Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  “We were told there’d be nurses,” Lucas Walker says, indignant. “I thought that was the theme.” Not that it matters. It’s uncertain the Bubs will even get inside. Out in the crisp air, the very big, very broad bouncer looks the Bubs up and down. He is staring at fourteen guys all dressed in some iteration of baggy jeans and wrinkled shirts. “How many of you are under twenty-one? ” the bouncer asks. The majority of hands go up. “No, I can’t have that,” he says, shaking his head.

  Lucas tries to reason with the man. “We’re performing tonight, ” he says. "What if the under-twenty-one guys wear X’s— on their foreheads?”

  “What band are you with?” the bouncer asks.

  Just then, Dave Iscove, a Bub circa ’94, comes out of the bar, accompanied by his brother. “These are the Bubs!” Dave Iscove shouts, pointing.

  “I know,” his brother says. “You can spot them from a fuckin’ mile away.”

  Iscove sees the Bubs are shivering. He apologizes for the situation with the doorman, says he called the bar, says he spoke to someone.

  “Let’s go warm up,” Alexander Koutzoukis says. And with that, the Bubs walk toward a vacant parking lot across the street, passing their van along the way. Matt Michelson stops dead in his tracks. He looks at the van. He looks back at the Bubs. “I thought you meant warm up, like, get in the van and warm up,” he says. “I’m fucking cold.”

  The Bubs circle up next to a Dumpster. “Listen,” Alexander says. “We have to take this gig seriously. It’s one thing to be an a cappella group singing at a bar. It’s another to be a shitty a cappella group singing at a bar.” He hits a note on the electronic pitch pipe, and the Bubs warm up, harmonizing on the syllables benny benny benny benny benny benny benny benny blaaaaack.

  It’s true, the Bubs are on the bill at Good Hurt tonight. They’re scheduled to open for Iscove’s band, an alt-rock outfit called All Rise, at twelve-thirty in the morning. It is an odd scene—an a cappella group performing at a club— and the irony is not lost on the Bubs. “This is how that Yale thing happened,” Alexander says to the group.

  Lucas implores the Bubs to lose the Pips-like choreography on “Smiley Faces.” “It doesn’t make sense at this venue,” he says. “Don’t do it.” He stresses the importance of looking cool. “The bouncer asked me what band we were with,” he says. “We have to act like a band.”

  Suddenly, amid the scales and vocal warm-ups, a strange (possibly disturbed) man makes a beeline for the Bubs, pushing his way into the circle. Tim Conrad looks like he might soil himself. The confusion quickly dissipates, however, when this man joins the Bubs in singing a vocal warm-up, which goes something like this (in harmony): “You can suck my balls.” This strange man is Jeff Murphy, Bubs class of ‘94. Most of the Bubs have never met Murph before (he lives out west). He plays bass in Iscove’s band, All Rise. He tells the Bubs how excited he is to see them perform tonight, and just as suddenly he disappears.

  Alexander runs through that night’s set list. They’ll open with “Inaction,” he says. “It’s the loudest rock song we have.” While that may be, it’s also sung by the wispy Doug Terry, who tonight wears a peach-colored button-down, open wide to reveal a Crest-white undershirt.

  This will be the Bubs’ second gig today, by the way. They are, perhaps, the only band to have played the Plaza Gardens Pavilion at Disneyland and Good Hurt in the same day.

  The Bubs—most with X’s on their hands—finally gain admittance to the club. It is after midnight. The place is dark, which is a relief, judging by the stank. It’s a thirtysomething crowd, a mixed bag of pool players and women begging to be hit on. The Bubs survey the space. Their faces betray their deepest fears: Singing at a rock club may just be a terrible, terrible idea for an a cappella group. But it is too late. The ska band onstage finishes up their set and Iscove jumps up onstage. “We have something super-different for you tonight,” he says. “Remember in college how a cappella was the biggest thing. These guys here”—Iscove points at the Bubs, now lining up in front of the stage—“they are the fucking shit. The national champions. You guys are in for a treat. Straight from Boston, the fucking Tufts Beelzebubs!”

  The Bubs jump up onstage, clumsily arranging themselves into a tight space. If nothing else, they’ve gotten the room’s attention. The bartenders are looking over. The pool table has gone quiet. The basses begin: Dinna-inna-inna-inna Dinna-inna-inna -inna. The tenors come in: Get it! Get it! Get it! Get it!

  It is clear, from the first notes, that “Inaction” was a bad call to open the show. Doug solos on this one, and he doesn’t sing so much as spit with intention: Call on the fates // this’ll take a second // While I fall on my face // like everyone else. It may be a rock song, but it’s an obscure rock song—worse, an obscure rock song sung by an obscure (for these parts) chorus of a cappella kids.

  “Get off the stage!” someone shouts from the back.

  Chris Kidd, a Bub alum along for the ride, tries to be supportive, though he looks mortified. He would have opened with “Magical Mystery Tour,” he says. “At least people know that song.” A guy at the pool table takes the pool cue and plays his best air guitar.

  While Doug sings the bridge, in the background the Bubs repeat No! No! No! No!—shaking their heads in time. The microphones are not helping. The Bubs need dull area mics, not hot solo mics. Iscove, oblivious (or just that damn fired up), is front and center, giving the devil’s horns.

  “They’re like the Polyphonic Spree,” someone says.

  “You suck!” someone shouts. The set is mercifully short— four songs total. Savini steps up to the mic. “We’ve got one more song for you,” he says. “You’ve been a lovely audience this evening. ”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE HULLABAHOOS

  Wherein the Hullabahoos’ relaxed attitude finally catches up with them while Brendon Mason reports back from a Lexington, Virginia, jail cell

  When the Hullabahoos returned to campus in late January, following the embarrassment of missing the Lakers game, they considered keeping that little story to themselves. The national anthem wasn’t televised and, well, who would know if they told one little white lie? The Hullabahoos are the group, after all, whose Web site boasts of performance requests from the White House, the Kennedy Center, and NBC’s Today Show. What it doesn’t say is that the B’hoos were invited to the White House and to The Today Show, but didn’t actually perform in either place—scheduling conflicts both times. “We were invited,” Morgan Sword says.

  A lull had set in. The Hullabahoos would elect new officers that Sunday night—generally a brutal exercise. It was still March, though. Why elect new officers so soon? “The group has a tendency to lose momentum in the spring and we need time for the officer transition,” Joe Cassara, the outgoing president, says. The Hullabahoos were learning new music, but all was quiet on the West Lawn front. Well, for everyone but Brendon Mason, maybe. It started with the Justin Timberlake concert. Six months before, Brendon had bought a handful of tickets for the Charlottesville stop of Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveShow. Brendon wasn’t planning on treating his friends to the concert. Rather, he just wanted to control his environment. So he bought up the seats around him and sold the tickets off to a well-curated group of coeds. And for six months he counted down the days until the concert. And then the night before, Brendon took part in something called the Case Race—a drinking game in which individuals attempt to finish an entire case of beer (twenty-four cans). No one ever finishes, though as with most drinking games, Brendon will tell you, everyone’s a winner. Unfortunately, Brendon was so hungover the next day he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow, let alone attend an eardrum-killing Justin Timberlake concert. Brendon is not shy. He loves to share stories of his drunken exploits; the ones that end with him blacking out are some of his favorites. The Justin Timberlake story, however, was somehow more embarrassing. Perhaps because it had consequences.

  Consequences. It’s a good word and one the Hullabahoos—and
Brendon—are about to learn the meaning of. The B’hoos had spent much of the year trying to up their game, enjoying a free trip to Portland, putting on a sold-out Christmas show. Yes, they’d missed the Lakers game—which should have been a career highlight. But they’d felt on top of their game musically, at least. Until now. It had been a quiet couple of months on campus and the Hullabahoos were getting lazy, not to mention cocky—a terrible combination.

  Our story begins upstairs in the Hullaba-house on Wertland Street.

  “Is this everyone?” Pete Seibert says. It is four o’clock on Friday afternoon when the Hullabahoos convene at the house before a gig. Pete surveys the room. It does not look good. The Hullabahoos have been invited to perform at Washington and Lee for the second annual (and creatively titled) A Cappella Festival, put on by that school’s coed a cappella group, General Admission. Normally, this is the kind of gig the Hullabahoos would have turned down flat. It wasn’t a particularly big show (the crowd wouldn’t top three hundred), nor did it pay anything. The B’hoos didn’t have any friends in the host group. And Lexington, Virginia, wasn’t far enough away to justify staying the night, but at two hours was just enough of a drive to be an inconvenience.

  Joe Cassara booked this gig despite resistance from the Hullabahoos—or rather because of it. When the girl from Washington and Lee called to invite the B’hoos, Joe asked who else would be singing. When she told him that Exit 245, the all-male group at James Madison University, would be there, that was all Joe needed to hear. He jumped at the chance.

  The Hullabahoos had never thought much of Exit 245. But last semester the boys from JMU had been the guest group at a Silhooettes show on campus at UVA. Many of the Hullabahoos had been in the audience that night (some of their best friends are Sils) and Joe Cassaro for his part was caught off-guard. Exit 245 wasn’t just technically solid, they were entertaining. And unlike most visiting all-male a cappella groups, these boys actually appeared to be cool. (Brendon Mason’s best friend from home, Dave Kidd, is in Exit 245.) “The Hullabahoos weren’t as bothered as I was about the competition,” Joe says. And he wanted to strike fear in the hearts of the Hullabahoos before he graduated in May. “Besides,” he says, “Exit’s been talking some a cappella shit.”

  But standing there in the Hullaba-house that afternoon, a sense of dread was creeping in. Maybe Joe had made a mistake. The B’hoos were about to leave for the gig, and four members were missing. Morgan Sword, it turned out, was with his girlfriend. “Lindsay’s formal is tonight,” someone said. Brian Duhon, likewise, was absent. He’d totaled his electric-blue Ford Mustang in a car crash in Canada on the tail end of winter break. Though he managed to walk away unscathed (despite all logic of physics) he had to leave what was left of the car upstate. He’d returned to Buffalo this weekend to pick up the rehabbed Mustang. Blake Segal, meanwhile, an aspiring actor, was performing in a theater piece on campus that weekend. And Alan Webb, well, he was preparing to leave for a Future Business Leaders of America conference on the West Coast. What’s he doing there? someone asked. “Meeting other future business leaders,” Pete Seibert said, laughing.

  Joe expressed some concern about the attendance. Pete laughed him off. There was precedent. A few weeks ago they’d done a solid sorority gig under the rotunda with just nine members. “We only need five songs,” Pete said, looking around the room. He announced the set list—basically, the same five songs the Hullabahoos had been performing all year: “One,” “How to Save a Life,” “My Love,” “Lips of an Angel,” and “Home.”

  Dane Blackburn bristled at the set list. His attitude (and patience) had grown increasingly poor since he’d abandoned the group outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles. He’d stopped suggesting songs, tired of the group rejecting R & B (his taste) for the kind of Grey’s Anatomy-type soft rock their female fans wanted to hear. He took the driving directions Joe printed up and climbed into his car, slamming the door.

  The Hullabahoos, by the way, would be closing the show at Washington and Lee. Joe asked the girl from General Admission why her own group wasn’t closing the concert. “Because everyone here loves the Hullabahoos!” she says. The B’hoos were actually a bigger draw at Washington and Lee than that school’s own a cappella singers. The president looked at his Hullabahoos. It appeared that not a single one of them had showered that day. It would be a strictly robes-over-cargo-shorts night.

  Perhaps Joe was right to be worried.

  The Hullabahoos are a lot like five-year-old boys. When they pull into the parking lot at Washington and Lee’s Lenfest Performing Arts Center, they meet the pretty girl who invited them—and ignore her entirely. She escorts them to the classroom where they’ll warm up, and they immediately start touching things. Two Hullabahoos are writing on the chalkboard. Another is playing the piano. Another is pulling at the string attached to a pull-down screen. Desks are knocked about as the Hullabahoos walk by; it’s as if they don’t even see the furniture. The only one not smiling is Patrick Lundquist, who is off in the corner, head down on a desk, dramatically rubbing at his temples.

  The Hullabahoos gather around the piano to warm up. They start with “One.” It sounds empty. Midsong, Brendon Mason points to the ceiling, a shorthand gesture that says, Tune up, we’re going flat. “If there are people missing on your part,” Joe says, “you need to compensate.” Myles Glaticy comments on the group’s breathing, which is entirely too visible. If the mess of them all breathe at the same time, between measures, there will be a lot of dead air—which kills the illusion that there are instruments onstage. Because Morgan Sword is missing, Chris Brown is forced to do percussion on nearly every song, and he’s winded, quickly.

  Still, the Hullabahoos seem content. Sufficiently warmed up, they return their attention to drawing obscene things on the chalkboard.

  The show opens, like most a cappella concerts, with an eighties tune. General Admission makes a grand entrance, walking down the aisle, singing the first chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” “What the fuck is this?” one of the Hullabahoos says. Sitting with the B’hoos during a show—it’s sort of like listening to DVD commentary on a movie. Some of the B’hoos try to stifle their laughs. Brendon isn’t so courteous. The performance is serviceable. But it’s unclear why a group with two black girls would have the small Jewish girl sing lead on Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.”

  The Hullabahoos are having a good time entertaining themselves. Until Exit 245 takes to the stage, wearing jeans, white Oxford shirts, and ties. Most of the kids carry Poland Spring bottles or plastic Nalgene bottles, but one, Chris Talley, steps forward and places a gallon jug of water at his feet. Somehow this reads as awesome. He even has the shaggy hair of an indie rawker, not to mention the impossibly skinny jeans to match.

  “Look, it’s Myles!” Brendon says. Myles leans over. “You can’t make fun of me about the skinny jeans anymore,” he says. “Those are way skinnier.”

  Exit 245 opens with another eighties tune, Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice.” Talley solos, brushing the hair out of his eyes and singing out, “You’re as cold as iiiiice // willing to sacrifice our love.” The arrangement is unspectacular—a lot of "ba da // da da // ba da // da da // pay the price // ba da.” But it has a certain swing to it.

  The Hullabahoos suddenly clam up. It wasn’t just the music. The guys from Exit 245 were clearly having more fun than anyone else in the room. They sang Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long.” They sang a Disney medley, of all things. Yet it worked.

  Amid the applause, the Hullabahoos file out of the auditorium, walking quickly back to the classroom to prepare for their own appearance. In the hallway, they catch the sweaty members of Exit 245 just as they’re exiting the stage. “Good job, guys,” the B’hoos mutter in near unison.

  “Close the door,” Pete Seibert says. “We’ll do the pep talk later.” When Chris Brown makes a joke, Pete is quick to react. “Brown, elections are tomorrow night,” he says. “You can run for this job and then you ca
n talk all you want.” Chris Brown looks stunned.

  “Circle up,” Pete says. “Let’s try Faith Hill.” He blows the pitch pipe and the Hullabahoos run thirty seconds of “Cry,” which they’d recently learned. (Coincidentally, the Beelzebubs had also just learned “Cry,” but had a difficult time finding a soloist. That’s the challenge of alumni arranging—the old guys don’t always know if there’s someone in the group who can handle the solo.) Patrick took this one, and would have shamed Faith Hill herself, such were his over-the-top, self-important vocal acrobatics. “The background needs to be stronger,” Pete says. “We were nine under the rotunda the other night and we sounded great. What’s the problem?”

  Pete announces the new set list. They had planned on opening with The Fray’s “How to Save a Life.” Instead they begin with U2’s "One.” "Cry” would come later in the set. And they’d close with Marc Broussard’s “Home.” It is a stronger set list, if suddenly Patrick-heavy. It was not ideal, but so be it.

  The Exit 245 performance laid bare all of the Hullabahoos’ insecurities—and perhaps their biggest flaw. “It’s just a cappella!” Pete likes to say, though he doesn’t really believe that. How else to explain his last-minute tweaking of the set. “We don’t mind what anyone thinks,” Joe says, “as long as everyone thinks we’re the best.” Pete tries to pump the Hullabahoos back up. But Brendon compounds the problem by sharing a story his buddy in Exit 245 told him: “That skinny kid has a record deal and was down in Miami over spring break laying down tracks with his band.”

  Joe interrupts “There’s no point in coming here if we aren’t going to be the best,” he says.

  The Hullabahoos are due onstage in a few minutes. “All aboard,” Pete says, readying the group for their pre-show ritual. He blows a pitch and Patrick, stretching on the floor, starts in. “People get ready // There’s a train a comin’ // Pickin’ up passengers from coast to coast.” Just as they finish, Dane Blackburn walks in, having missed the entirety of the warm-up. “Just in time,” Joe says, shaking his head. Dane doesn’t seem to notice.