Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Cruising home from Milwaukee, on the Minneapolis to Seattle leg, I was paging through my Archos mp3 player just playing weird shit.  I happened on an Ohio State Marching Band album that was recorded when I was in the band, and played a cut of us as we slogged through the 1971 Rose Parade.  I’m thinking it was the cutting edge of portable recording equipment - I remember the guy walking up & down the band as we advanced, in fits & starts, along the parade route: double microphones on a frame in the air, earphones on his head, trying to position himself to catch the best angle.  The Rose Parade extends for something like 7 miles.  The part you see on TV, where the cameras are placed and the grandstands hold all the bigwigs, is within the first 1/2 mile.  The rest of the parade is solely for the benefit of locals and tourists who grab spaces along the street and wait expectantly to see the parade that the rest of the world saw up to two hours before.  It would have been easy to let down and get sloppy after we were past the klieg lights, but we had a lot of stamina and pride, and we held up pretty well, as evidenced by the recording.

It picks us up from a distance, and for a few seconds we’re competing with ambient noise and mundane conversations from the crowd.  As we advance, our drum cadence becomes more insistent.  There’s a rolloff, and we begin to play one of the 4 tunes that we rotate through for the length of the parade.  I’m thinking that the recording engineer is musically knowledgeable about the tune, as he’s positoned perfectly as various sections of the band are dominant in the piece.

The piece ends, and he’s positioned behind the band as the music gives way to another drum cadence.  Crowd noise, conversation and a motor noise from a float fill the space left as we move away from the microphones and towards our disappointment against Jim Plunkett and Stanford.

I reflect on how weird it is to listen to the Doppler effect of your 21-year-old self playing and marching into a future that has now in large part gone by.