In a disturbing story that was first reported by Sharon Terlep of The Wall Street Journal, the “Best Damn Band in the Land,” as it was once described by legendary OSU coach Woody Hayes, privately circulated a parody songbook among its members that contained songs which featured lyrics of a crude and offensive nature.
But that’s just the beginning.
The songbook, which came to light during a 2014 investigation of the band and its culture by the University, was updated as late as 2012 and featured a sendup of the Holocaust that contained lyrics referencing Nazi concentration camp furnaces and train cars carrying Jews to their deaths.
Other songs in the book contained lyrics about bestiality, homosexuality and rape.
The Holocaust song in question is called “Goodbye Kramer,” and is set to the tune of the 1981 Journey hit, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The previously undisclosed lyrics include lines about a “small town Jew…who took the cattle train to you know where,” and Nazi soldiers “searching for people living in their neighbor’s attic.”
Other lines include “Head to the furnace room, ‘Bout to meet your fiery doom. Oh the baking never ends, it goes on and on and on and on.”
The songbook contained an introduction that identified “Goodbye Kramer” as a new addition, along with a parody of the University of Nebraska fight song. Nebraska had just joined the Big Ten conference in 2012.
The book’s introduction also instructed band members to keep the book under wraps.
“Take it with you on trips and to parties,” it says, “but never leave this out of your sight. This book is for OSUMB members only, Past and Present. If they were not out on the field in front of 105,000 crazy fans in black (OK, navy blue) wool uniforms, they do not deserve to see this.”
The book’s introduction also said, “Some of these [songs] may be offensive to you. If so, you can either ignore them, or you can suck it up, act like you got a pair and have a good time singing them.”
At the time of the investigation in 2014, Jon Waters, the OSU Marching Band director, who was an assistant director when the book was updated, said that he knew of the songbook’s existence in the 1990’s when he was a member of the band, but that it had been banned by his predecessor, Jon Woods.
Waters said, “I understood it to be gone. It had been outlawed for a long, long time and was something that was very much on the underground.” Waters also claimed he had never seen the book’s 2012 version and was unaware of the Holocaust song. “If something like that exists, that’s disgusting,” Waters said. “I never saw anything like that.”
Former band member Lee Auer, who wrote the introduction to the 2012 songbook, said, “I don’t think you’re going to find many 19-year-olds who don’t joke about those things.”
Auer works now as a band instructor after graduating from OSU in 2007. He says he enjoyed singing songs from the book while traveling one the bus to road football games, but regrets that the songs have now become public. “It was fun for me as an individual, but we knew if the public ever caught wind of them, people are going to lose respect.” Auer, who also claims he doesn’t recall the Holocaust song, went on to say, “Now I feel worse about it than I ever did.”
Another former band member, Matt Cominski, authored a song about Nebraska that included references to sex with animals and anti-gay jokes. He said he had “a lot of confidence that it was never going to see the light of day.” Cominski went on to say, “I knew a lot of people in the band were gay and they knew I wasn’t being serious. If I were writing to a broader audience or anyone other than a few close friends I would be horrified by those words.”
Cominski’s Nebraska tune includes lyrics such as “Nebraska got f—-d in their cornholes,” and “It’ll soften our d—s if there’s chicks in the mix.”
Waters, who was fired by the University after its investigation, has filed suit against Ohio State alleging defamation and wrongful termination. Earlier this summer, Waters said, “They took 50 years of college behavior and silliness and tradition and put it all on me. I was the culture reformer.”
For its part, the university issued a statement in which it said the songbook was representative of the “shocking behavior” that Ohio State is “committed to eradicating from its marching band program.” The school also believes it was justified in terminating Waters because he knew about the problems in the band but tried to keep them from administrators.
So…your call, Buckeye fans. Do you condone or condemn this type of behavior from the “BDBITL?” Was the university justified in terminating Jon Waters? Should there be any further sanctions against the band now that these lyrics have come to light? Tell us what you think in the comments section below
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*Featured Photo (above) credit to USA TODAY Sports
