Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  LETTERMAN: “Yeah.”

  PAUL: “I think whatever he wants. You know. Don’t you think?”

  LETTERMAN: “Wait a minute. I assume you have something prepared? OK, all right, well, you sit there, let me think it over.”

  Letterman is relentless. Between bits about Michael Dukakis, and the Top Ten List—Boston Mayor Thomas Menino read “Things you don’t want to hear from a hot dog vendor outside Fenway Park”—he continues to berate Jeremy Cramer. Letterman jokes with the crowd: “Are the kids ready? Are the kids ready?” The audience is eating it up. All Letterman has to do is say a cappella and they lose their lunch. Jeremy cannot believe this is happening. During the commercial break, one of the producers comes over to Jeremy Cramer and the Bubs. He’s asking them whether they can really sing. And the negotiations begin. “The producer would say, Well, maybe we can do something with a crowd shot,” Jeremy says. “But, because we’re the Bubs, we keep pushing. What if we run out onstage, that sort of thing.”

  Meanwhile, Natalie Portman comes out and does her thing, promoting Star Wars. And when the show comes back from commercial, Letterman says to Paul: “We have the brotherhood of music. I’m putting you in charge of the fourteen a cappella singers, all right? You figure something out.”PAUL: “Should I confer with them?”

  LETTERMAN: “Yeah, whatever you can do for them.”

  The show goes to commercial again. Now, the Beelzebubs are looking at one another. Is this going to happen?

  Minutes later, Dave says to the audience: “When you have a television show like this, often the best part is when members of the audience beg to be on the show. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in here tonight. And, Paul, you’re taking charge of this. What do you know about the group you are about to present?”PAUL: “I know that they are called the Beezl, the Beelzebubs. And I know their names. And that’s all I know. And I know what they’re going to sing. They’re going to sing their own arrangement of a Stevie Wonder composition, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered.’ May I introduce them?”

  LETTERMAN: “Yes, please do.”

  PAUL: (looking down at a note card in his hand) “Ladies and gentlemen, from Tufts, Jeremy, Adam, Alexander ...”

  The camera pans to the audience, in time to catch the Bubs jumping up from their seats and running onto the stage. Paul Shaffer’s band plays an E. Jeremy does a quick count-off, two-three -four, and the Bubs launch into the song. The intro sounds a little like this: Nunga nung a nung a nung nung nunga nung a nung. It is both amazing—the Bubs are on Letterman!— and impossibly embarrassing. They’re dressed, almost uniformly, in ill-fitting Tufts sweatshirts tucked into khakis. The camera zooms in and pans across the group. Paul hasn’t told them how long they should sing, so they just keep going. Eventually, after a minute, the camera cuts to Letterman, who looks confused. “OK there,” he says. “How about that?” The Bubs sing for another few seconds. The camera returns to Letterman. "Ladies and gentlemen. Still going....We’ll be right back with the J. Geils Band.” As the show fades to commercial you can hear Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra pick up “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.”

  In 2007, Doug Terry wonders: Could lightning strike twice?

  When Matt Michelson pictured spring break with the Beelzebubs—an eleven-day trip to Los Angeles and Mexico—he couldn’t have imagined the scene that awaited him at the Backpackers Paradise Hostel in Inglewood, California. Perhaps the seventeen-dollar -a-night fee should have tipped him off. Though the Web site did describe the place as “centrally located.” (Inglewood is, of course, many things—homicide up thirty-eight percent from 2005 to 2006!—but centrally located? Nope.) Matt had no one to blame for the accommodations but himself. “I booked it,” he says. “My bad.”

  The hostel was, judging by the clientele, a stopping-off point for some bizarre mix of Euro tourists and runaway teens. The pool was kept at a warmish temperature (perhaps better hospitable to bacteria and STDs?). An elaborate system of electronic gates had been installed to keep the guests and their automobiles safely inside. No one dared sit in the pleather mechanical massage chair, the one located perilously close to the pool. The hostel’s saving grace was supposed to be the room itself. The receptionist at the Backpackers Paradise had promised the Bubs their own private oversize dorm. But when the Bubs unlocked the door—revealing a long, dank barracks with twelve identical bunk beds—there were two guests already inside. The first was a female Japanese tourist who told the Bubs she’d been living in that room for a month; the second was a hotel maid who’d taken up residence.

  “Do we have to stay at this shitty hotel?” Lucas Walker said. The Japanese tourist giggled. Unfortunately the Bubs had prepaid for the hostel—five nights.

  A few of the Bubs, making the best of a not-great situation, sidled up to the hostel bar. “Can we have a drinks menu?” Andrew Savini asked the surly Eastern European barmaid. She didn’t move, just stared back at him blankly. Finally, slowly, she spoke. “We have red wine,” she said. “One dollar. White wine—one dollar. Frozen margarita—one dollar. Beer—one dollar.” Pause. “Oh, and da hot dogs.”

  “Let me guess,” Andrew said. “One dollar?”

  A Rastafarian seated a few stools over suggested the frozen margaritas.

  Andrew looked back at the bartender, who suddenly remembered one last item: “Oh, and we have lick-war.”

  “What?”

  “Lick-war.” She pointed to a few bottles of bottom-shelf liquor on the mirrored bar behind her.

  The next morning the Bubs abruptly checked out of the Backpackers Paradise Hostel and into a nearby econo-chain, negotiating a severance package with the hostel.

  When it came time to visit the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, the Bubs—as planned—made their move. Matt Michelson attempted to negotiate with the producers, much as Jeremy Cramer had done with Letterman’s people back in 1999. But Ferguson’s team was less receptive. And the Bubs were shut down fairly quickly. The Bubs would have to settle for smaller, local numbers—agreeing to sing “Cecelia” for the studio audience before the taping began. If it was any consolation, Craig Ferguson must have heard them from back in his dressing room, because when he came out to deliver his monologue, on air you could hear him whistling “Cecilia.”

  The Bubs’ eleven-night tour of the West Coast would include (among other stops) a gig at Disneyland and a detour to Mexico, where they sampled Cuban cigars. Maybe Craig Ferguson hadn’t worked out, but there was another high-profile gig on the Bubs’ docket, this one at a rock club, of all places.

  But first there was business to attend to. This may have been spring break, but it was far from a vacation for the Bubs.

  It was ten o’clock at night when, just a few days after checking out of the Backpackers, the Bubs locked themselves inside a Super 8 in San Diego for a meeting on Pandaemonium, which was scheduled for release five weeks later at Bubs in the Pub, the group’s final show of the year. Ed Boyer had e-mailed a rough mix of the album to Matt Michelson. Tonight, the Bubs would listen together and air any concerns. In a few weeks, Matt and Alexander Katzoukis would fly to San Francisco to mix the album alongside Bill Hare and Ed Boyer, where they could advocate for the group’s interests.

  Which is how the Bubs ended up taking this room hostage, comandeering two double beds, a rollaway cot, a handful of standard-issue chairs, and whatever floor space wasn’t taken up with luggage. For a while there, anyway, it was smooth sailing. Though the Bubs played the tracks on Michelson’s laptop, it didn’t sound half bad. Minor elements were missing, like the percussion on “Ruby Falls.” But the Bubs were happy with what they heard. Until, that is, they came to “Come Sail Away.”

  It would be seven hours before the Bubs would leave this room.

  Before hitting PLAY, Michelson prepared the group. Ed hadn’t had a chance to work on the song yet, which meant parts were still out of tune. Also: The solo hadn’t been recorded yet. Still, the Bubs couldn’t get past the imperfections. It wasn’t just th
at it was out of tune. The Bubs weren’t sure it had earned its place on the album. Two hours into the argument, Michelson (who was leading the discussion) tabled the talk. The fight over “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” meanwhile, would quickly turn into nothing short of a debate over the soul of Pandaemonium. Michelson played two mixes of the song—one with a vocal percussion track and one without. This argument had been raging since Squam Lake in January. Lucas Walker was against using percussion. He felt that dropping the drums here was somehow progressive. “The drums don’t sound organic,” Lucas said. “We have a chance to do something no one has ever done before.” Which wasn’t remotely true but certainly sounded good.

  Alexander Koutzoukis argued for the opposing side. “Without percussion,” he says, “it sounds like a wall of Auto-Tune. It’s like we were slapping people in the face with the arrangement; you could pick out every separate line, every bit of movement.” In short, every dim dim. He felt there was no energy without the percussion. Unfortunately, where Lucas would argue lucidly and with specificity, Alexander would begin every statement by insisting, “There’s no way you’re going to make me vote for not having percussion.” The kid’s closed-minded tactics were infuriating. Alexander wanted to be cutting edge, to respect the Bubs tradition. But this wasn’t about making a statement. “The song sounds better with percussion,” he said. “And the point is to put out the best album we can.”

  At five in the morning the Bubs adjourned.

  Ed Boyer doesn’t find this conversation surprising in the least. He isn’t concerned with the amount of time the Bubs spent discussing the album in a small Super 8 motel room on spring break; he’s concerned with the decisions born from these marathon arguments. “When the Bubs get together they make terrible decisions,” he says. “When they came out of that meeting, the consensus was that they’d use percussion on ‘Mama’—but it would be mixed quietly into the background. That’s like wearing half of a winter coat in the snow.” Still, he understood the impetus. “A couple of the guys had an idealistic, nonpractical view of what they wanted the song to sound like,” he says. “They wanted this captivating choral thing that didn’t need percussion and was going to be pure and fine on its own. If they were the King’s Singers or Take 6 and their voices were amazing you could get by with having nothing but the tenor-one part.”

  The kicker was, none of this really mattered. Ed Boyer—and Bill Hare—had already decided to use percussion. “The reason we pay Bill Hare is because he’s mixed hundreds of a cappella albums,” Ed Boyer says. “He’s not taking notes from fifteen kids who’ve never mixed an album before.”

  Ask a member of the Beelzebubs why they do this—why they have these marathon arguments—and they’ll tell you it’s because it’s always been done that way. The Bubs breed a culture of self-obsession. When Adam Gardner from the rock band Guster was a freshman singing with the Beelzebubs, he was subjected to a long car ride with Danny Lichtenfeld ’93. Danny felt Adam didn’t know nearly enough of the old Bubs music and so, for hours, they listened to the limited-edition twenty-fifth anniversary Bubs tape, the one featuring Gerald James’s rendition of “Take You Back.” Adam Gardner, meanwhile, felt that the Bub lore was being forced down his throat. The indoctrination would come to a head later that year on a trip to San Francisco. The Bubs have a hand signal they use—discreetly—onstage, to remind a Bub to smile. It’s easy: Give the thumbs-up, extend your index finger and cock your eyebrows. Onstage in San Francisco, Danny looked over at an exhausted Adam Gardner and gave him the thumbs-up. Just as discreetly, Adam mouthed back “Fuck off.”

  All of this indoctrination, all of this history that each kid has at his fingertips—the gig at Letterman, past soloists, Bub words— drilled into him on countless car rides, comes with a price. The group is guided by a set of expectations (real or heavily imagined) that dictates every one of their actions. It tells them where to travel and when. It tells them it’s OK to drive through the night to sing a five-song set at Duke—on consecutive weekends. One worries they’re not making their own jokes and experiences but rather are destined to relive those that came before them. Surely, this is not what Tim Vaill would want for his Beelzebubs.

  It had been a busy spring even by Beelzebubs standards. In February, the Bubs performed at the grand opening of the Granoff Music Building at Tufts. They went to Georgetown for the annual Cherry Tree Massacre, an a cappella festival put on by the all-male Georgetown Chimes. In Michigan, they were the guest group at the Midwest ICCA quarterfinals where, postshow, the Bubs invented a new drinking game, the Tour de Franzia, which involved pouring boxed wine down one’s throat. Later, in Ohio, the Bubs performed with Ed Boyer’s dad and his barbershop group. Somewhere amid all of this was StAAg Night, the annual Bub alumni dinner that ends late in the evening with hours of drunken singing they call woodshedding. (In barbershop terms, woodshed means to sing without arrangements, inventing harmonies on the spot.) StAAg Night is an incredible feat of continuity, both physical and historical, when an alum from the sixties can reasonably expect to sing his old solo backed by fifty voices spanning generations of Beelzebubs.

  The Bubs were occupied seven of eight weekends leading up to the trip to Los Angeles. On their lone free Saturday they drove ninety minutes to a state park, traipsing around in the snow for two hours—a photoshoot for their forthcoming album Pandaemonium . The Bubs also managed to learn a handful of new songs for their spring show, including “Come Sail Away.” When you are a Bub, your time is not your own. Which begs the question: When is it all too much?

  Perhaps because of this traveling, Chris Van Lenten ‘08 nearly failed out of school. Or maybe it’s because of his prodigious Nintendo Wii habit. Regardless, at the last minute he decided to skip spring break in Los Angeles entirely. Which pissed the group off. “We’re not the Bubs when we’re missing even one person,” Matt Michelson likes to say.

  However, a few weeks later—when the Bubs returned to campus—it would be Matt Michelson who needed to miss a show.

  The backstory: Way back in October, the Bubs hosted a visit from the Silhooettes, a rowdy all-female group from the University of Virginia, who nearly drank the Bubs under the table that night. The two groups had an honest-to-God sing-off at Doug Terry’s house and the stomping that accompanied the Sils’ version of K. T. Tunstall’s “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree” literally shook the foundations. There was drinking. There was beer pong. Later that night, everyone hit a frat-house toga party. When the sun came up, Matt Kraft was still cuddling with Olivia Bloom— the Sil with a passing resemblance to a young Meg Ryan. The Bubs were supposed to return the favor, traveling to UVA in April for the final Sils show of the year. The gig was on the Bubs’ calendar for months. The two groups were even supposed to do a duet together, an arrangement of “Wait a Minute,” by the Pussycat Dolls. The Bubs never learned the song. And four days before the trip, they canceled. It was the first gig the Bubs would miss in at least four years. But Matt Michelson and Matt Kraft had been training for the Boston Marathon—also scheduled for that weekend. And then there was the matter of Adrien Dahlin, a freshman, nearly seven feet tall, with a mop of big red hair. His e-mail is JollyRedGiant, and he was generally visible in the back row— except when he missed a show for the track team, of which he was a proud member. He’d missed more track meets than he would have liked that semester. Worse: Even when he did skip a track meet for the Bubs, the group still needled him about it. Well, Adrien had a track meet that weekend, and when a couple of Bubs got sick, the group pulled the trigger and canceled the trip to UVA.

  The Bubs did not take the decision to cancel lightly; rather, it was fraught with e-mail exchanges and investigations into last-minute airline flights (so Matt Kraft and Matt Michelson could fly back to Boston in time for the marathon). “We never cancel shows,” Doug Terry says. “It’s unprofessional.” Which is sort of the point and maybe even their tragic flaw: The Bubs aren’t professional musicians. They’re students. They’ve been using the wo
rd professional as a noun, when they should have been thinking of it as an adjective. And for the first time all year the Bubs were forced to contend with the fact that they were students— mortals, even—just a group of guys with disparate interests and priorities.

  But the weight of their phenomenal success has made them, at times, shockingly myopic. They don’t need music from their alumni—what they need is perspective. After Los Angeles, the Bubs were asked to perform at a rally for Senator Barack Obama, held at the five-thousand-person arena on the Boston University campus. The Bubs sang “America the Beautiful.” But they didn’t actually get to meet Obama.

  “We would have,” Matt Michelson says, “but we had to leave for a gig at a private school. It was really far away.”

  The Bubs had double-booked themselves, and the only person to raise a serious objection was Andrew Savini. It wasn’t just that Obama had gone to Savini’s high school. “Obama is the man,” he says. Surely the private school would have understood? Perhaps it could have even been rescheduled.

  Did any of the Bubs suggest canceling the private school gig? “I said that thirty times,” Andrew Savini says. “Obama might be the next president!” And then, just when a Bub seems curious about the world outside of the Bub room, Savini concedes the true reason for his disappointment: “The Bubs would have had another PR picture with a president!”

  The Bubs lacked self-awareness. Perhaps no story demonstrates this more than spring break 2007, the night the Bubs performed at a rock club in Venice Beach.

  On a chilly March night, a stone’s throw from Venice Beach, the Beelzebubs park their big white van outside a Los Angeles dive bar called Good Hurt. Andrew Savini goes in to do a preliminary sweep of the place. He reports back with some unfortunate news: “I didn’t see any waitresses dressed as nurses.”