Band takes its performance seriously, but is willing to poke fun at itself

"Okay, one-two-three, four!" With a swift slice of his hands through the air, Dave Driscoll is ready to start, but only a few alert trumpeters follow his cue.

"Now – everybody!" grins the student conductor of the Princeton University Band, practicing with his musicians assembled deep in the basement of the Woolworth music building for their weekly Tuesday night rehearsal.

"They don't pay attention to me," says Driscoll '04, a saxophonist when he isn't conducting the group, "I'll be up there telling them 'play faster,' 'play slower' – but they just play it however they want."

Do they heed him during performances?

"Enough," he quips.

Watching a recent rehearsal makes it clear that these orange-and-black-plaid-clad purveyors of "music, marching, mirth and merriment" are certainly not all play and no work. As easy going as it looks from the outside, this entirely student-run group is organized on surprisingly well-disciplined lines.

President Pat Miller '03 explains, "We don't take ourselves seriously, but we definitely do take our performances seriously."

The light banter between pieces, so markedly absent in the austere world of orchestral and chamber music – not to mention the plump plush spider nestling atop a piccolo player's head – belies the ferocious intensity of the rehearsal.

Two bars into the first piece – "A Friend Like Me" – and the basement is electric, its soundproof walls severely tested. One of the drummers pumps himself up with rapper-style head thrusts. A trio of trumpeters elephant-swing their faux-tiger skin covered instruments jauntily from side to side. A clarinetist throws his head back, as if laughing, and everyone is toe tapping. It isn't long before the head thruster at the back is virtually jigging on the spot with his snare drum.

At the center of these three converging semicircles of rhythm stands Driscoll, fingers flying above the music stand.

It's an energy that comes in handy while rallying school spirit behind a football team of the Tigers' dubious distinction – especially, as Miller wryly observes, since the members of the Band are sometimes "the only Princeton fans at an away game, and the only student fans at a home game."

Solitary supporters they may be, but Band members often find themselves one of the main attractions. Their famously irreverent halftime skits (a prodigious store of Old Nassau lore) have over the decades lampooned, among other things, academic courses at Brown, 'Life With Tubes,' the delights of New Haven and, of course, all matters Hahvahd.

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An inner circle of band members headed by drum major Dan Spector '03 meet thrice weekly to concoct these skits, which – given their less than innocuous history – are then given a dry run before censor Dean Dunne.

A perusal of the Band's website reveals a stash of tantalizingly inaccessible "Halftime Shows That Never Were," a compilation of annual year-ending skits, each one written solely for the amusement of the Band's members and its many supportive alumni.

Have any of their shows ever fallen flat?

Miller doesn't miss a beat in responding. "Oh, I think we're always genuinely funny," he says, straight-faced, "but it isn't always appreciated outside."

Hardly surprising, given the Band's penchant for playful antagonism of other schools. Favored antics include playing "Tequila!" in those most hallowed grounds of academia – college libraries – as well as holding high-decibel early morning marching practices around the sleepy dormitories of other colleges, says Miller, recalling his own freshman year brush with the Brown campus police.

It is this streak of absurdity – not to mention their outlandish sartorial style and euphonic use of plastic flamingos – that sets the group apart. Driscoll hints at occasional cool feeling towards the Band from some quarters – musical and otherwise – in straight-laced, buttoned-down Princeton.

"I guess it's because we're just ..." he trails off before finding his phrase and smiles mischievously, "slightly less predictable."