Musician, mentor and occasional zookeeper, the director of the Stanford Band is stepping down.
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Blessed
with perfect pitch and a talent for turning a deaf ear to sophomoric student
antics, Arthur P. Barnes has led thousands of students in the Leland Stanford
Junior University Marching Band through more than three decades of mirthful
mayhem. No, the Band members didn't march in a straight line, and frequently
they broke ranks entirely. But in the end, they always respected the Good
Doctor and the truly incomparable music he arranged just for them.
A former teacher of band and music theory at Fresno State, Barnes first came to
Stanford in 1963 to get his doctorate in musical arts. He joined the Band as
part-time director and, two years later, took the post full time. From the
beginning, the hip young grad student impressed Bandsmensmen with his ability
to transform popular rock 'n' roll songs into arrangements for brass and
woodwinds, a process known as charting. "Students would bring in songs on
records or cassette tapes and we'd listen to them in my office," Barnes
explains. If he liked a piece--and 
thought
it could be translated into band music--Barnes would shorten it to about two
minutes by eliminating introductions and guitar riffs. Then he'd find notes to
the song for each of six different instrument sections.
Incredibly,
Barnes charted more than 300 songs for the LSJUMB. That talent, plus his
willingness to leave students blissfully free to run their own affairs,
transformed the group from a Sousa-playing marching unit into the world's
largest rock 'n' roll band--a groove machine that delighted students almost as
much as it baffled their parents, administrators and older alumni.
Now, the silver-maned maestro of funk is retiring. But the merry band that followed Barnes through the years is not about to let him go quietly. The revelry began last November, when more than 150 Band alumni crowded into the Palo Alto Holiday Inn to raise more than a few glasses in tribute. Barnes describes that evening as the brightest moment of his career, but there were many other memorable times, too. With his help, we present the high points of his triumphant Stanford career.
The Star Spangled Banner
When
Barnes first arrived at Stanford, Bandsmensmen were in such a funk over the
dismissal of his predecessor, Jules Shuchat, that they sat out the season's
first two football games in protest. "To say that Barnes wasn't welcomed
with open arms is an understatement," recalls Jon Erickson, '65, whose
Band duties included shooting the cannon after touchdowns (and who now serves
as the University bursar.) "In fact, when he walked into the Shak and
introduced himself, it was all we could do to keep from laughing in his
face." The strike ended when students were granted more control over the
Band, but the real turning point came at the first home game of the football
season, when they played an innovative version of the national anthem that
Barnes had arranged during his previous gig at Fresno State. The piece began
with a 
long
drum roll and a haunting trumpet solo, followed by a reverent, full-band
finish. The anthem was also played at the 1963 Big Game--just eight days after
the Kennedy assassination. "I've never heard such a loud silence,"
Barnes says. "All the sportswriters said they had lumps in their throats.
It was the defining moment of my early years." Other university bands have
tried to copy Barnes's Banner, but he owns the rights to the original. To keep
it from being overexposed, he has decreed that it can be played only by the
Stanford Band--and then only at home games.
We Will (Little) Rock You
Band members came from all over the country to join Barnes for the first
preseason road trip to the 1970 Stanford-Arkansas football game. Some even
hitchhiked their way to Little Rock. For the record, 
Bandsmensmen
did not bare all when they dropped their pants during the game's nationally
televised halftime show, but the act caused a sensation just the same. Recalls
that year's drum major, Geordie Lawry, '71: "We had come up with a Beach
Boys surf show to demonstrate to these people something about California
culture." The Band lined up on the field shoeless, there was a drum roll,
"and every Bandsmensman dropped his pants--revealing surfer jams
underneath." Lawry himself was dressed in a full wetsuit, flippers and a
snorkle. "The Band was at its best, and the music was absolutely fabulous.
It was a ton of fun." Barnes himself regarded the trip as "new and
strange," which was apparently what a number of residents also thought
about the Band's music. Barnes recalls that after the Band failed to win an
award at halftime, the contest judge, The Tonight Show's bandleader, Doc
Severinsen, privately apologized to Barnes. "It's very political,"
Severinsen told Barnes. "I would love to have given you the award, but
down here in the South I can't do that." The musician's opinion was echoed
the following day when an editorial in the Arkansas Democrat proclaimed:
"The Stanford Band was the winner, hands down."
Taking It to the Streets
While
football fans remember the 1971 Rose Bowl as the game where Jim Plunkett led
the team to a 27-17 upset over Ohio State, Stanford's appearance at the 1972
Rose Bowl was even more memorable for Barnes, mostly because of a $50 wager he
had made with the UCLA band director. "We had 12 tuba players, but one of
them couldn't march in the Rose Parade down Colorado Avenue, so [UCLA director]
Kelly James bet me that I couldn't march the 5 1/2
miles carrying a 
tuba,"
Barnes recalls. "I said, 'No problem! All I need are two pairs of socks.'
" Barnes completed the parade in high style, playing tuba the whole way
without sheet music. ("Hell, I didn't need music," he huffs. "I
wrote it!") For years afterward, the Arthur P. Barnes Memorial Socks were
nailed to a beam in the old Band Shak, right next to a check signed by the UCLA
band director-- and sealed in plastic so it couldn't be cashed.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
For
70 years, the Stanford marching Band was a male-only bastion. Even as late as
the fall of 1971, members voted 108 to 22 to keep women out, fearing their
admission would bring unwelcome changes to the sanctum. "They said women
would be the ruination of the Band; that it would somehow sound softer,"
Barnes
recalls, shaking his head. "I said, 'I think you're wrong! In fact, I
think they'll be even brassier than you guys!' " Barnes finally convinced
the Bandsmensmen to reconsider, and in 1972 the Shak's doors were opened to
female student musicians for the first time. "Although [women were] a
small minority initially, it wasn't long before no one gave it a second
thought," Barnes says. "Today, students couldn't even conceive of a
Band without women." By the end of the decade, the Band had a female drum
major, Megan Evans, '81. "When I got into the Band, there was already a
long and strong tradition of wild women," says Evans, who is now a
doctoral student in Chinese theater at the University of Hawaii. Today the
Band, like the University, is about 50 percent female.
All Right Now
As a professor of music, Barnes had many responsibilities at Stanford, including
directing the University's symphonic bands and wind ensembles. Yet, somehow, he
always found time to chart new tunes for the marching Band's's halftime shows
and to teach his students to do the same. Barnes charted his greatest hit from
a tune that initially aroused little enthusiasm among the Bandsmen. "I
think I first heard "All Right Now" on the radio when I was living in
the Phi Sig house; it was by this obscure band called Free," drum major
Lawry recalls. "When I 
played
it for other Band members, it got a very lukewarm reception. They said, 'Who's
ever heard of this group?' It was a hard sell." Barnes, on the other hand,
thought it was a great tune--a perfect replacement for the Indian- oriented
fight songs that had been scrapped. "The words were right, and I thought
it would sound wonderful with the Band," he recalls. From the moment
Barnes charted "All Right Now," Lawry says, "we knew we had a
classic." To this day, students still jump enthusiastically-- right on
cue--whenever Stanford's de facto fight song is played.
Rule Britannia
Barnes's arrangements helped the Stanford Band make a name for itself musically.
But it was the Band's nonmusical antics--usually planned without Barnes's
knowledge--that garnered the most attention over the years. Some of the stunts
were pure genius, such as the time a Stanford Band member managed to obtain a
Cal band uniform, and then marched, feigning confusion, along with the Cardinal
at halftime. Many other stunts, including field angry letters to the
president's office. However, with Barnes's help, the Band usually managed to
redeem itself. Probably the greatest test of self-control came in the winter of
1983, during Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Stanford. Certainly, there were
plenty of raised eyebrows when then-President Donald Kennedy 
invited
them to play near Hoover House, where Her Majesty was to have lunch. But as it
turned out, campus fussbudgets needn't have worried. "They showed up in
absolutely spanking clean red coats," Kennedy marveled later. "They
labored hard and played a marvelous arrangement, which Art Barnes wrote
himself, of 'Rule Britannia'." (The Band split in two, the other half of
the Band played the "The Star Spangled Banner" simultaneously.) In
fact, Kennedy said, "the only thing the Band did on that occasion you
could consider the least bit bad was one of those chorus yells." The
offending phrase? "Go, Queen!"
Welcome to Paradise
As Stanford's profile overseas grew in the 1980s, the Band traveled farther
afield. For Barnes, the most memorable trip of recent years was the journey to
the 1988 World Exposition in Brisbane, Australia. "Anyone who went on that
trip would say it was the highlight of their time at Stanford," Barnes
says. "Bill Lane [former Stanford trustee and 
then-U.S.
Ambassador to Australia] saw to it that we had the red carpet treatment
everywhere we went." The Australians particularly appreciated Barnes's
arrangements of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" and "Waltzing
Mathilda" rehearsed against the Band's will, but later appreciated as pure
genius. The adulation continued throughout the tour. "To our knowledge,
the concept of a marching band was foreign to Australians, and the idea of a
'wacky' band simply blew their minds," says former Band manager John
Mannion, '89. "We played rock 'n' roll. We drank beer. We did generally
silly things. We were everything Australia wanted in a marching band."
Limelight
Barnes received many tributes at his retirement banquet in
November, but probably the most impressive was a proclamation signed by the six
Stanford alumni in the U.S. Senate. They praised Barnes for his arrangement of
"The Banner," as well as his commitment to music education. Still
visibly moved by his evening of commemoration, Barnes says: "I'd never
seen such an outpouring
of love and warmth. I think the reason is that many Stanford students find it
very difficult to have a one-on-one relationship with a professor, and the Band
was a saving grace for some of them." Perhaps the best testimonial came
from Mannion, who served as emcee for the evening's entertainment. "Art
Barnes never set out to 'manage' the Stanford Band. He set out to be their
leader. He has evolved into being their mentor, their friend, their guide and
their buffer from the University administration. And like the best leaders, he
surrounded himself with some very bright people and allowed them to do their
best."
Theresa Johnston, '83, a freelance writer in Palo Alto, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.