Floyd Vivino got sent down to Joe Sielski because he was always in trouble at school.
The powers that be thought he could better expend his energy in band.
So Sielski, the music teacher and band leader at Glen Rock High, put Floyd to work on the cymbals.
Half a century later, Floyd — now known as Uncle Floyd — is at the same school, still smashing those cymbals in the documentary “Banded Together: The Boys From Glen Rock High,” premiering Saturday, Oct. 29 at the Montclair Film Festival.
Floyd, 71, and his younger brothers, musicians Jimmy Vivino, 67, and Jerry Vivino, 68, are just three of the eight former Glen Rock High students featured in the film.
They all have one thing in common — they got to live their dreams in music and TV.
Sielski (”seal-ski”), a teacher and band director at Glen Rock High from 1963 to 2003, calls the years he taught those students his “golden age” — a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of talent.
“They were playing at a professional level while they were in school,” he says in the film.
And they’re still at it.
The documentary is the performers’ salute to the place that made them who they are: a green-lawned hamlet they call a combination of the placid Shire from “Lord of the Rings” and the suburban splendor of “The Wonder Years,” all centered by the 570-ton boulder that gives the town its name.
Los Angeles director Barry Rubinow, an alum of Glen Rock High himself (class of ’74), filmed interviews with the group of eight and Sielski, their beloved music teacher. They all got together for a reunion concert at the school in December 2021.
“It’s pretty amazing that all that talent came out in that short a period of time and from this small town,” Rubinow tells NJ Advance Media.
He grew up a close friend of two of the film’s subjects — upright bass player John Feeney and bass guitarist Doug Romoff, a producer of the documentary.
“The three of us hung out all the time,“ Rubinow says, though their careers would take them in different directions.
For Feeney and Romoff, that meant musically different, too — Feeney, who attended Juilliard on a scholarship, plays double bass with international orchestras as a classical chamber musician and a soloist.
Romoff first had the idea for the reunion project. But it wouldn’t be the kind of reunion where no one’s seen each other in years — they still play together.
