Brett Bawcum, we hardly knew ye

In my 4 years of the Redcoat Band and 2 years of basketball band, I've spent a great deal of time, either directly or indirectly, with our director Brett. He's been with the band in one way or another for 13 years or something like that, so he lives and breathes UGA bands.

He's only 10 years older than me, so he's not much like any other band director I've ever had. And I much prefer it that way. I can honestly say that he's the only director/professor I've ever had that was really into Outkast.

Being the kind of person that I am (shy and with a tendency to blend into the background) I don't really get into personal relationships with what I see as people of authority (or anyone else, really). But by virtue of the fact that I get at least one band-related e-mail a week from Brett and have spent at least one semester with him for the last 4 years, he's a little more personal than most. He refered to me by name over the intercom at a practice towards the end of this marching season, and I seriously did a double take. I had no idea he even knew my name, and I figured that out of 407 people, that was a pretty impressive feat.

Ironically enough (I'm not sure if this actually qualifies as irony, but it sounds good), he was the one that I had to audtion for in order to get into Redcoats. The person I was supposed to audtion for wasn't there that day for whatever reason, so Brett stepped in. Of course at the time I had no idea who he was, but he talked to me about living on campus, what the band was like, and just generally made me feel comfortable; which was exactly what I needed being a 17 year old kid about to attend a school some 34 times the size of my highschool. When I saw him on the podium the first day of band camp, I figured he was a drum major or TA or something. But after a while, I figured out that he ran this show.

Anyway...I told you that story to tell you this one. I'm currently on a band trip that is very well one of the best, if not the best band trip I've ever been on. Not because of the charter flights, the sweet hotel, or the money, but because of the people. There's only 27 band members and Brett, so we spend quite a bit of time together. Last night, like 20 of us snuck down to Brett's room Mission Impossible style. Half of us got up against the wall on either side, and one person knocked on the door (thus making it look like there was only one person out there). So when he opened the door, we all barged in (oh, and we all had our pillows) and demanded to have a slumber party. So we stayed in his room for a while and had him sing songs to us. He's actually leaving the band after this year to be a country song-writer in Nashville, so he sang some of the songs he'd written himself. They were damn good. I was genuinely impressed. But he also took requests. (If you've never heard a 31 year old man sing 'Strawberry Wine', it's quite a sight.) I think the highlight of my evening was when he did 'If I had a Million Dollars', and we all sang back up. I was also impressed when I asked for the theme to Diff'rent Strokes, and not only did he know it, but he made a medley of it with the theme from Friends and Growing Pains.

Anyway...more on this later. I gotta go catch the bus for the game. Go Dawgs and the like.