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.