Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (25 page)

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 word
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.”

“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!