Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Fall 1985: Hoppin' Knights Rock the World

My perspective of the football season during my senior year at Bartlett High School was different, as for the first time, I was in the marching band. I wasn't actually marching, but I was in the sidelines pit as a keyboard player, so I could neither be the fan in the stands, nor a photographer on the sidelines. Just about every weekend was a marching festival out of town in addition to our Friday night ball games, so I was far busier than I had been in previous years. I recall that my job was primarily to play the keyboard parts on the song "Axel F" from the movie Beverly Hills Cop.

One of our first out of town tournaments, if not our first, was at Milan, Tennessee on the weekend of September 14, and it was memorable for a couple of reasons. We had a student who had transferred in from out of town named Perry McCall, who was quite a breakdancer and stepper, and had been accepted into the Rho Psi Kappas, the unofficial fraternity we had at Bartlett. (I had hoped to also be accepted into that group, but was rejected.) At any rate, when the band performed at Milan, Perry got out on either the field or the sidelines and breakdanced, which I don't think pleased our director Mr. Cooke much, although I remember thinking it was cool indeed. But the other thing that I recall was an organization called the Milan Knights, whose members were everywhere around the festival. They were an all-Black group (at least as far as I could tell) and wore jackets with a season and year on one side (Fall 1985, for example) and the letters HKRW on the other, as well as nicknames like "Sporty T," "Cool Rock C" and "Andre." However, what they actually had to do with the band festival was never clear to us. When we left the festival, we stopped at a Burger King down the street for food, and I recall that the Knights had followed us down there, and were deep in the restaurant. I don't recall that they started anything with us, but I think some of our members thought they might.

A couple of weeks later, we ran into the Milan Knights again when we went to another festival at Rothrock Stadium in Jackson, Tennessee. This stadium was in East Jackson, across from an abandoned college campus complete with abandoned dormitories, which we found out was the former location of Union University before it had moved out on the 45 Bypass. I found it a rather forlorn and sad place, but in the twilight as we arrived, Jackson Central-Merry's band was warming up on what had been the Quadrangle of the old campus, and to my amnazement, they were playing the same arrangement of "Precious Lord" that the Bartlett Chamber Choir had sung to win an award at Opryland in 1984. (I didn't know it at the time, but that arrangement was made by a former Jackson State University student from Chicago named Arnold Sevier. It was unpublished at the time, but since has been published and is now readily available everywhere). There were plenty of Milan Knights in the stands of the stadium in their blue-and-white attire, but we noticed quite a few other students in the stands wearing fraternity regalia as well. Most of the organizations seemed patterned after the Black college fraternities such as Phi Beta Sigma, Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi and Omega Psi Phi. Someone told me that the "HKRW" on the Milan Knights' regalia stood for "Hoppin' Knights Rock the World," but I never independently verified that. I honestly don't recall how we did, but I remember that we had fun, so we must have done well.

On October 11, signs had gone up about a Sophisticated Gents party at the Raleigh Skateland, but it ended up being postponed because of the Memphis State homecoming events, which included a Bar-Kays concert. In fact, the Rho Psi Kappas had discussed throwing a party and decided against it because so many of their members wanted to attend the homecoming events at MSU. The next day, as we headed out on the band buses to Murray, Kentucky for yet another marching festival, Eddie Oliver, one of our drummers, was giving us a thorough review of the Bar-Kays show, which he had attended. The Sophisticated Gents skating party was rescheduled for October 18, but that was also the date of a party being sponsored by two other organizations, the Lambda Psi Deltas and Phi Nu Kappas at the Rodeway Inn on Alston Avenue near the Old Bridge. Most of the Rho Psi Kappas were planning to attend that party, and as I was not much of a skater, I decided that I would likely attend that one as well.

When the day came, Joel tate, who was the drummer in my band, and I rolled first to the Fairgrounds, where Tech and Treadwell were playing football, but since there wasn't any crowd, and no impressive bands or drummers, we headed over the Crump Stadium, where Northside was playing South Side. There was a large crowd there, and when that game was over, we headed further down to Beale Street, and then ended up at the Rodeway Inn where the Phi Nu Kappa party was in progress. Since Rhonda Holloway and Chrystal Robinson were on the door, we had no difficulty in getting in, but there did not seem to be a whole lot going on, and we ended up leaving.

The next day proved to be a tragedy. As we were heading down Stage Road from the band room on our way to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi for a band festival, a boy crossed the median of the road and slammed into our equipment truck, which Mr. Cooke, the band director, was driving. The boy turned out to be a Briarcrest student named John Mitchell who had been at a church lockin the night before, and had fallen asleep at the wheel. The police kept all of us at the scene for several hours as they investigated what happened, before we were finally allowed to proceed to Oxford. The wreck had damaged some of our pit instruments, and I recall nothing about our performance that day. What I do remember is that we eventually got word that the boy who struck our truck had died.

That fall I also had formed a band with the saxophone player John Tate and his brother Joel Tate, who was a drummer. Early on, we called our band City Commission. Later Joel lost interest, and we briefly joined up with another Bartlett student named Madure, but after creative differences, we separated from him, and eventually Marlas Franklin became our drummer. Our guitar player was from Treadwell High and was named Derek Harris. Sadly, we never really got anywhere, and were somewhat working at cross purposes. Even though we all liked Prince and Morris Day and the Time, I was becoming more and more enamored of the British band The Style Council, and similar bands like the Blow Monkeys and Swing Out Sister, as well as old-school soul and blues. Derek and I ended up going separate ways. I did a bit of playing with Mojo Buford on Beale (he always disparagingly called me a "be-bopper" because of my alternate blues changes) and Derek eventually ended up on the road with Albert King.

Another interest of mine that fall was that I finally started seriously researching the music of the classical composer Joaquin Turina, whose La Procesion del Rocio had so impressed me at the Tennessee All-State in Nashville back in 1984. Having developed an exchange of letters with the composer's son-in-law Alfredo Moran, I learned a lot more about the composer and was sent some manuscript copies and out-of-print scores and recordings. I also wrote to his publisher Union Musical Espanola, since the American agent G. Schirmer could never seem to fill my orders for Turina's music, and they allowed me to make purchases from them in Spain. I was thrilled beyond words when in the mail on November 5, I found a package from Madrid, which contained the piano scores for Turina's Danzas Fantasticas and Fantasia Sobre Cinco Notas. The "Preludio" from the latter work had first introduced me (or should I say seduced me?) to Turina's music.

The Rho Psi Kappas had planned a large party at the Ramada Inn on Union Avenue downtown, on November 16, which was the same night as Snowflake, Bartlett High School's winter ball. In the event, I didn't go to either event. Snowflake was open to all Bartlett students, at least in theory, but there was a lot about it that discouraged Black students from attending. It was held at a country club, and tickets were expensive. Furthermore, if I understand correctly, the entertainment was invariably a rock band. As for why I didn't go to the other event, I really cannot recall. I might literally have not had the money for a ticket.

By November, basketball season had started, and I recall that on the 19th, we rode the team bus down to Germantown High School for one of the first games of the year. I was both an equipment manager and a reporter for the Panther, so I had the unique and enviable position of being an embedded reporter with the team. What I recall though was that Ricky Fields had been to Club No Name down on Lamar at some point, and had gotten a cassette tape from DJ Sundown (was that an earlier name for DJ Soni D?)which he was jamming on his box. That was the first time I ever heard the Memphis party anthem "Set It Off," or at least the first time I ever recall hearing it. Indeed, I have never heard that song anywhere outside of Memphis, but here it is still heard at parties, even after all these years.

Peculiarly, I don't recall marching in any Christmas parades with the Bartlett band. It may be because I played in the pit and would have had nothing to march with on the streets. I do remember one year when for my birthday, my parents bought me a jam box that could play compact discs, and a couple of compact discs of my choice, one of which was Arthur Honegger's oratorio Le Roi David and the other of which was Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto. I also recall that they took me downtown to the lighting of the city Christmas tree, which was on an open square in front of the Morgan Keegan Tower, and that there was a parade of high school and junior high bands, including Hamilton High School and Trezevant High School, and that may have been in 1985.

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