How Scatter Bands Fare

January 11, 2012

Reading time min

In a genre characterized by goofy outfits and outlandish halftime shows, the scramble band remains an anomaly among the country's universities. And while the Stanford Band almost certainly is the most famous—how many others have been the subject of a series of questions on NPR's Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!—it is neither the oldest nor the most outrageous.

Scramble bands have been the norm in the Ivy League since the late 1950s. At Rice University, the Marching Owl Band (or MOB) hasn't been “marching” since 1970. And nearly all of these bands have had controversial halftime performances.

The Princeton Band's field shows are a veritable skewer of politicians, are rife with sexual innuendo, and regularly poke fun at Princeton opponents.

Cornell banned them from performing a show in 2006 that lampooned Cornell and its hometown of Ithaca, N.Y. Colgate did the same thing earlier in the season, when the Princeton Band wanted to do a halftime bit comparing its mascot to a zombie.

Senior Greg Snyder, president of the Princeton Band, says the group had several run-ins with the administration in the 1970s and '80s, but today's band has found common ground from which to advance its irreverent style. “The administration just wants to be sure it's a family-friendly environment,” he says. “We're pretty much in agreement with that.” When they've crossed the line, Snyder says, it's usually because they've stepped too hard on Ivy stereotypes, or made light of a tragic incident.

“We don't have an adversarial relationship in any way,” says Gerry Price, Princeton's associate director of athletics. Although his department reviews all the band's scripts—as does the student life office, which funds the group—Price can't recall many interventions. “I've been here 13 years and we've had problems with maybe five [scripts], if that,” he says. “The band tries to be funny and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't—just like anybody else who tries to be funny.”

The scramble band didn't fare so well at the University of Virginia, where the student-run Pep Band was replaced by a traditional marching band in 2004. The Pep Band was known for high-energy halftime shows that relied more on humor than musicality to entertain. It had been at odds with athletics officials for several years.

In 1993, the athletics department assembled a replacement band that was booed lustily by the Cavalier crowd, and that attempt was abandoned. But the Pep Band's demise followed on the heels of its halftime show during the Continental Tire Bowl in 2002, in which it parodied the popular reality show of the time, The Bachelor, and depicted a female West Virginia student wearing pigtails and overalls.

The governor of West Virginia demanded and received an apology from the UVA president. A year later, the athletics department banned the Pep Band from performing at all athletic events, and in 2004 it installed the Cavalier Marching Band. The Pep Band, though still active, has been reduced to a novelty act.

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