Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  SO I LEFT HIGH SCHOOL WITH NO ACT, AND MINIMAL performance experience, but a dream to be on stage. Well, if the modern world of stand-up comedy was too hard-edged for my old-fashioned style, I had to figure out another avenue. And it just so happened that I did have another artistic pursuit, one that couldn’t be more fitting to my wholesome image—my barbershop quartet, the Boys Next Door. By any objective standard my group was pretty darn good. We did well whether it was in front of a friendly audience at school or on the street singing in front of a bunch of strangers in Harvard Square. We basically crushed it at every one of our unpaid performances.

  I was struck with the brilliant idea that my barbershop quartet could be my ticket into show business. In hindsight it seems incredibly naïve, of course, to think that I would get famous as part of a barbershop quartet, but I believed I was just thinking outside the box, and that was going to make all the difference. After all, at the time Steve Martin was one of the biggest comedy stars around, and although his albums weren’t allowed in my house because they featured a big label that said “EXPLICIT” across it, I used to watch his many appearances on Saturday Night Live, playing his banjo and doing absurdist humor with an arrow through his head. I thought I could bring the art of barbershop back and make it hip, the way Steve Martin had when he put his own twist on what was essentially an old-fashioned vaudeville routine.

  So, with this in mind, I decided to put together an audition tape for Saturday Night Live. I watched the show every week, and I knew I was nothing like Eddie Murphy or Joe Piscopo, but it seemed entirely plausible to me that I might get an audition with my current skill set—I had done a darn good job in the high school Gong Show; I could emcee, tell jokes, and sing barbershop; I was old school—like Jackie Gleason or Danny Kaye. Maybe what the world needed was a throwback like those guys. I thought I deserved a shot at the big time. So I went down to the local public access cable studio, strapped on a lavalier microphone, sat on a stool in front of a white backdrop, and I narrated the introduction to my demo tape.

  “Hello, Lorne Michaels. A lot has been said about this young man Tom Shillue. Have you heard of him? Let’s have a look. . . .”

  Using the massive off-line video editing deck at the public access station, I taught myself to edit from scratch and cut together scenes from the Gong Show: me emceeing, doing impressions of my teachers, and, of course, I finished with what I thought was my ace in the hole, my barbershop quartet. Who else is going to submit a barbershop quartet to Saturday Night Live? I thought. Nobody! That’s who!

  After its one and only airing (in order to get free use of the cable equipment, you had to agree to air anything you produced on local cable TV, so at some point that week, they popped my five-minute audition for Saturday Night Live into the schedule, probably between a town selectmen’s meeting and a broadcast of the high school football game), I sent the VHS tapes not just to Lorne Michaels but also to a handful of folks from the ending credits of the show. I didn’t know how important they were; I selected them based on whether or not they had a nice-sounding name. There was even a guy who worked on the show named Tom Shiller. Shiller? Only one letter different from Shillue! I thought at the very least I’d get his attention with my name. I probably sent about ten in all of the carefully packaged and addressed VHS tapes down to 30 Rockefeller Center, New York, New York.

  Now what do you do after you send in a résumé for a job? You follow up with a phone call, of course. So a week later I was calling 30 Rock and asking for Lorne Michaels. Keep in mind that I was all of seventeen years old at this point, but I was brimming with the kind of heedless confidence I wish I had today. We should all act like rubes all the time, because we’d get a lot more done and we’d never worry about whether we were doing the “acceptable” thing.

  “Tom Shillue for Lorne Michaels!” This was my greeting. Friendly and unhurried, but also with an urgency, as if I had just gotten off the phone with Lorne a few minutes before and had remembered something the minute we hung up, so I needed to call back immediately. In my self-taught crash course in cold calling I quickly learned that when you ask for somebody important on the phone, the person on the other end always asks, “Who’s calling?” This presents the first stumbling block. So, to get past this I’d act like someone important who would expect to be put through right away. Of course, this never worked—the receptionist would inevitably follow up with “Does he know you?” to which I’d energetically reply, “I can only hope he does! What’s your name?”

  The receptionist would usually tell me her name and then proceed to hustle me off the phone, but then I had a name that I could use the next time I called—so it was sort of a win.

  “Hi, Darlene, how are you?” I’d say the next time I called. “It’s Tom Shillue for Lorne.”

  I know this approach seems a bit on the delusional spectrum, maybe even a little bit psychopathic—but from my perspective there was absolutely no downside to my behavior. Perhaps Lorne Michaels’s personal assistant was rolling her eyes at me from 250 miles away, but I’d never met her, so it didn’t matter! Deep in my core, the dork king remained.

  After several weeks of aggressively pursuing an audition for Saturday Night Live my results appeared to be: not a thing. I had nothing at all to show for all my mailings and cold calls, except the experience itself. Sometimes that’s enough: the knowledge that I had tried, even though I had nothing to show for it.

  But some stories have unexpected endings.

  *

  Several weeks later I took the bus into the city to do what so many suburbanites of my age did, walk up and down Newberry Street in the Back Bay, occasionally stopping in one of its many record stores or boutiques to stare long and hard at things I wasn’t going to buy. Most of the shops had bulletin boards that catered to the students of the many colleges in the area, and on one I saw a notice:

  ENTERTAINERS WANTED.

  SINGERS! DANCERS! ACTORS!

  SPECIALTY ACTS!

  This was a posting for theme parks, looking to hire entertainers for the summer. Well, this seemed too good to be true! I mean, the only amusement park I’d ever been to was Paragon Park at Nantasket Beach, and the only entertainment they had there was Zoltar the animatronic fortune-teller. This posting was for the big parks, places like Busch Gardens. They were casting for entertainment roles in theme parks “all over the U.S.A and Canada!”

  I wrote down the date and time of the audition from the poster and found a pay phone to call my baritone, Sponsel Martin.

  “Can we get the guys together for this?” I asked.

  “Absolutely!” he said.

  As barbershop quartets go, we had been pretty busy lately. After we had performed in the talent show at school, we were approached by a member of the audience and invited to be his guest at his organization’s next local meeting. The audience member in question was actually the father of my old sweetheart-that-wasn’t, Susan (yes, Ally Sheedy’s dad!), and he was a member of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, heretofore referred to by its tidy acronym, SPEBSQSA.

  We went down to the meeting in the church basement and sang the two songs we had sung in the show. We didn’t think any performance could have gotten us a better reception than we did at the Gong Show, but these guys practically hoisted us up on their shoulders. This room full of old guys lit up—they couldn’t have been happier to see a group of kids singing their kind of music. We stayed until late that night with them learning old songs and singing “tags.” (For those of you not familiar, a tag is the end of a song, when the group builds to a crescendo, either by one singer holding out a note while the others harmonize around him or all four hitting a big fat chord together. Every quartet likes to put their own special tag on the end of a standard barbershop song, and when quartets get together they teach and trade tags with each other late into the night. They’re like the Pokémon of barbershop.)

  We joined up the following week and bega
n singing with the Canton Bay–Statesmen SPEBSQSA chorus. They immediately had us fitted for uniforms and proudly stuck us in the front row. We really just wanted to sing in a quartet, but we couldn’t resist all the accolades they were throwing at us. They really took the ENCOURAGEMENT part of SPEBSQSA very seriously.

  So we assembled our quartet for a Saturday-morning audition at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Boston. Our quartet didn’t really have any uniforms to speak of—we usually just wore a bunch of mismatched three-button sport jackets culled from various Goodwill outlets. But for this “professional” audition I thought we should look as slick as possible, so we used our SPEBSQSA chorus tuxedos. The Canton Bay–Statesmen men’s chorus must have scored a good deal on these suits at a fire sale, because they were exceedingly retro. So we were decked out head-to-toe in those mint-green beauties, with dark-green piping on the lapels, and bell-bottomed pants with zip-up boots. Walking through Copley Square on the way to the hotel we looked like four Boy Scouts auditioning to play pimps in a remake of Shaft.

  We went into the hotel and signed in for our audition spot. This was my first taste of professional show business. Dancers in leg warmers stretched and did pirouettes in the hallway while singers were doing vocal warm-ups in the bathroom. Girls and guys both were decked out in tight sweatpants, hiked up with the waistbands folded down. A lot of the performers seemed to know one another. These were theater people, and here we were, a group of square Irish Catholic kids from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic town. A little bit of that Southie attitude rubs off on anyone from the Boston suburbs, so to us, we were the tough guys in that room. We just stood there leaning against the wall with our hands in our mint-green polyester pockets and waited to be called in. We didn’t need any of that warm-up stuff. We knew what we were made of. We would tear the shit out of “You Must’ve Been a Beautiful Baby” when the time came.

  When they finally called for the Boys Next Door, we waltzed in and I pulled out my pitch pipe. To my great surprise there wasn’t a table full of casting directors at the end of a big showroom but rather just one round little man sitting at a round table with a bottle of water and a platter with cheese, crackers, and fruit in front of him.

  “Hello, boys!” he said, getting up and shaking hands. “I understand you’re a barbershop quartet. Well, I don’t want to make you nervous, but I’m going to tell you right off the bat, we need a quartet for one of our parks, and if you have what it takes, you might be looking at a full-time job. I like your look. Where’d you get those suits?”

  “These are our formal outfits,” I said, jumping in. “We use these for corporate shows, dinner parties, and grand openings.” We had yet to do any of these things, of course, but the statement was not technically a lie. If we ever did have bookings like that, these would be the suits we would wear.

  “We’ve also got casual outfits that work better for outdoors and more informal shows.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that. If you end up working for Show Biz Incorporated, you’ll be provided some pretty nice wardrobe. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s hear what you got.”

  I blew a B natural and we launched into “OH . . . YOU . . . must’ve been a beautiful baby, cuz baby look at you NOW (you now!).”

  “Beautiful Baby” was tight. It was a direct rip-off from our barbershop heroes, the Boston Common. They had won the International SPEBSQSA Championship in 1980, and we’d even met them at one of the big Northeast District conventions, and cornered them in a hotel lobby so we could sing a song with them. Barbershoppers come from all around to attend these SPEBSQSA conventions for the purpose of competing against other quartets and choruses, but for most the real desire is to hang out, have fun, learn tags, and look for an opportunity to “sing one with the Champs.” We had learned every song on the Boston Common’s album note for note. We weren’t champions but we were doing a pretty darn good imitation of them in that ballroom. At the end, I sing the word “NOW!” and just hold the note, and the other guys echo with the classic descending chromatic barbershop chords “TAKE A LOOK AT YOU . . .” and end it with the big fat major chord “NOW!!!”

  His face didn’t give anything away, but we could hear the chords. We knew we had impressed him.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Got anything else?”

  I blew a B flat and we cued up our best slow song: “If the Rest of the World Don’t Want You, You Will Always Be Welcome Back Home.” This sentimental ballad was what barbershop was made for. We had used it to make old ladies cry in three separate counties. The climax of the song is “If the rest of the world don’t want you . . . then go back to your MOTHER AND DAAAAAAAD!” And when we hit it, we could see Mr. Show Biz must have had kids of his own—parents are much more susceptible to this song than regular people, and when we hit the “DAD” chord, we could see it in his eyes.

  We got the job.

  *

  The Boys Next Door was originally an ironic title for our quartet. We didn’t consider ourselves “boys next door” types. Remember, in high school I was trying to fashion myself as an iconoclast. Compared to the well-behaved girls of the Norwood High chorus, we guys in the back row were restless and somewhat difficult to deal with, so in an effort to keep our horseplay from infecting the rest of the chorus, our director, Mr. Dugan, would hand us sheet music and tell us to go into the bathroom and work on it. The boys’ room was next door to the music room, so we became the Boys Next Door. We took pride in being sent to the boys’ room, in the same way that as youngsters we took pride in being sent to the bench at Shattuck Elementary. As they say, Bad Boys—what are you going to do?

  So out of those days of bathroom singing came our quartet. Sponsel was the musician of our group. His real name was Bob but we called him Sponsel because he wore an old wool military coat that said “Lt. Sponsel” on its breast pocket. I’ll continue to call him Sponsel so as not to confuse him with my other chum named Bob.

  There aren’t many guys who were given a full music scholarship to college whose first love is barbershop harmony, but Sponsel was one of them. He was all about the singing and the sheet music. I was the performance guy, I was the attitude, but together we were the heart and pulse of the quartet. I was the Lennon to his McCartney. You can take my comparing us to the Beatles as ridiculous, but I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a pretty solid comparison. I had the inexplicable overconfidence that I’d been brimming over with since childhood, and Sponsel was a music snob, and there is no snob like a music snob. We went through various members in high school, finally settling on Sponsel’s brother Jim, who played tuba in the band and became the tuba of our quartet. We always had trouble finding someone who could sing the high tenor notes, as all of our voices had changed. Then one day we heard this little underclassman walking down the hallway singing “Message in a Bottle” by the Police, and he was hitting all the notes. We hustled him into the boys’ room and made him sing with us. He was tiny and had a voice as sweet as pie, so I called him Squimbo-Pie, and without asking if he was interested, we told him he was part of the group.

  A little over a year later we were driving to our new job at Canobie Lake Park in Salem, New Hampshire, in an old 1966 Dodge Dart. It was the same make and model that my dad used to drive. Our bass, Jim, had bought it for a few hundred dollars, and we dubbed it “Harmony Car.” With all the singing on the way up, I avoided any carsickness. If only I had known that worked sooner! We pulled into the big empty parking lot and right up to the fence in the shadow of the the Yankee Cannonball, a big white wooden roller coaster. Canobie Lake was an old-fashioned amusement park on a beautiful piece of land—nothing but big trees, green grass, and all on the shores of a massive lake. There was an old Dancehall Theater on the shore, which from the 1930s to the 1950s had featured big bands like Duke Ellington, Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra. We had a week of rehearsals ahead of us before the season began in late June. We were introduced to the other performers, who were all professional actors and actre
sses from New York City. In discussing our new job with them I was surprised to learn that many of them would have preferred to have spent their summers doing “summer stock” or “repertory theater” somewhere besides this theme park. It was likely that this was their third or fourth choice for a summer gig, but that didn’t mean they didn’t appreciate it. This was a job in “the biz.” They were glad to be here instead of waiting tables, and they certainly didn’t arrive with any sense of entitlement. We, on the other hand, sure did.

  It’s hard to describe the combination of naïveté and cockiness that the Boys Next Door had as a group. We were very excited to be working as entertainers—this was our first steady paying gig as a quartet, after all. But we also had a brash attitude as a group that broadcast, Canobie Lake Park were the ones that were “lucky to have us.” All I can say is that it’s an a cappella thing. You probably remember the look on the faces of the members of your college a cappella group when they got up to sing “unannounced” in the dining hall; the smug expressions that said, “Yeah—we’re doing this . . . enjoy!” A cappella singers have no humility at all. That is how we felt about ourselves. Some of this is justified: a cappella music is difficult and takes a long time to master, so when you’re starting off, you’re terrible at it and very aware of that fact. Once you become proficient, you never stop being proud of yourself. But it’s not just the mastery, it’s that you’re self-contained. You can take it with you. So it gives you the sense that you’re welcome anywhere. That doesn’t work for other musicians. There are plenty of class-A violin players out there, but you never see them stand up in the middle of a diner and break into “Flight of the Bumblebee.”