The
President of the United States pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving. People strip near naked and jump into
freezing water, on purpose, for “polar bear” plunges. Cousins of these same people go to Spain to
run through the streets with angry bulls.
The fact that some events happen enough times to actually become a
tradition is mindboggling.
Many, but
not necessarily all of the band traditions at Houston, are less dangerous than
running with the bulls. Putting pennies
in shoes, the Rooster Cheer, playing “Louie, Louie” as the first song at every
game, hearing trumpets chant “I love being a trumpet” on a hot asphalt parking
lot and some sort of senior prank are a few non-lethal traditions that come to
mind. Some traditions were created out
of my incompetence. The misspelling of
names in concert programs was almost always an accident. Some of you may remember a concert program
with EVERY name misspelled except one.
That student’s mom had complained about her daughter’s name being spelled
incorrectly in the Christmas program so for the Pajama Concert I intentionally
spelled her name correctly and everyone else’s wrong. The Pajama Concert itself was born out of my
irritation with a parent complaining about the ending time of our concerts
cutting into her child’s sleep time. I
reasoned that if her kid was already dressed for bed it would speed up the
sleeping process. I am nothing if not
caring (sarcasm/off).
Some
traditions had to be stopped. It used to
be that every freshman would be caught at some point during their first week of
school and have an “F” drawn on their forehead.
This was a school-wide thing. I
would not allow band kids to do this to other band kids so, for the first week
or so of school, all of my freshmen would hang out in the band room as close to
me as possible. The school eventually
put a stop to the practice. During my
first year at Houston, we tried to start a tradition of marching in to
ballgames with the mascot of the opposing team suspended from a noose at the
front of the line. Believe it or not,
the noose was not the issue (different and less politically correct
times). Our first game was against the
ECS Eagles and the parrot that once hung (still?) in my office for 25 years was
what we hung from the noose. We used a
red devil for Germantown and a stuffed dragon for Collierville. All of the details were handled by my
trombone players. All was well until we
played at Millington. I am at the back
of the line when John Clayton, our principal, comes to me, points to the front
of the line, and says, “Do something now with that bunch of idiots”. I ran to the front of the line and saw the
noose with a small box hanging from it.
You see we were playing the Millington Trojans. If you don’t get it, ask a friend. None-the-less, that was the last time for
that particular tradition as we decided to practice “safe traditions” from then
on.
I look upon
our “The Houston Band” logo as sort of a tradition. How it came about is a bit unusual. When I came to Houston our logo was a running
horse jumping over a music staff and we were referred to as the “Mustang
Band”. I hated the name and would have
us announced at ballgames as “The Houston High School Marching Band”. The announcer would inevitably substitute Mustang
for Marching. At about the same time, a
very famous brothel in Nevada was closed and it’s assets auctioned off. The “Mustang Ranch” was its name. One of my dads came to me with a bit of
information I did not have. It seems the
name of the Mustang Ranch’s house band was……… (wait for it)………. The Mustang
Band. He wanted to purchase the neon
sign that hung above where the band played and give it to us to put up in the
band room. Even I realized this was a
bad idea on so many levels but I used the prospect of signage as well as the
previous existence of the Mustang Band moniker to leverage a change of name and
logo. Forevermore “The Houston Band”.
PS. Donating to The Houston Band Foundation is a nice tradition to start.
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