For a band that has experience fighting ninjas on the moon, winning radio station KZOK and Rock Wood Fired Pizza’s “Battle of the High School Bands” contest was no problem.
The contest challenged groups to play a classic rock song, and create a video to go along with it, in hopes of claiming a $10,000 prize.
First-place winner Liberty High School did just that, beating 43 other bands with a performance of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” set to a short video that featured, among other things, the ninja battle.
“It feels great to win,” said senior Andrew Nyte. “But I was really taken aback. I knew we had a chance to win, but it doesn’t really sink in that you actually can. And we did.”
The group had originally prepared Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” for the contest, until Band Director Phil Donley woke up one morning and heard a clip of South Kitsap High School playing it on the radio.
“My first thought was, ‘Did I wake up late? Am I missing class?’” he said. “Once I realized, I knew we had to change our tune.”
The students already had “Rebel Yell” in their bag of tricks, and cleaned it up before recording it for the competition.
It was the second time Liberty had entered the contest, and they went into it with a few hesitations.
Last year, the online voting system had been hacked and months of hard work amounted to nothing.
But this time around, fans voted by sending text messages of their choices to the radio station.
“I was a little worried about that because, quite frankly, getting into that top 10 became a battle of who has the best text messaging plan,” Donley said. “So we worked really hard to try to promote the video and get people outside of our school to vote for it too.”
For a month, students, teachers and family members voted daily for the Liberty band.
E-mails were sent to parents, a note was put in the school newsletter, and Donley even contacted family and colleagues in Chicago to put in their votes.
But when the video was posted on YouTube, the votes really started to roll in.
One student’s sister maintains a video blog on the Web site, and a quick mention of Liberty’s video had people flocking to the site.
“She made one mention of our video, and I’m not even kidding, within two weeks we had 13,000 hits on the video,” Donley said. “There were hundreds of comments, even people from Europe saying they would vote if they could.”
Liberty ended sixth in the fan voting process, with 34,000 votes – securing the top 10 spot needed to move on to the final judging process.
American Idol competitor Blake Lewis, Alan White of the band “Yes”, University of Washington Marching Band Director Brad McDavid and Donn Bennett of Donn Bennett Drum Studios made up the judging panel.
They awarded Liberty the top prize for quality of musicianship, originality of arrangement, and execution.
“It’s just really exciting to get Liberty’s name out in the community, and get our band recognized for something,” said junior Jeremy Hamann, who put together the video.
Donley and the students cited the video as something that made Liberty stand out from the other bands.
Most other schools simply filmed the students playing their songs.
“We just had a lot of kooky ideas, and once it was all put together, it was just crazy and fun,” Nyte said.
As for the prize money, Donley and a small handful of students have formed a committee to come up with a use for it.
Paying for buses and trips has already been crossed off the list.
Donley said it’s important to find a use that benefits everyone.
Some ideas that have been thrown around are replacing equipment, bringing in guest composers, or getting a piece of music commissioned for the band – but no decisions have been made yet.
“Something that will be for us, but would ultimately be for others as well,” Donley said. “If we can find that balance, that would be ideal.”
