Zany Band Strikes Another Sour Note : Colleges: Stanford’s marching musicians come under fire again, this time for making fun of the controversy over the spotted owl.

It’s not easy to shock the Stanford University marching band.

Since they rebelled against tin-soldier costumes and John Philip Sousa in 1963, the zany pack of marauding musicians has given audiences halftime performances in which formations have included flying genitalia and four-letter words and satirical themes have included Jimmy Carter’s hemorrhoids.

But the Stanford athletic department succeeded in stumping the band when it suspended the group last week for making fun of the spotted owl.

No pants-dropping. No urinating on the field, which got the band its first suspension in 1986. Just a spoof on the Pacific Northwest’s spotted owl controversy Oct. 27 that was loudly booed at the University of Oregon’s Autzen Stadium.

After surviving the hostile Oregon fans, students were astounded by what they considered rough treatment from their own athletic department.

“We never thought we’d be banned for political satire,” said Benjamin Myers, band publicity director. “I don’t like the image that conjures up in people’s minds.”

But Alan Cummings, acting athletic director, promised: “The department of athletics will not be embarrassed again by the band.”

From now on, the department will review all shows. In the past, it looked only at the band’s plans for home-game performances.

Does this mean the Incomparable Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band won’t be quite so incomparable any more?

Well, armed with countless complaints from alumni and donors that the band was an idea whose time has passed, the athletic department plans a thorough review of the band’s activities at the end of this season.

Jesse Dorogusker, incoming band manager, agrees that he and the athletic department have more talking to do over winter and spring.

“A lot of people in the band and on the staff are not willing to make sacrifices in our format, which is often political satire,” Dorogusker said.

“William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift didn’t have to answer to their athletic departments,” added Guy Tucker, a band announcer and scriptwriter.

Cummings, though, said he’s not into censorship; he just wants the band to try a little tenderness.

The Oregon athletic department has asked Stanford not to bring the band next year, calling its show “in poor taste.” The department also has charged the band with a $112 for repairs because of vandalism, which the Stanford athletic department is investigating.

“They went too far as related to satire in another’s community,” Cummings said of the spotted owl show. “We want them to exercise sensitivity to the environment or community they’re in.”

But that’s not necessarily what you get from an independent student organization. Since its reformation in 1963, the band, which has about 120 members, has had little university scrutiny compared to traditional marching bands. While the band has a faculty adviser, music professor Arthur P. Barnes, it is funded almost entirely by student fees. The athletic department pays for one road trip a year--this year, ironically, the Oregon game.

Other college-sanctioned marching bands may perform interchanging geometric patterns to Chicago’s “25 or Six to Four” or salute Disney. But the Stanford band “scatters” into formations and salutes square appliances, Idi Amin and puberty.

Stanford drum majors have taken the field in everything from wedding gowns to Mylar suits. Shows traditionally have been dreamed up at what members call beer-inspired Monday night SMUT sessions (Stanford Marching Unit Thinkers) and performed after early Saturday morning breakfasts of doughnuts and beer.

Marching phallic formations have been common over the years, with band announcers calling them Hoover Towers, after the school’s famous landmark, or linear accelerators spewing particles.

In one game against USC, the Stanford band covered the field with dollar bills to see if the robotic Trojan band members would break ranks to pick them up. They didn’t. But the band delighted in several news photographs of USC football players handing referees wads of money.

And probably the band’s most famous move of all wasn’t even intended to be funny.

In the 1982 Stanford-California football showdown, known simply on campus as Big Game, the band prematurely stormed the field, thinking Stanford had won. In all the confusion, Cal scored the winning touchdown on a kickoff return, threading five lateral passes between band members and knocking over a trombone player in the end zone.

Because of its notoriety, or perhaps in spite of it, the Stanford band has been invited to play for Queen Elizabeth II, the Democratic National Convention, in Australia, Japan, at a funeral . . . the list goes on.

The turning point for the band came when it was suspended in 1986 for a series of “insulting and lewd” incidents, according to then-Athletic Director Andy Geiger. The athletic department wouldn’t reinstate the band to play for Big Game until it agreed to perform sober and come up with its own guidelines for conduct and performance.

The band did and played the Cal game wearing handmade halos.

Last year, the administration stopped another band tradition of serenading incoming freshmen with the Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope” because it gave the impression that Stanford students are “spoiled, privileged children who exult in the radical exclusivity and use of drugs.”

And two weeks ago, the band was suspended for saying such things as: “Mr. Spotted Owl, Mr. Spotted Owl. Your environment has been destroyed. Your home is now a roll of Brawny . . . what are you going to do? ‘Me, I’m going to Disneyland.’ ”

The administration’s tighter rein seems ironic to band members, who admit even they have mellowed along with the rest of America’s college-age population.

“The last time they got suspended, they dropped their pants and spelled out obscene words,” said current band manager LindaKay Brown in an interview at the Band Shak (yes, that’s the way the band spells it). It is a cavernous building, once the school’s steam plant. It could pass for a national museum of litter--replete with ratty sofas and stolen road signs with sexual innuendoes.

“A student organization’s character changes as the students change. . . . I can honestly say this band and the bands in the past couple years have been milder,” Brown said.

And the spotted owl show wasn’t even their most outrageous this season, band members said. That was a show a week earlier on ways to cut the federal deficit.

During one segment, they suggested franchising Nevada’s Mustang Ranch, the country’s most famous brothel that recently was taken over by the Internal Revenue Service. Then, to the tune of the B52’s “Love Shack,” they spelled out “McHo” on the field.

The athletic department reviewed that show.

“They allowed us to spell out ‘McHo’ on the field. (Nothing) led us to believe that something like the spotted owl was an unpresentable topic,” Myers said.

Band members have no problem with having road shows reviewed, they say, and therefore will be playing at Cal Nov. 17 for Big Game.

But they aren’t sure what to expect for the future. Cummings is optimistic for the rest of the season.

“I fully expect there will be no problem with Big Game,” he said. “I like to view our relationship with the band as a partnership.”

And if the partnership falls apart, Brown acknowledges that the band also has the option not to perform.

“We won’t change something just because they say change it. We look at the merits of their criticisms,” she said. “We retain the right to control and maintain our creativity.”

At least for this season.