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Fort Sanders Community Marching Band rouses game-day spirit by Joe Tarr

by Joe Tarr

Tommy Bateman was leading his band on its regular march through the University of Tennessee campus, when a couple approached him wearing dumbfounded faces.

It was a beautiful sunny evening before the Florida football game, and the campus was a swirling sea of orange, drunks, families, college kids and elderly alumni.

“Who are you guys?” the woman asked.

“We’re the Fort Sanders Community Marching Band,” Bateman responded, pointing to his black T-shirt with the initials F-S-C-M-B printed on it.

“But who are you?” she asked again, still confused. She got the same answer.

“But what are you doing out here?” she pressed on.

“We’re out here because it gets crazy on game day, and this is fun,” Bateman explained.

“There you go,” the woman said, turning to her husband. “All right. I can get into that,” the man chimed in.

For the past four years, the Fort Sanders Community Marching Band has been baffling, thrilling and, inadvertently, pissing off fans before UT football games. This bit of guerrilla theater injected into the game-day madness by a ragtag group of twentysomethings has spurred a lot of puzzled looks and small amount of antagonism. But the band’s raison d��tre is simply to have fun.

The group dresses mostly in black and marches from the Fort down onto campus and around the stadium and back. The instrumentation changes, but usually there are a couple of trombones, two trumpets, a clarinet, a saxophone, a French horn, a xylophone and lots of drums and tambourines. They’ve used violins, guitars, toy accordions, a keyboard, pipes, pans, and several makeshift percussion instruments, like a computer keyboard and pill bottles.

A majorette leads the procession, brandishing a plain black flag on a wooden stick.

You won’t hear “Rocky Top” but they do play “Rocky’s Theme,” Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “Danny Boy,” T Rex’s “Children of The Revolution,” and Hendrix’s “Fire,” plus the “Fort Sanders Cheer,” a traditional school romp with a shout of “Fort Sanders!”

The idea for the marching band was born on the porch of Bateman’s apartment on the 1700 block of Highland Avenue in the summer of 2000.

“It was an end-of-summer, hanging-out-on-the-porch, thinking-about-the-upcoming-year conversation. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we did something like this?’ It became, ‘Hell, we can do this,’” he says.

The idea is not anti-football or anti-UT, as some observers assume. Bateman and several others in the band are big Vol fans. But they are attempting to bring a little levity to game-day insanity and to suggest to the Vol hordes the heretical idea that there is in fact more to life than football.

“The absurdity of it was very attractive,” says Bateman. “A lot of people in the Fort who aren’t sports fans or who don’t like sports fans feel very much captive in their neighborhood on game days. You can get out of the city or feel trapped in your own home. They’re in your yard or they’re asking to use your bathroom.

“It’s reclaiming the day—not necessarily for the Fort—but yourself. It’s not being afraid of the thousands upon thousands of people.”

Amy Longcrier usually leads the march with the big black flag. “I just think it’s a really fun thing to do on game day,” she says. “You’re not really allowed to do that any other time. It’s taking advantage of the chaos.”

When they first started marching, the band members were a little timid. “There were nerves where there really aren’t nerves now. We combated the nerves with substance abuse,” Bateman jokes. “Also, we didn’t really know where we were going. Now we have a planned route. There are certain street corners people expect us to play.”

There’s no official membership for the FSCMB. About 23 people show up for the march before the Florida game (a few leave early because they scored tickets to the game, which many thought would be rained out by hurricane Ivan, but it turns out to be a beautiful day). They meet at an apartment house in the 1600 block of Laurel Avenue, running through the tunes a few times to practice.

The game starts at 8 p.m., and the group heads out around 6:30. They stop in a parking lot on Laurel Avenue to play a few songs. A college kid from a nearby party runs over with his orange T flag to dance alongside Longcrier.

The band plays while marching, stopping in various spots to perform to the crowd. They march down 17th Street and play a few songs at Cumberland, then head on campus. They perform in several spots around the stadium—in one place a drunken middle-age guy pukes about 10 feet away, but both the band and the drunk are oblivious to each other.

Reactions run the gamut. There are a lot of high-fives and cheers, many more befuddled looks. Negative reactions don’t predominate, but the “fuck you”s and “you suck”s are too frequent to dismiss. One guy pelts a reporter tagging along with a bottle cap.

Bateman has gotten a unique perspective on the UT football crowd mood. “It definitely differs from game to game. It was an anxious, excited crowd for the Florida game. At the beginning of the season, the crowd is more optimistic. There aren’t many games where we’re expected to lose. The last game against Georgia—who we’d lost the last couple of times to—people were intense and not as open to our silliness.”

At noon or 1 p.m. games, the crowd is generally lethargic; mid-afternoons are more lively; and in the evenings they tend to go into the stadium earlier because they’ve been tailgating all day, he says.

The reaction from police and security is also wide-ranging. Some ignore the band; other policemen make requests at street crossings. The band did spook a police horse slightly, which earned them a stern warning. But at another game, a policeman near the stadium made an unusual request. “The police officer had been standing in the same spot for a couple of hours and was sick of hearing a street preacher,” Bateman says. “He asked us to go and play around the street preacher for a little bit and drown him out. The street preacher yelled at us for being heathens.”

Often the reaction has nothing to do with UT, Knoxville or the band. The first game of the season this year came just after the Republican National Convention in New York. A lot of people mistook the group members for leftist anarchists—a number of crowd members shouted pro-Bush cheers or confronted the band about their political affiliation or stance on the war.

“A lot of people assumed we were protestors because they’d recently seen images of protestors. Not to mention we’re kind of scruffy and wear black, which people assume means we’re anarchist protesters. Which is the wrong assumption to make,” Bateman says.

The black color was chosen because there aren’t any colleges with a predominantly black color scheme. Several of the band’s instruments did make a political venture to New York City as part of another street marching band, the Utopian Street Orchestra, which was organized by Erick Haaby, a sporadic marcher in the Fort Sanders Band. One of the drums came back with an anti-Bush sticker on it, but the band members ripped it off halfway through a march when it attracted attention.

Many members have never been in marching band, but a few, especially in the horn section, were high school band geeks, says Bateman—who, if he ever was a geek, certainly isn’t now, as a member of the rock band The Rockwells. All four Rockwells—Bateman’s brother Trace, and Jonathan and Fred Kelly—play in the Fort Sanders Band. “We relive the immediate gratification of being in a band—and this is just the horn players; most of the percussion just come to beat on shit. We can relive the gratification without the hard work and preparation that goes into being in a school band,” Bateman says.

“I used to do marching band in high school and a lot of people did,” says Seth Hopper, who plays trumpet. “I probably would have done it in college. We try to march in step, but we really need to have band camp over the summer. It’s sort of chaotic. We never really rehearse. We get a new piece, we play it that day, and we’re marching.”

The marching band has made forays that don’t involve football, mainly some excursions singing and playing Christmas carols around town over the last holidays. “I’d love to get us into a parade,” Bateman says.

So how many members of the Fort Sanders Marching Band actually live in Fort Sanders? Not as many as there used to be, but quite a few.

“Originally, everybody [lived in the Fort]. I got kicked out of my house in the Fort. It wasn’t my desire to leave. It took me a while to get used to the quietness of Fourth and Gill. We still get in trouble at parties there,” Bateman says. “I miss the Fort.”

October 21, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 43 © 2004 Metro Pulse