Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (23 page)

“A cappella isn’t so much about money,” says Julia Hoffman, who runs the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards. “It’s about bragging rights.” The East Coast Summit, some say, had become Minkoff’s masturbatory, narcissistic parade writ largeish.

As collegiate a cappella exploded, and its alumni spread forth like spores, a number of businesses popped up targeting the burgeoning market. In some ways, it was like Motown all over again. And somehow all roads led back to the indomitable Don Gooding.

Herein, the infighting, presented as a (dark) comedy in three acts.

Don Gooding, an alum of the Whiffenpoofs, graduated from Yale in 1981 and went on to have a successful career as a venture capitalist, working for Accel Partners in Princeton, New Jersey. However, he felt unfulfilled. In 1991, he and his first wife were visiting her folks in Maine. They drove by the L. L. Bean headquarters (birthplace of the popular catalog), which gave Don an idea for his own business. In January of 1992, Don incorporated the Primarily A Cappella catalog. The first edition offered some one hundred and fifty CDs plus sheet music, and Don hired a friend to run the operation out of a spare bedroom in his Princeton home. It’s worth noting that Don’s tax returns for the side project actually read UNITED SINGERS INTERNATIONAL. “I had grandiose plans,” Don says. “But I was losing money hand over fist.” He needed a business partner. This is where things get interesting.

John Neal was a tough-talking British expat living out in the Bay Area. He’d started out as a theater producer and a talent manager. He was also the owner and operator of the Harmony Sweepstakes—like the ICCAs for professional a cappella groups. There were negotiations. John Neal agreed to run the Primarily A Cappella catalog in exchange for a whopping sixty percent ownership of the company. Begrudgingly, Don Gooding agreed, retaining forty percent for himself. “John Neal was the only game in town,” Don says. In October of 1993, Don got on a plane and hand-delivered his entire inventory of CDs—of the Blenders, the Bobs, the Real Group—to John Neal out West.

Don had, in time, become a partner at Accel. But he was burning out on the venture capital game. “Venture capital is about manipulating people,” Don says (and, in light of his a cappella dealings, what comes next will strike some as ironic). “It took many years and a bruised ego to realize I wasn’t good at this. I’m really an entrepreneur at heart.” In 1997 he quit the firm entirely and turned his attentions to Primarily A Cappella, which Neal had taken good care of in his stead. In fact, Primarily A Cappella was just starting to make money. You can see where this is going.

“Now that I was focusing on the a cappella business full-time, ” Don says, “I could no longer ignore the human being that is John Neal.” Some say Neal regularly skimmed a little off the top from his collegiate a cappella groups—claims that he denies. (Adam Farb describes John Neal alternately as a “scumbag” and “hilarious.” “John is like every record producer in Hollywood,” Adam says. “Just a little less tactful. That’s why he’s in this small subculture and not in Hollywood. But he’s no more of a freak than I was or Deke is.”)

Regardless, Don Gooding tried to take back ownership of Primarily A Cappella. John Neal still remembers their last conversation. “Our last conversation that didn’t involve lawyers, anyway!” he says. It was a disagreement over collegiate a cappella groups. John Neal was tired of the turnover in college groups. “I’d spend a year training a business manager to do his job,” Neal says, “and then they’d graduate.” The new business manager would want to know why the group hadn’t been paid. “I don’t care that you’re so-and-so from whatever Yale group,” Neal says, “you didn’t send an invoice!”

When those talks dissolved, Don Gooding’s wife suggested he start a new company. And so he did. He called it Mainely A Cappella. It’s not a typo. “We live in Maine,” he says. Both companies sell sheet music and a cappella paraphernalia, plus CDs and MP3 downloads of collegiate recordings. Two firms, Primarily A Cappella and Mainely A Cappella, doing the exact same thing. Was there room for two companies? “No,” Don Gooding says flatly. In 2006, Don Gooding’s company did $1 million in business—from
a-cappella.com
and from an a cappella storefront run out of a strip mall in Maine.

John Neal declines to comment on the earnings at his own Primarily A Cappella. “Don Gooding is a businessman,” he says. “Me, as long as the lights are still on and I can pay my employees and I’ve got my house, I’m not concerned with what the bottom line is.”

Mike Mendyke and Don Gooding, both CASA board members, had issues dating back nearly a decade. To make a long story short, in the late nineties, Don Gooding started an a cappella record label, Hot Lips Records. He’d briefly signed the Boston-based pro group Five O’Clock Shadow. Mendyke, a longtime member of Five O’Clock Shadow, was soon forced out. Blame that old rub—creative differences. Mendyke sued FOCS. (Don Gooding funded the FOCS defense.) The group had been paid just north of ten thousand dollars to record 1998’s
So There
. It was a standard record deal. The money wasn’t really theirs—it was an upfront payment against future royalties. Mike had written an original song for the album and was never paid. It was just one symptom of the mismanagement, Mendyke claims. Don contracted Five O’Clock Shadow to do a four-city tour with the Nylons. “We’d show up at these huge venues,” Mendyke says, “and fifty people would be in the audience. He didn’t know how to run a record label.”

Don Gooding isn’t amused. “Mike Mendyke has been a thorn in my side for ten years,” he says. “And he was fired because he couldn’t sing on pitch. He cost me ten thousand dollars in legal fees.” In Mendyke’s defense, if he couldn’t sing, he hid it well. Mendyke would go on to sing in a part-time a cappella group with Dick Van Dyke called (yes) the Vantastix. Still, Don Gooding shuttered Hot Lips Records after releasing just a handful of titles.

The two would clash a second time in the fall of 2006 when Mike Mendyke launched acaTunes—The Digital A Cappella Music Store. The site is exactly what it sounds like: iTunes for a cappella with individual tracks selling for one dollar. Mendyke’s business partner was Freddie Feldman, a computer science guy and an alum of the Northwestern Purple Haze—also a CASA board member. Feldman owns an a cappella recording studio in Evanston and once helped a friend record an a cappella version of the entire Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon
album. (At the launch party for the album, they played the a cappella disc alongside
The Wizard of Oz
. It synced up perfectly.)

Don Gooding saw acaTunes as a direct attack on his own business, Mainely A Cappella. “Mike Mendyke,” Don says, “he’s sort of got a Don Quixote thing—going after me in six different ways over ten years.” But Don quickly started selling MP3s in response. “Competition keeps you on your toes,” he says.

Though acaTunes worked brilliantly, business was slower than Mike and Freddie had projected. Still, they soldiered on (acquiring distribution rights to a popular a cappella podcast, A Cappella U, hosted by the infectious superfan, Joey C, aka Joseph Campagna). In December of 2006, Mendyke sent Don an e-mail:
We’ve sold 1,000 tracks at acaTunes!

“So what!” Don says. “So in six months they made a thousand dollars. That’s not a business, that’s a
hobby
.”

The final straw was Mendyke’s investment in an a cappella competition with designs on taking down Don Gooding’s own ICCAs. The competition was conceived by Mark Surprenant, a former member of the University of Michigan Compulsive Lyres. “The Compulsive Lyres,” Don Gooding says. “That’s fitting!” At CASA board meetings (which took place monthly over the Internet) , Mike Mendyke pushed his agenda hard, desperate for the organization’s imprimatur on this just-launched competition, feeling it would help them attract participants. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. That competition would fold abruptly one month before its first finals, set for May 2006 at Epcot. Mendyke lost his entire investment. It was another victory for Don Gooding.

In 1998, after three years at the helm of the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella—the competition he’d willed into being—Adam Farb wanted out. It wasn’t just the traveling. Though it was that too. (He was producing twenty-five a cappella shows in two and a half months, and the miles quickly wore him down.) He was running BOCA on the side, having started a small a cappella record label, Smokin’ Fish Records (named for an inside joke with the Brown Derbies), to distribute the disc. Farb hired Liana Tang, an alum of NYU’s APC Rhythm, to assist him with the NCCAs. “I couldn’t run the show out of Kinkos anymore, ” he says. In the fall of 1998, he called Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center—both were booked for April. Farb was lost. “If I did the show that year,” Farb says, “I was either going to kill myself or someone else.” And so he cancelled the finals. In a cappella circles, 1999 would become known as the Lost Year. “A lot of people were pissed at me,” he says.

Both Farb and the NCCAs were at a crossroads. The show had momentum, but like any burgeoning business, it needed capital: a hundred thousand dollars by Farb’s own estimation. The NCCAs needed their own equipment, plus a big marketing push. Farb wanted to staff up. And to make matters worse, the constant turnover (read: graduation) among the competitors wreaked havoc on the system. “What’s unique about a cappella is that there’s no institutional memory,” Farb says. “Every year kids graduated and you had to start over.” Farb didn’t have the money or, frankly, the drive to continue. “I was fried,” he says. When Don Gooding offered to buy him out, Farb was thrilled. Don had been a venture capitalist and a member of the Yale Whiffenpoofs. “He could bring the infrastructure the organization needed,” Farb says. In 1999, Farb agreed to sell his stake in the NCCAs and the BOCA compilation to Don Gooding. It would not be a smooth transaction.

Don Gooding says he bought the rights to both for a flat fee of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Farb says Don promised him close to seventy thousand (which included a “declining stake in future profits” from the competition) . The deal was contentious—and very nearly litigious. The frustration ate away at Farb. To make matters worse, he watched as Don did nothing to improve the NCCAs. “I thought he had plans,” Farb says. “But I just think he didn’t know what to do with the thing.” Eventually Farb stopped caring, and he gave up all attempts to rectify the financial disparity. “At some point, I just said, Fuck it. I’ve got better things to worry about. You have to move on.” By 2001, Farb had dropped out of the a cappella scene entirely. He even tried to give his collection of a cappella recordings away to his alma mater, the Brown Derbies. They declined the gift. “Even Deke didn’t want them,” Farb says.

If the a cappella crowd had its own version of
Us Weekly
—and clearly it warranted one—it would be the forums at
rarb.org
, the Recorded A Cappella Review Board. “It’s the gossip column of a cappella,” says Dave Sperandio. He would know. He’s banned from posting to the RARB message boards. (More on that soon.)

It started innocently enough. Like most Web sites worth their column inches, RARB was launched from a dorm room back in 1993, the brainchild of Washington University students Seth Golub and Chris Tess, both onetime members of the all-male a cappella group the Pikers. Seth, now a Google employee working on artificial intelligence, built the site. And the concept was simple—almost altruistic. It was a place where collegiate a cappella groups could have their albums reviewed by professionals (mostly collegiate a cappella alums and members of CASA) on a scale of one to five (five being the best). In the first year, nearly thirty albums were reviewed. These days it’s closer to a hundred annually. And it’s deadly serious business. Groups know the veteran RARB reviewers by name and even request specific reviewers. Elie Landau and Rebecca Christie have been reviewing since the late nineties. “They tend to prefer a more natural sound,” says Ben Stevens, the RARB coordinator. “The newer reviewers— Robert Dietz, Ryan Joyce—they’re from the Bill Hare school.”

For all the talk about RARB, the nonprofit has an operating cost of twelve dollars a year—for Web hosting; reviewers are paid in albums. But the real genius—or the real curse—of RARB isn’t the reviews, but rather the forums, where some thousand registered members discuss the reviews (among other things) ad nauseam. Upward of twenty thousand messages have been posted since 1998, on close to two thousand topics. It’s Ben’s job to (among other things) police the forums, which tend to spike around the ICCAs and the BOCA announcements. For example, when Divisi lost in the finals of the ICCAs in 2005, it inspired pages of back-and-forth talk on the judging.

In 2003, producer Dave Sperandio really did lose his posting privileges, after referring to RARB founder Seth Golub as a “slack ass” in an online argument about why RARB didn’t yet offer emoticons and avatars in the forums. In late 2007, someone posted a note saying they missed Dio on the forums, and could a resolution be reached. Which is sort of funny because Dio cops to posting under an assumed name since the smackdown.

If there was any doubt, collegiate a cappella had become a serious business. Perhaps nothing underscored the incestuous, self-destructive nature of this subculture more than the Wikipedia pogrom of February 2007. The bloodletting was initiated by a Dartmouth University student named Shane Avidan, who was working as a part-time administrator for Wikipedia. He began deletion proceedings against a smattering of a cappella stubs, including entries for Andrew Chaiken (a beatboxer who goes by the name Kid Beyond), the House Jacks, BOCA, CASA, the ICCAS and, yes, even Deke Sharon himself. The administrator argued that the a cappella community was bordering on a pyramid scheme. Julia Hoffman from the CARAs was one of the few people to see the humor. “It’s rare you encounter a cappella terrorists! ” she said.