Band Camp

Upon graduating from high school, I made up my mind to give up on continuing to play the drums. Bottom line; I wasn’t very good. Then my drum instructor talked me into trying out for the marching band at the university I was headed to in the fall. He said all I needed to do was learn the rudiments.

I spent the summer learning the rudiments. They consist of 40 (actually less since many of them are redundant) basic sticking combinations from which modern drum playing is derived. They have nifty names, many of which are onomatopoeic, like paradiddle, flam and ratamacue.

Auditions for the marching band drum line were held the Monday before school started. If you passed the audition, you got to stay for the week and rehearse. When I got there, we were quickly reassured that everyone would most likely pass, and that the audition was mainly to determine which instrument you would play. I only wanted to play the snare drum. Not only does it play the most prominent role in the drum line, it is also the lightest instrument, except for the cymbals, which is an important consideration since you have to march around with them for hours at a time. Of the twenty-two people auditioning, approximately fifteen wanted to play the snare drum. I know because I took an informal poll. There were six snare drums.

The two guys who would be auditioning us quickly established that they were intimidatingly incredible drummers and veterans of drum corps, a highly competitive marching organization. Eric, a Ken doll look-alike who would be our drum instructor for the semester, auditioned us one at a time while his friend taught the rest of us cadences (highly syncopated drum parts). I auditioned early. Alone in a room with Eric and a snare drum, he asked me to play paradiddles, which I did. He then named off a bunch of other rudiments and I played them all. That was it. I was relieved and elated. Upon returning to the fold, Eric’s friend played a rhythmic pattern and asked if anyone could play it back. I confidently raised my hand and proceeded to play something that was not even remotely similar to what he had played. Some cringed, others guffawed- I wanted to die.

While the auditions continued, Eric’s friend had us switch between the instruments, which included six snares, five or six basses, three quints (five small toms) and four cymbals. By the time the auditions were over, I was holding the cymbals. The only thing lower than the cymbals was the pit, which is where they threw the mallet players (who didn’t need to audition at all since there were only two of them) and the percussive sound effects.

Eric conferred only briefly with his friend before announcing the results: I made the snare line.

I was the only freshman in the snare line; the other five had been in the snare line the previous year or longer. They immediately decided that we were going to hold the sticks traditional grip. I didn’t know how to play traditional grip. They told me I’d better figure it out fast. We began by sight-reading some sloppily hand-written parts we were to learn. They could sight-read the parts in real time. I could barely read the parts at all. I assumed the others already knew the parts, having played them the year prior. When I asked one of them if this was the case, he scoffed and shared my ignorance with the others so they could have a good laugh.

The whole premise of drum corps style drumming is that you combine all the rudiments in the most difficult ways possible and play them as loud as you can just to prove your playing prowess. In addition, drum corps players have invented all kinds of new sticking combinations, called contemporary rudiments. The snare heads are made of Kevlar, the same material used to make bullet-proof vests, and are tuned to sound like amplified table tops. It’s a very macho and masochistic way of playing the drums. Unfortunately, Eric and the rest of the snare line balanced this by sadistically making my existence as painful as possible. They ridiculed my lack of skills. Eric apologized to the others in front of me for letting me play the snare, explaining that he had let me in only because I knew the names of the rudiments. He would often ask me to stop playing with the others so he could hear how it was supposed to sound, and when I did play he’d shake his head in disappointment in the exact same manner that my junior high basketball coach had shook his head at me.

I suspect they wanted to intimidate me into quitting. Instead, I became singularly determined. The week consisted of at least eight hours of group practice every day. The drum line remained mostly segregated from the rest of the band, and we practiced longer than they did. The drum line usually divided up into sections, and the snare line scheduled extra practices in addition to the drum line practices. In the evenings, while the rest of the marching band went to parties in which they got drunk and tried to figure out how to get in each other’s pants, I went back to my dorm room and practiced some more. I bought a pack of band-aids to put over the blisters.

Roy Bailey, a veteran quint player, took me under his arm. He encouraged me, putting things in perspective by telling me to always ignore opposition and reminding me that drumming was supposed to be fun. Roy had a bunch of videos of Buddy Rich playing the drums using traditional grip, and I taught myself how to play traditional grip by watching those videos. One night Roy, a couple bass drum players and I got together and I learned how to play the card game Spades. Little did I know that much of my first year of college would be spent with Roy; drumming, playing Spades and listening to jazz.

The week mercifully came to an end. I called my mom, and when she answered the phone a terrible thing happened: I started crying uncontrollably. How embarrassing. I realized that a new chapter in my life had begun, and I’d better buck up if I were to survive it.