HCGMU: Where are you from?
Doc Nix: I’m from Alexandra, Virginia.
HCGMU: When did you join the Mason community?
Doc Nix: As a faculty member I was hired in the fall of 2006, but before that I participated in music competitions that Mason would have in the summer time, so I became a part of the community through that. And once the job opportunity opened up I went for it and became a part of the faculty.
HCGMU: What is an interesting fact about yourself?
Doc Nix: I see myself very much at home here, not just because of growing up down the road, but the native thread of my family has been in Virginia for centuries. All the Nickens, Tapscots and Colemens — all these different families are still all over this area.
HCGMU: Who influenced you when you were in college?
Doc Nix: I bounced around to a few different schools. While I was at James Madison University Dr. Patt Rooney had been working for so long on The Marching Royal Dukes, and that was one of the main draws of wanting to go to JMU for me — to be able to be a part of that band. Also, Bill Posey and my tuba teacher Kevin Stees.
When I went to Manhattan School of Music, I had a cast of people there that were so inspiring. My composition teachers, my conductors, my tuba teachers, my theory teachers — all of these people were working artists, scholars and teachers. The Manhattan School of Music was an amazing place for me to develop, especially being in New York and being around so many motivated and talented students. I was in a school with students who were all so talented and creative and had such great work ethics.
Tom Duffy was the director of the bands at Yale who created opportunity after opportunity, within the school and artistically as well. He was the kind of person who never told you, “no” if you had a good, strong idea. He always found a way to make it happen. At Michigan, my tuba teacher Fritz Kaenzig, my fellow tuba players, all the members of the jazz community, my theory teachers, my conductors, and the musicologists. Everybody put a piece in, and being able to find so much raw information and having so many people to encourage me to put it together my own way. That’s why I was able to become as much myself as possible. Especially when I was in Ann Arbor, that was a great time where it all kind of came together for me.
HCGMU: What are some of the goals for The Green Machine this semester?
Doc Nix: Coming up real quick, we’re going to be a part of recording a spot for NPR — I’m really proud that we were asked to be a part of that. We’re going to be building the second combined CAA bands concert at the Richmond tournament. I really hope that we will get some time to record a CD that we can release. This is something that’s much more complicated than just finding a time to do it, there’s layers and layers that need to happen, so that’s a much larger project, but I hope we can figure it out.
At the end of every year we have a nice banquet where the community comes together. It’s one of the only times the pep band, the drum line and the color guard are all together in one place. We don’t have many chances to perform together yet but that’s coming. These are the seeds of the George Mason University marching band. Not only the students attend, but also the administration, faculty, staff and businesses that support us. It’s a way to get everybody in one room just for some recognition and celebration and just to make sure everyone can see everyone else who is involved. There are a lot of connections that people may not be aware of themselves.
HCGMU: How would you describe the energy the Green Machine aims to produce?
Doc Nix: At the core of all of it is showing love and generating love and sharing it, demonstrating it and doing that through joy and getting into the yelling and encouragement and unification. The hard-core Green Machine members know all the players’ names, they know what they can expect from them on the court and are really happy when they overcome personal challenges. The band knows what to look for. When things go right, they know what kinds of things to celebrate. When we play music, we try to get people clapping and singing and dancing. We play things people like to hear. Sometimes that means something new, and sometimes it means something old. My biggest hope is that every person in the patriot center is a part of the band. Once you’re clapping along and stomping at the right time, the whole stadium is the band. I hope that when we’re playing, the team feels like we’re part of them. When you get 10,000 people verses the other 5, the game should go well for us.
HCGMU: What was your reaction to the Rage Against the Machine video receiving so many hits so quickly?
It was a little bit scary. Before we figured out all the settings on the comments, we were so open to anything anyone wanted to say. Part of me felt a little guilty because we were putting our students out there. It wasn’t an official Mason release. Luckily it was a friend was who put it up and he started to monitor what was being said. It was just out of control. It was going up a 100,000 hits a day at first, and that’s a lot. I’ve put videos up before and years later they’ve gotten a couple thousand hits and this was nothing like that. We were trying to figure out what kind of monster we released. As time went by we figured out how to control the comments and we grew a little bit thicker skin. We started to focus on what we wanted to get out of it. We started to see that people were seeing our band clearly working hard and enjoying what they were doing, and enjoying each other. Jeremy Freer was the arranger on it, it was his idea, and no one else had really done the song that way before. The Washington Post put it up first on their sports blog. Our instrumentation and our performance style and our energy and commitment to being wild and fun had a lot to do with it. We take having fun seriously. It was a perfect storm of things that made it explode. We can get on there and see all the different countries that people have been watching. Bands have been trying to get a hold of us to see the arrangements.
It created more and more attention. People became interested in what we were doing. We were invited to play at the frozen four. Mason doesn’t have a hockey team to send, but The Green Machine played. It was one of the first times it was just about us. Six months later here we are at Mason Madness and we’re getting written up in Yahoo sports for a pep rally. It’s incredible. It makes the hard work on the next project easier to do once you have the confidence rolling.
HCGMU: What is one of your most memorable moments at Mason?
Doc Nix: They’ve kinda escalated over time. One early one was when I secured the funding to take the band to Disney World, that was the first time I asked for something big and extra outside of our normal routine. It was a pretty intense meeting. I sort of gathered all the giants around the university and then let them battle out who was going to pay for it. This is the first job I had out of school, and here I am just a full time professor with an annual contract, and here’s the VP of this and the VP of that. They worked it out and we got to go, so that was a really important moment.
Another moment was being able to perform a wonderful outdoor concert in Charleston. Hanging out on the beach in San Juan. The bus driver was so cool to us in Cleveland, it just kind of goes on and on. Bill Murray showing up and conducting the band in Charleston, and hanging out with the band a couple weeks ago was definitely a highlight.
One lifetime highlight for sure was last year was at the 2010 Mason Madness. I was part of the dunk contest, and I was to step out on the court unexpectedly and then throw the ball up in the air and Mike was supposed to catch the ball and dunk it. And what was so neat about it besides getting asked to do it was that I played basketball when I was young, and it came to a point where it became clear that I was going to purse music instead of basketball, and one way your teammates can show a lot of faith in you is passing you the ball, and there were many times that I was not passed the ball. Walking out on that court and getting the pass from Ryan Pearson … I have never felt so included in anything. It was a really special moment.