The tunes started to roll, White Cockade, Adams and York, and Sailors Hornpipe. I was immediately drawn in. I was then seduced by the singing of Ruben Ranzo and the seamless transition to Clapboard Hill. All of it great and exuberant, but fully within the boundaries of what I had expected. I had, after all, been watching those barefooted bastions of sea music from the time I was a little boy and attending Sudbury Musters in the mid seventies. But, just as side one was coming to a close, the boundaries had been breeched.

Suddenly, from my crappy little speakers, came classical music fused with a complex matrix of fifes spinning around tunes that felt traditional, but not structured like other tunes I had learned. There were too many fifes for me to track and I went into a dizzy trance as the music moved from one tune to the next; a beautiful melodic waltz; a single fife sliding into a slip jig with the others soon in tow; tempo changes; slower; faster; reels; jigs; breaks; ornaments; teases; and something wild on the end that didn’t make any logical sense but seemed like the only way end. I clawed for the liner notes, praying to God it wasn’t going to have some lame title like Sonata in D. It was…it was…The Sea of Ale and the Dock Street Mermaid. Miraculous!

I never made it to side two. I never made it back to the beginning of side one. I only used two buttons on the boom box; rewind; play; rewind; play; rewind; play.

Suddenly a new thought fell into my teenaged brain. I was going to join the Mariners. It had never even been a passing thought until that moment. But, now it seemed so clear. I would join, and soon I would be playing such masterpieces.

Not long after, 1988 to be precise, I went to my first Ancient Mariner practice along with my buddy Roger Hunnewell. But, what I found was that the Sea of Ale was nowhere to be found. It was a complex piece of music that nobody, in 1988, new how to play, and nobody could located the sheet music. What I subsequently learned, was that the music was complex enough that the Mariners needed to bring in a ringer for the recording. Alan Reed, the only non-Mariner to play on the Mariner album, was brought in to play one of the four voices on The Sea of Ale along with John Ciaglia, John Benoit and Skip Healy. Incidentally, none of those guys were still active in 1988 either. So, the road to The Sea of Ale looked bleak.

Through the decades there were efforts to pull the music together. Jason Malli, most notably, was able to find some badly damaged copies of the original Ciaglia chicken scratch. We leaned that The Sea of Ale was actually two different medleys glued together for the recording. The Admiral of the Narrow Seas and another called Get Off Your Ass. We also learned that it had never been performed live, thought I’m sure that statement will be hotly debated. We also learned that the original masters of the recording have gone missing. Maybe they will show up someday.
 

 
Work was started to diligently transcribe and edit the music from the hard-to-read copies into a clean, workable format. Then the newly transcribed music, all seventeen pages, sat for another decade, waiting for the right moment and the right men, with the right amount and right mix of energy. I’m happy to tell you that twenty four years after I first heard The Sea of Ale and the Dock Street Mermaid, the music has been brought back to life, performed first on a grand stage in Basel, Switzerland. For four and a half minutes Scott Redfield, Joe Mawn, Marc Bernier, Eric Chomka and myself had the honor to play this great music with Skip Healy in what felt like a passing of the torch.
 

 
For me the circle is now complete, and in my mind I keep hitting those buttons; play; rewind; play; rewind; play; rewind.

Enjoy.

The great thing about The Firehouse is that it is ours. It is owned by a Mariner and for the week the Swiss were here it was home to any that chose to make it so. Here is a list of other cool things about ‘The Firehouse’:

• We can play fife and drum music there until any hour of the morning.
• It is decorated with classic Mariner photos and memorabilia.
  
• It has beautiful stained glass.
  
• It has beautiful pint glasses…at least when there’s beer in ‘em.
  
• It has a walk in cooler with more kegs of beer than your average liquor store.
  
• It sleeps a hundred men in an assortment of hovels and lofts.
  
• There are lofts in the Firehouse where you can sleep till noon and it is still black as night.
• There is a bar in the kitchen.
  
• There is a bar upstairs.
• There are two urinals.
• The bathroom has a cool fire mural in it with a scantily clad fire woman.
   
  
  (incidentally, this painting reminds me of a song about my mother being a fireman…but I’ll save that for another time.)
• When your done in the bathroom, you can ring the fire bell.
• You can hang stuff from the red pipes that wind across the ceiling…and that is exactly what we did.

I set up three microphones for the week and flipped on a recorder anytime there was activity in The Firehouse. They were unobtrusive and guys never really noticed them. What I have, consequently, is a weeks worth of recordings. Fife and drum, fife and table, fife and pans, songs, jokes and laughter. Really it is just recordings of what we do when we hang out together without the crowds of a muster or a performance. Some of it is mellow, a lot of it is not. None of it is rehearsed and most of it is from the wee hours of the morning after spending our days on Block Island or our evenings at the Griswold Inn. And like any beautiful piece of wood where the grain and knots give it character, so too these recordings come with an occasional knot and definitely a bit of grain. I think that is what gives them their charm.
 

The first recording I would like to share is of a tune called Planxty Bill Gallagher. This is a tune that John Ciaglia wrote as a study after Roy Watrous. One reason I enjoy this tune is that we never play it until the Swiss arrive, and every time I think, ‘wow, what a great tune, we should play this’.

We do our best to keep their memory and legacy alive not only by carrying an oar with all their names affixed, but also retelling their stories. Like how Norm Ott once saved a young polliwog from certain death after pissing off another well known drum corps. Like how Roy Watrous could spin a classic tune, called Billy Budd, and give all the credit to the machine that he worked on day in and day out. Like how Babe Kelly could snap to attention and put on a brilliant show after being a bit over-served. Like how Sean Egan could strike up a conversation with beautiful women using outlandish pickup lines. Like how Freddy Bruder helped to start the Swiss Mariners. Like how Howard Hornstein battled, beyond all comprehension, ALS, and remained a vital contributor to the Mariners until his passing. There are many more. Some hilariously funny, some stunningly sad and some inspiring. Throughout the muster we tried to tell these stories. Some as vignettes while we were performing and others as conversations over an ale.

We hope those that attended the muster saw not only a fife and drum corps celebrating a milestone, but also learned a bit about the past, a bit about our music, a bit about our style of fun, and a bit about the brotherhood we share with each other. In short, we hope you learned a bit about The Mariner Spirit.

After scouring the web I have collected here a handful of photo’s that do a nice job of capturing some of that spirit. In addition, we will be posting a series of entries that capture not only the Mariner Muster, but our entire week through the Deep River Muster.
 

The Mariners take the stand during the tattoo.
 
Our Swiss friends arrive in style donning Fasnacht masks.
 
As the sun sets festive lanterns are lit. We stole this idea from the Swiss but have a lot to learn about technique.
 

The stage is lit.
 

Before the parade the bass section lines up.
 

On the Oar or On the Street.
 

Cliff leading us in The German Clockwinder.
 

The Mariners watch as other corps perform.

For other great photo’s from the weekend check out:
Set 1
Set 2

Lastly, thank you to all the corps that participated, gave use thoughtful gifts, performed great music, shared a beer, told your stories and made this a great celebration!

Who are these guys? Fifers, drummers … well I could tell you all about them, but sometimes it is just more fun to listen.

Below are a couple of clips from our gathering at Dan’s Firehouse last weekend. The first, sung by one of the wogs, is a takeoff of and old drinking song called Fathom the Bowl. This version, written by Chris Lussier, another wog, is called Don’t Play the Trombone and has words like…

play fifes from grenadilla
cocobolo for sticks
and drink apple cider until you get sick
and sing lots of chanteys until you will moan
but please at a muster don’t play the trombone

I’ve just included a clip here since the whole song would require me to put up a parental warning and I’m just not willing to do that. If you want to hear the song in its entirety, you’ll just have to become a Wog.
 
The second clip is of another Wog playing a tune called Calliope House on the Mandolin, while a couple of us back him up.
 

 
I like both clips because they represent the type of musical diversity that feeds into our fife and drum repertoire. I also like them because it peels back the curtain on the type of loose fun we have at Mariner rehearsals.