A love letter to Texas high school ... band

It's just as intense, competitive, and formative as Texas high school football

“Were you in band?”

I ask this question a lot, really at even the slightest hint that the person with whom I am speaking might have been in band. In this case, I was asking the barista at my coffee shop in Park Slope, because she had a “J.D. Polk Band” t-shirt featuring the sort of juvenile logo design you see on high school band t-shirts. I still have all my high school band t-shirts, for some reason.

“Yeah, I was. Were you?” Eager to pounce on the topic — as always — I told her I was practically the king of the band nerds; not in that I was ruling the band, but that I was among the most devoted and competitive of the band nerds. “So you were in a bunch of bands. Do you like this band?” She pointed up to an airy indie rock song playing in the coffee shop. I clarified I didn’t mean a rock band, but high school band — marching band, drum lines, football games, jazz band. She gave a mildly puzzled look to my brief description of band but nodded along, I suspect just to bring to a close this type of 20-second conversation she likely has a hundred times a day.

In my now 10 years living on the East Coast, I rarely come across people who were in band. If they took music classes in high school, their version of “band” doesn’t even begin to approximate the intensity and scope of my experience in the great state of Texas. As I’m writing this essay, Google Docs is telling me that “in band” is a grammar error. But if I ask someone who went to a public school in Texas if they were in band, I don’t get quizzical looks like I got from the barista because they know exactly what I’m asking: if they were one of the freaks in the cult whose high school experience was wholly dictated by the year-round calendar of performances, social events, and competitions. For me, the answer to the question of whether I was in band is undeniably, completely, and hopelessly yes. 

As a teen, I can’t say I possessed anything resembling social skill. I grew up in a broken home on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, to the extent that there is a wrong side of the tracks in Waxahachie, Texas. We lived in a somewhat shitty duplex in what might have been the first mixed-race neighborhood in my still-segregated hometown. My classmates with married parents who owned their houses in all-white neighborhoods felt like kids growing up on a different planet than me, a feeling of alienation exacerbated by the fact that my mother and I did not attend church, which was the invisible hand shaping social circles throughout school.

As such, I was a kid who needed a place to belong within school’s social constructs, and I needed adults to guide me. School itself wasn’t providing either of those things. I was never a particularly devoted student, and my teachers judged me solely in relation to my older brother, who was the valedictorian of his class seven years prior. I can still distinctly hear ringing in my head a teacher in junior high telling me I was not as smart as my brother, and I still have a marked-up English paper from my senior year on which the phrase is written in the margin. Needless to say this did not motivate me to strive for academic excellence, nor make me receptive to the tutelage of those teachers, who failed to recognize that I was at least smart enough that the near-zero effort I put into school work was enough to get As and Bs in Advanced Placement classes.

The search for belonging made a pit stop on the tennis team, which I played as youth. The team was stocked with preppy upper-crust “popular” kids. They were armed with the type of hostile religious righteousness that comes with being a “mean girl” in a small Texas town that might have the highest churches per capita rate in the country. My vocal atheism, meek insecurity, and general awkwardness made me a pariah on the team, and at times a target. An upperclassman once overheard me talking to my one friend on the team about my belief in evolution. Incensed, the entire varsity boys and girls tennis teams lined up to take turns shitting on me, a scolding that probably lasted a solid 15 to 20 minutes. One boy in the class above me, a generally jolly fellow around whom the social system of the tennis team seemed to revolve, got right up in my face and yelled “Evolution of animals, bitch!”

A few weeks after that, the tennis team’s student manager — a caricature of a redneck bully who stood at least 8 inches taller than me — attacked me while I was playing on the court, landing a couple solid punches to the side of my face. Only after I was on the ground and in position to take a pretty serious beating did any of the numerous onlookers intervene. None of those onlookers was the team’s coach, who literally did not show up for any portion of the hour-and-a-half junior varsity practices. I’m not sure I ever got a single instruction from him on how to play tennis.

I dreaded tennis practice even more than class. By default, I was left with band. But it was a considerably easier sell because music was something that clicked with me even at a young age. I vividly remember my musical awakening, which was Billy Joel doing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on Saturday Night Live. With my family huddled around the TV, I was so unprepared for the rush of excitement that I ran into my bedroom to be alone and process what was happening inside me. Throughout elementary school I bought (or shoplifted) almost every Billy Joel album, a discography that’s so seared into my brain that it’s still my go-to karaoke choice. In junior high I became enthralled with music that spoke to my mindless pubescent rage —grunge, alternative rock (whatever that phrase means), and thrash metal — which led to another binge of albums that I bought or stole (apologies to Sam Walton, his family, and the shareholders of Wal-Mart).

Band begins in sixth grade, and I chose to play the saxophone because my brother played saxophone, but no longer in elementary school and suddenly inundated with students I didn’t recognize, I was too insecure to put the work in to be good at it. My junior high tryout tape, which I recently unearthed, displays an alto saxophone player who had not actually learned the music and was fumbling through notes he clearly wasn’t comfortable fingering yet. As a result, I made the second of three junior high bands, and I was moved to the baritone saxophone, which is not to be taken as a vote of confidence in a seventh grade saxophonist’s future in band. But in eighth grade I started putting the work in and made first chair all-region on bari, which means I finished first of six or seven players hailing from neighboring towns.

While band is more akin to any other extracurricular activity in junior high, it necessarily becomes your whole life in high school, primarily because of marching band, which requires monumental effort to put a show together. The school year opens in July with two weeks of summer band — the nerd equivalent of two-a-days — during which you learn and memorize the music, in addition to the marching drill (I’m told marching band in Texas has grown even more intense and now requires three-a-days). In Waxahachie, that meant spending your days on a gravel parking lot that may have had more tar than gravel, and the scorching summer heat could bring that tar to a bubble. One year I got new white sneakers for the start of school and after the first day of summer band they were already blotched with tar; mother was displeased. When school starts, the band schedule shifts to a morning rehearsal, one of four class periods, and an afternoon rehearsal. For the more ambitious band nerds, you cram in practice for individual competitions, which expand from all-region in junior high to all-area and all-state. For kids in jazz band there is also an all-state jazz track in the fall. As if this wasn’t enough, the solo and ensemble competition have students play a solo piece usually accompanied by a piano, and for sax players, a saxophone quartet piece.

Unlike my absentee tennis coach, the band’s head director was a man who poured his life into us — Bill Centera. He came across more like a football coach than a band director. He sometimes gave us life lessons from Mike Holmgren, then the coach of the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers. The music he chose was brash and exhilarating, and he wanted us to play loud. During the homecoming parade, he walked in front of the band with his wife at his side and his two Labrador retrievers on a leash; I remember one was named Coda. Originally a sax player, he occasionally joined the trumpet section in the stands during football games and played tunes two octaves higher than written, and with such clarity and force that you’d think he’d been the lead trumpet player in his college jazz band. He was someone we wanted to please, partly because when we didn’t he unloaded on us with a fury as forceful as his trumpet playing. He exuded confidence, charisma, and bravado, and for a kid like me who exuded the opposite of those things, I eagerly lined up behind him for the battle that is Texas high school band.

But at the beginning of my freshman year, the band machine was overwhelming. There were kids who looked more like men, and all-state caliber musicians who today are incredibly good professionals. While some had the music memorized before summer band even started, I was struggling to even play it. I was placed in the second of three bands because there was a junior bari player who was, well, better than me. It didn’t help that I was developing early signs of what would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. One day that fall I was waiting for my mother to pick me up and, feeling particularly overcome, I climbed into one of the instrument lockers and played Metallica’s “Bleeding Me” over and over again on my Walkman. Kids stopped to see whose legs were sticking out. A few tried to talk to me. I said nothing.

Band certainly had its bullies, but not with the same viciousness I experienced on the tennis team. And because they were also in band and thus not exactly the cool kids on campus, it was easier to see through them and dismiss it. The bari player in the band above me regularly tried to haze me, but he was such a doofus that my reaction was usually a hearty eye roll; after he graduated high school he was fired from his cashier job at Wal-Mart for running up a huge bill on a sex phone hotline with the credit card number of a customer. Another bully in band not unlike the tennis team’s manager said a few mean things to me in passing, but I don’t even remember what they were because I thought he was a total fucking loser; coincidentally he was also fired from his job at Wal-Mart after graduating, for waltzing out the front door with a huge TV in a grocery cart without paying for it. Presumably the alarms went off.

The social hierarchy in band was also topped by white home-owning church-goers, but instead of trying to shame me they tried to convert me, or get me to go to youth group with them. When that didn’t work, they generally let me be. Still, it shaped the social strata of the band; the various members of the various cliques I would learn were kids who went to the same youth group. I was never part of any of these cliques, but I was friends with the cliques, like an honorary member of the clique. This is a social pattern I retain to this day — a floater who fits in everywhere but nowhere at the same time. Aside from not going to church, I was a fairly obnoxious high school kid. When my bipolar swung toward mania, I would try to needle classmates with shock humor and things I knew to be offensive, a knee-jerk response in conversation fueled by social anxiety. It led to me saying things I now cringe at the thought of people remembering. One time I tried this bit on an innocent and naïve girl in the primary youth group clique in my class. I don’t remember what I said — certainly something awful — but I do remember she looked at me, turned to her side, closed her eyes, clasped her hands together, and started mumbling to herself. She was praying, as if the devil himself had come to tempt her with the sin of F bombs and crude jokes.

My sophomore year I was still in the second band at Waxahachie, but I was working at it and made all-region that year. I quit tennis to join Waxahachie’s second jazz band, which was Centera’s strength as a director. While jazz bands don’t compete for a state title because there isn’t one, we were almost certainly the best jazz program in the state, with the top band earning an invitation to the Montreux Jazz Festival my freshman year. Jazz band triggered my second musical awakening, specifically after hearing a big band arrangement of the Chick Correa tune “Got a Match?” that the top jazz band played that year. The end of the chart features a screeching trumpet soli that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, just like when I was 7 years old watching Billy Joel on SNL. It kicked off a period for me that I lovingly refer to as my “jazz coma,” a six or seven year stretch when I didn’t listen to much outside of jazz and classical. And while the jazz band’s dominance was all but assured, the focus for us my sophomore year was shoring up our reputation in an area where we had yet to prove ourselves — marching band.

Waxahachie had never qualified for the state marching competition. When I was in eighth grade they missed the cut by one spot. This year we were marching the Peterloo overture for orchestra by Malcolm Arnold, based on the 1992 show by the Cavaliers of Drum Corps International (DCI), which is a summer drum and bugle circuit that’s kind of like the major leagues for marching band, featuring the crème de le crème of band nerds. I like to call DCI the band nerd equivalent of heavy metal because bugles are considerably louder than flutes and saxophones and even the traditional brass instruments that are used in high school band. It’s so loud you can almost feel the force of the sound hit your face. Centera brought a DCI attitude to high school marching band. Peterloo is a musical depiction of the Peterloo massacre in 1819. The opening sequence is a soft and heart-turning melody that is interrupted by piercing, dissonant brass lines. It builds to a final crescendo with a triumphant return of the beautiful melody. Toward the end of the year we cut an audio tape for something that pushed our drum major to tears. “Thank you for this feeling!” he screamed after one take.

The Cavaliers performance of Peterloo remains one of my favorite pieces of music, and it was a classic pick from Centera, who sold us the goal of making state with the effectiveness of a televangelist. Adding to the air of importance in our quest was the fact that a former Waxahachie band student turned filmmaker Duane Condor shot a documentary of our marching season, which brought a film crew to our practices and performances. The entire season was building to what we assumed would be Waxahachie announcing to the state of Texas that our marching band program had arrived. But to our total shock, we finished fifth at the area contest, and only three bands qualified for state. After the results were announced, Centera gave a pep talk to a crowd of band kids in tears that I can still remember every word of. The judges notes of our performance didn’t make any secret as to why we missed state: the brass was overblowing. Apparently, they didn’t like our impression of a DCI corps.

Despite this crushing defeat, the rest of the year went well for me personally. By the end of spring, I was a featured soloist in the second jazz band. With my contemporary above me graduating, the path was clear for me to assume a leadership role in band. My class was particularly stacked with good players on every instrument. While the marching band didn’t qualify for state, we were primed to do so my senior year, when my class was at the peak of its powers. With Centera directing the jazz band, we would continue to be the premiere program in the state. I’d found my place of belonging and was about to break out as a featured performer.

But it all fell apart. Right before our spring jazz concert, the last band event of the school year, we showed up to class, and Centera didn’t. After school that day, the entire band gathered to hear from Waxahachie’s junior high director David Cote, who informed us that Centera would not continue as head band director at Waxahachie High School. The rage and confusion we felt resulted in pointed questions for Cote, who through no fault of his own had only unsatisfying answers as to what just occurred. But in small towns like Hachie, everybody knows everybody’s business, so it didn’t take long for us to learn that Centera was having an affair with the choir teacher, and his wife found out. We never saw him on campus again. No explanation. No goodbye. Nothing. As if going through stages of grief, I found out where the choir teacher lived and drove by. In the apartment complex’s parking lot was Centera’s pickup truck with the “Spirit of Waxahachie Indian Band” sticker on the back window.

Even more galling than leaving unannounced was that Centera took the head band director job at Carrollton Newman Smith, our jazz band’s chief rival, to the extent that we had one. His replacement in Waxahachie was a man named Benny Davis, who was a perfectly qualified band director, but he had none of the bravado or charisma of Centera. Davis made us feel like what Centera made us forget that we were — band nerds. From the jump it was clear he didn’t like our DCI impression either. Our marching show that first year with Davis was a Beatles theme that nobody seemed to find particularly inspiring. The trumpet section no longer had a green light to take the written music up as many octaves as they could play it. Originally a trumpet player, Davis occasionally joined the trumpet section in the stands, just like Centera, but rather than belting Super Cs, he played the music as written; you couldn’t even hear him. The senior class above me immediately went into mutiny, and kids started to quit. I got the impression Davis welcomed this to a degree, I’d guess just to rid the band of Centera’s influence, which probably weighed on him given his approach was 180 degrees from his predecessor’s. The jazz band’s bass player tried to quit right before our biggest competition — the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Jazz Festival. Our repertoire for the festival included a ballad called “Quiet Time” on which I was the featured soloist. Rather than risk him spoiling my biggest moment in band to date, I convinced him to stay — in exchange for attending his youth group for a contractually obligated three (3) times.

Our primary competition at the UTA Jazz Festival, which had previously been nobody, was now Centera and Newman Smith. Had he still been at Waxahachie, we would have absolutely obliterated them, as we always did. Instead, the judges announced a first place tie between Newman Smith and Waxahachie, with matching scores of something like 92.7. After one year of them having Centera and one year of us not having Centera, our advantage over them had been completely erased. Despite the tie score, UTA declared us the winners of the festival, which came with an invitation for the following year to play the festival’s “night concert,” which is where all the bands competing gather for the announcement of the winners, which is sandwich between two performances — the previous year’s winner and UTA’s top jazz band. Centera’s undergraduate degree was at UTA, and he clearly took a lot of queues from UTA’s jazz director, Bill Snodgrass, namely the playing as loud as you possibly fucking can. Newman Smith’s best players were all graduating, so Centera wasn’t going to have much to work with to play the night concert the next year, whereas we were returning all key contributors, including me. I always suspected that Newman Smith actually won the festival, and Centera, with his close ties to UTA, just told them to give it to us so he didn’t have to take an inferior band to the night concert, but they called it a tie so he could still tell his kids they won. That’s my tin-foil conspiracy theory anyway.

I established myself as one of the best bari sax players in the Dallas-Fort Worth area during my junior year, if not the best. Aside from playing the featured solo for the UTA Jazz Festival-winning band, I missed qualifying for the all-state band by a single point, and I finished fourth among about 25 in the competition for the all-state jazz band, which was brutally competitive because only one bari player qualifies because there’s only one all-state jazz band (I’m told there are now more than one). Going into my senior year, the band’s primary goal was again to qualify for the state marching contest, which we did. But because Davis wasn’t as good a hype man as Centera, the victory felt empty. While the senior class was elated, the underclassmen didn’t seem to understand the significance of the achievement. On a personal level, my goal was to make the all-state band, the path to which was to finish first at the all-area contest. On that fateful day in January, I was the first person to walk into the tryout room. Minutes later, in walked the kid who beat me by one point the year before; let’s call him Jared. After the five kids arrived, in walked the five judges, which to my shock included one Bill Centera.

The contest went like this: There were five kids trying out for one all-state band spot. We each played the same three etudes for five judges who ranked the five kids first to fifth. The top and bottom scores for each kid were thrown out. The other three were added up, and whoever had the lowest score made all-state band. After it began, it didn’t take long for me to recognize that this competition was, like the year before, between me and Jared. My performance had one serious blunder; in the allegro etude, which was basically all sixteenth notes, my tonguing got out of sync with my fingers, which led to a 4 or 5 second sequence that sounded like babble. The tryout closed with Jared playing the same etude. As he was moving flawlessly through it, I found religion and began praying for him to fuck up. As if I willed it into existence, he fumbled so badly in the final measures that he stopped playing for a moment. Panicked, he simply played the final note of the etude and got up, dejected and red-faced. I walked out of the room thinking I won. But when they posted the results, Jared’s scores were 1, 1, 2, 2, and … 1. Mine were 1, 1, 2, 2, and … 5. The judge who had me fifth was … Bill Centera.

Ultimately it didn’t matter that Centera had me fifth; that being my lowest ranking, it was tossed from the result. My total score was 5, Jared’s was 4, and I lost to him once again by one point. But if he had had me first where I belonged I would have won. And more painful than not making all-state was being denied the spot by the man who had inspired me to be in band to begin with. After they posted the result I retreated to a corner where I began to cry. Centera followed me. “When you’re majoring in music next year nobody is gonna care about this all-state shit,” he said. Jared also came by. “I wish they could take both of us,” he said. Jared went on to win first chair in the all-state band, beating out the six other bari players who made state from different areas. I saw him again a year later at the TMEA conference, which is a band nerd convention. “If you had made all-state, too, that try out for first chair would have just been me against you again.” Having bludgeoned many a bari player over the previous two years, I believed him. While I did not technically make the all-state band, I often tell people now that I was an all-state musician in high school, because on the merits of my ability I was. What prevented me from making it was the system. If I’d lived in West Texas or East Texas or an area where the band programs aren’t as strong, I would have rolled into the all-state band with a trail of blood behind me. Instead I was slotted in the Dallas area, which is home to some of the best high school band programs in the nation, and more importantly the one kid in the state who could beat me. I’m a little embarrassed that 20 years later I still have swimming in my head this rationalization for saying I was an all-state musician. But fuck it, I was.

Centera once told us that the best feeling in the world was walking into an all-region or all-area tryout room with your horn and watching everyone’s face turn sour, because they knew who you were and that you were about to murder them. He was right. I saw that look a lot, and I must confess that I miss sucking blood from the sweet flesh of inferior saxophonists. When you qualify for one of the all-whatever bands, they give you a patch to sew on your letter jacket. The left arm of my letter jacket is completely filled with patches, the band nerd equivalent of collecting scalps. The all-state patch, however, is a round one that’s too big to fit on the sleeve; it only fits on the back of a letter jacket. The back of my jacket is empty.

I went on to major in music at the University of North Texas, which is home to the most prestigious jazz program in the world (sorry Juilliard and Berklee). It’s incredibly competitive, but I was holding my own. At the end of my freshman year, the jazz band I was in played an arrangement of Art Blakey’s “Moanin’” that was a duet between a bari sax and a trumpet. I remember at the end of one of the run throughs on this chart, someone in the band let out a hearty “woo!” and clapped for a second. He was clapping for me. “You sound really good,” the director said to me after class. 

But something was missing. My lesson teacher, who was a doctoral student, went AWOL on the regular. During my sophomore year he was absent the entire month of November, and I later learned it was because he was doing things like picking up the saxophone professor Eric Nestler from the airport, and similar acts of effectively painting Nestler’s butthole with his tongue. UNT had 115 saxophone players at the time. As much as I was improving, I was still light years behind the best of the bunch, and the path to closing the gap, which included mastering flute and clarinet, looked increasingly daunting; I had not even mastered the saxophone yet. I didn’t see any way I could get to the top of the mountain at UNT, and with my sense of cynicism and nihilism growing rapidly in the college environment, I felt increasingly alienated from the sea of stuffy band nerds who’d once given me a place to belong. With an assigned lesson teacher who could give two shits about how I was doing, I didn’t have an advocate within the program, much less a Centera to inspire me. I dropped out of the music department after my sophomore year.

And it haunts me to this day. Why did I drop out of music, this thing I loved intensely and was good at? Where could I have gone if I hadn’t? I’ve gotten to experience a lot of amazing things in my journalism career, and I love my life in New York City, but there are times when this question overwhelms me. I’m not delusional enough to think I could have been a recording artist on the saxophone, but I sure as shit could have been a band director in Texas. I have college friends who are now band directors, which gives me a good view of the life I passed on. They text me every other year or so to say Bill Centera is at a clinic they’re attending, noting that he travels with a sizable posse these days. That’s not surprising given we, his students, were effectively his posse in high school, and I would imagine at this point he is the most accomplished high school jazz band director in the state of Texas. “Go remind him that he cost me my all-state patch,” I text back.

I ended up getting a journalism degree, and the first six years of my career was largely covering high school football in Texas. I had a bit in the press box among the other writers where at halftime I’d viciously critique the marching bands — the flute section is out of tune, one of the snare drummers isn’t matching the stick height of the drummers next to him, that mellophone player is so far out of alignment he might as well be in Nebraska. At a game I was covering in Frisco, Texas, a band took the field at halftime, and during the announcement I heard “head band director Bill Centera.” Their show featured more woodwinds than I was accustomed to hearing from his bands, and the brass section was notably not overblowing. Apparently he learned the lesson of our failure with Peterloo, though some of the marching drill was verbatim from our show. After the game I went down to say hi to him as his band was filing out of the stadium. “There’s no way you remember me, but …” I began. He stopped one of the kids walking by and said with a touch of excitement in his voice “This is one of my old students, Jeff. He played bari.” He paused for a second, raised his brow, dropped the corners of his mouth, and nodded his head a few times, as if he was suddenly impressed with whatever version of me he was hearing in his head. “He was good.”