The Trojan Marching Band was hands down the best-sounding college band in the United States — in the world, with its musicianship stemming from the faculty’s ability to recruit (and conscript) players from the best music school west of Juilliard, Curtis, Berklee, or Oberlin. In those days, if you wanted to be a Hollywood filmmaker, a philharmonic musician, or anywhere west of Chicago, an NFL football player, USC was the place to kick off your career. The Trojan’s marching formations on the gridiron, however, were far less than exceptional, or exceptional for the wrong reasons, despite the fact that those of us who were indentured servants, the scholarship kids with “2-S” student draft deferments, did more drill practice than the kids we derided for joining the Army ROTC. The Vietnam War was raging and my crowd was influenced less by John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) than by Donald Sutherland’s MASH (1970). A full metal jacket, we joked, was the breastplate worn with our Bronze Age band uniforms (molded plastic, actually). Because tens of thousands of students were marching in the streets and on campuses nationwide to protest the war and support civil rights, some of us in the band resented the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah “Spirit of Troy” we were obliged to demonstrate at every NCAA and Pac-8 basketball and football game. But we were…
