“It was shocking,” Ron says.
It’s not surprising that the Hullabalumni (that’s what they call themselves), nearly a hundred strong, have such fond memories of their collegiate days. Though most never sang again—a few are trying to make it in Nashville, some on the indie circuit— they can take comfort in the fact that (much like Hasselhoff in Germany) the B’hoos are big in the Philippines.
Though the Hullabahoos would hate to admit it, they’re more of a fraternity than most a cappella groups. (They’re also a bit like the United States Marines. Before each concert they circle up, put their hands in the center, and shout, “Unit. Corps. God. Country. Hullabahoos.”) For one thing, the Hullabahoos have their own de facto frat house, aka the Hullaba-house—a four-bedroom, off-campus apartment on Wertland Street, across from a local landmark, Georgia O’Keeffe’s old place. Seven of the Hullabahoos live in the house, which, like most college residences, contains a glut of inherited furniture—food caked into the cushions like amber fossils of years past. The attic alone holds an efficiency kitchen, a full bath, a Ping-Pong table, two oversize papasan chairs, a futon, a magnetic darts game, and some scattered folding chairs. There is a thirty-two-inch television, an Xbox, and several predictable DVDs—Fight Club, Reservoir Dogs, the unrated edition of The Girl Next Door. One of the B’hoos also lives in the attic, having sectioned off a corner with a bedsheet and some rope MacGyver-style. The Hullabahoos have been renting the place for three years and it’s home to their postconcert parties.
It’s like that with the Hullabahoos—most don’t fit the a cappella archetype (such as there is one). Morgan Sword—last year’s president, now the soul of the Hullabahoos—is a six-foot-four prep-school kid, the kind confident enough to wear Birkenstock clogs with white socks. As a freshman he expected to play club baseball at UVA before some girls in his dorm convinced him to audition for the Hullabahoos. When he got into the group he called his high school sweetheart, Lindsay Friedman (then a student at Williams College). She was indignant. “You can sing?” she said. Morgan’s friends back home in Princeton, New Jersey, still make fun of him for being in an a cappella group. But Morgan is recognized on campus at UVA almost daily, and stardom—albeit the kind relegated (mostly) to a five-mile radius—is a nice comeback to any ribbing his buddies might dish out. “Girls I don’t know will come up to me and say, Hi, Morgan! I’m like, Hey, friend! I never thought I’d get social respect for a cappella.” Pete Seibert is the music director of the group and his friends on campus make fun of him too. When they see him at a party, they like to run up to him and shout, “Oh, my God, are you a Hullabahoo!”
If there is one thing the Hullabahoos are most proud of—more than selling out their campus concerts, more than their reputation overseas—it is their intramural flag football team. They’re called Hullabahoos B. What’s with the name? Well, Hullabahoos B implies that there is also an A team. The Sigma Chi frat house might have a Sigma Chi A team and a Sigma Chi B team—such is the demand for flag football among their brothers. “When we beat a frat,” says Patrick Lundquist, a brickhouse of a Hullabahoo, “we like them to think they just lost to the scrubs from an a cappella group.” Patrick’s can’t-miss plan for on-field domination in the 2006-2007 season: “A Peyton Manning-style hurry-up offense.” Before they called themselves Hullabahoos B, the team was known by a different name, the equally ironic Jazz Hands. They’ve placed as high as third in the UVA intramural league. Brendon “Bug Juice” Mason, a onetime high school football star who was recruited by William and Mary, is a second-year in the Hullabahoos, and he’s been a boon. How heated are the games? Last season, during the intramural play-offs, Morgan Sword felt so sick that he had his girlfriend drive him to the emergency room. With an IV in one arm and a raging fever, Morgan told the doctor that he absolutely had to get out of the hospital that afternoon.
“I’ve got a game,” Morgan said.
“Do you play for UVA?” the doctor asked.
Morgan replied the only way he knew how: “Sort of?”
When Morgan was a first year, he was actually accepted to all three all-male a cappella groups. UVA is not known for its music program, and as such, competition for fresh meat is fierce among the a cappella groups. He told the buttoned-up men of the Virginia Gentlemen that he wasn’t interested, that he was deciding between the Academical Village People and the Hullabahoos. Still, one of the Virginia Gentlemen called, offering to take Morgan to dinner. “Morgan, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” the kid said. That’s called dirty rush, Morgan explains. The Hullabahoos consider themselves above all that. “We’d rather take the high road,” Morgan says. “We don’t have a single guy in the group who wanted to be somewhere else.” The Hullabahoos are not, however, above shamelessly padding a kid’s ego.
When the Hullabahoos came back to campus in August 2006, they began planning for auditions. The Hullabahoos were looking to pick up a bass or two. “But more than that,” Morgan says, “we just need good Hullabahoos.” He’s not talking about good singers. “We spend so much time together,” he says, “the first requirement is that we’re gonna get along. We’ve certainly turned down kids before who sang way better than any of us. But if you take them, you’re compromising the integrity of what you’re doing. ” People can contribute in other ways, he says, like looks. You can always teach a cool kid to beatbox.
Turnout was solid for the first round of auditions this year— and fairly standard, save for one curveball: An openly gay member of the Hullabahoos watched his ex-boyfriend audition for the group. Now, the Hullabahoos are very welcoming—especially considering their relation to the Mason-Dixon Line. But most everyone was relieved that the kid’s sound wasn’t right for the Hullabahoos. Even if it had been, they admit, they probably wouldn’t have taken him. “Hullabahoos hooking up with other Hullabahoos?” one member says. “We just can’t have that.”
To get to know the potential new members better before the callbacks, Morgan and the B’hoos resurrected an old tradition, the Hullabahoos-versus-Auditionees football game. The Hullabahoos have a strategy. “We dominate early,” says Joe Cassara, the current president of the B’hoos, “but we let the kids win so we don’t look like assholes.” The Hullabahoos even throw interceptions to kids who are on the fence—kids who are auditioning for other a cappella groups. The game isn’t about athletics. (Which explains why Pete, the music director, runs the field with a can of beer in his hand.) “It’s about seeing who is a leader,” Morgan says.
In the past four years, the Hullabahoos have lost just one kid—an honest-to-God cousin of President George W. Bush, a kid named Sam Bush. Perhaps lost is the wrong word. At the auditions, the Hullabahoos ask each kid to fill out a form, which lists their hometown, major, voice part, that sort of thing. There are a few personality-based questions too. Example: Fill in the blank. I have the most extraordinary _______. Sam Bush wrote cock. He would go on to join—and quit—the Virginia Gentlemen.
Not much was memorable about the callbacks this fall—save for Joe Whitney, a six-foot-something stringbean with blue eyes and a goofy grin, a guy whose friends regularly describe him as the whitest guy they know. For callbacks, each kid is asked to prepare five minutes of entertainment. For his talent, Joe Whitney showed up pushing a microwave on a handcart. “What’s that for?” Morgan asked, though he was pretty sure Joe was about to blow something up.
“Oh,” Joe said. “I’m going to cook!”
With that, Joe Whitney opened up his backpack and pulled out some peanut butter, graham crackers, Marshmallow Fluff, and chocolate bars. He used to make this snack when he was a kid, he told the Hullabahoos. He proceeded to nuke the fluff, which he then spread over the graham crackers. He handed the s’mores out to the Hullabahoos one by one. But he was not done. Just as the B’hoos were finishing up their snack, Joe Whitney removed his sweater to reveal a white T-shirt underneath. In black marker on the T-shirt he’d scrawled the words SECRET INGREDIENT, with a giant arrow pointin
g down to his crotch. Needless to say he was accepted.
When the audition week was up, the Hullabahoos took five new guys. Very quickly, four accepted the invitations. Joe Whitney (and his microwave) was the final holdout. He’d been leaning toward the more classic Virginia Gentlemen. What changed his mind? First, the Hullabahoos’ “wall of sound,” he says. Two? “Every girl I asked told me the Hullabahoos were better than the Virginia Gentlemen.” What did the girls say, exactly? “AVP is the group you want to show to your little brother. The Virginia Gentlemen are the group you want to show to your mom. And the Hullabahoos are the group you don’t want to show to your girlfriend.”
The Hullabahoos are, in many ways, the anti-Beelzebubs. For one thing, they don’t have that kind of discipline—and they wear their laziness as a badge of honor. Their music director, Pete Seibert (a genial kid from West Virginia who recently lost ten pounds by spending money on alcohol rather than food), often ends disagreements in rehearsal by saying, “It’s just a cappella!” Also: They’d sooner disband than do choreography. About the only thing the Bubs and the Hullabahoos would agree on is the foolishness of competing in something like the ICCAs. Which is easy to say when you’ve already got a national reputation.
The Beelzebubs have nearly five decades of alumni experience to draw on—with alums regularly arranging new music for the group. The Beelzebubs may have an off year now and again (see the mid-seventies, or the early aughts) but what they lack in standout soloists they make up for in energy, sheer force, and dedication. The Hullabahoos, not so much. Their founder, Halsted Sullivan, remembers coming to the Hullabahoos’ fifteenth anniversary show in 2003. “The group was pretty terrible,” he says. It doesn’t help that most of the Hullabahoos don’t read music. In fact, several never sang before college.
The lax Hullabahoos attitude can come back to bite them. A few years ago, the Hullabahoos were four thousand dollars in the red. They’d recorded an album, Jacked, and were borrowing money from their families to pay the printing costs. “Poor planning,” says Keith Bachmann, who was music director at the time.
The B’hoos have frequently flirted with insolvency, spending twenty-five thousand dollars on their 2006 album Off the Dock. The album has since sold more than a thousand copies at fifteen dollars apiece—which still leaves them in the red. Worse, the sales are likely illegal. Collegiate groups have only just begun paying royalties for the rights to these songs, figuring the U.S. government won’t crack down on a bunch of college kids. Of late, some production warehouses—the people who actually print these CDs—have started to ask the groups to provide verification that they’ve secured all clearances. (The Harry Fox Agency in New York has carved out a niche securing what’s called mechanical rights for bands—including a cappella groups—so that U2 actually gets a couple of pennies every time someone sells a cover of “With or Without You.”) Not that the Hullabahoos worry much about the IRS, the RIAA, or anyone else. Actually, the only thing they’re worried about is cannibalizing their own sales. They’ve laid down tracks for a new disc, including songs by Justin Timberlake and Rascal Flatts, but don’t want to put the album out too soon. “Off the Dock is still selling well,” says their music director. Though not as well as it should be. Like the major music labels, the Hullabahoos have to deal with piracy. “Our shit is all over LimeWire,” Morgan says.
Salvation for their financial woes came from an unlikely source: the Republican Party. A company called Ashley Entertainment (who’d worked with the Hullabahoos on and off since the mid-nineties) hired the boys to perform for a series of events at the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan, including a Union Pacific Railroad pep rally. The boys learned a bunch of songs about trains, including Marc Cohn’s “Ghost Train” and Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.” Later, at an RNC event at Sotheby’s, Trent Lott actually joined the B’hoos on “God Bless America.” (Footnote: Lott was part of his own a cappella group, the Singing Senators, a barbershop quartet that also included Larry “Wide Stance” Craig.) The Hullabahoos earned thirteen thousand dollars for three days’ work. Suddenly they were flush with cash. Yet, in typical Hullabahoos style, the group quickly lost touch with their contact, the owner of Ashley Entertainment and the man who had hired them for their most lucrative gig in years.
But in the fall of 2006—not long after Joe Whitney and his microwave show up—Morgan Sword gets back in touch with Howard Spector at Ashley Entertainment. Morgan is now planning the group’s winter-break trip, which is set for January 2007, and he’s set his sights on booking one major gig: singing the national anthem at a Los Angeles Lakers game. Morgan has been chasing the booker at the Staples Center for months, sending press kits and following up with phone calls, and he reaches out to Howard Spector for a letter of recommendation. Then there is the talk of a possible B’hoos trip to Hong Kong for the summer of 2007. If the Hullabahoos have a goal for this 2006-2007 school year, it’s to compete on the level of a group like the Tufts Beelzebubs without sacrificing their laid-back soul. But can a group pull off a tour of Hong Kong when its music director still says, “It’s just a cappella!” Or when its treasurer regularly forgets to cash checks—and compounds the problem by siphoning cash from the Hullabahoos’ account to pay for beer?
“The Hullabahoos are nipping at the heels of the Beelzebubs in terms of success,” says Lib Curlee, the business manager of the all-female UNC Loreleis. “But there’s an aura around the Bubs’ name.” In a few weeks, the two all-male groups will collide at UNC, courtesy of an invitation from Lib, who invited both to North Carolina for the Loreleis’ 2006 Fall Jam, setting the stage for an a cappella showdown.
On campus, meanwhile, the Hullabahoos have gotten a reputation for being cocky. But they may just have the goods to back it up. Not only is Hullabahoos B looking solid—they’ve got a new recruit, a freshman named Bobby Grasberger—but musically, as the group approaches their twentieth anniversary (with arguably its strongest lineup), this may be their best year yet. Which could be their downfall. Most a cappella groups are lucky to have one standout soloist. This year, the Hullabahoos have three—and another two who would be starters on any other team. But the proliferation of talent has actually led to a divide in the group. The biggest fear? “That we’ll become Patrick Lundquist and the Hullabahoos,” one of the B’hoos says.
Patrick Lundquist is the blond Hullabahoo, and he’s hard to miss. He’s six foot three, a natural athlete with an easy smile and cartoonish dimples, a man so good-looking your dad might sleep with him. It’s almost an accident that Patrick finds himself in the Hullabahoos. When he was a kid, an older brother told him singing was “gay.” But when the school’s chorus teacher heard Patrick sing, she wouldn’t let the boy quit. And so Patrick went on to play baseball and sing in the choir. As a senior in high school, he even starred in a local production of Les Misérables. No one made fun of him.
Patrick actually wanted to take this school year off. “I wanted to go to Los Angeles to act,” he says. His parents—lovely, private-school types—begged him to stay in Charlottesville. Los Angeles wasn’t going anywhere, they said. There was more to it. His parents weren’t worried their boy would wind up waiting tables. “I think my mom was worried I’d succeed,” Patrick says, “that it would be too easy for me.” One gets the sense that Patrick awoke every morning to a standing ovation.
The thing is, Patrick’s not even the biggest diva among the Hullabahoos. Brendon Mason is not just difficult but proud of it. Then there’s Dane Blackburn, who is generally known to do exactly one selfless act a year for the Hullabahoos. “I make chicken wings for the auditions,” he says.
The Hullabahoos don’t really talk about any of these personality conflicts; rather it simmers under the surface, the hidden truth behind every offhand comment. And there’s some healing to be done. Last year was rough, personalitywise, with the Hullabahoos essentially split in two. “There was the cool, former high school athlete house,” says Joe Cassara. That’s where Morgan a
nd Patrick lived, along with another Hullabahoo. Then there was the Hullaba-house on Wertland Street—which was “the former-drama -kid” group. The Hullabahoos may just be their own worst enemy.
“Patrick probably sells more tickets than any other member of the group,” Morgan says. “He’s probably the most recognizable. But the one thing we do not tolerate in the B’hoos is people getting big egos.” This will all come to a head. But on the most beautiful night of the school year, why ruin it?
It is close to ten o’clock on a warm September evening in Charlottesville, Virginia, and four thousand coeds crowd Thomas Jefferson’s fabled Lawn. UVA was, in many ways, the first true college campus. But it’s unlikely that Jefferson could have imagined this scene. Tonight, boys recline on bedsheets, passing cups of beer from some unseen keg. Pretty blond girls in strapless linen dresses greet each other with a kiss—sometimes a double kiss. The stadium lights crack on in the distance.
These four thousand students—more than twenty-five percent of the campus population—have gathered before the rotunda, an imposing bit of architecture modeled on the Roman pantheon. They’ve come for Rotunda Sing, an a cappella blowout that’s easily the most popular orientation week event at UVA, despite its ass-numbing length. By the time the Hullabahoos take to the stage, eleven a cappella groups have already performed, including the Academical Village People—an all-male group known for humping the white columns of the Rotunda every year. A jazz group performs—something about chili con carne. There is even a Christian a cappella group, CHoosE (short for Christian ’Hoos Exalt).
The concert feels a lot like American Idol, a show whose effect cannot be understated in collegiate a cappella. Especially on the UVA campus. Travis Tucker, a finalist from Idol season three, started UVA’s first R & B a cappella group, ReMix. Idol is the reason an otherwise good singer turns a word like baby into a nine-syllable vocal embarrassment along the lines of: babe-ay-ay -ay-eh-eh-ay-ay. (Technically, that flowery trill is called a melisma.) The Rotunda Sing organization committee likes to say the lineup of acts is drawn at random, but the Hullabahoos regularly close the show—a testament to their prominence on grounds.
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory Page 6