A Necessarily Sketchy History Of The Revolution

from a letter from Michael Fuchs, c. 1995



It was May of 1993. Another year was ending. For the Pep Band, the year had
been notable due to the fact that it had been almost completely devoid of
public controversy. No offended write-ups in the national press. No
legislators threatening to outlaw us. No more than the usual few dozen
letters of complaint. For the UVa Athletic Department, the year could not be
considered to have gone so smoothly. For the first time in our history, the
University was investigated by the NCAA, and ultimately convicted of 13
rules violations, including interest-free loans, unreported income, and
other preferential treatment of athletes. This was dark - we had fallen into
the cesspool of dirty intercollegiate athletic programs, and we would never
be able remove the resultant tarnish on our school's image.

Whether or not these facts are related, the Athletic Department had also
decided that 1993 was going to be the last year on Earth of the Virginia Pep
Band. They called a meeting with the Pep Band leadership, to be held on the
last day of Final Exams, spring semester. The student press had shut down.
Most everyone had gone or was leaving. It was ominously quiet.

UVa Athletic Director Jim Copeland broke the silence. He spoke to the
students sitting across the table from him, Pep Band Director Edward Kuo and
Board Members Mandy Moore, Leylah Cherry, Cari Hamm, and Matt Fader. He told
them that a decision had been made, and the decision was this: The Pep Band
henceforth would be run by a faculty director whom they had picked out, and
future Pep Band performances would involve music only - the mic would be
dead, and the humor and satire a part of history. Copeland further asserted
that there would be no compromise on these issues, and that if the members
of the Pep Band chose not to participate, the AD was willing to put on
frisbee-catching dogs and high school bands in Scott Stadium until such time
as a new band could be formed by the faculty director they had hired.
Copeland then got up and left the room.

Needless to say, the two essential characteristics of the Pep Band are that
of being student-run, and being a scramble band - that is, a band that tells
jokes. We discovered later that the AD had been conducting secret
negotiations and planning with this faculty guy, Dwight Purvis, for over 8
months. But in one 5-minute address, Jim Copeland had just seemingly
cancelled the Pep Band.

News of the disaster broke at the Pep Band Beach House at North Myrtle, SC.
As 40 or so Pep Band members trickled in for Beachweek, they were informed
of the situation. The mood was not cheery. Everyone drank a lot. Staring
down expressionlessly at the ShitBox (the venerable and seemingly
indestructible tape-playing device of the Pep Band), Knoll Munson was heard
to mutter disbelievingly, "The ShitBox has outlived the Pep Band...!" There
were plenty of other lamentations and epitaphs. This looked pretty much like
the end of the ride.

There was some discussion about what was to be done next. Leadership allowed
that they were going to offer a compromise proposal (involving limited shows
and a limited role for a faculty director), though they held out no hope of
it being accepted. Many were terrified that such a proposal would be
accepted. These people talked of performing the fabled "Show to End All
Shows," which was a long-standing Pep Band Suicide Pact, involving whirling
swastika formations and abortion jokes. They discussed the possibility of
seeming to capitulate, taking the field, commandeering the stadium press
booth, and then going out in this mythical blaze of glory - and spending the
night in jail, of course. Many were attracted to the idea. No one seemed to
have any very good alternatives.

Except for Bill "Flash" Pemberton, drummer and Pep Band Elder. He seemed to
have this notion that the Athletic Department wasn't really in as strong a
position as they might like for us to think they were. There it was, 3
months before the first home game in the fall, and the Pep Band was still
the only band in town. Surely they must be counting on us capitulating, or
at least fragmenting the Pep Band and attracting a large portion of our
membership for their new band, Bill reasoned. What if the Pep Band didn't
play ball? What if we walked? What if, in the worst case, we disbanded, sold
off our assets, and established a trust fund - maybe 5 or 10 years down the
road, the Pep Band could be reborn. Who knows? Anything was better than
becoming a marching band. But maybe there were some other options, too. Bill
and I sounded out the Board Members on hand, doing a little preliminary
lobbying. BeachWeek wound down.

We returned to summer in The Hook, and hastily convened the informal Pep
Band Council of Elders. We were having some ideas about keeping the Pep Band
together, and away from the Athletic Department. About conducting a
political campaign to fight for our right to have a student-run band at the
University of Virginia. We thought about some things this would involve:
galvanizing the membership of the organization so that it would stay
together and be willing to fight; mobilizing the Pep Band alumni; issuing
press releases; conducting a monster letter-writing campaign; building a
coalition of political support amongst students, alumni, faculty,
administration, the student press, student council, and other student
organizations; lobbying the University President, Rector, and Board of
Visitors for our reinstatement; temporarily redefining the mission and
activities of the Pep Band so that it might survive independent of the
sponsorship of the Athletic Department. We fleshed these ideas out into an
8-page document we called The Pep Band Papers. We arranged a meeting with
the Director, and then with the full Board. We explained what we had in
mind.

A summer mailing to the membership went out, and, in addition to detailing
some of our plans and calling for courage, it announced a meeting of the
Band over Midsummers. Edward elected to wait until then and put our options
to a vote of the full band before launching the campaign. Time dragged. The
Band met - and voted almost unanimously to sever ties with the Athletic
Department. The front page of The Daily Progress proclaimed "UVa Pep Band
Declares Itself Free Agent." The Athletic Department had their answer. And
we had some serious work to do.

Press releases. Meetings. Editorials for the summer and initial fall
editions of the student papers. Strategic planning. Working the media.
Working the community. Thrust and parry. We formed committees out of the 25
or so members in town for the summer. The AD had full-time paid staff
writing press releases for them. We were overmatched. But we happened to be
in the right, and God was on our side. Mainly what we had to do was keep
that Big White Hat we were wearing visible, and drag the AD's slime trail
and dirty secrets out into the light.

Then came the Big Break: The USA Today Piece. We were in the national
spotlight. And we looked goood. The press just kept coming after that: every
local daily and weekly, every state and regional paper. The Washington Post.
The New York Times. Radio call-in. The local TV news. The International AP
Wire picked us up. Someone reported getting the story in Prague. And it was
almost all in support of the Pep Band and condemning of the AD and
University Administration. Sympathetic news stories were filled with quotes
from our leadership about how we wanted to continue to support the teams,
but we had been ousted by the Athletic Department. Quotes from AD officials
were confused and defensive. Letter writers and columnists ridiculed the
scandal-plagued UVa Athletic Department for their totalitarianism and
heavy-handed treatment of students, and called for the reinstatement of the
Pep Band. Editorialists bemoaned the irony of the muzzling of free speech at
Thomas Jefferson's University. It was extremely exhiliarating.

As the story spread, the public support grew exponentially. Mail flooded
into the University President's office, and onto Jim Copeland's desk.
Essentially, we were beating our opponent's brains out in the public
relations battle, and everyone knew it, especially the AD. Associate
Athletic Director Kim Record was their point person, issuing statements for
the press (most of them untruthful) and trying to put some decent spin on
the events. The proposed format changes only involve faculty oversight and
increased emphasis on musicality, she claimed. The Pep Band has a history of
drunkenness and conduct problems, and we are only trying to protect the
image of the University, she exhorted. "Never were we trying to force them
to do anything they didn't want to do," she claimed.

But it was too late. We had already achieved the one essential victory of
any political conflict: we had defined the agenda. We understood from the
beginning that if we had allowed this brouhaha to become merely a question
of whether or not the Pep Band was any good, we would not have attracted the
overwhelming support of the public. We had struggled mightily to make it an
issue of free speech, of student self-governance and autonomy, of having a
sense of humor about something as serious as big-time college football. We
had made it an issue of whether students at the University of Virginia were
going to be allowed to have a student-run band, or a student-run anything.
Everyone agreed that we should, and they clamored for Evil Jim Copeland to
allow us back into our own stadium to support our own team.

But for the time being, we were outside of the stadium - at least for our
performances. We managed to get limited rights to a big lovely patch of
grass just across from the stadium. Putting up fliers and notifying the
press, dragging amplifiers out onto the hillside for our Announcer, here we
put on our shows. And they were good, what with us being able to say
anything we wanted to and all. We drew crowds. We bashed Copeland. Then we
trekked over to the so-called Hill of Exile that directly overlooked the
Stadium and played for a while during pre-game. Very loudly. And then we
filed into the Stadium, sans instruments. But we weren't empty-handed.

That first game, we all gathered on the general seating hillside, and we
unfurled and laid out a 20'x60' "Free The Pep Band" sign. It was really hard
to miss. After a couple of games, the sign that came out at halftime, to
substantial laughter and applause, read "Quiet - Isn't It?" After the AD
began censoring the signs (yet another in a seemingly endless series of
public relations disasters for them), a plane circled overhead at halftime
trailing a large "Hey - Where's the Pep Band?" banner. We painted one letter
each on a few dozen shirts and wore our "Free the Pep Band" sign right
through the gates. We paraded through the alumni sections, to great aplomb,
carring a sizeable "Will Play For Food" sign. We passed out pointed flyers.
We raised a ruckus.

Very much unlike our intended replacements - the ill-fated and much-abused
UVa Sports Band, aka the Scab Band, aka the UVa Marching Cheese Dicks. At
the height of their limited powers, they were 24 players strong (mostly
woodwinds, and mostly professional musicians recruited to fill in the gaps
amongst the few first years, and fewer upperclasspersons, Dwight Purvis had
managed to attract), and scarcely made a peep. Even after they brought in
amplification (public relations embarrassment #467). Much more audible,
however, was the booing, hissing, thunk of hurled stadium cups, and chants
of "Scabs Go Home!" that erupted every time they attempted to play. Their
initial reception was absolutely unmistakable: When the stadium announcer
asked the crowd to "please welcome the UVa Sports Band" the stadium erupted
with abuse. That was the first and last time they were publicly announced
there. It was enought to warm your heart.

Our support grew along with the Athletic Department's embarrassment and
vilification. Almost every day the editorial pages of the Cavalier Daily and
the University Journal were devoted to this issue. It was reported that the
Sports Band's budget more than doubled the Pep Band's last allotment. And
they only had 20 players to show for it, while the Pep Band was still
rolling along with 90+. In fact, several Scab Band members defected to us,
donning the white hats and becoming notoriously enthusiastic Pep Band
members. We started getting offers for gigs we never would have gotten: we
played a Republican Party rally at Foxfield, and got paid $500 to play a
couple of charts for millionairess and BOV Member Pat Kluge out at the
exclusive Cheswick Hunt Club - she was having her birthday dinner with the
fomer president of NBC, who wanted to surprise her. Wealthy and influential
alumni started coming forth declaring that they were suspending their annual
donations until the Pep Band was reinstated. The largest Alumni chapter in
the nation, in D.C., issued a statement demanding our return. And the
American Civil Liberties Union was expressing interest in investigating
possible violations of the Pep Band's First Amendment rights.

We were the toast of the town.

But we were still Banned. There's an old political adage that it's the
amateurs that are dangerous. In this case, that meant that if Jim Copeland
wasn't such a ham-handed bozo, if he had a whit of sense in him, he would
have cut some sort of deal with us before things had gotten totally
humiliating for him. Neither he nor any of his lackies had ever anticipated
any of this. But he would not capitulate, even after it became clear that he
was the last and only man on the planet who did not want the Pep Band back.
He had dug in his heels. He had made it a point of (dis-)honor. So, there we
were. We were enjoying incredible success, as well as having a lot of fun.
But we wanted our gig back. And the football season was winding down fast.

Just before the last football game of the season, the traditional ugly
matchup against our rural rivals Virginia Tech, the situation was this: The
AD was in a bind. The football team was right on the fence (or perhaps "bent
over a chair" is the better expression) for a bid to a bowl game. They
needed to beat Tech to insure it, and everyone knew that not having a
functional band in the stands was not helping. Of course, it didn't hurt
that we had spent the last 6 months fomenting a momentous shit-storm that
they were not weathering very well. The Sports Band, what was left of it,
was all tuckered out - pretty much completely beleaguered. The Pep Band was
frustrated - and was also starting to become substantially worried, for the
following reasons: much of our success in the campaign had been built on the
failure of the Scab Band (and we had not merely been passive observers of
their floundering, heh heh). The Scabs were pretty pathetic sitting huddled
in a little corner of our old section of the football stadium - but
basketball season was going to be another story. We knew it's possible to
sound okay with as few as a dozen players in University Hall, the basketball
colliseum and a pretty acoustical room. Suddenly the Scab Band was going to
sound okay, and there would be no half-time for them to be conspicuously
absent from. Also, they were likely to attract a few new players, just for
those sweet reserved seats to tough-ticket basketball games. And what were
we going to be doing meanwhile? Playing out in the freezing cold of the U
Hall parking lot? Probably not. And in the fall, fully half of the student
body would never have seen the Pep Band inside of the stadium. The Scab Band
would pick up a few more ignorant first years, and we would lose a few of
our less faithful older members who may be growing weary of being in a
guerilla outfit. Bad scenario. Time was no longer on our side.

The time was ripe to cut a deal, and here is the form it took: We agreed to
come back and play in the stands at the Tech game, without doing a show -
essentially calling a truce and postponing discussion of the microphone
issue. So we then got the basketball gig back. We had known that we were
eventually going to have to do something with those bozos in the Scab Band,
so we agreed to accept a certain number of their student members into the
Pep Band, where they would pay our dues, and abide by our Constitution.
Overnight we have blown up our competition. No more Sports Band. Ha, ha.
Further, we are the official band of UVa again, we have a normal exciting
basketball season (don't miss the shows much, right?), we survive the winter
happy, strong, and warm, and come back pretty hard in the fall. We also get
the late-Sports Band's budget. If we don't get our shows back in the fall,
we simply walk again. What is the AD going to do, start another Sports Band?
(The first one went over so well.)

And how has this gambit worked out so far? At the time of this writing, just
before the fall 94 football season, pretty damned well. Predictably, the
Sports Band guys didn't turn out to be very well suited to life in the Pep
Band - the number of them that remain, by best estimates, is 0. Basketball
season was as good as ever, and we sounded better than ever, earning much
praise. Negotiations are going on now regarding our shows, but the word is
that we will have shows at some number, less than all, of home games.

So the drama is still unfolding. But the important result seems to be that
we have maintained our integrity and character as a student-run scramble
band, and as a University tradition that is valued by the students and
alumni, and is not going away anytime soon. And, moreover, it seems clear
that, in the final analysis, Jim Copeland and his NCAA Sanctions Buddies did
their damnedest in a resolute all-out effort to destroy the Virginia Pep
Band - and we're still standing.

Here's to us - and here's to victory.