The first time I set foot in a great hulking building on Galvez Street, things were a little different.
Stepping through the creaking double doors, a terrified but curious freshman, I cringed. The place reeked of decades' worth of spilled beer, soaked into multiple pieces of scrounged carpet (the original had long since rotted away). "Liberated" signs blanketed every square inch of wall; some, as we later discovered, had vital roles in holding those walls up after 25 years. I picked my way past decomposing sofas, stumbled through tequila bottles and red plastic cups, and stared at the muumuu-clad students draped over anything that might pass for furniture. Simultaneously revolted and awed, I beheld the Band Shak for the first time. For the next 2 1/2 years, it would serve as my second home.
I have been a proud member of the Leland Stanford Junior (pause) University Marching Band since that first Friday night in 1996 when I ran with the Band from Kimball to Lag to the Quad and back to the Shak. Somehow, over the course of those years, I learned to tolerate the regurgitated-beer smell and the filth and even the Shak Rats (though I drew the line at the dead one that got nailed over the entrance as a macabre sort of mistletoe), treasuring this odd place because it was our place. No one but Bandies and their guests ever went near it, and thus we could "improve" it however we pleased. The squealing pipes (a.k.a. Shak Baby), the bottle target ("clear!"), the bean pit and the light yurt were all beloved, if gross parts of Band lore and tradition.
I was there the day the Shak came down, its condemned walls razed to make way for the new Alumni Shrine. It was 8 o'clock on a sparkling December morning; I was a junior, exhausted and hung over and on my way to my last final of the quarter. (Yes, staying up drinking until 4 a.m. the night before a final is stupid, which was why I did it.) Most of the Band was in Long Beach with the women's volleyball team, but 15 or 20 stragglers made it to Galvez Street that morning. I hauled my drum out of the trailer serving as TempShak, and we played a final rally for our former home. We started with "Tear the Roof Off the Sucker," saluted while our former manager belted out taps on her trombone, and finally, sniffled through "All Right Now" as the wrecking ball swung.
Like I said, today is a little bit different. When I enter the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center to work at Stanford magazine, I don't usually step over any drunken students (though, to be fair, the place has just opened). Courtly palm trees line the entrance, replacing abandoned bikes and grungy coolers awaiting cleaning. The shiny new building is full of light and windows and cubicles: it smells of fresh paint. Our windows bump up against the trees shading Frost Amphitheater, and it's deliciously like working in a forest. Amidst sounds of typing and talking, I strain to catch a hint of Shak Baby's whimper. Though this building dwarfs our former home, I can puzzle out the location of the shak's front doors from the steam-tunnel grate spattered with pink paint and from the scorch marks left on the street after we set the piano on fire three years ago.
I love working here, and it involves a lot less beer spilled on my clothes, but I do put up with a great deal of flak from my band buddies about selling out. They can't get used to the fact that the office mailroom sits above what was once the Drum Room and that all the signs in the building are actually supposed to be here. They threaten to steal my keys and sneak in to "redecorate." So far, I've managed to fend them off.
However, perched next to my office nameplate (in flagrant violation of the building's standards of cubicle decoration) sits a small chunk of red brick that I scavenged from the rubble of our home-away-from-home-away-from-home, in memory of an ugly, dilapidated, smelly building that will always occupy a grimy little corner of my heart.
Chaney Rankin, '00, wrote this while working as Stanford's editorial assistant. She is now studying linguistics at Georgetown University.
