Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  But Keeley and Sarah don’t have more time. They want one last shot at the ICCA title before they graduate. They want to right the wrong. For Evynne. For Lisa. For themselves. But after that first Friday-afternoon performance—mediocre, at best— Keeley isn’t sure that’s possible. She goes home and calls Lisa. “It’s not the same,” Keeley says, her eyes tearing up. “What am I doing?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BEELZEBUBS

  Wherein the legendary Tufts Beelzebubs face a crisis in leadership

  Long View Farm Recording Studios sits on a hundred acres of western Massachusetts farm country, some two hours outside of Boston. The place is something of a commune—part bed-and -breakfast, part horse farm, part spiritual retreat, part top-tier recording studio. In the winter of 1976, Cat Stevens booked time at Long View. However, before he’d confirm the reservation, he insisted the owners install a sauna. (It’s still there.) In 1981, when the Rolling Stones needed somewhere to rehearse for their Tattoo You tour, Long View management converted the hayloft into a makeshift stage. The Stones—joined by a thirty-person entourage—stayed in residence for six weeks. In that time, Keith Richards left the property exactly once, for a surprise performance the Stones played at Sir Morgan’s Cove, a cramped rock club in Worcester; it was the first live gig the Stones had played in three years. With the parade of music legends passing through the studio, it’s no surprise that (with all due respect to Cleveland) some would come to refer to Long View as the rock ’n’ roll capital of the world. The allure of the place hasn’t faded in these intervening years. When indie rock gods Death Cab for Cutie signed with Atlantic Records in 2005, they checked into Long View for a month. Even Matisyahu, the Orthodox Jewish rapper, has heard the call. Before the Tufts Beelzebubs came to Long View, exactly one a cappella group had recorded there: the world-famous Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

  Bonnie Milner, Long View’s owner, came to the barn in the seventies to do some recording of her own and was captivated by her new surroundings. “I asked the owners”—Geoff Myers and John Farrell—“for a job,” she said. “They told me to come back in ten years.” They were convinced she’d run off with the first band that came to record. In 1989, Bonnie did come back—with her three-year-old son in tow—and got a job cleaning the horse stables. Five years later she bought the place. Today Bonnie employs a fifteen-member staff of studio engineers and grounds-keepers. While the advent of professional home recording (Pro Tools, Auto-Tune, and the like) has slowly killed off residential studios, places like Bearsville—a once famous spot in Woodstock, New York—Long View has weathered the changing tides. If anything, Milner says, home recording has helped Long View firm up its identity as an escape for artists. “Home recording has really made people start thinking about their environment,” she says. Long View is like recording at home, but you don’t have to make your bed.

  It’s with that spirit in mind that, in January 2001, the Tufts Beelzebubs—the university’s oldest a cappella group—came to Long View to record Next. Not that Bonnie Milner wasn’t skeptical of the Beelzebubs. Understandably she was concerned about turning the historic studio over to a bunch of college kids. “But the Bubs had too much charisma,” she says. Two years later the Bubs went back to record a new album, Code Red, checking into Long View for nine nights. And as advertised, the Bubs were inspired. For “Disarm”—originally a Smashing Pumpkins song— the Bubs wanted an intimate sound. And so inside the studio the Bubs dimmed the lights and lit candles while the engineer set up fifteen sets of headphones so they could record the track as close to live as possible. “It’s probably my fondest memory,” says Chris Kidd ’05, who sang the solo on “Disarm.” Still, there were drawbacks to Long View. “We were burning through money,” says Ed Boyer, Beelzebubs class of 2004, the group’s music director for much of that year. To cut costs the Bubs slept three and four guys to a suite. But, at the end of the week, they got a bill for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand dollars. They would go on to spend another fifteen thousand dollars to mix the CD, have art designed, and print the thing. (Mixing an album means, among many other things, deciding what elements belong in the foreground of each track and what should be in the background.)

  Which begs the question: How can a collegiate a cappella group afford to spend thirty thousand dollars producing an album? Especially when—despite their forty-year history and active alumni base—they don’t receive a dime from the old guys? The short answer: gigs. The Bubs, because of their legacy and professionalism, can charge upward of three thousand dollars for one thirty-minute concert at a prep school. (The year the Bubs produced Next they earned a group record of nearly fifty-five thousand dollars.)

  That so many iconoclasts recorded at Long View seems fitting. Because Code Red may be the most controversial album in the history of collegiate a cappella. When the album was released in 2003, the Bubs actually received hate mail. “It blows my mind that people would waste time writing letters,” Ed Boyer says. “But they did.” What did those letters say? “That the Bubs were ruining a cappella.”

  Despite its proximity to Harvard, the Tufts University Beelzebubs—founded in 1963—may be Boston’s premier collegiate a cappella group. And the proof is in the gigs. The Bubs regularly sing with the famous Boston Pops. They’ve performed at Carnegie Hall. In October of 2004, they were hired to sing at John Kerry’s final stump speech in Boston, just weeks before the presidential election. There have been other high-profile Beltway gigs over the years too. In 2000, Tufts president Larry Bacow hosted an event at his home, honoring an even more esteemed POTUS, Bill Clinton. The Bubs were asked to sing “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” President Clinton’s campaign theme song, which they did. A few years later, when Hillary Clinton came through town on her own tour, again the Bubs got the call. Matt Michelson, then the group’s business manager, e-mailed the Bubs repertoire over to a contact at President Bacow’s office. She replied quickly, nixing nearly every song on the list— even the Simon and Garfunkel tune “Cecilia,” a Bubs staple. “They wouldn’t let us sing ‘Cecilia’ because it had the words up in my bedroom,” Michelson says. Bacow’s team, perhaps still sensitive to the Monica Lewinsky fallout, did not want to offend the First Lady and thus specified “nothing sexual.” Michelson jokingly replied to the e-mail suggesting the Bubs sing the Tears for Fears track “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” instead. Bacow’s assistant didn’t get the joke. Left with little choice, the Bubs went back to the well and sang “Tuftonia’s Day,” the school fight song.

  In the seventies, Peter Gallagher of Fox’s The O.C. was a member of the Beelzebubs, and he looks back on his college days fondly. “The Bubs would have these beer-soaked road trips to Williams College,” he says. “And they’d always start full of expectations. But invariably it would end up with you sitting on the curb with your fifth beer thinking, Maybe we should go to bed. And there’d be ten of us sleeping in some dorm room.” Why weren’t the Bubs more successful with the ladies? “All of the women wanted to be with Harvard men,” Gallagher says, “from the Krokodiloes.” Or maybe it was because the Bubs just weren’t that good back then. Gallagher was a member of what the Bubs refer to as “the shitty Bubs,” or “the Dark Years.” Gallagher is defensive: It was a politically active era, he says, and students had more to think about than a cappella music. Still, the Bubs rebounded nicely. And they’ve since become perhaps the most famous collegiate a cappella group after the Yale Whiffenpoofs. The Bubs also have the distinction of being the only collegiate a cappella group whose music has been played in outer space. A Tufts alum, Rick Hauck, piloted NASA’s STS-7 mission—the seventh flight of the space shuttle—and on June 20, 1983, the Bubs recording of “Tuftonia’s Day” was used as the astronauts’ wake-up call. There was another first on that mission; her name was Sally Ride.

  The Bubs pride themselves on setting the pace of collegiate a cappella. But it wasn’t always expensive recording studios and the like for the men from Tufts. Tracks f
or the very first Bubs record, Brothers in Song, were laid down in the dining room of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house in 1964. The Bubs recorded standards like Grieg’s “Brothers, Sing On!” “Ride the Chariot,” and “Daddy, Get Your Baby Out of Jail”—most in one take, and the entire album was finished in an afternoon or two. But even then the Bubs were innovators. Dr. Dwight W. Batteau, a professor from the engineering department, recorded Brothers in Song free of charge because he had some new equipment to test out. He’d been working on advancing an experimental method known as binaural recording, which involves, improbably, singing into an actual dummy head with microphones stuck into its ears. The science (hopelessly simplified here) says that the outer and inner ears encode music in three dimensions. A binaural recording is immersive—if played back correctly, it will sound as if, in this case, the Bubs were serenading you. Unfortunately, that effect can’t be reproduced without headphones. And for that reason (and others more complex) binaural recording is rare these days, though there is an underground community of audiophiles who still worship the method. In 2000, Pearl Jam even released an album called Binaural.

  The Bubs have released twenty-three studio albums since their founding (not including live albums) and have sold more than forty thousand copies. (The 2006-2007 Bubs are charged with recording the twenty-fourth.) Their reach is pervasive. Proof: The 1991 Bubs album Foster Street, featuring “Rio” and “Pinball Wizard,” is credited with introducing vocal percussion— the beatbox—to collegiate a cappella. For the record, Long View Farms was not the first high-profile studio they’d recorded in. Foster Street was laid down at RCA Studios in Manhattan in January 1991, where, just down the hall, Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic were recording Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

  There have been times, however, when the Bubs have fallen behind the curve. In 2001, the Bubs released Next. “It was fashionable to be perfect,” Ed Boyer ’04 says. “And Next was not.” There were tuning problems. There were issues with rhythm. The funny thing is, Next is still one of Ed’s favorite Bubs albums. “It has character that the other albums don’t,” he says. But when the Bubs checked into Long View in 2003 to record what would become Code Red—the album some say ruined collegiate a cappella—they had a very specific goal in mind: to record a disc so perfect, so produced, that the a cappella tracks were nearly indistinguishable from the original tunes.

  Bill Hare, a legendary a cappella producer based in the Bay Area (who works with groups as far away as Sweden) likes to say that a cappella has, of late, diverged into two separate and distinct arts. “Recording an album is an expression of what’s in your head,” he says. “Singing live is a demonstration of your real skill.” Both are viable. “I’ve never been a believer that a group should sound live the way they do on the recording,” he says. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t have had everything from the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s on up.” It’s an apt comparison, believe it or not. Like Sgt. Pepper’s, Code Red was a tour de force of production.

  The Bubs ended up reverse-engineering a lot of Code Red. On Bush’s “Machine Head,” the Bubs wanted to match the distortion of Gavin Rossdale’s guitar on the original, so Bill Hare brought out an actual electric guitar. He played the guitar through different Pro Tools amp simulators on his computer until he found the one Bush and Gavin Rossdale used to get that distortion. Then Bill unplugged the electric guitar and strummed. Without the amplifier, the strings sounded like plink plink plink. The Bubs would sing “Machine Head” one way onstage, but in the studio Bill asked them to emulate that tinny plink plink plink with their voices. Bill Hare ran the track through the selfsame amplifier Bush had used. And bam. “The Bubs sounded exactly like the original,” Bill says.

  Code Red was released in April 2004 and it received enviable notices. Dave Trendler reviewed the album for rarb.org, the a cappella equivalent of the tastemaking Web site pitchforkmedia.com, writing: “Who are these superhumans? Whether by machine, superhero, or mortal man, the Beelzebubs have blended the simple human voice with excellent studio work to create an unconventional album.”

  Still, the Bubs did receive hate mail. Some called the album computerized. “People said it was overproduced,” Ed Boyer says. Code Red opened with the Styx song “Mr. Roboto.” Here one might point out the inherent irony of the song’s lyrics: The problem’s plain to see // Too much technology // Machines to save our lives // Machines dehumanize. (Perhaps anticipating these complaints, the Bubs included a statement in the album’s liner notes, saying, “Every sound on this recording was created solely by our fifteen mouths,” much as the Mills Brothers had done in 1931 for their record Swing It, Sister.) It wasn’t just the public that questioned the merits of Code Red. Some of those complaints came from the Bub alums themselves. “Perfection is an aesthetic and an accomplishment,” says Bill Allen, Bubs class of ’83. “But I prefer spontaneity.”

  The thing is, Bill Allen might be the one to blame for all of this. In 1985, he was working as an engineer at A & R Recording Studios in Manhattan, when the Bubs came to record Clue. Bill Allen ran those sessions and he believes he’s responsible for the first-ever studio effect on a Bubs record. It was the intro to “Grazin’ in the Grass,” and Bill recorded the Bubs saying the word pow several times. “I had them linger on pow,” he says. Powwwwwww. Bill took a pencil and scrubbed a mark on the quarter-inch tape, which he laid on the splicing block, and cut with a razor. When he flipped the tape and played it backward, the powwwwww became wwwwwwwwooopp. “That’s how we got the big crescendo that starts that track,” Bill says. Still, www-wopppp was a far cry from an octavized bass, a Pro Tools amplifier, and Auto-Tune. (Backstory: Auto-Tune is a computer program that corrects a singer’s pitch in recordings and in live performance. When Billy Joel sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XLI, some accused him of abusing Auto-Tune. How do you know when it’s too much—be it live, or on Code Red? Well, the singer sounds like Cher’s “Believe.”)

  Some angry (and likely jealous) a cappella readers wrote into the RARB forums insisting Code Red was a studio project, or that it was unfair to penalize a group that couldn’t afford to record at a place like Long View. John Sears, an ICCA judge, had his own concerns: “The album bores me to tears. It’s more of an album I can pop in for my friend just to say, Look what can be done when you take college a cappella to an extreme level.” But the thing is, the Bubs didn’t just sing those songs live—they killed them. “Every song was a showstopper,” says Dr. Michael Miller, Bubs class of ’74. He singles out Greg Binstock, Bubs class of ’03, who sang “Nothing Compares 2 U,” by Sinéad O’Connor, and Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Dr. Miller isn’t exactly in the Björk demographic. “But that song would knock people out,” he says. “The group had such control.” Love it or hate it, Code Red was a game changer.

  The Bubs never went back to Long View Farm Recording Studios. It was too expensive, and frankly, with advancements in computer technology, it was probably overkill for a self-financed a cappella project. Ed Boyer, Bubs ’04, stepped up, negotiating a deal with the group. If the Bubs bought him recording equipment, he said, he’d learn how to make a Bubs album. In the spring of 2004, the group bought Ed an Apple PowerBook G4 for two thousand dollars, a Pro Tools rig for another two grand, and a preamp—later he picked up a Neumann mic from eBay. The Bubs recorded 2005’s album Shedding in Ed Boyer’s bedroom closet. It was an entirely different operation. The Bubs gave up the personal chef and camaraderie of Long View but were spoiled in other ways. Because Ed wasn’t really on the clock like an engineer they’d pay at Long View, they could experiment wildly. They could do fifty takes of the same dim dim bop bass line. A song from a Divisi album might be made up of forty individual Pro Tools tracks layered on top of each other, but on Shedding, each Bubs song was made up of closer to 120 individual tracks (or more).

  But something was missing. While Code Red had a clear mission—imitative, produced a cappella—Shedding was really more of the same. At le
ast to the naked ear. Ed Boyer insists there’s a difference, something about the difference between technology that’s apparent and technology that’s transparent. It’s a valid point—if you’re an engineer. The mortals didn’t pick up on the subtleties. Trey Harris reviewed Shedding for RARB, writing: “Once you release an album like Code Red, it’s hard to follow up. You’ve raised the bar for a cappella covers and production so high that it’s nigh impossible to beat. After a group comes out with an album as perfectly imitative as Code Red was, I’d expect them to move on to different ideals.” Still, it was hard to argue with perfection and Shedding swept the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards, winning Best Male Collegiate Album, Best Male Collegiate Song for “Let’s Get It Started,” Best Male Collegiate Solo for Andrew Savini’s “Epiphany,” and Best Arrangement for “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

  The pressure of the Bubs legacy mounts each year. “With Code Red,” says Sean Zinsmeister, who graduated in ’06 and shared music director duties with Ed Boyer on Shedding, “we really pushed it as far as we could go in terms of mimicking instruments. ” He talks a lot about “responding to the critics.” It seems Sean graduated at just the right time. “I really wasn’t sure where we could go after Code Red,” he says. “I’m glad I don’t have to be there to figure it out. I’m glad that isn’t my problem.”

  No, that would be Ben Appel’s problem.

  The first thing one should know about Ben Appel is that he’s young. He ran for music director in the spring of 2006, at the end of his freshman year. It wasn’t so much that he felt ready for the job—he just felt he was more ready than the other prospects. “I felt it was my duty to run,” he says. It seems the group agreed.