Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  The Bubs have settled on a sound for the new album, though they have a hard time putting that aesthetic into words. “They just want to make it organic,” says Ed Boyer, the Bub alum being paid to produce the album. Organic is a nebulous word. But Ed knows what they mean. It’s a reaction to the too-perfect, polished (some say computerized) feel of their own most recent albums Code Red and Shedding. “We wanted to get away from mimicking instruments,” says Alexander Koutzoukis, who just took over as music director of the Bubs. “We didn’t want people to question whether they were hearing voices or not.”

  “The Bubs want an album that showcases more of the group’s energy and their live performance,” Ed Boyer says. “As opposed to something that says, Hey, this is what we can do in the studio.” This is easier said than done.

  On that second morning, Ed Boyer gathers the Bubs in the house’s great room, with its cathedral ceiling and wood beams, not to mention its panoramic view of Squam Lake. Each day begins with an hour-long discussion of what’s to come, followed by an elaborate set of warm-ups and exercises. Today the Bubs talk about recording Gnarls Barkley’s “Smiley Faces”—that morning’s project. They talk about what the song means. “Even if you’re not happy,” Chris Van Lenten says, “you’re putting on this smiley face and pretending.”

  When it comes time to warm up their voices, Ed leads the exercises. After their usual warm-ups and scales, Ed asks certain Bubs to step out in front of the group and sing a song in, say, “the style of Greg Binstock.” Greg Binstock, an alum, had arguably the best solo voice in the history of the Bubs, but he had a certain swishy quality to his trills. It’s a round robin game of imitation. “Sing ‘Smiley Faces’ in the style of Jay Lifton,” Ed shouts, pointing to someone else. “Sing ‘Cecilia’ in the style of Marty Fernandi.” Marty Fernandi graduated before some of these kids were born.

  This may all seem haphazard—overkill, even—but there is a method to Ed’s madness. “I’m trying to get the Bubs creatively invested in the recording process,” he says. “Because if they’re not invested they’ll stop contributing. I’m showing them how to sing outside the box. I need them to be spontaneous and unafraid. ” The biggest problem with a cappella recording may be capturing the combustion, the blood presence of a live performance. “I keep telling them,” Ed says, “don’t get hung up on rhythm and pitch.” With Pro Tools, with Auto-Tune, Ed can fix all that. “Just worry about keeping the energy up.”

  The Vaill compound consists of two residences—the main house (a cavernous maze of bedrooms) and a guest cabin some thirty yards away. The cabin is outfitted like some Barbie Goes Camping play-set—what with the bedroom set seemingly made of Lincoln Logs. Ed Boyer ’04 has set up his equipment in this bedroom-cum-control room, the Pro Tools rig up on the computer screen, the soundboard to Ed’s right. Across the hall is a second bedroom—now a makeshift studio where the Bubs hang patches of gray foam, the kind legit studios use to dampen reverb and echo.

  How exactly can the Bubs get Code Red-level professionalism out of this tree house? For one thing, when recording went digital—and portable—everything changed. The act of recording is no longer linear; you don’t have to record in a timeline. “You have the authority of the computer,” Ed explains. A great band might still record live. That’s ideal. “A live band finds their groove,” Ed says. “But what are the chances that fifteen guys will have that groove together?” Instead, the Bubs record individually with Ed, each listening to a cue track in his ear and singing directly into the mic. (A cue track is nothing more than a note-by-note recording of a tune—it might even be Ed playing, say, the baritone part to “In Your Eyes” on a keyboard, or a MIDI file of the actual arrangement. ) Since its introduction to collegiate a cappella in the mid-nineties, the cue track has revolutionized recording, in that each member can record separately—knowing that he or she will maintain the same pitch and tempo as the rest of the group. All of those individual tracks are then edited together in a painstaking, boring process. And what of the sound quality istelf? Thankfully, this is all what’s called close mic recording, and a Bub singing into even a half-decent microphone will produce usable audio.

  Ed Boyer is surrounded by Matt Michelson, Andrew Savini, and a handful of Beelzebubs laid out across the bed. A freshman, Tim Conrad, sits over to the side, asleep on a rocking chair. It is four-thirty on Monday, January 8, and much of Moultonborough, New Hampshire, has iced over. The sun is starting to set when Ed asks for candles. He likes to work by candlelight when he can. It sets the mood, relaxing the gray matter and setting the stage for creativity. Someone runs down to the house and comes back with a couple of candles, which they light and set about the two-bedroom wood cabin.

  Matt Michelson, the president, issues a warning. “Let’s try not to burn this house down,” he says. He is not kidding.

  Why, exactly, Tim Vaill agreed to let the Bubs invade his New Hampshire residence time and again remains a mystery. Because this man, the founder of the Bubs, remembers exactly where he was when the Beelzebubs burned down another of his properties. “It was June first, 2005,” he says, matter-of-factly. And Vaill, class of 1964, was on vacation deep within the lush countryside of western China, alongside John McCarthy ’68 and fellow Beelzebub alum Ray Tang ’72. At some point in their journey Ray’s BlackBerry managed to pick up a signal—for a split second, anyway—just long enough to receive a message from Tim’s assistant back in Boston. She kept it short: “Your house in Somerville burned down.” It would be twelve hours before Vaill would get a Beelzebub on the phone. “I had no idea if anyone was hurt,” Vaill says. “And I was worried about the guys.” To make matters worse, the house at 157 College Avenue had been on the market, and just a few days earlier Vaill accepted an offer to sell the place.

  Tim Vaill grew up in Bethany, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, the son of a Yale man, class of ’35—a man who in his day had been the head of the Whiffenpoofs, the first-ever collegiate a cappella group. There was always music playing in the Vaill household, and more often than not it was one of his father’s old Whiffenpoof records. When it came time to apply to college, the young Tim Vaill wanted to get away from New Haven and settled on Tufts (though whether he had the grades for Yale is another matter). His father’s parting words were, prophetically: “If there is an a cappella group on campus, join it. If not, start one.”

  The thing is, there had been an a cappella group on campus, something called the Tuft Tones, but they were long gone. It was the fall of 1960, Tim Vaill was a freshman, and folk music was the thing—the Kingston Trio, the Weavers, that’s what the kids wanted to hear. So Tim Vaill joined a five-man folk band, the Nomads V. Improbably, the group got an agent who booked them at colleges along the eastern seaboard. The boys would leave campus on a Wednesday night and return bleary-eyed on Sunday. Believe it or not, Dizzy Gillespie once opened for Tim Vaill and the Nomads V somewhere outside of Philadelphia. “No one was interested in jazz at the time,” Vaill says. Success was fleeting. During Vaill’s sophomore year, two of the V flunked out of school (only to sign contracts with MGM). Tim Vaill, meanwhile, a math major on an ROTC scholarship, returned to his studies.

  That’s when Tim remembered his father’s advice. In October 1962 he convinced his buddies, Barrie Bruce ’63 and Neal Robison ’63, to start an a cappella group. Neal would be the music director and together they recruited six others for their first rehearsal in the basement of West Hall.

  The first song the group learned was “Winter Wonderland”; their first set included “No Man Is an Island” and “Theme from Exodus.” “It was ponderous stuff,” Vaill says, with a smile. As for dress, the a cappella group wore madras jackets. “Everyone owned a madras jacket in those days,” Vaill says.

  The gigs were slow in coming. The first would be a sorority Christmas party in early December 1962 at a hotel in Lexington, Massachusetts. But the group’s real coming-out party would be the Tufts annual Christmas Sing—a campus-wide talent show held at the Cousi
ns Gym. At the time, it was very fashionable to attend. “The Christmas Sing was the thing to do,” Vaill says. And confident in the group’s musical progress, Vaill set about registering for the show. There was only one problem: They still didn’t have a name.

  Vaill retreated to Barrie Bruce’s dorm room. Names were bandied about, including Jumbo’s Disciples—after the Tufts mascot. Still, the men could not agree. In the midst of a spirited two-hour discussion (the first in a history of marathon sit-downs for the Bubs), John Todd mentioned Beelzebub. His roommate had been reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Beelzebub was the devil’s right-hand man. Tim Vaill liked it. The name was dangerous, he says. And weren’t they dangerous guys? Still, the conversation dragged on and a compromise was eventually made. The next day Vaill scrawled a name, JUMBO’S DISCIPLES: THE BEELZEBUBS, on the sign-up sheet for the big Christmas Sing.

  From the very beginning the Beelzebubs (they soon dropped the cumbersome Jumbo’s Disciples bit) remained independent from the university. Why they valued their independence so much is the subject of some speculation. There are current Bubs and Bub alums alike who believe it was part of some counter-cultural movement. Not true, Vaill says. “This was before people were antiestablishment,” he says. “It’s because none of us liked the chair of the music department.” The feeling was mutual. The man’s name was Rod MacKillop (now deceased) and he despised the Bubs. You can’t blame the guy. “We were raiding from his choir,” Vaill says.

  Over the course of 1963, word of the Beelzebubs spread about campus. Still, the group was limited by their repertoire. “We needed music,” Vaill says. And so he rang up his father, who wasn’t just a Whiffenpoof alum but an administrator at Yale. One weekend Vaill père unlocked the music department archives for his son, who proceeded to “borrow” from the Yale Glee Club library. “Were there Xerox machines in 1963?” Vaill asks. He can’t remember. But somehow the four-part arrangements from Yale made it back to Tufts. The Beelzebubs recorded their first album, Brothers in Song, in the spring of 1964 in the dining room of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house.

  Tim Vaill graduated in June of 1964 and the future of the Bubs was very much in doubt. Vaill, a navy man, was off to Vietnam. Bill Duvel had taken over as music director from Neal and would remain in charge, but Vaill had been the driving force. When the Bubs reconvened in the fall of 1964, Vaill was aboard the USS Taluga, floating somewhere in the South China seas. (Their mission: to supply jet fuel to fighter planes.) Despite his far-flung surroundings, not a day went by when Vaill didn’t think about his beloved Beelzebubs back at Tufts. He wrote letters home but heard nothing.

  Finally, one day in early October, a bruised and battered manila envelope showed up on the deck of the USS Taluga. Vaill still remembers that day, how he tore into the envelope. In his hands, he held a reel-to-reel tape the current Beelzebubs had recorded for him. The Bubs had survived. Vaill spent nine months in Vietnam. Later, safe at home, he sent the Bubs a typewritten letter (now preserved in the 1965 Bubs scrapbook) along with a check. The return address read: USS Taluga (AO-62), FPO SFRAN, CALI, Ensign T. L. Vaill. “Please find the first of what I hope will be many contributions to the cause of the Beelzebubs,” Vaill wrote.

  In the years since, Vaill has never been far from the Bubs. He started the Beelzebubs Alumni Association (the BAA) in the summer of 1966. In 1973—for the group’s ten-year anniversary— Vaill organized a dinner at the Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge. To mark the occasion, Vaill and a couple of alums— under cover of night—met to form a quartet. They called themselves Peking and the Mystics and they wore hospital whites because Ray Tang could “borrow” them from the nursing home where he worked. In the middle of the inaugural performance, the men of Peking stripped down to reveal blue Peking and the Mystics T-shirts they’d had printed up.

  Years later, Vaill and his wife began inviting the undergraduates to his house in Andover, Massachusetts, twice annually for formal Bubs events: In the fall, there was the annual Vaill football game, and in the spring, Lasagna Night. “It’s rare for a man in his sixties to know so many young people,” Vaill says, “to be on a first-name basis with so many. But the intergenerational contact is one of the best things about the Bubs.” For Tim Vaill, the whole experience was doubly sweet when, in the fall of 1998, his own son, Sam Vaill, transferred to Tufts and auditioned for the Bubs. There’s no room for nepotism in a smallish singing group, and the audition could have been awkward for all parties involved. But the call came at four A.M. Sam Vaill had been accepted into the Bubs.

  Over the years, the Bub alums had often talked about securing a Beelzebubs House—a home base, of sorts, that would be part rehearsal space, part museum, part dormitory. “I had no desire to be a landlord,” Vaill says. But, in the spring of 2003, Tim Vaill put his money where his mouth was and launched the Beelzebubs Housing Project, signing the papers on a two-family, wood frame house with a porch on College Avenue, across the street from the Tufts football field. He made some minor home improvements—including new appliances in the kitchen. But the house was meant to run itself. He rented the ground floor to a couple of Tufts students and saved the top two floors for the Bubs. Ed Boyer was among the first to move in.

  Very quickly, however, Tim Vaill’s worst fears were confirmed. The kids on the ground floor called when the toilet broke. Vaill was the president of Boston Private Bank, with a thousand employees working for him. He certainly didn’t need the aggravation. Vaill would rent the house to the Bubs for a second year, but in the spring of 2005 he put the place on the market. It sold quickly. On May 28, 2005—Memorial Day weekend—he received an offer. Vaill wasn’t evicting the Bubs. The sale was contingent on the new owner leasing the house to the Bubs for the 2005-2006 school year. And Matt Michelson, Matt Kraft, and three others had already committed to living there in the fall. Until, that is, Sean Zinsmeister ’06 decided to have a barbecue. (“I’m not talking about this,” Zinsmeister says.) Details are scarce. What we do know is that sometime around two in the morning a gust of wind knocked over the barbecue, spilling hot coals and ash onto the wood deck. Kiron Rogers ’06 would bang on doors, shuffling sleepy Beelzebubs out of the house. No one was hurt, though all were shaken as they watched their beloved Bubs house burn to the ground. When people on campus ask what happened to the house, Michelson likes to tell them “It was a grilling accident.” Tim Vaill got the call in China. When he returned home to Boston he would sell the scorched earth to another buyer. Somehow, against reason, he still allows the fifteen members of the Beelzebubs to enjoy his lake house in New Hampshire unsupervised.

  And in January 2007, after a long day of recording, the Bubs sit around the dinner table eating a pot of beef stew one of their own cooked up. There are compliments for the chef, but not much in the way of meaningful conversation. Rather, the Bubs are preoccupied with a DVD playing on screen, something called Pirates!—a take-off on Pirates of the Caribbean—which any Bub will proudly tell you is the most expensive porno ever made.

  These are long days—and nights—at Squam. While some of the Bubs relax after dinner (with another screening of Pirates! or with bowling on the Nintendo Wii) Ed Boyer returns to the log cabin to record soloists. It’s a smaller group tonight when Andrew Savini steps into the second bedroom to lay down the solo for Ozzy Osbourne’s surprisingly sweet ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” It is ten-fifteen at night. Savini will not emerge—save for a cigarette break—for nearly four hours. (For the record, Ed gets a flat fee for the week. With his other a cappella clients he will work by the hour, but for the Bubs, he gives himself over to the project unconditionally.)

  “Let’s just try it once to see where we are,” Ed says.

  Savini sings the song clear through before joining Ed at the computer to listen to the playback. Savini is worried that the solo sounds too boy-bandish. He puts a lot of pressure on himself. His solo, “Epiphany,” off of 2005’s Shedding, won the Contemporary A Cappella Recording award for Best Soloist, and he�
��d like to repeat the honor. Ed has his own thoughts. “On the first verse,” Ed says, “keep it simple. You don’t want to empty out your bag of tricks there. The song has to build—it needs somewhere to go.”

  And so Savini goes back to the booth to sing again. This time, on home, he sings high—and dramatic. “Mama, I’m coming HOME.” Ed interrupts. “That there,” Ed says, “when you go up, that was a major chord. Let’s keep it minor.” There are similar problems with the chorus. It’s all too big too soon. Ed sends Savini back into the booth and has him record the solo sentence by sentence. It is excruciating. When Andrew reverts back to his vocal tics, to singing ty-hi-ime instead of time, Ed abruptly cuts him off and rewinds. “That last take sounded a bit Phantom of the Opera,” Ed says. The conversation drags on. At times Ed gives Savini advice that is long on words, yet short on practical suggestions. It’s starting to feel a bit like that scene in Lost in Translation—where the Japanese director speaks for thirty seconds and it’s translated into More intensity! But somehow it works, and Savini—never known for subtlety—delivers a restrained, moving vocal for the solo.

  Later in the week, Matt McCormick (a freshman) comes in to record the lead vocals on U2’s “City of Blinding Lights.” It is a different session entirely, with its own set of challenges. “Sometimes they don’t know how to connect their voices to the emotional message of the song,” Ed says. On the verses Matt McCormick was a bit too happy-go-lucky. “In concert, when you’re singing live, you need to be big,” Ed tells him. “But in the studio, let’s bring this down. There should be a contrast with the chorus and the verse.” He pushes Matt. “In the studio,” Ed says, “you can go for a note you wouldn’t necessarily get live. Don’t cop out.”