1978 Drum Corps Recordings

My brother Jim Scheffler recorded one drum corps show in 1978, the annual Wheaton Pageant of Drums on July 3. The Guardsmen performed in judged exhibition that night. Competing corps would earn less money if they didn't march in the Wheaton 4th of July parade, but the performance fee was higher for an exhibition corps. We would be marching in parades in the Hoffman Estates area on the 4th of July. We scored 20 points higher than the corps that won the show, the Vaqueros. None of the other corps recordings from that night have survived. 

1978 was the beginning of the great Guardsmen hornline that would beat almost everyone in 1979. Our 1978 show featured my favorite music of the four years I performed in the Guardsmen. I loved Parade of the Wooden Soldiers from listening to my brother's recording of the Silver Sabres playing it in 1972. I really liked Celebration Suite, I learned that music by listening to the tape of the 1977 Fox Valley Raiders. Poets and Peasants Overture was one of my favorite pieces of music from 1974, when the Phantom Regiment played it. And I loved playing chimes in Greensleeves when we changed our closer in mid-season. 

This recording gives you a chance to hear our early season closer, before we replaced it with Greensleeves. In 1978, Jim Campbell was in the process of inventing the “Pit,” and this was my third show playing solo timpani for the second half of the show.
During the grand finale of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, I was at the front of the field playing timpani. At the climax of that number, while 4 soprano bugles were playing their 4 screamer notes, the rifles did a long spectacular rifle toss toward the front of the field. On this night, as I was playing my final timpani roll of the show, one of the rifle throwers overthrew a rifle right at me, and Nancy Greaney, the rifle catcher, barely managed to corral that rifle as it hit and sliced through the timpani head I was playing at that moment. On this recording, you can hear my long timpani roll, then the pitch of my timpani note drops and fades out as the rifle tears through the drum head. Within seconds it sounded like I was playing on a sheet of paper. As the full hornline hit their last big chord of the show, I finished my roll on another timpani that wasn't the right note. The rifle had come within inches of injuring me, but thanks to Nancy, it didn't touch me or my sticks, just the drum head. And it wasn't even a penalty for dropped equipment, because Nancy caught the rifle as it bounced off my timpani and it never hit the ground. 

On August 13 the Guardsmen were in Fort Collins, Colorado, at our last show before DCI prelims in Boulder four days later. Rain kept the first few corps from competing that night, but the sky cleared later on, so we performed in judged exhibition. Hall of Fame percussion judge Rod Goodheart was there to judge drum execution. Rod was an innovator in the field of percussion judging, and he tried something new that night because it was a judged exhibition. Rather than writing down each execution error (tick) on a score sheet, Rod spoke his "Execution Evaluation" into a tape recorder that he carried with him for the nights when he was assigned to judge percussion analysis. Rod later presented this new approach to the judging innovation committee he led, and by 1984, all field performance judges spoke their "Execution Evaluations" into a recorder. This is the system DCI field performance judges use to this day.
At the end of the tape, Rod Goodheart says, "We may have all gotten more out of this than we realized tonight. Thank you. That was good. Fine control overall."

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