The Band Plays On : Musicians Regroup, Recruit and Rehearse for Gay Pride Parade

For weeks now, in preparation for Sunday’s Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood, Leonard Dootson and Mark Lane have pored over old rosters of the Great American Yankee Freedom Band. They’re trying to lure drummers, clarinet players and baton twirlers who performed with the group in its heyday but have fallen away in recent years as membership has dwindled from 120 to a sorry dozen.

Dootson and Lane, both trumpet players determined to save the band from extinction, have posted fliers in gay hangouts seeking musicians, with or without experience. They have badgered friends, friends of friends and total strangers to dust off instruments they last touched in high school, when band was a haven from dreaded physical education classes.

They have cajoled sousaphone players, saxophonists and French horn aficionados from gay bands up and down the coast to join their ranks for just one afternoon so there will be enough instruments for rousing versions of “The Thunderer,” “Hooray For Hollywood” and the “Macho Man/YMCA Medly.”

There is some room for optimism. After months without leadership, the band has found a conductor. The musicians have bought white marching shoes to make the spiffiest of impressions, and they have polished dozens of trophies that the band won in its glory years to display in a recruitment booth on the parade route.

At Tuesday night’s rehearsal in a dingy hall in Plummer Park, Dootson and Lane urged, flattered and hectored the ragtag bunch of regulars to give their all at the annual parade.

How had an 18-year Los Angeles institution come to this? The saddest and simplest answer is AIDS, which has decimated the ranks of arts institutions across the country. But the Gay Mens’ Chorus of Los Angeles is thriving, and so are gay marching bands in San Francisco, New York, Ft. Lauderdale, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City. So the explanation must be more complicated than that.

Band members here and elsewhere point to a stew of circumstances: Funding cutbacks for public school music programs that are the breeding ground for new musicians, infighting that plagues most community-based organizations at one time or another, a lapse in leadership, and an expanding list of gay activities that makes joining a band less compelling.

The loss of members to AIDS, while not unique to the band, has been devastating. On the old rosters in Lane’s West Hollywood apartment, names are struck and marked with marginal notations: Too sick . . . Pneumocystis three times . . . Not a working phone number.

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Larry Loftin, a trombone player and one of the band’s stalwarts, used to maintain a membership database. He estimates that 30% to 40% has passed away. Loftin keeps a picture of the late John Giovanazzi in his music folder, in memory of the performer who once sat in Loftin’s chair.

Loftin’s shiny instrument was bought with the proceeds of a life insurance policy willed him by another band member, Michael Twitchell.

Members note that there are an array of pastimes for gay men and women that did not exist a decade ago.

The band “was one of the first activities not [gay] bar-related,” said James Rose, a flute and French horn player who joined the band in its first season. “You could come here with no pressure that someone would hit on you. You didn’t have to look your best or be a bodybuilder. Now there’s all sorts of things to do--ski clubs, hiking, church groups.”

(The Great American Yankee Freedom Band’s name, for which “gay” is an acronym, was coined in more oppressive times, hiding the band’s sexual orientation so it could play in straight parades.)

The band, one of 22 gay marching or concert bands in the nation, also has been hurt by the politics--disagreements about leadership and direction. Gay bands have folded in Chicago, Phoenix, Cleveland and Baltimore.

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Booms and busts in membership are common. “We’ve all gone through it,” said John Winkelman, the conductor of a gay band in San Diego, who will play the tuba with his Los Angeles brethren this weekend.

Los Angeles band members, many of whom expressed displeasure with their last two conductors, hope they have found magic in Cindy Nunes, a systems analyst at Cal State/Long Beach who conducted wind and brass ensembles in college a decade ago.

“I saw them in their heyday, and I’d like to try to lead them back to that,” said Nunes, who won raves after two weeks of rehearsals for her wry, easygoing manner.

Nunes’ arrival helped convince the band to make one last stab at staying in business. But the debate was rancorous about whether to march down Santa Monica Boulevard this weekend.

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Old-timers such as Rose, who remembers huge concerts at Disneyland and the Hollywood Bowl, feared humiliation. The band had played recently in Orange County with a mismatch of instruments and no drummer, “and the Salvation Army sounded good compared to us.”

But the band’s efforts have so far yielded a handful of new members and a contingent of about a dozen visiting musicians--from San Diego, San Francisco and Long Beach--that will bring the band’s ranks to about 30 for the parade, enough to cover the essential parts.

The newcomers are brimming with enthusiasm.

There is Lane himself, who only joined in January, dusting off the trumpet he last played at Hot Spring High School in Arkansas, home to President Clinton’s wailing sax.

Taking odd jobs only sporadically as a house-sitter or dog-walker because he has AIDS, Lane, 33, had time on his hands and the desire to throw himself into something.

“I had no idea they needed people so badly, and it fired me up,” he said.

There is Ronn Jones, a West Hollywood hairdresser, who had played the trombone 20 years ago in high school in Ft. Lauderdale and impulsively bought one in a pawnshop about a year ago.

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Then he saw the band’s recruiting flier at a restaurant. He came to a rehearsal without his instrument, figuring he was too rusty to play, but might march with the drill team. An enthusiastic welcome brought him back the next week, this time with the trombone.

“I put it to my lips, and music started to come out,” Jones said with childlike excitement.

After a few practice sessions, Jones’ partner, Blair Slavin, paid him the highest compliment. “He came out of the bedroom and said, ‘I recognize that; it’s ‘Hooray For Hollywood,’ ” Jones said.

(Now Slavin has been recruited to carry water bottles and adjust music on the stands.)

The least skilled newcomer of all is Tony Leyva, who had never played a drum but had always wanted to. He saw a flier, as well, and confided his childhood dream to a friend, Greg Wine, who had been a high school drummer. Wine missed the thrill of playing the snare in parades in Massachusetts.

“Let’s go,” he told Leyva. “I’ll teach you.”

Wine, with his hunky blond, beach boy looks, is a particular catch for the Great American Yankee Freedom Band, and he is expected to march on the flank, in clear view of the spectators.

“Most of us are pretty nerdy,” Lane said. “He might attract new members.”

Wine blushed at the compliment, confessing that he had been “a band geek” in high school, a chubby boy with pale stringy hair.

“Hey, I don’t mind blossoming in my 30s,” Wine said. “And if somebody thinks this is cool because I’m doing it, that’s flattering. There’s no wrong reason to be in band.”