More in the link. I posted this because I was briefly in the UC Davis Marching Band 8 years ago, and from the things I experienced, it really isn't surprising they got this far. The band director they had left in 2004, so you can imagine how bad an already-outrageous student-run organization could get with 4 years of no faculty oversight. Oh, the stories I could tell...(10-05) 16:39 PDT -- When he was hired as director of the loud, rowdy Cal Aggie Marching Band at UC Davis, nobody told Tom Slabaugh about the tradition of "naked van."
But on last year's road trip to the football game with Portland State, a trumpet player yelled "naked van!" and everybody in the vehicle - men and women alike - stripped to their underwear.
Slabaugh ordered band members to put their clothes back on, but they ignored him, he said in a memo to university officials.
Meanwhile, a sousaphone player and a clarinetist wrote "I BOOBS" in masking tape on the van's window, causing a motorist who saw the van on I-5 in Oregon to complain to the university.
The naked van episode was one in a series of "ridiculous, disturbing and offensive" incidents, some of them alcohol-fueled, that Slabaugh says he witnessed in his year with the Cal Aggies, according to a copy of his memo obtained by The Chronicle.
On the band's fall retreat in 2007, four drunken band members were caught urinating in a dormitory elevator, and at band picnic day, four others took their uniform pants down and simulated the incident for a photographer. At outdoor rehearsals, male band members dropped their pants to get a laugh, while women sometimes stripped to their bras, he wrote, and one evening practice was disrupted when a bass drummer began performing lap dances.
'Sexualized' comments
Drunken hazing of band members also occurred, he said, and posters tacked to the walls of the rehearsal room were defaced with crude and "sexualized" comments.
When Slabaugh tried to get the band to behave, he said he faced a barrage of obscene insults and gestures - even a lewd Christmas card from the trombone section.
Frustrated because he didn't have the power to expel out-of-control musicians from the student-run band, Slabaugh took the unusual step of filing a sexual harassment complaint with the university in May.
The Cal Aggie band is a "hostile work environment," he wrote.
Members of the band's leadership council declined to be interviewed for this story.
"I'm not really willing to talk about anything anyone has done," one said.
Meanwhile, Slabaugh is on stress leave and unavailable for comment, said his lawyer, Chad Carlock.
When Slabaugh was hired, he knew there were "issues" with the band, the lawyer said, but he believed the university would give him the power to clean the problems up.
"We're still hopeful that's the case," the lawyer said. "I'd like to get him back to work."
'Over the cliff'
Through the years, marching bands at many colleges have gotten in trouble for wild behavior - Stanford's band, for example, has repeatedly been suspended. But what's going on at UC Davis may be uniquely problematic, said Wayne Erickson, western division president for the College Band Directors National Association.
"I've never heard of it getting to that point," said Erickson, who is also band director at Utah Valley State College. "It sounds like they've driven in the ditch and over the cliff."
In response to Slabaugh's complaints, Lisa Brodkey, a university sexual harassment officer, gave sexual harassment training to the band, she said in an Aug. 12 letter. Brodkey also did a walk-through of the band room and ordered offensive "signs, pictures, condoms, etc." removed from the walls, she wrote. UC Davis was considering whether to give Slabaugh the power to expel unruly band members, she wrote.
Really, most of what American Pie says about band kids is true. Its kinda disturbing.
