The thick Midwestern heat and humidity hang in the air as more than 160 performers stand at attention on Pattonville High School's football field.
Instructions and feedback boom from the press box. A conductor echoes the calls. So do the members on the field. The clanging of a metronome cuts through the haze.
Then, a burst of motion.
An electronic whoosh. The rush of speeding feet. A surge of sound. Though the performers carry brass, drums and flags, this isn’t your typical school band.
This is drum corps — an elite and high-octane version of marching band that blends art and sport.
At its highest level, “marching music’s major league” is a multimillion-dollar activity that features college-age performers from around the world. They spend their summers traveling the country on buses, sleeping on gym floors and chasing a perfect 12-minute show — all for a shot at the world championship.
“It’s Broadway on a football field,” said Jim Sturgeon, a longtime judge with Drum Corps International, the nonprofit that oversees the activity’s competitive circuit. “It has many of the same elements. It can have colors. It can have different costumes. It can have set pieces. It can have all of these things and lots of enrichment from a musical standpoint.”
The memorized shows can range thematically from straightforward, like the Santa Clara Vanguard’s 2013 interpretation of Les Misérables, to pushing the envelope, like the Bluecoats’ exploration of entropy in their 2024 world championship program “Change is Everything.”
The Boston Crusaders’ show this year is called “BOOM,” a retro-futuristic production exploring the conflict between innovative optimism and atomic-age fear.
“It’s not just marching band. It is something that transcends it so much,” said Jeffrey Turk, who is from Cape Girardeau and a color guard member with the Boston-based corps. “It's the reason why we spend all this money, go leave our homes for months at a time and go to who knows where — so we can do it over and over again. It’s because we love it.”
Metro East traditions
That passion for performance is steeped in decades of evolution.
Drum and bugle corps trace their roots to the military, where they once served as battlefield signaling units. As radios replaced bugles, those units eventually transformed into neighborhood ensembles backed by veteran groups, like the VFW, or other community organizations.
“If you could breathe, you're in. If you couldn't stay in step, they'd hit you over the head till you were,” said Bill Knapp, a 71-year-old alumnus of the now-defunct Belleville Black Knights. “Back then, we were just kids off the street. Some of us had some musical knowledge, and some of us didn't. But by the time you'd been in there for a few years, you knew what you were doing.”
When more and more groups popped up, rivalries between them naturally arose — and so did competition.
The Belleville Black Knights were a powerhouse. After being formed in 1953, the corps quickly gained national prominence for its visual identity and precision on the field — even winning back-to-back AmVets National Championship titles between 1954 and 1956.
While all of the St. Louis area’s world-class drum corps have come and gone, their legacy lives on in the stands, social media and alumni groups.
“The friends I’ve had since the early ’80s, I am still friends with today,” said Tammy Collins, a 61-year-old Black Knights alumnae who now lives in northern Virginia. “I think everybody who's marched in a band or in a drum corps, they all can just feel the experience of what these young adults are going through because we went through it ourselves.”
Many of the Black Knights still perform in the East St. Louis-based Ainad Shrine Drum and Bugle Corps, entertaining fans in local parades and raising money for the Shriners Children's Hospital.
Planes, trains and automobiles
Moving a drum corps, the group’s staff and volunteers across the country every day for an entire summer is no easy feat.
“There's a million variables that you don't have control over when you're traveling down the road,” said Chris Holland, the CEO and president of the Boston Crusaders and its parent company, Inspire Arts & Music. “Logistically, it's really a year-round operation.”
It takes a major fleet to accomplish the logistical feat: six buses, two tractor-trailer trucks, one mobile kitchen plus a smattering of ATVs, carts and dollies. It sometimes means booking flights for staff, too. The night prior, the Boston Crusaders were in Oklahoma before getting to their practice site at 7 a.m.
“When we roll into a school, I get nervous because, if you don't really know what you're signing up for, it's a big footprint that you're taking on,” Holland said, adding the organization's administrative team does a good job in explaining their operation to host schools. “We're managing all of that in different facilities almost every other day.”
Drum corps across the country continue to grapple and adapt with the financial side of the operation, but those efforts aren't always successful.
Many smaller groups have fizzled out over the years, like the Black Knights, due to financial constraints. The top-tier Santa Clara Vanguard took a hiatus in 2023 as the group’s board cited skyrocketing gas prices, a lack of affordable housing and economic pressures.
“This is never a break-even venture,” said Holland. “Most drum corps are spending somewhere between low $2 million to $3 million to administer the summer.”
The Boston CEO said that the key to continuing a safe, competitive and meaningful experience for the organization’s members requires drum corps to diversify its revenue streams.
Inspire Arts & Music also runs high-school marching band competitions and musical festivals throughout New England. The organization also relies on its deep bench of donors, many of them also veterans of the activity.
“The drum corps in my community of friends and mentors have always been there,” the director said. Holland is an alumnus of the Boston Crusaders before getting tapped to lead the organization. “There's so many people over an extended period of time that have just never left.”
That sense of loyalty runs deep — and far.
Rob de Bruin vigorously mixes cherry red Kool-Aid mix and water in a 5-gallon jug. He and his wife, Natasha, flew in from their hometown near Amsterdam to volunteer feeding the hundreds of members, volunteers and staff — a task that costs roughly $12,000 every three days.
“My daughter marched here in 2018 and ‘19,” Debruyn said as water splashed in the container. Natasha is nearby, transporting large pans of steaming meat on a recent morning. “I wanted to be a volunteer because I’m involved in drum corps ever since ‘82.”
Debruyn marched bass drum in the Netherlands-based Beatrix Drum and Bugle Corps in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when he met his wife. The love of the activity has made this yearly ritual the couple's vacation.
“We love to hear the music and we want to help the kids out in being independent,” he said. “It's a way of life.”
Hunter Jones, a 21-year-old trumpet player from Johnson City, Tennessee, agrees. He recently graduated from East Tennessee State University with a degree in computer science and plans to work in the field after the summer tour.
“It's the commitment to something so much bigger than yourself,” he said. “Everyone is just committed to becoming the absolute best version of themselves and working together to put together this larger-than-life product.”
The show must go on
The gates outside Belleville West High School are bustling.
A line of thousands stretches down several parking lots and wraps toward the school’s academic buildings. As you approach the ticket booth, a sign with big block letters is affixed to the shack: “SOLD OUT.”
Anya Lewinsky, a 22-year-old fan from Manchester, waits in line alongside her 20-year-old friend Erin Shogren from Portland. The pair met at a research camp in Pennsylvania last year and vowed to catch a live show together each year.
“It’s like watching a pop concert live. There’s music, there’s dancing, it’s entertaining, it’s fun, it’s loud and I think people enjoy that kind of thing,” Lewinsky said. “I’m also a marching band kid, so I find it just super entertaining to watch what people do at a really high level. It’s what inspired me to do marching band in the first place.”
Lonnie Clippard, 77, was also waiting in line with his husband Tommie Cantrell. The couple traveled from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to watch the show.
“I discovered [drum corps] on PBS when they used to carry it,” Clippard said. He especially loves the “excitement and the pageantry” around the activity. “I was in band in high school in a little hill town that we hardly even had a school or a band.
The gates open, and a flurry of people begin making their way into the stadium — including Rodney Williams, a 74-year-old drum corps fan from north St. Louis.
He started marching in drum corps in 1984, back when he was 14 years old, and has been following the activity ever since.
Though, there’s one group he’s really excited to see: The Boston Crusaders.
“They’re neck to neck with the Bluecoats,” he said. “It’s gonna be one of those two that’s going to win the entire thing.”
The Boston Crusaders are hoping to unseat the reigning national champion from Canton, Ohio, after coming in second last year. If they’re successful, it would be Boston’s first title in its 85-year history.
While the Ohio-based Bluecoats aren’t at the show, fans are still on the edge of their seats for the beginning of the contest.
Then, lightning strikes and the wail of a siren rings out. Audience members appear confused about what that means before an announcement booms over an intercom, telling everyone to seek shelter.
The Midwest’s unpredictable weather strikes again.
“All of the corps were warming up … then we got announcements that there was lightning that made it unsuitable to perform in,” said Miles Newman, a 22-year-old fan and alumnus of the Cavaliers, who was waiting to spectate the show. “Anything can happen, but always assume that the show may be able to go on.”
Minutes turned to hours. The crowd begins to thin as some spectators question if the contest is going to be cancelled.
Then word spreads like wildfire — the show must go on.
BOOM
Fans packed into the empty bleachers at Belleville West High School like sardines.
A silent field erupts with cheers as the Seattle Cascades take the field, the first corps in the night’s lineup. Then, as the clock inches toward midnight, the time comes.
“Welcome to the field,” the announcer's voice echoes throughout the stadium. “From Boston, Massachusetts: The Boston Crusaders!”
The performers are dressed in retro-futuristic costumes — the color guard in Mondrian color-blocked orange, turquoise and pink. The musicians are in silver and turquoise costumes reminiscent of space-age fashion.
The sound of a ticking clock sets the stage, a deep electronic whoosh builds underneath it and then a wall of brass hits two staccato points. The members of the corps fly across the field as the low and high brass pass off musical runs until the hornline swells into Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s piece “The Kingdom.”
The crowd goes wild.
Showmanship abounds. In one section featuring the mellophones, members reach over and play each other’s horns. In another feature, the contras perform a playful rendition of Juan Esquivel’s “Whatchamacallit.” One belts out the last note of the phrase while doing the splits, rolls over and catches a rifle flying high over his head.
As the show comes to a close, fans give a standing ovation to the bone-shaking performance.
“Seeing them live is honestly the best thing I could ever watch,” said Wyatt Palacios Lindsey, a 14-year-old snare drummer from Mehlville. “I think that'll go down as my favorite show in history.”
The Boston-based corps takes first place at this one, but the season’s far from over. The road to glory heads to Indianapolis next month for the world championships.
That’s where a summer of sweat, sunburns and standing ovations will come to a close — under the lights of Lucas Oil Stadium.
See more photos from The Boston Crusaders' stop in the region by St. Louis Public Radio Visuals Editor Brian Munoz.
