Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

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Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory Page 5

by Mickey Rapkin


  Still, Ben did not run for music director on a whim. You can’t in the Beelzebubs. There is an established protocol for seeking higher office here and it involves consulting every current member of the Beelzebubs individually, stating your intention, presenting your platform, and opening the floor to questions. (It becomes especially awkward when one candidate for music director must approach the other candidate for the job.) Second, it’s become customary for candidates to call a litany of past officers— Bub alums stretching back forty years—to get an understanding of what the job entails. In some cases, a phone call with Danny Lichtenfeld ’93 or Deke Sharon ’91 might turn into a three-hour conversation on the intricacies of the university administration or on navigating internal group politics. Ben Appel ran on a platform of the Bubs’ motto: Fun Through Song. “He didn’t want to rule with an iron fist,” says Matt Michelson, the current president. “Ben didn’t want to do things just because of protocol.” How so? “There have been times when the Bubs ran like a machine, ” Michelson says. “We’d have a gig. We’d sing. We’d leave. Ben wanted to focus more on the performance.” He wanted to take the machine apart.

  In the fall of 2006 the Bubs returned to campus with plans to record a new studio album (as decades of Bubs have done on alternate years practically since the beginning). And this group was taking the task seriously, to be sure. Early in the year, the Bubs had a nine-hour meeting where they did nothing but debate the title of the new album. They have had similarly endless conversations about the direction the album should take, about the problem with verisimilitude. When your music is indistinguishable from the original tracks, what do you do next—get more real? That will be the essential question of this album, and the biggest hurdle for Ben Appel and the Bubs. The group will have help with the task—namely, from Ed Boyer, who shared music-director duties on Code Red and is now a full-time a cappella producer living in the Bronx. Boyer—paunchy, red-faced—graduated in 2004 from the dual-degree program at Tufts and the New England Conservatory. He and his business partner, John Clark (an alum of the coed Tufts Amalgamates), have made a name for themselves in a cappella circles. “Bill Hare got ninety percent of the credit for Code Red,” Ed says, “which is fine, even though I did most of the work.” Boyer has agreed to produce the new Bubs album, which is scheduled for release in the spring of ’07.

  But the album’s direction falls squarely in Ben Appel’s lap. And Ben has his own ideas—ideas the Bubs are thrilled about. There is talk of going in an entirely new direction, opting for a real organic sound. Ben is even talking about making this a concept album, with tracks leading directly into each other, possibly with dialogue as connective tissue. But Ben Appel’s biggest asset may be his attitude. To lead a group with such rich history, a group whose alums are often still involved in the day-to-day business of the undergraduates, one must not be awed by the legacy. And Ben isn’t.

  Unfortunately, though most of the Bubs don’t know it yet, just a few weeks into the 2006-2007 school year, Ben Appel, their new music director, is about to drop out of school.

  In late August 2006, just before the Orientation Show, Ben Appel disappeared for three days. He’d literally left rehearsal for a lunch break, said he’d be back, and got on a Greyhound bus to see his parents. It was poor timing, to say the least. The Orientation Show would be the group’s first big performance of the year, and it was crucial in establishing the Bubs’ alpha reputation among freshmen. Plus, it was a great place to recruit new members. The Bubs had graduated a handful of guys the previous spring and were down to ten. They needed a few good men. The Bubs had been learning Gnarls Barkley’s “Smiley Faces” and hoped to debut the song at the Orientation Show. In Ben’s sudden absence, Lucas Walker ’08 took over, teaching the song to the Bubs. The group was curious to know where their music director was, but the officers kept his troubles a secret. “We didn’t know whether he’d be coming back,” Matt Michelson says. “We thought it was better to wait.”

  Ben Appel did return to campus a few days later. He sat down with the officers. He’d been suffering from depression and social anxiety, he said, and he was on academic probation. To make matters worse, he and his girlfriend were in the process of splitting up. But the only time he felt like himself was onstage with the Beelzebubs, he’d said; that’s when his other problems—the obsessive-compulsive disorder, the crippling inability to focus on even the simplest decisions—went away. He was seeking help, he told them—that was the important thing. Ben Appel said he wanted to resume his position as music director of the Bubs. The officers asked questions, but they didn’t pry. Ben Appel had returned to campus just in time for the Orientation Show on September 4 and perhaps his issues really were under control. And so life went on. The Bubs held auditions. They picked up five new members, including Nick Lamm (a fey potential soloist) and Matt McCormick (a curly-haired kid who’d never had a beer in his life). But Ben’s problems returned. With a vengenance.

  A few days before the Homecoming Show, Ben Appel called his friend Andrew Savini, a senior in the Beelzebubs. The two sat in Savini’s room smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes. Together, they walked over to the Bub room (part museum, part rehearsal space, on the second floor of Curtis Hall) for a meeting with the officer corps. Ben spoke first, slowly but decisively. He was going to leave school, he said. He needed to take care of himself. He needed to get better. “I needed a drastic change,” he said.

  The officers were quiet. Matt Michelson, the president, said something about wanting to help Ben. He reminded Ben of what he’d told them a few weeks earlier—that the Beelzebubs had made him happy. “Wasn’t that what you said?” Matt mumbled. And then tempers flared. No one involved is particularly proud of what happened next. Andrew Savini fears some of his fellow Bub leaders lost sight of the human problem—that Ben was their friend first and foremost, that it was about his health and not the health of the Bubs. Still, the Bubs did have the new album to think about, not to mention the Homecoming Show in a few days. The officers wanted to make sure Ben had thought this through. Earlier in the semester, Ben Appel told the officers that he’d need to see a psychiatrist and seek help from the Academic Resource Center. “Have you gone through the steps?” Matt asked. “Have you been doing what you were supposed to do?” Matt just wanted to understand what his friend was going through. But he’s not sure it read that way.

  Matt had an ulterior motive. He hoped the Homecoming Show might help Ben Appel. That the crowd noise might ease whatever white noise was troubling Ben’s mind, that the applause, the affirmation, might take hold and fire the right combination of neurotransmitters to restore Ben’s delicate balance of serotonin. But that wasn’t to be. The decision had already been made. Ben Appel wanted to tell the entire group, before they went onstage for the Homecoming Show, that he was leaving Tufts. But Matt convinced him otherwise. “I didn’t want to distract from the show,” Matt Michelson says. “I didn’t want to ruin the night.”

  The Homecoming Show was held at Goddard Chapel—all dark wood and stained glass. At the right hour, the sun casts a glow inside the chapel that can only be described as divine. In the late 1800s, the entire Tufts student body would squeeze into the chapel for events. Tonight, it only feels that way. Fifteen minutes into the show, Ben Appel steps forward. He looks like he’s raided Alex P. Keaton’s closet, what with the khakis, navy blazer, starched white shirt, and Republican power tie. His movements are so lazy he actually appears to be moving in slow motion. Yet somehow his innate, low-energy cool makes him stand out the most. The Bubs love their group members equally, but some more equally than others. And when Ben Appel stands in front of the group, there’s a perceptible change in their posture. The Bubs are not objectively as attractive as lore would have it, or as the four hundred (mostly) female members of the audience would suggest. But when the Bubs get onstage, when they stand behind a soloist like this, they look like different people. It’s that way with performers.

  The song is “19-2000” by t
he Brit band Gorillaz. The background starts in simply enough, with the Bubs repeating in a near monotone, distorting their voices: “It’s the music that we choose // It’s the music that we choose // It’s the music that we choose.” Ben comes in on the solo, singing: “You got the cool! // You got the cool shoeshine!”

  There is a tension here that was missing in earlier songs. At the bridge, the Bubs suddenly grow quiet, pulling in tight around Ben, affecting a don’t-mess-with-us attitude. Ben sings, all serious and mysterious: “They do the bop.” On bop, the Bubs, in unison, raise their left hands defiantly and snap twice.

  “They do the bop!” (snap snap) “They do the bop!” (snap snap)

  And just as suddenly, Ben Appel stands bolt upright and shouts, “You got the cool!”

  It had been a rough couple of years for the Bubs leadership. Until 2003, it had been almost unheard of for an officer of the Beelzebubs to quit midterm—especially a music director. But then, in January of 2006, Ben Kelsey ’08 stepped down. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just realized he wasn’t qualified for the job and did the only thing he could: He fled the country, taking a semester abroad in Spain. Sean Zinsmeister ’06 took over, which came with its own set of problems. Sean was a divisive personality and some say he encouraged politics within the group, which resulted in a mammoth rift. Andrew Savini, now a senior, had actually contemplated quitting the Bubs. “It was like no one could lead the fun except Sean,” Savini says. “People wouldn’t laugh at jokes if Sean didn’t laugh first.”

  The truth is, Sean and Matt Michelson had a complex friendship, loud disagreements punctuated by good times, and Matt was particularly looking forward to this new school year. With him as president and Ben Appel as music director, he thought they could restore some lost Bubs spirit. The Bubs would face other obstacles for which Ben was uniquely qualified. In the spring of 2006, the Bubs graduated six guys—six of fifteen. As president, it would be Matt Michelson’s job to turn the new guys (including several pasty-white freshmen with oversize Afros) into Bubs, and Matt was feeling the pressure. A cappella is big at Tufts, he explains: “No one is here for Division One athletics.” (It doesn’t help that the school’s mascot is an elephant called the Jumbo.) Worse, there was a time in the late nineties when the Bubs got by on their name alone—and were embarrassed to find that their on-campus rival, the coed Tufts Amalgamates, had surpassed them in musicality. Never again, they said. Matt was looking forward to Ben Appel helping him set the agenda. But that wasn’t to be.

  Secretly, quietly, in the days leading up to the Homecoming Show on September 29, the officers talked about who might replace Ben as music director. They called Lucas Walker. They called Alexander Koutzoukis. They called Chris Van Lenten (who wasn’t interested). They wanted someone to take the job for the entire year. Lucas balked. He knew the work it would take, and he was honest about his shortcomings. For one thing, arranging music didn’t come easily to him. Second, he was majoring in physics and philosophy. Plus, Lucas had a girlfriend. She barely saw him as it was. Lucas remembers the night he got into the Beelzebubs, how he sat outside a party talking to a Bub alum’s girlfriend. “She was trying to reassure me that joining the Bubs was totally worth it and that I could absolutely handle the time commitment, ” Lucas says. “She was completely right about the former and completely lying through her teeth about the latter. This is the great paradox of being in the Bubs: My life is simultaneously perfectly fulfilling and completely ruined, both due to the same group of fourteen other dudes.”

  Alexander Koutzoukis, a skinny sophomore, might have been the strongest musician, but the officers questioned his ability to command the group—he was soft-spoken, shy even. And more than anything the Bubs needed a leader, and so a decision was made: If Lucas would only commit to one semester, then so be it. “I still didn’t really want to be music director,” Lucas says. But he took the job. Now they just had to tell the rest of the Bubs.

  After the homecoming concert, Ben Appel sat the group down in the Bub room and came clean about what what had been going on. He would be leaving school, he said. It was quiet in the room, the proceedings very matter-of-fact. Lucas Walker gave a short speech about what he’d like to do that semester, the music he’d arrange, the alumni he’d call for help. He talked about the album, which would, of course, still come out in the spring—answering the call of Code Red and the legacy of the Bubs. The Beelzebubs have released a studio album (more or less) every other year since the beginning. This year would be no different. This class would not be the ones to ruin tradition.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE HULLABAHOOS

  Wherein we meet the upstart bad boys of collegiate a cappella

  The University of Virginia, home of the Wahoos, was founded in 1865, and not much has changed since—the only color on campus comes courtesy of Ralph Lauren. Just ask Dane Blackburn. "People stop me on campus and they’re like, hey, aren’t you the...” Pause. “What?” Dane says. “The black guy in the Hullabahoos? ” It’s eased up a bit since they took a second black guy, Brendon Mason. He’s loud and hard to miss. Plus, he was a former child star, having appeared on Nickelodeon’s Bug Juice. “There are clips on YouTube,” Brendon says apologetically.

  The Hullabahoos were born in 1988 as an alternative to the Virginia Gentlemen, the staid offshoot of the campus glee club. Unlike most men of collegiate a cappella, the B’hoos (for short) don’t often wear khakis or blue blazers. The first thing one notices about the Hullabahoos is the Technicolored robes draped over their street clothes. The robes are their trademark look, and it’s inspired a series of cheeky fan T-shirts, like this one: ROBED FOR YOUR PLEASURE. Believe it or not, the robes are bespoke, handmade by a seamstress at Mr. Hanks discount fabrics in downtown Charlottesville. “I’ve still got the original pattern in the back,” says Mr. Hanks—which, incidentally, isn’t his name. (It’s Tom.)

  While the Hullabahoos may be UVA’s most popular all-male a cappella group, they are not beloved everywhere. The a cappella community simmers with rivalries—sort of an East Coast/West Coast rap shakedown in sequined vests. The University of North Carolina Clef Hangers have had beef with the Hullabahoos dating back almost a decade. On that group’s 2001 recording of “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” the Clef Hangers called out the B’hoos, rapping: “Dropping the funky tracks and making the Hullabahoos mumble.” The Hullabahoos don’t know why the Clef Hangers hate them—the incident long forgotten as students graduated. But Carolina-based producer Dave Sperandio—the Timbaland of a cappella recording and a former member of the Clef Hangers—remembers exactly how the feud started. “The Hullabahoos used to come to UNC and hook up with our girlfriends, ” he says. They still do, by the way. Even the lone, endearingly awkward Hullabahoo (the kind of guy prone to non sequiturs) managed to get some on a recent road trip to UNC, hooking up with a member of the all-female a cappella group the Loreleis—a girl whose grandfather just happens to be the cantankerous owner of a major league baseball franchise.

  It’s not just the Clef Hangers who’ve had problems with the Hullabahoos. A couple of years ago, there was an incident with a Cornell University a cappella group, Last Call. Both groups were performing at NYU one night. Keith Bachmann, a Hullabahoos alum, tells the story. “After the show, the Callboys— that’s seriously what they’re called—were like, Hey, do you guys wanna trade CDs!” Bachmann says. No, the Hullabahoos did not want to trade CDs. And their refusal apparently offended the bevested Callboys. The confrontation came to a head later that night when the Hullabahoos saw the Callboys coming toward them on East Ninth Street. “They were doing the West Side Story snap!” Bachmann says. “We just did not know how to respond to that.”

  A lot of it is just plain jealousy. Because being a Hullabahoo has its privileges. Like that time they went to Asia and sold out the Hard Rock.

  Ron Puno graduated from UVA in ’99 and as that year came to a close, his father, a diplomat living in the Philippines, sent a handful of Hullabahoos CDs to some lo
cal radio stations. Somehow, the music started to get major airplay on the island nation, and a production company offered to fly the Hullabahoos to Manila to perform at the Hard Rock Cafe. When the plane landed in Manila, however improbably, a throng of screaming reporters and photographers met the B’hoos at the airport. Because Puno’s father was a big deal, the Hullabahoos were assigned a security detail of six motorcycles. The Hullabahoos concert, by the way, sold out—some twelve hundred tickets. Or roughly five hundred more than the Hard Rock’s previous headliners: Nick Lachey and 98 Degrees.

  The seventeen Hullabahoos—an all-star team of members past and present—took advantage of their sudden international fame, appearing on the Filipino answer to David Letterman. They signed autographs at the mall. “There were fans screaming for us by our individual names,” Puno says. For some, however, this attention proved problematic. “You have to understand,” Puno says, “in that part of the world, there are a lot of effeminate-looking men that dress up like females. You’re in a dark corner hooking up, and then you’re like, Wait, what is that! It was like The Crying Game.” Puno managed to avoid that particular Shanghai surprise, but some Hullabahoos (who shall remain nameless) were not so lucky.

  As the fourteen-day international tour came to a close, the group’s popularity only grew. And their brief appearance seems to have kicked off a wave of pop-appella in the Philippines, Puno says. (Shortly after their departure, a Making the Band-style TV show for a cappella swept the nation.) As unlikely as it sounds, the Hullabahoos still have a following in South Asia. Ron Puno, now thirty and a senior manager in the IT department at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, went to visit his dad in Manila in 2005. As he was standing at a bar, a man approached him sheepishly. “Are you Ron from the Hullabahoos?” the man said.

 

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