Fourth of July: A return to the Corps

[euro_euph06]

Fourth of July: A return to the Corps

Beat of the drum brings musician back to his band of brothers

 

By CECELIA GOODNOW

P-I REPORTER

 

Dave Endicott is polite to a fault -- courtly, even -- but for a moment an uncharacteristic note of sharpness colors his tone, and you realize you have just committed a big faux pas.

 

 

Note to self: Never, ever refer to a drum and bugle corps as a "band."

 

Would Endicott have dragged himself off his sick bed for a mere "band"? Would he have trimmed his waistline, endured the worst physical abuse since basic training, gutted out music lessons and invested up to $8,000 to play in a "band"?

 

No, drum corps is special -- an elite blend of showmanship, precision and competitive zeal that wrings the best from its young musicians and binds them forever. It's not a band, corpsmen say, it's a band of brothers.

 

So it is that Endicott, a salt-and-pepper 61, finds himself embarked on a quest to reclaim a peak moment of his life -- his 1966 participation in the nationally renowned Madison Scouts of Madison, Wis.

 

Endicott, along with a handful of other Seattle men bound by their Midwest roots, has spent months training for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion performance at next month's national championship competition in Madison. About 230 former Scouts from around the nation will perform a lung-busting, muscle-burning, precision routine lasting even longer than the regulation 10 to 11 1/2 minutes. Most are decades past the maximum, junior-drum-corps age of 22. The oldest is 80.

 

Performance styles have changed radically since the heyday of some of these Scouts. Shows have gone Broadway, with costume changes and razzle-dazzle. Choreography is now computer-generated. The marching itself has changed, with knees-up steps giving way to heel-to-toe fluidity. Originally a regional corps, the Madison Scouts now draw applicants from around the world.

 

Even the "bugles" have changed in design, though they're as heavy as ever. Endicott's contrabass bugle -- the drum-corps equivalent of a tuba -- weighs 38 pounds and stands waist-high when set on its end.

 

Despite the hurdles, these ragtag recruits will emerge from five grueling weekend camps in Wisconsin as a well-oiled, precision machine. At least that's the plan.

 

 

Karen Ducey / P-I

David Endicott will play the contrabass bugle when he performs next month in Wisconsin at a reunion of the Madison Scouts, an elite drum and bugle corps.

Endicott, a self-possessed Rotarian who once served as former Sen. Slade Gorton's press secretary, is a confident guy, but the thought of messing up on that Madison field of dreams nibbles at his innards.

 

"Frankly, I'm scared," he said. "I'm scared about this."

 

The camp instructor's warning still rings in his ears: "If we don't do this right, you may replace a very good memory with a very bad memory."

 

It's a risk aging Scouts are willing to take for what Madison instructor Scott Pearson calls "that Disney moment when you get to go back and relive a favorite moment of your life."

 

"You see these people you haven't seen in 20 years and it's like you never left," said Stanley Winston, 42, a Renton flight attendant from the 1983-85 Madison corps who will perform in the alumni color guard.

 

Until he signed up for the show, Al Johnson of Ballard hadn't played mellophone -- the drum-corps equivalent of trumpet -- since 1986. Now 40, he's an internist at the Polyclinic with a hectic, hospital-based practice, a wife and two small children.

 

Yet he fits in five to six hours of music practice each week and flies back to Madison for the camps. Next month he'll take his family to see him perform on the field -- one small, proud dot in a sea of white spats on forest-green trouser legs.

 

The whole shebang will end up costing him $10,000, but, Johnson said, "There was never any doubt in my mind I was going to do it."

 

In fact, Johnson considers himself a bit of a dilettante compared with some of these guys.

 

"They're all fanatics," he said. "They're all kind of nuts."

 

 

Visual excitement

 

The Madison Scouts began in 1938 as a Boy Scout troop -- a bond long since severed -- and is one of two remaining all-male drum corps in the U.S. Nationally, drum corps used to have ties to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion, but they broke away years ago to gain more creative freedom, designing spectacles that bring audiences to their feet.

 

"Having people screaming at you -- standing ovations from the moment you get on the field -- it's a big rush, a big, adrenaline rush," said Seattle artist Robert Yoder, 44, a 1982-83 Madison Scout who will perform in the alumni color guard. At home he enjoys a quieter kind of fame; his work "Sluice Gate" is now on display at the Frye Art Museum.

 

"It isn't just playing the fight song while spelling out your team's name; it is really a pageantry experience," said Jimmy Fursman, interim executive director of the Seattle Cascades, a Shoreline-based corps.

 

At 29, Fursman is a former Madison Scout himself and will perform in the alumni show's color guard when he takes the Cascades to Wisconsin to compete.

 

Travel is a way of life for these groups, which is one reason their numbers have shrunk from the thousands that flourished when Endicott marched in the 1960s to about 50 today.

 

This summer, the Cascades will travel 13,000 miles, hitting 30 states. They'll be home Saturday to host the Seattle Summer Music Games -- a good chance for neophytes to experience the color and pageantry of drum corps. (They'll also play, very briefly, at 10 tonight to open the fireworks at the WaMu Family 4th on Lake Union.)

 

It takes up to a million dollars a year to float these shows, whose production values grew highly sophisticated in the 1980s. Getting more, and younger, kids into the activity is one of the challenges.

 

"My hope," Endicott said, "is that there would be a lot of (corps) again -- that these values of discipline and teamwork would be passed on."

 

 

'A lifetime sport'

 

In a way, Endicott has pneumonia to thank for his decision to join the Madison Scouts alumni show -- though it wasn't foremost in his mind last Veterans Day, when the illness struck.

 

"I was down for six weeks," he said. "I was pushing serious time on my sofa coils."

 

 

 

In 1966, Endicott was a member of the Madison Scouts.

The slowdown gave him time to think about his life and values. That's when it hit him -- the rightness of returning to the Scouts for a final moment of glory. He wrote up a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the $6,000-$8,000 expense and months of work against the satisfactions of the quest.

 

The quest won, though serious work lay ahead.

 

"I hadn't put lips to mouthpiece in 40 years," said Endicott, who had forgotten how to read music. "I was in pneumonia, I could barely get enough wind to breathe."

 

Endicott started tuba lessons with Tyler Smith, Ingraham High School band director, and began sitting in with the Shoreline Community Band.

 

"My philosophy," said Shoreline music director Ken Noreen, "is that music is a lifetime sport, and I think Dave proves that."

 

But drum and bugle corps demands more than musical skills; it's so intensely physical that younger men than Endicott are reduced to moans of exhaustion after a 12-hour day of drills.

 

Right away, Endicott put himself on a diet, vowing, "I am not going to go out there as a big, fat old man in a Boy Scout uniform." Solidly built, he's down 15 pounds so far, with a little more air to lose from the spare tire.

 

With only a month before the Scouts attack "Malague

[Claritone]

Al Johnson of Ballard hadn't played mellophone -- the drum-corps equivalent of trumpet

Umm... what?

[MartinHorn]

Umm... what?

Yeah I noticed that too. Well I guess you can't get everything right.

[euro_euph06]

Al Johnson of Ballard hadn't played mellophone -- the drum-corps equivalent of trumpet

 

 

 

The definition of many things have changed over time. Like a tromebone was called a sacbut (sp?) back in the day.