The World's Largest Clarinet

Every year at the band banquet, one piece of the entertainment (in addition to me setting things on fire) is the band banquet video.  The video consists primarily of photographs of the year, both official and personal (but not, y’know, personal; what happens on band trips stays on band trips, amirite?) with musical accompaniment (often the real versions of field show or stands tunes from the year, which means at least we get rid of the incredibly long Tatgenhorst endings…); in short, a pretty standard awards ceremony montage. 

However, breaking up the stretches of photos is a skit, which is performed and filmed by band members.  It’s usually pretty funny (or it’s intended to be funny, anyways…), and the topic changes every year.  I honestly don’t remember most of the skits, although I do remember one about a quest to find out what the “J” in “J. Bradley McDavid” stands for.  (For those of you not in HMB, JBrad (also known affectionately as “Buddy-buddy-buddy”) is the director.)

And in my rookie year (yes, the year of the burning napkin), we nearly did a skit about the World’s Largest Clarinet.

Why?  Well, our bowl game that year had been against Purdue, which boasts of having the World’s Largest Drum, and has a whole little, I don’t know, cult around it.  And we felt like making fun of that.  (Along with their silly salute during their fight song.  Seriously, whose idea was this?

(It’s a bit ridiculous how much both my high school and college careers involved schools boasting “World’s Largest Drum”s, or at least really big drums.  Kennewick High has one.  Purdue has one.  Texas has one.  With all of the bowl games during my band tenure being against either Purdue or Texas, there was literally a “World’s Largest Drum” at every bowl game I went to.  Seriously, people, overcompensating much?  And none of them are actually the World’s Largest Drum.)

In all honesty, we probably thought the idea was funnier than it really was, but that’s not our fault.  Exhaustion, dehydration and impending sickness will do that to you.

For those of you who have never done a full Rose Bowl trip… actually, I’m just bragging, because I know that’s most of you.  Anyways, the day of the game itself is… let’s say “long”.

 It starts off with getting up around 3 am, because you have to leave the hotel around 4 am to head for the parade staging ground.  Once you actually step off (which could be hours later, because the overriding motto of marching band is “hurry up and wait”), it’s a 5.5 mile route.  If you’ve ever walked 5.5 miles straight, you’ll know that’s not all that bad on its own.  But now imagine doing it in a heavy wool suit, in sunny, 85-90 degree weather, while playing an (often heavy) instrument and performing choreography the entire way.

I am not exaggerating when I say that at the end of the parade, I was able to scrape solid sheets of salt off of my rather sunburned face.

(Now that I stop to think about it, what I thought was a quirky HMB tradition of shaving facial hair before the Rose Bowl actually makes a lot more sense.)

After that, you get a quick lunch and head off to the stadium itself, where you do a pregame show (and fantasize about spraypainting “Jones” onto the state flag that the Purdue band hauls out in addition to the American flag because how selfish is that?  Where’s the Washington state flag?), a halftime show, and four quarters of screaming and yelling and playing.  By the time all the postgame stuff is over, it’s well into the evening.

However, our day didn’t end there, because winter quarter at the illustrious University of Washington started, in the Year of Our Lord MMI, on January 2^nd.  (Remarkably, they changed the policy after that so that classes start no earlier than the 3^rd, and often a day or two after that, depending on where things fall on the calendar.  Only took them 140 years to figure that out…) And that meant we needed to get home that night.

So, we all piled back onto our buses and headed for the airport.  Unfortunately, it was so foggy at the airport that we had to sit on a road near the charter plane for a couple hours before we could leave.  As best as I can recall (and working backwards from the fact that I got back to my dorm room at 2am), our plane took off around 10:00 that evening, by which point we’d all been up for around 19 hours, marched in a burning hellscape of a parade, had a full game day after that, and had very little to drink (seriously, I don’t think most of us got more than about 24 oz. of fluid the entire day) along the way.  It’s no wonder half of the band was sick the following week.

(However, this has nothing on the worst bowl trip ever, which was a couple years later.  I’ll post that story in the near future.)

At any rate, that’s why we were exhausted, dehydrated and getting sick.  But as I’m sure most of you have experienced at some point during your lives, at a certain point in this cycle, everything gets incredibly funny.  And thus, the idea of the World’s Largest Clarinet skit was born.

So what was the World’s Largest Clarinet?

The skit would have been filmed in a documentary style, covering the history and ritual of the World’s Largest Clarinet, and including interviews and footage of the World’s Largest Clarinet in action.

There would have been four poles attached to the World’s Largest Clarinet so that four people could carry it while marching, while another couple people would run along behind and take turns trying to play it. 

The carriers would have been spectacularly outfitted in knee-high striped socks, short shorts (even the guys), some sort of shirt (I’m fuzzy here) and colanders on their heads.  They would also have spoken their interview lines in chorus.    (This will make more sense if you go look at the folks wheeling around Purdue’s drum.)

The joke, of course, besides those outfits, because how great would we have looked in those?, would have been that the clarinet itself would have just been a regular clarinet. 

So apparently the answer is yes, this was way funnier at the time.  In fact, in my head, it’s still hilarious.  Sorry.

I don’t really remember why we didn’t get around to making it; I think laziness was probably a big part of it.  But I still think it would have been awesome.  Because who cares about a giant bass drum?  It’s still just a drum.  It goes “boom” when they hit it.  Woo.  (And their choreography sucked, too!)