The doggerel days of summer

The brilliant Robert Graboyes, at his Substack,  Bastiat’s Window, did better than I by Independence Day with his post “For July 4th, Eight Uniforms & Eight Marches.”  There are video clips of all of them, plus an audio clip of a composition of his own.  Now, myself, I think that for the NOAA and the Public Health Service to have official marches is pushing it.  On the other hand, the U.S. Space Corps’ new march, “Semper Supra,” is a more than worthy addition to the repertoire.

I heard a representative sample of “Semper Supra” in the updated version of the Armed Forces medley that the Oakland Municipal Band plays at its season opener on the Fourth of July.  The free concerts, which continue on Sundays in July, have been running since 1912 in Lakeside Park.  The weather is usually splendid.

Down toward the Lake, one can see the beloved Green Monster freeform children’s play structure, a childhood favorite of mine.  Sly and the Family Stone posed on it for the cover of the single “Dance to the Music.  A few years ago, the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club restored this rebar and concrete gem.  The project called it the Midcentury Monster, which is accurate but a bit off.  25 years ago, the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club raised funds to restore the beautiful Art Deco Necklace of Lights, and Gill Electric donated the labor (plug the good neighbors!).  The Necklace of Lights had been turned off during World War II because of its proximity to Bay Area military bases, so it wouldn’t serve as a kind of “Bomb Here” sign.  It was extended to make a complete loop when a causeway was replaced, and the estuary channel broadened and daylighted.

The band concerts and the volunteer improvements are an American tradition, from the days when people took pride in their towns and cities, from when the only other live musical entertainment relied on the piano in the parlor.  It’s quite a treat to be able to stroll on up with a lawn chair and enjoy the concert.

This Fourth, I arrived a tad late and missed the Anthem.  I set up as the Band was playing Sousa’s “U.S. Field Artillery March,” which incorporated what used to be known as “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”  It’s now “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” presumably for the benefit of the vocabulary challenged.  When I was a kid, asking what a caisson was would have gotten the response of a reminder that dictionaries exist and we have one on the bookshelf.

When I was a teenager, my peers produced one of the innumerable sets of alternative lyrics involving drinking.  Our version:

Give a cheer, give a cheer for the girls who drink the beer
In the cellars of St. Vincent’s High
They are brave, they are bold for the liquor they can hold
For it’s guzzle, guzzle, guzzle as the beer goes down your muzzle
Shout out your order loud and clear—More beer!
Wherever you will go, you will always hear and know
Of the drunkards of St. Vincent’s High

I poked around a bit to confirm the unoriginality, and found one version that had me doubled over:

For it’s run, run, run—I think I hear a nun

“Nobody loves a smart aleck, Bethie Anne.”  And yet I sang along with our version anyway.

Every concert ends with “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” a true classic which deserves close listening for the brilliance of Sousa’s arrangement.  One of the volunteers lends flags to children and leads them in parading in a circle around the bandstand, while the smart alecks among the audience (ahem!) sing, at the proper moment:

Be kind to your web-footed friends
for a duck may be somebody’s mother
Be kind to your friends in the swamp
Where it’s very, very cold and very damp
Now you may think that this is the end
Well, it is

Except during the piccolo counterpoint solo, because it’s a treat and singing to it would be sacrilege.  Apparently, there is a set of lyrics that runs through the end of the stanza, but this is how I learned it.

One of my Daughters of Known Troublemakers organizations engages in the patriotic exercise of awarding medals to veterans or active service members in the name of their troublemaking ancestors.  I’ve been tasked occasionally with coming up with recordings of the appropriate marches and burning them to CD for playing after the solemnities.  I compress them and spike the 2.5 to 5 kilohertz range so they’ll jump out of the audio system and carry across the room.  It’s akin to how Buck Owens used to engineer his singles, so they’d jump out of pickup truck AM radios and make an impression.

One year, one of the recipients had served in the Civil Air Patrol.  There actually is a Civil Air Patrol march, but it’s incredibly obscure.  I was able to find a version on YouTube.  The sound quality was suboptimal, but I was bound and determined to signal process the heck out of it so I could play something decently acceptable.  Wow, was I proud of myself for having done so!  And just as I was congratulating myself for having rocked, the medal recipient came over and thanked me, but said the Civil Air Patrol had long ago retired that march in favor of the U.S. Air Force “Wild Blue Yonder.”

And I realized at that moment it was a typical case of American blind justice, and the judge wasn’t going to look at the 27 8x10 full color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

I didn’t come home from the Municipal Band concert and grill myself a steak, as I could have done in keeping with another tradition.  I’d recently cooked up a batch of red sauce, which involves hours of simmering and produces five quarts that can be frozen.  I had to get creative with freezer space, so I decided to make Chicken Cacciatore and reduce the volume load by a couple of boneless, skinless thighs.  DAR on my mother’s side, ESL (Italian was first) on my father’s side.  I had an excellent, really American Fourth of July.