neonvincent

As I wrote two days ago, I'm resuming my series on my performances with the UCLA Band from 1977 to 1980. Today, I'm posting the first of five (!) videos from 1978 that were posted just last week (sorry, no new videos from 1977), 1978 - UCLA at Cal Pregame 10/21/78.

Watch on YouTube

While some of these videos were shown to the band at the time (when they were 8 mm films), I don't recall seeing this one. That doesn't mean much, as there will be videos from 1980 that I recalled seeing but most of the details of which completely escaped me, but that's a subject for later.

One of the things that struck me was the flag feature at the very beginning of pregame just as the rest of the band was finished setting up. Even though I was assistant flag instructor, I had very little to do with the pregame routines. I also was marching way in the back of the band with the sousaphones/tubas, so it was hard for me to see the flags way up front. Therefore, I didn't appreciate what they were doing. If I had, I might have retained the opening flag feature the two years when I was teaching the flags by myself. Oh, well.

The other things that I noticed did not come as a surprise. One of the running themes of this series was how the UCLA Band adopted more corps-style elements during the time I marched. One of them is the second major drill move after the formation of the giant wedge from the opening arcs, a rotation around the front 50-yard line that Kelly James called the bat wing. That was a move that was impressive in concept but difficult in practice, as one can see from the video. It was later picked up by the 1980 Santa Clara Vanguard, who executed it beautifully. The 1978 UCLA Band, not so much.

Another topic that I haven't written about much because videos of most pregame shows weren't available until last week was Kelly James' aspiration for the pregame shows to be big events that fans would want to come into the stadium early to watch. This show reflected that ambition. It was the most complex show we performed that year, right up to the end of "Officer Krupke." He also wanted it to be a non-stop production. This performance didn't quite measure up to that standard, but a future video will show that the band eventually succeeded in doing so.

Finally, I've alluded to the hostility of the Cal fans. This video and the next show that. It didn't help that the Spirit Squad taunted them during "Officer Krupke," but the band and cheerleaders expected the reaction.

Speaking of the next video, that will be the halftime, which will be the performance at Cal I mentioned in the fourth post in this series, the clone show performed at the halftime of the UCLA vs. Arizona game. Stay tuned.