Turning the Beat Around

It’s a chilly, fall Monday evening, and most Stanford students can be found pent up in the library or eating dinner in a quiet dining hall—that is, except for a cohort of students jumping up and down, doing the pelvic thrust in time to Styx’s “Blue Collar Man.”

Welcome to the typical weekly Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB) rehearsal. Bright-orange earplugs are issued to the members trickling in, and a small whiteboard lists the agenda for the day scrawled in green dry-erase marker: “Ignorance, Lovecats, Uptight, Frankenstein…etc.”

Saxophone players in the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB) claim the field, grooving to upbeat tunes. (Courtesy of Alvaro Ponce)

The typical warm-up exercise involves losing one’s shoes and grooving with instruments as if they are dance partners while the Band familiarizes itself with old songs. The “Clairpicks” section even strikes up a kick-line.

Some read their music off traditional stands, but many just mimic others around them, not really caring if they play out of tune. As Arianna Vogel ’14 nonchalantly put it after admitting she has no idea how to play her trombone, “You have to learn not to care that you’re making a fool out of yourself.”

To say the least, this is not a typical college band rehearsal. In fact, compared with any traditional marching band, the Stanford Band could very well be construed as utter chaos.

Discipline and dignity may seem like the natural pillars of a marching band, but the LSJUMB is just plain fun. After all, it’s run by Stanford students for the sheer purpose of entertaining other Stanford students.

Peter “Shotgun” McDonald, the Tööbz Sexion Leader for the Band, described how the LSJUMB sees its role.

“There is a lot of arbitrary following of authority and doing what you’re told in the marching band process,” said McDonald, who is also a Daily columnist. ”And at more academically prestigious universities like Stanford, people see through the authority and see that their purpose is to entertain.”

And entertain they do. From the traditional Band Run to its quirky halftime shows, the Band captures all the suppressed energy Stanford students have building under the surface of their otherwise academically oriented lives.

So how did the LSJUMB get to be so wild? Apparently, the Band was once as reverent as its full name suggests, until a restructuring of the music department in 1963 resulted in the dismissal of the then- director Jules Schucat. To protest what it saw as an injustice, the Band went on strike and refused to play at the first two football games of 1963.

Finally, Schucat’s replacement, Arthur P. Barnes, thought of a compromise to get the Band back on the field: Barnes would allow the Band to be a student-run organization and the Band would play at football games again. The freewheeling 1960s plus the student direction of the Band gave it the rambunctious spirit it still has today.

The 1960s rebirth of the LSJUMB is still seen in both the pictures on the wall the Band Shak and the alumni who come to jam with the band every so often. And as the Band’s faculty advisor, John Giancarlo, said over the deafening roar of “Turn the Beat Around,” “This year the Band is better musically than ever before.” Half the Band members openly admitted they started Band not being able to read sheet music.

Despite its cult-like mystique, the Band offers a tight-knit community where any Stanford student who wants to be a musician can be considered one. As junior Kevin “Yogi” Fischer put it, “Anybody can rock out.”