Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  “Hands in,” Joe says. “We came here to be the best. Let’s kick some ass. I love you guys.” The last bit was designed to make them laugh. No one did. Unit. God. Corps. Country. Hullabahoos.

  Out in the auditorium, the emcee introduces the Hullabahoos. “They’ve been invited to the White House and to The Today Show,” she says and a hush goes over the crowd. One can actually hear people whispering, “The Today Show!”

  The Hullabahoos walk onstage but they aren’t themselves. No one is smiling. They’re all business. Even Bobby Grasberger’s hat seems cocked just a drop farther to the right. The Hullabahoos had been psyched out, Joe will later say. He wanted to push the Hullabahoos—that’s why he booked this gig. He hadn’t expected them to cower. “I hated that,” he says. “Some people panicked instead of rising to the challenge.”

  The B’hoos open with “One.” It still sounds empty, but more than that, it lacks feeling. In the past, just the strains of the opening chord would be enough to get the Hullabahoos smiling (even the morning after the Lakers game, at the Disney Concert hall, performing “One” for the tour guide hours after that embarrassment). But tonight it feels forced. When they arrive at “Have you come here to play Jesus?”—this is where the group drops out, and Brendon and Patrick harmonize on the word Jesus—something goes wrong. The entire stage is quiet, which is what makes the harmony stand out generally. But tonight the harmony is spectacularly off. And when it misses, there’s nowhere to hide that note. Patrick and Brendon look at each other, and the look exchanged is one of utter confusion, a look that says, first, What was that?, and then quickly turns to blame, as in: That unspeakable offense to mankind must have been your fault.

  The set drags—it feels like an eternity. There’s minimal interaction with the crowd, and worse, no discernible energy. Joe does a long (not funny) intro about the origins of the robes. The problem (one, anyway) is that the Hullabahoos are performing as if there’s no audience. Patrick destroys the Faith Hill song. It works despite (or rather because of) the arrangement, which is entirely egregious—and nearly identical in structure to Pete’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” arrangement (or “One” for that matter) . Which is to say the song the builds to a climax, the group gets suddenly quiet, and Patrick comes back in (generally a half-step up), belting out a note that hits you in the gut.

  Joe Cassara was right about a lot of things. The main one: The Hullabahoos don’t know how lucky they are to have soloists like Patrick and Brendon, not to mention Chad Moses, Myles Glancy, and Dane Blackburn. But even with a great soloist, if the group isn’t emotionally invested, you’re dead.

  Dane closes the show with “Home,” leaving his sunglasses on for some unknown reason. “I got confidence issues,” he says to the crowd, pointing to the shades. What the audience doesn’t know is that halfway through the song the sunglasses fog up and Dane can’t see a thing. The show’s saving grace: Myles will be happy to know that when he steps out to sing “How to Save a Life,” the entirety of Exit 245 will turn toward their own singer in skinny jeans, Chris Talley, patting him on the back and pointing. “It’s you! It’s you!”

  There isn’t much time to worry about what’s just happened onstage. Because the girl from General Admission has just wandered over to invite the Hullabahoos to the after-party. Or, rather, after-parties. “There are two parties,” she says. “One house has beer. The other one has liquor. It’s going to be pretty crazy.” Outside, Joe asks one of the girls how to find the party. She points indiscriminately up the hill and says they can’t miss it. Which of course they do. Suddenly the B’hoos are standing in front of a house with a red porch light. “Is that it?” Joe Cassara says. “Brown, go knock on the door.”

  “And say what? Is this the a cappella party?” Chris Brown is relieved when no one answers the door.

  The Hullabahoos eventually find the party. And one girl from General Admission—who sang backup on “Killing Me Softly”— is close-talking to Pete. She is drunk, already, and she keeps referring to Pete as Keith.

  “You’re killing me softly,” Pete says to her.

  One of the girls gives Matt Mooney a compliment, sort of. “I was sitting next to this, like, fifty-year-old MILF,” she says. “When you sang, she was like, ‘Don’t you think he’s handsome!’ ”

  “Moms like me,” Mooney says.

  The music director from Exit 245 corners Pete in the kitchen. He compliments Pete on the group’s tone, then proceeds to call him out on his arranging style. “The arrangements are all pretty much the same,” the kid says. It might have been awkward if they weren’t distracted by Brendon Mason, who is standing in the next room, leading a housewide chant of “Frats! Frats! Frats! Frats!”

  Brendon singles this out as the moment he should have left town, along with the other Hullabahoos who departed for Charlottesville, pulling into campus around two in the morning. But he didn’t. None of the Hullabahoos would see Brendon Mason again for close to twenty-four hours. The next day at UVA there was some e-mailing among the Hullabahoos. “Did Brendon get arrested?” someone wrote.

  Brendon Mason wanders into the Hullaba-house the night after the show at Washington and Lee, wearing his trademark Hanes undershirt and flip-flops. Elections will be held momentarily. The group is begging for the story—a story, Brendon says, he would like to tell just once, and so he waits for everyone to arrive. Finally, dramatically, he begins:

  It had started innocently enough. Brendon and his childhood buddy, Exit 245’s Dave Kidd, had been growing tired of the a cappella festivities. After the other Hullabahoos left town, one of the girls mentioned something to Brendon about an after-party at a nearby fraternity house. And so the foursome stumbled over to the festivities—a party Brendon says was unlike any he’d ever seen. “I was grinding,” he says, smiling, as if he’d invented the term. The lights were off. He was sweating so much, he says, he “should have been having sex.” He’d been to many fraternity parties in his time, but this was something else. It was like a movie, he says. The night could not end there.

  Of course, it could have ended there. Brendon could have gone back to Charlottesville with the rest of the Hullabahoos hours ago. He could have sat with the B’hoos eating Gus burgers at the White Spot on the Corner, safely back on campus. But instead, when the frat party ended, Brendon Mason—former Disney child star, celebrated offensive lineman of Hullabahoos B football squad—stumbled outside with his buddy Dave Kidd and eventually came upon an off-campus house party. Upstairs, the two found a handle of low-budget gin, from which they sampled liberally.

  As the four o’clock hour approached, Brendon and Dave Kidd were walking in the street, still holding the handle of gin, which they were chasing with a bottle of Gatorade they’d picked up along the way. That’s when someone caught sight of the LEXINGTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE sign. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to steal this sign. And so Brendon put the gin and Gatorade down and he and Dave Kidd started clawing at the metal. They were able to unhook one side before Dave Kidd yelled, “Run!” Brendon’s reaction time was—not surprisingly—piss poor. And a cop car appeared. The officer stepped out of his car. “What are you trying to do to my sign?” he said.

  “Nothing, sir,” Brendon replied.

  “Do you know that person running down the street?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is that your alcohol?” he said, pointing to the handle of gin in the grass.

  “My what?”

  Brendon Mason was fingerprinted, handcuffed, and thrown in the drunk tank, where he fell asleep on the concrete floor of the cell. “I blew a point three,” Brendon tells the Hullabahoos proudly. “It’s off the BAC card.” In the morning—after a breakfast of prison biscuits, which Brendon reports are quite good—Dave Kidd picked him up.

  Upstairs at the Hullaba-house, one of the B’hoos asks the obvious question: “Did you get raped?”

  “No. I had my own cell.”

  “We’re all very proud,” Blake Segal says
, shaking his head.

  It was a throwaway joke from Blake, but in some ways, it spelled out the operating principle behind the Hullabahoos. That story—the biscuits, the handle of gin—was much more important than what happened onstage with Exit 245. In fact, no one ever really mentioned that gig again. Because it happened in a vacuum, which is to say, off campus. If they were embarrassed, at least no one was there to hear it. They were still the Hullabahoos.

  When it came time for the elections that night, heart won out over organizational skills. Which is entirely fitting. Missing the Los Angeles Lakers game had been an embarrassment. But it was also a great story. And that’s really what the Hullabahoos were all about. The elections only affirmed what it meant to be a Hullabahoo.

  Going into the night, Patrick Lundquist was the wild card; he was running for president. He talked about “the Patrick Lundquist idea box”—a collection of great ideas just sitting around waiting to be implemented. He was insufferable. And this gave the group license to air every grievance—every emotional snub—they’d felt this year. Patrick sat in front of the firing squad.

  “A big check mark on the president’s to-do list is managing the personalities in the group,” Morgan Sword said.

  “Are you asking about the diva thing?” Patrick said.

  “It’s kind of funny that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “That it’s all about me?”

  “The truth of all of this is we’re seventeen people who are not of equal talent when it comes to singing,” Morgan said. “And it creates this artificial hierarchy. It’s silly. But people act according to it. It’s always been somewhat intentional that Joe and I, who aren’t the best singers, have been running things.”

  There is a delicate balance of power at work in these a cappella groups—a sort of self-correcting meritocracy put in place to account for the fact that the best singers inevitably get the most attention. It’s the reason bands have broken up since time immemorial. When it comes to planning big-ticket gigs, Patrick would have been the best president. He is a dominating personality whose good looks alone have led to gigs like the fall 2006 trip to Portland. He is also the one who reached out to Howard Spector, the man who booked the B’hoos for the Republican National Convention three years ago, in a quest to get back in the men’s talent stable. But Patrick can be humorless, sitting in the corner by himself before a show. It’s no surprise that he was shot down tonight. Electing him president would have given the guy free rein on the mic. They imagined the concerts, with Patrick—as he was wont to do—mimicking that movie trailer voice (a favorite joke of his): “In a world where the Hullabahoos come to Rotunda Sing ...” The Hullabahoos would have imploded.

  It’s Chad Moses—the candidate least likely, on paper anyway—who is elected president of the Hullabahoos. A story: One weekend last semester, when Joe Cassara was away at a job interview, he left Chad (then the group’s business manager) in charge. And the B’hoos very nearly missed a gig that weekend. At a children’s hospital! Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. As business manager, Chad had earned a reputation for both forgetting to retrieve mail from the Hullabahoos’ mailbox (leaving checks uncashed) and spending too much of the group’s money on beer. The children’s hospital incident just confirmed the group’s suspicions about Chad’s leadership skills. They pulled into the hospital that day with ten minutes to spare. Unfortunately, it was the wrong hospital. Chad turned to the group and made his now famous declaration: “Let’s get the crap out of here.” By the time they found the gig, they were thirty minutes late for the kids.

  Musically, 2007-2008 could be their best ever. Not a single soloist was graduating, and Pete Seibert had agreed to stay on as music director for his senior year. Facing the Hullabahoos at elections, Chad had said the exact right thing: He talked about ownership. “I don’t always have the best ideas,” Chad said. “I am going to rely on you. This is a group. And every member of this group should feel responsibility for it.” Patrick would have been a dictator. And so the Hullabahoos elected the guy who liked to get drunk and spend the group’s money on beer. (They refer to those drinking nights as Hullaba-funded.) If this year had been about playing on the level of a group like the Beelzebubs, the Hullabahoos just unanimously decided that it wasn’t worth it. One needs to be invested. There should always be stakes. But not to the detriment of all else.

  The elections actually relieved a lot of Joe’s Cassara’s anxiety about how the Hullabahoos would fare without him next year. (Joe and Morgan Sword are known in the group as the Team Dads.) Graduating seniors don’t vote on officer positions. So he and Morgan sat back and listened to the deliberations. “It was nice to hear them talk,” Joe says. “They care!” After an hour, Joe Cassara finally called the candidates back upstairs.

  “You can’t wear those shorts next year,” Joe said. “And you have to get rid of the chin strap. Chad, take a few victory laps and start working off that gut. Congratulations.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Wherein the ICCAs goes international, the man behind Mainely A Cappella quits the scene, and we meet Merv Griffin’s favorite a cappella group—which not surprisingly turns out to be the a cappella equivalent of the cabana boy

  As collegiate a cappella became less of a novelty act, the stakes seemed to rise exponentially. There were rivals to BOCA, the Best of Collegiate A Cappella compilation, sprouting up every year, it seemed. One, Voices Only, was a two-disc compilation founded in 2004 by Brock Harris (a CASA board member). Another compilation, called simply sing, catered to the burgeoning a cappella scene in the South and Midwest but also included professional a cappella groups. (Sing would be entirely superfluous save for the fact that its second edition was called sing 2: eclectic boogaloo—an excellent eighties reference.) Dave Sperandio, the man who was banned from the message boards at RARB, and his organization, the Alliance for A Cappella Initiatives (AACI), had also launched their own one-day collegiate a cappella competition held annually at an a cappella conference he’d started in the early aughts called SoJam.

  The thing is, in 2007, even Don Gooding—the owner of Varsity Vocals, the proprietor of a-cappella.com—decided it was too much, that it was time to get out of the business. After buying the NCCAs from Adam Farb in 1999, Don hired Jessika Diamond, a Canuck, one of the few people in a cappella who never actually sang in an a cappella group, to run the competition. (She also happened to be Farb’s ex-girlfriend.) It took a lot of legwork to revive the competition after the Lost Year. Jessika got in touch with the groups who had competed in recent years to find out what they liked (and what could be improved) about the NCCAs. She soon uncovered a secret: Adam Farb was not a popular guy. The Golden Overtones at UC Berkeley had hired Farb to produce a CD—which they received. Unfortunately, he handed them just one copy. They had been expecting five hundred. There was a disagreement over who was going to pay to print the discs, and when the university bursar wouldn’t cut Farb a check, he disappeared. The Men’s Octet at Berkeley, who’d won the NCCAs in the 1997-1998 school year, never saw the advertised prize money, Jessika says. (Farb doesn’t have the records anymore, but says the organization had plenty of money and would have surely paid the winner.) Such was the resistance that Don Gooding went so far as to actually post photos of the entire NCCA staff on his Web site just so people could see that Farb was no longer on the payroll. In three years, Jessika Diamond managed to restore the competition, and in 2001 she launched the first international show at McGill University in Toronto. The next year the competition was officially reborn as the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, the ICCAs. "Deke used to call me the queen of a cappella,” Jessika Diamond says.

  Jessika ran the ICCAs for three years. And from the outside, anyway, it seemed like everything was in order. In her final season, she’d received two hundred tapes from various college a cappella groups hoping to compete. But now Don Gooding wanted out. “The ICCAs lost money every year that Jessika ran it,” Don Goo
ding says.

  Jessika sighs. “There’s going to be a lot of finger pointing here,” she says.

  Jessika Diamond, who’d had her hand in so many a cappella projects—from CASA to the ICCAs—parted ways with Don and largely retreated from the scene. She was, however, still running the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards (the CARAs). She would leave that behind, as well, but not before a stint in the hospital. “I developed shingles over forty-five percent of my body,” she says.

  The CARAs had been haphazard at best. Here’s how the nominations worked. Jessika would have listening parties at her apartment in the Bay Area. Five people would come. There would be stacks of a cappella CDs around the room. Together they’d nominate in thirty-three categories, including best female collegiate soloist, best professional a cappella group, that sort of thing. They’d listen to thirty seconds of each track. People would go to the bathroom. People were drinking. They’d skip whole categories while eating chips in the kitchen. Still, at the end of the session, they’d emerge with a final list of CARA nominations. From there, Deke Sharon (who’d started the awards in 1992) would make cassette tapes of all the nominated music, which he’d ship out to qualified voters. But as the numbers grew—some one hundred and twenty collegiate albums alone are released every year—this became cumbersome. Soon, voters were receiving three-cassette sets in the mail. Who was even listening to cassettes anymore? Besides, the nominations were something of a joke. The nominators rarely listened to an entire track; they just didn’t have the time. Once the committee actually nominated a track that had a piano on it.

  At what would turn out to be her final listening party, Jessika’s skin started to burn. She was lying down on the floor, scratching her back. She couldn’t stop. Eventually she had to kick everyone out of the house. “I literally had to take my pants off,” Jessika says. “And I didn’t know any of those people well enough to do that in front of them.” The next day she went to the doctor. By the end of the week she was hospitalized.