Monday Memory: When it all clicked 25 years ago
25 years ago this week the Bluecoats were making preparations for pre-season for the 1995 season. Little did anyone realize how this season would be a transformative one and also foreshadow the future of the activity.
1995 Opening Set of Homefront: !945
Coming out of the 1994 season and a 9th place finish, the design and instructional staff doubled their efforts at not just producing a different and unique show for 1995, but how to keep the members improving all season. Internally, members brought a fresh look to the season as well, as a young 1994 corps had grown up a bit returning the next season. Even the management side was approaching this season in a different manner. There was a lot going on and in normal drum corps circumstances, this much change often leads to less then desirable results. Not with the Bluecoats.
After the 1994 season the Bluecoats found itself $20,000 in the red. On a drum corps operating at the time on a $250,000 budget, this deficit was concerning, but manageable. The Board of Directors made several cost-cutting decisions across the organization, while at the same time continuing to plan and spend for a competitive top 12 drum corps program. Most significantly, the corps chose to begin tour on July 1st, rather than mid June as it had normally done. The cost of the fleet touring was not off-set by DCI individual show paychecks. Secondly the corps dropped Innovations IN BRASS as a drum corps show, to avoid the extra costs of paying each corps to perform and cover the cost of day of housing Instead Bluecoats offered a free show to the community.
page from the 1995 Innovations IN BRASS Free Show Program
A free show with a corps running a deficit? Yes. Board members and other volunteers sought community sponsors to sponsor ads in the show program. Two local performing groups were given the opportunity to join the corps in performance and an invitation was extended, and accepted, for the Commandant’s Own Marine Drum & Bugle Corps to perform as well. This combination of performances led to a packed (then) Fawcett Stadium on a late June evening. Corps members walked through the stands collecting donations in their helmets and coupled with program ad sales and other event-day donating, the corps erased half of the debt-load in one single night.
While the members were unaware of the corps’ financial cost-cutting, the extra time spent in pre-season mode paid dividends. Not only was there a less frantic pace on the staff preparing the show, but the time also allowed the members to bond across the corps. And what they were working on was a show for the ages — both backwards and forwards.
Those who came to the Bluecoats in expecting to play Big Band Jazz in 1995 saw from the start that Sophisticated Ladies was to be the opening chart. It cast aside three years of less traditionally Bluecoat shows of the Beatles (1992), Dizzy Gillespie (1993) and the bluesy side of Ellington (1994). But that all changed by winter’s end as the design team thematically revamped the show around the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, and specifically what life on the Homefront looked like. “Big band” was put in the drawer for a show that, in so many ways, resembles modern drum corps. Musical moments wrapped around a motif, as Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree seamlessly merged with Over There and Reveille. The corps uniform more closely resembled costumes of the activity today, with the 1940’s guard skirts complementing the re-tailored uniform that looked like a soldier from the bottom up. And that Included setting aside the iconic helmets (literally, used symbolically as grave markers during part of the show) and the donning of military service caps.
1995 exchange of the tri-folded flag to a war widow
The connection to the audience was visceral, leaving many emotionally spent as never before in the activity had a wife been handed the tri-folded flag of her loved one killed in action. The moment, singularly iconic in the annals of DCI History, left a deafening silence across such a large stage. And moments later the final strains, wrapping America the Beautiful around I’ll Be Seeing You with a dash of Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue brought the crowd to their feet at the end of Part II. And then the victory party closed out the show in grand, Times Square-like fashion. The layers and symbolism foreshadowed what the activity was to become.
And in one “short” season, the Bluecoats had done something incomparable in the activity. Erased a nasty deficit, retooled their approach to design, improved the member experience, connected like never before with audiences and improved their placement to their best ever to that point in history. It was a year when everything from top to bottom and left to right just clicked.
