Those Wacky Scramble Bands

There are almost 3000 colleges and universities in this country, and only an even dozen real college bands. Most colleges field, for God knows what reason, high school-style marching bands. These collegiate marching bands are just like the ones they have in high schools (with similar wool uniforms, Sousa marches, and geometrical field formations), only bigger, louder, and even more serious, regimented, uncreative, and dull.

Real college bands,i.e. scramble bands, perform humorous halftime shows, with a voiced over script, and include skits, jokes, parodies, and satire. They do not march, but rather scramble from place to place in an inefficient fashion. The formations and songs presented on the field are generally related to the jokes, if they are not the actual punchlines themselves. Scramble bands tend to play arrangements of rock and roll, blues, or soul songs, television theme songs, beer commercial music, etc. - they avoid Sousa marches, Latin fanfares, and classical arrangements like the Plague. Scramble bands are likely to have people playing non-traditional instruments such as mailboxes (Columbia), manequins (Princeton), or violins, slide whistles, and Poulan Weedwackers (us). These people, referred to variously as miscellaneous (or miscies), trash percussion, or managers, often do not play at all - they might dance, juggle, or just cavort. Scramble bands are prone to dressing strangely and looking wacky - definitions of the uniforms tend to be spacious, and are generally supplemented and customized by distinctive hats, pins and buttons, creative individual fashion statements, and often outright costumes. Scramble bands overwhelmingly tend to be run by the students in them (and not by some faculty member).

In short, scramble bands are what the college experience is all about - freedom of thought and expression, individuality, creativity, questioning of the sacred and revered, having a grand good time, having a sense of humor (and a sense of humility), and most of all learning - learning how to lead, organize, politick, negotiate, and take responsiblity (and maybe even how to generate and survive a little controversy). It is no coincidence that scramble bands are found at the top universities in the country.

"That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake...."

--Albert Einstein

The 11 other scramble bands are:

• The Harvard University Marching Band
• The Yale Precision Marching Band
• The Princeton University Band
• The Columbia University Marching Band - aka The Cleverest Band in the World (tm)
• The Dartmouth College Band
• The Brown University Band
• The Huge The Enormous The Well-Endowed Undefeated Ivy League Champion Oxymoronic University of Pennsylvania Fighting Quaker Marching Band
• The Rice M.O.B. (Marching Owl Band)
• The One, The Only, The Truly Incomparable Leland Stanford Junior (Pause) University Marching Band
• The Humboldt State Marching Lumberjacks
• The University of Chicago Band

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