Part two of this feature is an "interview" of sorts with Sun Hall of Fame and newly minted Buglers Hall of Fame member Ray Fallon. Due to Ray's busy schedule, this was done via email, with Ray responding to a series of my questions. Hope you find this as interesting as I did. I appreciate Ray's taking the time to answer a few of my questions - keeping in mind I am definitely not a "trained" interviewer!
Bruce: Ray ... tell us, if you would, a bit about your introduction into drum corps.
Ray: I think my folks put me in drum corps as a social retardant for my older brothers, figuring that they couldn't try that much if their 10 year old brother was around. It didn't work that way. My oldest brother Jimmy joined Oceanside (Legionaires) when a friend from South Hempstead named John Brown told him it was fun. The corps was essentially a backdrop for his sister's baton twirlers at the time. First my brother Jimmy, then Frank joined as drummers. When my folks put me in the corps, my brothers offered me to the horn line so I wouldn't be around to cramp their style. I was a big kid, so they gave me a baritone.
Bruce: How long were you with the Legionaires, and in what capacities?
Ray: I joined the Legionnaires in 1961, when I was 10. We were a standstill and parade corps at the time. I remember that our horn instructor, a guy named Al Heyster, told me to puff my cheeks and blow, and to try to get a G and move the valves once in a while to look like I was doing something. (G could be played valve or open on the old G-D bugles.) We played simply God-friggin' awful arrangements of Give My Regards to Broadway and Saint Louis Blues.
Then in 1962 the corps hired a young guy named Bill Gallagher, who was a bass trombone student at Julliard, and played bass-bari in Sun. He was teaching us music and we started to play pretty well. In 1965 he was drafted into the Army and a friend of his, Ted Sasso, who was only about 18 at the time (maybe 20 or so) replaced him. We soon got word that Bill had gotten shot in the head at Da Nang, but survived. I met him once again when he got out of Walter Reid, but he had fairly severe brain damage and very little memory. Never saw him again after that.
As far as my capacities with the corps - I played baritone, bass-baritone, contra-bass, played with, wrote and taught a couple of horn quartets, taught the beginning players for a couple of years; became brass arranger and instructor when our regular guy disappeared.
Bruce: Did you have any influences there?
Ray: Bill was a huge influence, as was Teddy. These were the right two guys for a baritone player. When the corps got its first contra bass horn in 1964- 1965 I got it, and played it for a number of seasons. My biggest influence as a player was listening to Billy Hightower playing with Sun. No one in drum corps sounded remotely like Hightower. I would sit home playing along with Fleetwood records on Sing Sing Sing, and It's a Pity to Say Goodnight When the Lights Go Out. When I started High School at Chaminade in 1965 I started getting trombone lessons, and the guy (who was the principal trombonist for the New York City Opera Company), couldn't figure out how a 14 year old kid could lip trill. I tried to explain drum corps to him but he was astounded. Pissed of a good portion of the band by putting me on 1st chair trombone.
Bruce: Where did you go from Oceanside?
Ray: In 1969 I started school at St. John's in Jamaica on a NYS Regents Scholarship. In February the SDS burned the flag and took over the Administration building. I got pissed off and enlisted that same afternoon. I took auditions for the AF Band at McGuire AFB and had orders to go to Andrews AFB as soon as I finished basic training. 2 weeks in to basic they informed me that I had scored well on a language aptitude test and sent me to language school in Monterey California for Chinese. I was pissed, but I kind of dug the school and the job.
Bruce: How long were you with Sun?
Ray: Amazingly, after hanging around Sun my whole teenage years, I wasn't actually a member for very long. I was discharged in June 1974 after 4 years and a couple of months (the Air Force extended my enlistment so they could give me back-to-back overseas tours and keep me in Asia where Chinese was useful.)
I joined the first week of September (about a month after going through the windshield of my VW at 70mph in front of Freeport Collision on Merrick Rd at 3am. - 156 stitches in my face and 3 days unconscious.) When I joined, Teddy assigned me to 2nd baritone and put my two brothers on 1st. It might have made sense at the time, as they had been playing in St. Ritas while I was overseas. I didn't worry about it.
When we learned Sing Sing Sing (Screech's arrangement) it came complete with the Hightower solo that i'd been playing along on since I was 13. The baris at the time were a little reluctant to tackle it and I jumped right on it. The 1975 show as awful, but I still had a good time playing. The bari line was really good people, with John Kelly and John Griffin, and a bunch of folks. I think that Teddy had some other committments and I ended up in front of the line once in a while, and by the end of the season I was on the brass staff.
Bruce: Were there any influences in Sun that led you to writing and arranging?
Ray: I started writing horn quartets when I was a kid in Oceanside, and when Bobby Bunce disappeared in 1966 I took over as instructor and arranger, although I was 15. It was a little weird. When we started having meetings for 1976 with Sun I suggested the Chick Corea tune "Spain" which had won the Billboard Top Jazz tune of 1975. John Sasso, who was just that sort of guy said, "you like the piece? Write it. I'll take a look." Dennis Delucia suggested the arrangement that Bill Watrous did with the Manhattan Wildlife Refuge, a chart by Joe LaBarbera. I wrote it with a bari solo and a screaming solo for Screech in the middle. It was sort of a trial experimental deal, and I had one shot at teaching the piece and convincing the corps it was a good chart. The soft ware didn't exist at the time to have a computer play the arrangment. You heard it in your head, wrote it on paper with a pencil and taught it to real live horn-players. The day I had to teach Spain I had the flu and a 102 degree fever. I still managed to force feed the whole chart to the hornline and I guess it stuck.
Bruce: Did you have any influences outside of DC that inspired you?
Ray: When I came back from overseas I had missed the early '70s, both in drum corps and in everyday music. Big Bands were huge at the time. I loved the arrangements that bands like Buddy Rich's and Maynard Ferguson's were playing, and went to see big bands whenever I could. As far as trombone players at the time, Bill Watrous was smoking, with a ridiculous high end and fast fast slide. I started to take arranging classes at school and just loved it.
Bruce: Where did you go from Sun? Any particulars reasons why those choices?
Ray: When my son was born in 1977 and I left Sun, I really didn't want to go anywhere else. I was still sort of worn out from 4 years of the military and 3 years of in-fighting at Sun. I took 1977 off and didn't think about it much until I spoke to Dennis Delucia at the end of 1977 and he asked me if I wanted to come to Bridgemen as a brass instuctor. I said yes and while I worked with Bayonne I was offered teaching jobs at the Hurricanes and Milford Shoreliners. During the 1978 season I went and sat in at a rehearsal at Archer-Epler, the first alumni corps, and ended up writing and teaching there for over 10 years.
Bruce: Jump ahead a few years ... you're married, with children, and working a demanding, stressful job. What led to your decision to go back to school?
Ray: This is one of those things that there isn't one simple answer to. By the turn of the century I had done everything I was going to do in drum corps - taught 3 DCI corps (Bayonne, Crossmen, and Boston), 3 DCA corps (Sun, Hurcs, and Archie) and a number of smaller corps and alumni corps. I enjoyed them all, but I also had seen a lot of years go by without ever figuring out how good I could have been. Maybe this was all there was, but there was no way to really know. I had never finished school after I started having kids, and in 1999 I took a semester at UMass to see what it would be like. It was good. So I signed up full time, and worked full time, and then all of a sudden my wife, who already had MS, came down with a super-duper pneumonia that her doctors described as SARS. Twice during the six weeks she was in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston they told me she had less than 24 hours left. At one point they even offered to "make her breathing easier" with morphine, which I knew was a euphemism for punching her ticket to the great beyond, but she just wanted to be able to breathe and almost agreed to it. She pulled through, I guess you could say miraculously. At one point during her recovery there were 11 stethoscopes on her back simultaneously while the doctors who had been ready to cover her with a sheet were now dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back for saving her. It was the damnest thing. it took a long time to recover though, and get back to work and dig out of the debt we'd incurred that winter, so I didn't go back to school again for a couple of years. Then I broke my back in a work accident in 2005 and slowed things down even more.
Finally in 2007 I went back full time. Even though I have more than enough total credits to graduate, UMass has a lot of requisite courses like Math and Natural Sciences and what they call "Diversity" courses. Even though they're a state school, they give no credit for Military training, which i think is a crime, as it disallowed my language training, which other schools had allowed up to 18 credits for. So now I've got a Math course left and some other things I'm taking for myself before I graduate.
Why? That's the big question I guess - I felt as if I'd let my folks down by not graduating, and had let myself down as well. Additionally, I spent my whole life telling my kids how important education is, while never finishing myself. I felt like the kind of dad who told his kids that drinking was bad, from behind a beer or 12. I guess I felt like I owed it to pretty much everybody.
Bruce: This has been a big year for you - the Sun HoF, the Buglers HoF - attaining your degree. What do you make of all this?
Ray: You know - when I let myself think about things like Halls of Fame in the past I told myself it wasn't important, probably because I didn't think I'd get into any of them. It isn't that I didn't work hard, or even that I didn't accomplish some things, but I worked with too many corps, didn't really play long enough before I started teaching a lot, and I sort of pissed off a bunch of people along the way. I think that starting back in Sun right after I got back from overseas put me where I wanted to be before I was ready to be there. I wasn't ready to handle the competition, which by the way is healthy, or the political aspect, which you have to do if you want to work in drum corps or any other competitive activity. It's just a part of life. When I did start to be accepted into these halls, first the Hurricanes in 2006, then Sun in 2008 and the Buglers' thing in 2009, I have to admit it's been sort of exciting, but I can't shake that feeling that they're all making a mistake, picking the wrong guy, etc. It's near, but it leaves me feeling a little guilty at the same time. I would never vote for me for a hall of fame.
Bruce: What does the future hold for Ray Fallon?
Ray: This is the biggest question - I'll be 58 in a couple of months and I really have no idea. I'll get my license to teach music in Massachusetts in the next few months, but I wonder sometimes who's going to hire me? I'm older than a lot of the teachers' parents, for gods' sake. I'm happily married, and have 6 great kids. I wrote one band show this Spring, and I just got a call to start working on a new project for Archie. I try to keep my hand in at Bayonne, but our schedules have not been kind so far this year. I guess at this point I'm just holding my breath to see what happens next. I know I've run the string of "honors" out. No halls to get into after this. I hate to sound like I think I'm old, but I feel old.
My son finishes his Masters Degree next July. His brother Dan is a National Network Manager for a Law Firm in Atlanta. Tammy is teaching Blue Devils' B Corps Guard as Caption Head, and Ray Jr. is on the road with Boston Crusaders and heading back to school in September to study Music. My 18 year old step-daughter Emma just finished her freshman year of College, majoring in being a hippy, African Dance, Women's Wisdom, etc., and our 15 year old stepdaughter Nancy is finishing her freshman year of high school, playing piano, flute and singing. Both younger girls have sung at the New England Conservatory each Summer for years. My wife, who has her MMus in Theory and Composition is my best friend and my best teacher. Life is good. But what happens next? Your guess is as good as mine I think.
Bruce: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, Ray.
