but rather I was draft bait. When my draft number for 1970 was announced as 65, I either had to join the military or be drafted by late winter.

The Air Force seemed like a good place to receive training and avoid being a foot soldier. Men, boys?, drafted in Louisiana went straight to Fort Polk (Tiger town) and a lot of them became reluctant 11-Bravos in Southeast Asia. It's not like I didn't want to lose a leg or a foot, it was more like if I had a choice in the matter, getting a better deal with the Air Force was a practical decision. For the record, I could have gone Army and I could have and would have fought.

Like most of my life I would have approached it as a challenge and tried my best to be a razor sharp killer. There are those who think I was a draft dodger who joined to avoid a fight. There is a grain of truth to that, certainly since I was attempting to avoid getting killed or maimed. But the other truth is I simply made a tactical decision to improve myself and avoid death. I understand those who don't want to fight or kill. I respect their decision but it just isn't me. I studied history for four years in college and those unwilling to fight, pave the way for slavery.

When the O'Jays' sang "War, what is it good for, huh, absolutely nothing" seem to overlook the words and deeds of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who could have avoided killing in the Civil War, as he had both status and position but stated, "I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery."

War is the horrible price men pay for freedom, THAT's what it's good for even for those who fail to recognize it. In any case, I took the oath at the customs house downtown and rode the Airport Downtown Express bus to the airport to board a plane for San Antonio. I knew the bus line well. I rode it every weekday from Metairie Road to Phlox Avenue to attend East Jefferson High School for three years. I also rode it into town on weekends and the summer to see movies and hang out, ala' Petulia Clark's biggest hit. 

Several decades later I would, after working there for over 25 years, be President and General Manager of Louisiana Transit. Transit buses tended to be an artery that fed me throughout my life.  After Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB (San Antonio) I was bussed to Wichita Falls, Texas to Shepard AFB for tech school. Joining the Air Force to fly and then finding myself on a bus riding across Texas from one base to another seemed humiliating at the time but again, buses (I also worked for Trailways for a while) were my conveyor belt. 

Since only college graduates with 20/20 vision were trained to be pilots and navigators and since I hadn't gotten my diploma in four years, what I could do in the Air Force was defined for me in a class we took at Lackland. It was to be a memorable experience. Basic Training is pretty serious with a lot of screaming. But we'd been through a few weeks of it by now and I guess the Sergeant who put on the class for us to fill out our wish list for school assignments decided to give us a little entertainment. 

He came in in uniform but he took on the persona of "Reginald Van Gleason" comedian Jackie Gleason's alter ego that is pretty much Johnny Carson's tea time movie host "Art Fern" or Ernie Kovac's "Percy Dovetonsils." A completely over the top impersonation of a high class, huckster dufus with high tonsil talking and nonsensical attitude. Here's a Youtube sketch of Gleason portraying Reggie:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4VUCZRasLs

You have to wait a minute and fifty for Reggie to appear but I think it's worth it. To this day I think about a third of the class thought the guy was actually like the character he was portraying while he conducted his class. It was a tremendous comedic relief for me and gave me hope that the Air Force did actually have a great sense of humor. You'd never know it from our DIs. 

I filled out my request form for several choices from 1 to 5 or something. Computer Operator was my third choice for duty assignment and what I wound up with. First choice was language school. They said you'd learn languages like Russian. I took the test and didn't feel that I did really well but came within 1 point out of 100 (off by 1%) of making the cut for the school which lasted 10 months. One of my ideas was to select the longest school I could get. Turns out the only language they taught was Vietnamese, which I guess is why it takes 10 months to get fluent. 

Not sure if I would have chosen language school knowing that was the only language they were teaching. Even though my bold words above say 'I'd fight, if asked,' I was still avoiding death and dismemberment rather instinctively because I wasn't looking for overseas assignments.  I wanted to go to the Florida panhandle, not Viet Nam. And yes, I am fluent in hypocrisy. The next longest school was Air Traffic Controller. 

If I joined the Air Force for training, why not go all out and it was the next to longest school after language school. I had to take a flight physical for that school. I technically passed the physical but the doc said he was not going to recommend me for the position because he knew if I flew a lot and couldn't clear my ears well, I didn't handle the altitude changes well, I shouldn't be doing it as my primary MOS. Turns out air traffic controller was to be forward air controller in Viet Nam and they flew you out to call in the strikes. So I got my third choice. 

This triggered my ride to Sheppard on a bus. I also spent a few extra weeks playing in the Lackland Drum and Bugle Corps. I am a band rat. When I hit a base or a campus I seek out musicians and look to join. It is an affliction that came upon me in Junior High. I joined band because my Dad picked me up from first day tryouts for basketball on instructions from my Mother who felt that I was too frail to compete safely. 

I had a heart murmur which was similar to my Dad's. He got rheumatic fever in the navy while training to be a dive bomber in WWII outside Chicago. They ran the trainees out into a wet field at night in the cold and left them out for a few hours for an air raid. He caught pneumonia and got rheumatic fever. It left him with a bad heart. Similarly I was thought to have had rheumatic fever when I was 6 years old. I missed a few months of school. By the time I was 12, I got a clear bill of health but by then it was too late. 

I wasn't running up and down a basketball court, I was marching in a band with a trombone. In junior high, before we chose instruments, they had an expert come in and look at our embouchures (teeth and mouth alignment) to recommend an instrument to match our mouth's foundation to an instrument appropriate to the player. I was told I had a woodwind embouchure. I chose trombone which is a brass instrument. I sorta wanted trumpet but so did everybody so trombone was a little different. To this day, after playing seriously for decades I don't have a good upper register. I guess the gal who made the recommendation could tell me she told me so. In defense, I went bass trombone as soon as I could lay my hands on one because I have a fantastic lower register. After that it was love.

I played baritone bugle in both the Lackland and Shepard AFB drum and bugle corps. I’d never been accused of being a prodigy with a horn. I sat either 2nd or 3rd trombone through much of high school. By the time I was a senior, I was 2nd chair 1st trombone but that was more based on seniority than anything else. I also played in the stage band in high school. Our director, Martin “Mike” Clancy had been a lower brass player himself and took a liking to me because I wasn’t an out and out thug. Unfortunately our high school had it’s share of thugs. 

My Dad sat on me most of my youth and I had grudging respect for authority because I hadn’t been given much of a choice. We called Mr. Clancy “Prof.” Prof had given me some music for trombone to practice. It was “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I had a couple of Si Zenter albums and I would ape his style, which was heavy on the vibrato, using the slide to produce the unique sound. The night of our stage band’s senior concert, which preceded the regular band’s concert, Prof told me I would be playing Red Roses as a solo with guitar chord backup. 

I knew he did it because I was a good kid and I played the solo but to this day have no idea if it was really any good or not. I’d always questioned my worth, throughout most of my early years. The same year I played that solo, Mr. Clancy asked me and another trombone player to play with his Dad’s band in Mardi Gras parades. That year, my senior year, I played every day or night for eleven days and nights in a parades throughout town. From Carrollton on the first Saturday of carnival to both Rex and Comus on the final day of carnival, which is Mardi Gras. 

Some nights I marched with my high school and other nights with Clancy’s jazz band, which was Mr. Clancy’s father’s group. We were the king of carnival’s band behind the lead float in Rex. After Comus on Mardi Gras night I was soot black. The Flambeaux carried either fusee flares or oil burning rag lights. Both produced light but also produced a lot of soot. When my Dad, bless his heart, picked me up after Comus, he didn’t recognize me. I’d lost ten pounds by the end of the week and I was jet black.

I played at Lackland while on TDY for a few weeks on voluntary assignment. They let us delay our tech school for as many weeks as we wanted to stay at Lackland and play in the corps. One of the guys I played with accepted an assignment to play in the Air Force academy drum and bugle corps in Colorado Springs rather than get his tech school training. It would be his permanent duty assignment. We marched in graduations, parades and played to the colors when the flags were raised and lowered. In time, however, I felt I needed to move on and get the training for which I had joined the Air Force. It turned out, however, that Shepard AFB, where I would get eight weeks of computer training had another music assignment in store for me.

When I got to Shepard, I heard they had a corps and I sought them out and managed to catch on. To join the corps at Lackland you had to audition. If you had corps experience in the Air Force, you no longer had to audition, you were a legacy. The guy who ran the flight I was in initially was pissed off at me and gave me grief but in the end I got the orders and he had to let me go. I moved myself on foot across base to be in the corps. I was about five or six weeks into playing with the corps when we were practicing in a big room. 

We were working on a fairly new march. The bugle had a key and a rotor, in the key of G. You had to under or over blow it now and again to get subtle notes just right. By now all bugles are in the key of Bb, just like band instruments but back then it was traditional for corps to have G instruments. G bugles don’t have the tonal range a regular band instrument has. For one thing it lacks the three keys a Bb instrument has. It just has fewer ways of producing mid tones. By now I had been playing on a bugle for a few months and had played trombone for nine years prior to that, including college. 

Perhaps I’d never been outstanding but by now I was competent. The Master Sergeant who had the corps had guys coming and going all the time. Troops came on base to get training, stayed a few weeks and moved on. Turnover was constant. He didn’t know me very well and for that matter didn’t know a lot of the baritone bugles of which there were about a dozen. The other thing I’d always done defensively is play out. Filling the horn hid struggles for range. Once you put enough air from your diaphragm into the horn you could pretty much blow any note you wanted, even if you struggled to hit upper range notes. It was defensive. It also meant I’d better know my part because you could hear me from just about anywhere. When I was at Ruston High School Mr. Barnes always knew when I hit a clunker because he could always hear me anywhere he was in the football stadium at practice. I was on the upper edge of whatever we were playing whether a high “piano” or a stronger “fortissimo.”

This day at Shepard, Sarge was directing us and was trying to figure out who was playing a certain phrase in the music and he couldn’t figure out where in lower brass it was coming from. Rather than embarrass anybody by making us play our parts one at a time, he had one bugle lay out each time we played the twelve bars of music as a group. We didn’t sit first chair or anything and I sat toward the end of the line. As we played the phrase over and over as one by one each bugle laid out, we played it over and over about nine times with a fair consistency. 

Then it became my turn to lay out. The other eleven horns began to play the phrase and little by little as they got two bars then three, it began to unravel and by the fourth bar the whole thing fell apart. Kind of like a musical train wreck. It then got weirdly silent. Nobody had said stop playing, it just fell apart when one out of twelve bugles laid out. I had been so loud for so long, I was carrying the entire section under me. When I was playing, I was the umbrella to play under. When I quit, the safety blanket was pulled. It was a strange moment. Most of my life I wasn’t sure of my worth. Sarge just shook his head and said, “look, don’t ever lay out again, okay?” It brought the house down. It was a defining moment for me. I was needed.

One night we went to town to play at a function in Wichita Falls. A school bus picked us up, we went to town, played our dozen or so marches, it got dark and we were picked up again by the same driver to return to base. I remember none of the details of where we played or what. On the way back to base on a fifteen minute ride, some of the guys in the back started to sing. It was kind of unorganized but one by one everybody started to fill in. We were musicians after all and most of us could hit the notes. 

The guys on the bus were a wide cross section of America. Tall, short, white, black and everything in between. A couple guys broke out with “Dixie.” You’d think the black guys would be offended but most of them had great voices and we hit two choruses and the volume picked up and well, it was amazing. The acoustics on the bus were like being in a sound chamber and our voices filled it to the breaking point. It was both loud and well, impressive. We were actually better singing than we were playing the bugle. 

Not a second after the last chorus of Dixie died, than Battle Hymn of the Republic began. If Dixie had been loud, the Battle Hymn became even fuller. Goosebumps raised on my arms as we sang three verses. I don’t know how I or anybody else on the bus knew all the verses of Battle Hymn, but there it was, in amazing harmony and it was stirring. As stirring as anything I can remember. As the final chorus wound down we realized we’d arrived at our barracks a couple of minutes ago and no one got up until we finished the final chorus. I was in the second row toward the front sitting behind the driver. As we began to rise to get off, the bus driver stood up in the middle of the aisle to address us. I sat close enough to see he had tears in his eyes. He told us he’d take us anywhere at anytime and consider it a privilege. It was an amazing, special moment in my life. It is almost indescribable to see such emotion in a perfect stranger but that’s what music is capable of. It’s why I was always a band rat.

No, I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. I guess it's the beret or the neck scarf or the whole getup. Peter Allen would have loved it, for sure. Took me several decades to find a Getzen G bugle to replace the one (holding here) I left behind in Wichita Falls. Ebay. I love the thing and play it regularly. Bugles are an acquired taste.