On second thought, the flamethrower doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea, because this crowd is dead. Granted, Tameem Bakkar was joking when he said he wanted to rig an aerosol can and a lighter to the end of his trumpet to ignite the crowd, but under the circumstances, an impromptu exhibition of pyrotechnic showmanship certainly couldn’t hurt.

Maybe it’s the early-December blanket of awful that the wind and the rain have dropped here on the steps outside Qwest Field’s north gate. Or maybe it was all the coma-inducing pregame brats and beer they wolfed down in the parking lot, but the 25 or so people who are watching Bakkar and his 50 fellow band members perform out here seem more bemused than entertained. The band just ripped through its incendiary take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire”—BAHM-BAHM, buh-duh-duh-duh! BAHM-BAHM, buh-duh-duh-duh!—and Bakkar belted out a sweet little horn solo at the end. But if the spectators’ puzzled expressions and cocked heads are any indication, the only thing they’d have to say would be, “Where the hell did this marching band come from, and why are they wearing scarves that say Sounders FC?”

Fair question, if anyone was willing to speak up and ask it. This is, after all, the first Sunday in December, and the Seahawks are about to play, and they don’t have a marching band, do they? Besides, this doesn’t look like a “real” marching band; everyone’s wearing T-shirts and jeans and baseball caps. So what’s with the sousaphones and the cymbals and the haphazardly choreographed trombone swaying?

“Do you guys know the Sounders?” Steve Baretich, the band’s associate director, asks the crowd at the end of the three-song set. If he had anyone’s attention, he might remind them that the Sounders FC is Seattle’s new Major League Soccer franchise and that it would play its first game ever here, at Qwest Field, on March 19. Then he’d explain that this is Sound Wave, the team’s official marching band, and that no other team in the league has one. They’re here today to build some buzz and introduce themselves to the Seattle sports community with a flashy halftime performance.

Baretich says the name again, and his voice rises a little. “The Sounders?” No one responds. Come on, people, throw the guy a bone. A couple people drift off to the gate.

Bakkar doesn’t seem to mind. He’s lofting his trumpet above his head like a trophy with one hand, punching the air with the other one, and screaming out “Yeah!” while the rest of the band members “Woo!” These band geeks are…geeking out. They’re so pumped to be playing, they don’t see the clouds rolling in off the Sound or feel the little raindrops that hint bigger drops are on the way. They’re so excited to finally put their skills on display, they forget that, for the last year and a half, some people were hoping that they wouldn’t make it this far.

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SABRINA SARAJAY

Trumpet. Gave up cheerleading and soccer for band.

I have a sister who’s younger than I am, and she doesn’t play an instrument. So anytime I rehearse or practice at home, she’s like, “Can you go downstairs?” And I’m like, “No! Just listen to it—isn’t it so good?”

I started playing trumpet back in the summer before seventh grade. We had just moved into our house that we’re currently in, and my mom used to be a huge garage saler. So the neighbors across the street from us had a garage sale, and there was an old, but nice trumpet there for $75. My mom was always kind of wanting us to get involved in music and extracurricular things, so she bought the trumpet and I picked it up and liked it quite a bit.

I played for four years, consecutively, and then after my sophomore year, I quit. I was a cheerleader, so it was kind of hard to juggle the two, just because we were doing a lot of the same events and it was kind of hard to be in two places at once.

One of my friends, Naomi, saw something about the auditions for the Sounders band, and she texted me right away and said, “Sabrina, there’s a marching band for the new soccer team. You should try out!” I was like, “Really? I don’t know. I guess it could be fun,” but I was thinking you’d have to be absolutely amazing to be a part of it and have all these years of experience under your belt. So I was like, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for it.” I knew I enjoyed playing trumpet, but I wasn’t, by any means, this excellent soloist or a great player. Then she kind of kept pushing me, and I said, “Okay, if you do it with me, then I’ll do it.”

Tryouts were pretty nerve-wracking. You get there, and they say hi and ask you a couple questions: “Why do you think you’d be a good asset to this band?” And then you were also supposed to bring a piece of music that you’d practiced and prepared for the audition.

And that was it. I was so nervous. I probably turned so bright red. I get really nervous and shaky. I don’t even remember what I brought to play.

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To call sound wave a marching band is probably misleading and even dismissive, because the phrase conjures up plumed hats and regimental formations and squawky interpretations of “Louie Louie” that send most sports fans to the sweet embrace of a mile-long beer line. But those are the words the comedian and The Price Is Right host Drew Carey insisted on using when he came to town in fall 2007 to announce his minority ownership stake in Seattle’s then-unnamed MLS expansion team. At the time, his involvement was just a quirky addendum to an otherwise exciting development in local sports: Seattle had fielded a professional soccer team (the original Sounders) in one form or another for 23 seasons over more than three decades, but landing a franchise in the 13-year-old MLS, which is the closest thing soccer has to an NFL, meant the city had a seat at the “legitimate” pro sports table.

So when Carey strolled into the George and Dragon Pub on November 12 to inform Seattle’s soccer diehards that, oh by the way, one of his conditions for investing in their dream was that he’d get to add a marching band to the mix, they didn’t know what to think. A marching band for a soccer team? It was an odd juxtaposition of sports cultures, but Carey did his best to sell it, confessing his love for the movie Drumline and waxing athletic about injecting the rah-rah college football atmosphere into the MLS. So some people said, “Huh…well, that’s different,” and it was, because aside from the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and Washington Redskins, no other team in professional sports has a marching band. And the more those people kicked around the idea, the more they thought it sounded fun and interesting and not nearly as lame as they remembered their high school marching bands to be, partly because they believed Carey when he said he wanted his marching band to be “funky” and “hip.”

But then there were the ultras. Every city with a soccer team has its ultras, the borderline-psychotic fans who chant and sing and wave flags and taunt the opponent’s goalkeeper throughout every match. They believe in the traditions of football—real football, not American football—and those traditions don’t include some cheesy, Mickey Mouse, front office–funded pep band.

The ultras don’t need an officially sanctioned noisemaker because it’s their job to support the team and make noise and “create atmosphere”; that’s the way it’s always been done in Europe and South America, and what happens there is football law. If some fans want to bring trumpets and sousaphones and snare drums and strike up an impromptu jam session in the stands, whatever. Cool. But this? This marching band would co-opt the whole ultra culture and make it corporate. And if all the European and South American soccer fans who already think the MLS is a third-rate league got wind of this thing, oh man, the Sounders FC would be an embarrassment and ruin every other American team’s reputation by association. So the ultras gnashed their teeth and pounded their fists into walls and wished that the big stupid Price Is Right wheel would break loose from the set and roll over Carey’s big stupid head for torturing them with the Worst Idea in the History of Soccer. It was probably an ultra who posted this response to a video on YouTube of Drew’s trip to the George and Dragon Pub: “a marching band?! [god] i hope qwest gets burnt to the ground.”

David Falk isn’t exactly an ultra, but he runs GoalSeattle.com, the most revered soccer Web site in Seattle. He’s willing to give the marching band a chance—but he understands why it might make some of the more militant ultras want to burn down Qwest. “There’s a real conflict there for soccer fans who, to be fair, have supported Seattle soccer with their tears and blood and money while the rest of the Seattle sports community has ignored them for decades,” he says. “And now that it’s coming to the forefront, there are times when people get a little sensitive and say, ‘Look, we’ve done it this way for forever, and just because there are all of these people on board, don’t suddenly walk on our traditions.’ ”

He’s calm and matter of fact as he says this. “Do I think this contradicts with the soccer culture? Absolutely. And I don’t know of anyone who wouldn’t admit that. And if the band doesn’t think there are any contradictions, they’re walking into a minefield.”

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MILES WARD

Sousaphone, tuba. Named his horn “Funk Engine.”

I went to Willamette University in Salem, and as a freshman I was told, “Yes, there’s a pep band here, there’s a marching band here, you’ll have fun, it’ll be great.” And I got there and there hadn’t been one in 10 years. So I approached the band directors about it and they said, “Well sure, if you want to start a band like that, go right ahead.”

I asked them where the tubas were, because tubas aren’t instruments that most people own. You borrow them from the school. They’re very expensive. So I went on a two-day search through a 105-year-old building in Oregon called the Smith Facility. It was the original capitol of the state, and, in a dirt-floor basement that’s now being examined for archaeological purposes, there were tubas over in the corner. So I pulled one out, and it was so dirty that it had to be run through the school dishwasher to clean it off. And then I had it repaired, and then the university kind of awarded it to me as a result of four years of running this band.

How is Sound Wave different than the bands I’ve played in before? The easy way to say it is that the ranks are deep. The second string is as strong as the first string. I played for the Husky Marching Band, too—a great band, spectacular, cranking, deafening sounds—and when you have 280 people on the field, 100 of them are playing for the first year. They’re mostly there to just fill out the formations. So it’s a pretty small number of people actually making sound. And I’ve played with even smaller groups where everyone has to play. But with the Sounders, it’s a pretty big group, and everybody cranks. It’s a lot of fun to play with because it feels like if someone can’t make it one day, everybody else is just as good. It’s nice to have that kind of unity. It also makes learning and performing the music so much faster because everyone’s so strong.

What I think of when I see soccer is that image of the South American riot bowl. There’s a bunch of people just going totally nuts. There’s always, like, six guys with timbales in the corner, freaking out and having a great time. So the idea of a marching band in the context of that seems real natural to me. Like, “Yeah, you’re going to want a bunch of people in the corner making a bunch of noise and having a great time,” instead of what I think a lot of the people [walking into the band tryouts] were thinking: “Are we going to have uniforms and pom-poms? Is this going to be absurd and totally out of place?” I think the whole organization has enough of a clue that it’s going to be cool.

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Two weeks before the band’s official introduction at Qwest, they’re rehearsing a stomping New Orleans–style jazz piece called “Almost Never” in the bowels of the stadium. Sound Wave’s director, Keith Rousu, has been negotiating with the Emerald City Supporters—the Sounders FC’s “official” fan group, which counts among its 300 members a fair share of ultras—since last June, when he put the band together. Not everyone in ECS hated the idea of the band, and most of those who did have accepted it by now, but it had been a struggle. And even after all the reassurances that the band wouldn’t launch into sorry songs like “In the Mood” or play when the team was being introduced—according to ultra culture, the worst transgression imaginable—or that it was willing to learn songs that would complement ECS’s chants, the group still wasn’t entirely satisfied. ECS was upset that management planned to seat the band next to their section in the Qwest Field stands; the music, they argued, would drown out their chanting and singing.

The band is so excited to put their skills on display, they forget that, for the last year and a half, some people were hoping that they wouldn’t make it this far.

Rousu isn’t worried that Sound Wave will do something to invoke the fan group’s wrath, but he is over the whole “marching bands will kill soccer” thing and ready to move on. He would rather focus on the music, because right now the band can play about eight of the 20 songs he wants them to know by the first game of the season in March. It’s a considerable gap to close, made all the more difficult by the fact that they’ll take a break from rehearsals for almost all of December and January. Plus, when he’s not working at his full-time job as the head daytime dispatcher for Puget Sound Blood Center, he’s still arranging mainstream tunes like “Ants Marching” and “Handlebars” for the band, which takes 10 or 16 hours per song. He’s plenty familiar with the process—he was in the Husky Marching Band at UW, and he’s been the director of the Seahawks drum line for the last six years—and he’s confident that the band can pick them up relatively easily because it has “hot chops,” as he likes to say. But still, these things take time.

So yeah, Rousu has work to do. The halftime performance at Qwest is coming up, and they’re still working out some kinks.

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TAMEEM BAKKAR

Trumpet. Can fly a plane.

Interestingly enough, after high school, I dropped playing music while I was in the Marine Corps. At that point in time, I’d decided to move on to being a marine and move on to being a pilot.

My uncle was a Marine Corps pilot, and, ever since I can remember, I wanted to be him. He was just the person that I aspired to be. I served from ’91 to ’94. I was on active duty. I went into an officer’s program, and what actually got me out of the officer’s program was a dislocation of both shoulders simultaneously. I was on the obstacle course, and I was real close to the regimental record time for the course. I’ve always been competitive and decided that I was going to go for the record and, in doing so, I lost control on one of the obstacles. That was the end of my Marine Corps career. They put a pin in my left shoulder, and at that point in time, and I’m sure they still do, they had a pretty strict policy on what they call “artificial hardware.”

At that point, I wanted to be anybody other than who I was, because who I was failed at what I was trying to do. I’ve always been like, “I don’t fall short. I don’t fail.” It’s that competitive spirit, it’s being a marine. And that’s what I was, through and through. I bled crimson and gold—those are the Marine Corps’s colors. When I got out, the only thing that I could think of to do was go to college. One day, I was sitting in my room, really feeling sorry for myself, and over in the corner was my trumpet that I played in high school. And I picked it up, and it became therapy. And more and more, when I felt down, I picked it up. And I started feeling better all the time. That’s when my track led me into music and led me into Husky band and led me into my passion for music that I have now.

Being a marine is a title that I will hold and keep close to my heart forever. There’s nothing that could completely fill that hole. That was a place, after high school, where I really belonged and where I really excelled and felt good about who I was and what I was and what I was doing for the world and that type of thing. I looked everywhere for that and didn’t feel that again until I got into the Husky band. When I got into the Husky band, that’s when my blood changed from crimson and gold to purple and gold. And my blood is still purple and gold—and if you cut me in the right spot, you can still find the crimson and gold in there, too. And the way that I see this happening, the way that I see the Sound Wave going, it won’t be too long before if you cut me in the right spot, you’ll see green and blue.

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Back at Qwest, it’s raining. Of course it is. The drops clung tight to the clouds for the entire first half, while the band sat what must have been half a mile above the south end zone, squeezed into bleachers in a castoff bullpen of concrete and aluminum like grade-school kids on a field trip. The sun came out long enough for a couple of the girls in the band to take giddy pictures of each other—“We really were here!”—with the field in the background, but somewhere along the descent from the nosebleeds to the northeast tunnel, it started to pour.

Now, if you stand at the tunnel’s entrance, you can see the drops, big and fat and falling fast, lighting up like electrical sparks as they pass the stadium lights. But not a single member of the band is standing at the tunnel’s entrance. They’re back inside the cinderblock hallway that circles the stadium and seems big enough to hold an airplane but, at the moment, is struggling to contain all the random trombone blasts and trumpet bleats and snare drum raps. Miles Ward is standing in the middle of the group, red-faced and wrapped up in the coil of his sousaphone as he blows air into the brass monster to keep it warm and in tune. Tameem paces, reminding himself to breathe and running through the notes in his head one last time. The drum guys? They’re chasing each other in a circle and using the complimentary green rally towels that the ticket takers were handing out at the gate to snap each other in the ass.

It’s time to go. The fan development manager gives the signal that they’re up, and they huddle at the tunnel’s entrance and start marching out onto the field. If they didn’t see the rain before, they do now; drops are beading up on the horns like little reflectors, capturing all 60,000 people in the stadium and multiplying them by another 60,000. “Five and a half minutes of fury,” Rousu says as they walk out onto the field, but he doesn’t scream it to his troops like a battle cry. It’s barely loud enough for the guy next to him to hear.

Now they’re at midfield, lined up just like they were on the steps outside the stadium before the game. And they’re playing the same three songs they played before. And Tameem is belting out his solo at the end of “Fire.” It may be five and a half minutes, but it feels like one; all that bitching that “marching bands don’t belong in soccer” that they’ve carried around with them for the last year, they’re blowing it into these three songs and out of their minds. They’re swiveling their horns from side to side like a chorus of symphonic canons and throwing in little bits of “choreography” that weren’t really planned but feel like the right thing to do now, because this is their chance to show everyone here who they are. They’re high stepping and high-fiving and laughing. And even that swagger won’t prove they deserve a place in the stands right next to the guys who chant and scream and taunt the opposing goalie, but damn if this doesn’t feel good right now, this shotgun blast of sound.

Tameem’s looking up at all the people he doesn’t know, telling them with his mile-wide grin that by giving them everything his two busted shoulders would let him give, he’s won back another little piece of his pride. And he’s lofting his trumpet above his head like a trophy with one hand, punching the air with the other one, and screaming out “Yeah!” while the rest of the band members “Woo!”

And this time, the crowd is going nuts.