Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  Keeley McCowan was less polite. Keeley, who is in her fifth year, works the early shift at one of Eugene’s finer restaurants. She’d been awake since four that morning. Worse, she was dieting. If she could show up—not just show up but perform—why couldn’t these new girls?

  If Divisi was going to compete in the ICCAs again (and they were, that had already been decided by Keeley and Sarah last spring before most of these girls were even in the group), they’d need to be a cohesive squad. And so Keeley and Sarah were particularly excited when, in October, Divisi was invited to perform at the University of Anchorage’s annual A Cappella Festivella. While members of a sorority might bond at charity events or toga parties, a cappella groups have the luxury of getting acquainted on elaborate trips. And this one would be a five-day, four-night affair—all expenses paid. In Alaska, the girls conducted a beatboxing workshop. They sang five songs at the festival—the only five songs they knew. “We were so new,” says Rachelle Wofford, an intense sophomore. “We didn’t even have choreography.” But the music wasn’t really the point. Keeley and Sarah hoped the group would find some common ground.

  There was the bonfire down at the beach. There were late nights at the hotel. Invariably the conversations turned personal. And that’s when Michaela Cordova pulled back—when her old fears and doubts surfaced. It was a particularly difficult, tense moment. Michaela (by her own admission) never got along well with women. But this was different. “We were being so silly,” she says. “We were sitting around with high ponytails on top of our heads, just acting ridiculous. It was so liberating to be goofy with this group of girls I’d just met.” But on her last night in Alaska she quietly left the hotel room. “I was respectful,” she says. “It’s just hard for me to talk about my feelings. I don’t want to say my life’s been harder than everyone else’s. But I had to remove myself. ” Which she did. Quietly the other girls wondered what had spooked Michaela.

  There were highlights. Sometime that week, Divisi’s new catch-phrase was born. At the hotel, messing around on the Internet, the girls stumbled across a YouTube video in which a transvestite goes shopping for shoes. The whole thing plays out over a techno beat, with the tranny uttering (again and again, in various inflections) the word shoes. The women of Divisi adopted the phrase and made it their own. And defying logic, Shoes became their battle cry.

  Alaska had been a step in the right direction (well, maybe not for Michaela), but despite shoes, the girls remained fractured, cliquey even, during the fall of 2006. As a countermeasure, Sarah introduced Thursday-night bonding sessions, but even Keeley admits you can’t force these things. “Just because you’re wearing the tie and the red lipstick doesn’t make you Divisi,” she says. She pauses. “I almost hope we lose at the ICCAs so the new girls will learn what it takes to be competitive.”

  Divisi worked on refining their competition set that fall, which included Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap, and a Joss Stone power anthem, “You Had Me.” Divisi worked on little else. Still, the disparate personalities, the poor leadership—Lisa Forkish would have been embarrassed.

  At the final Friday-afternoon performance before winter break, Divisi got a glimpse of just how much work was left to be done before the ICCAs in January. “Hide and Seek” was consistently flat. “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” sounded like noise—a bunch of unrelated notes that never really locked. The applause was tepid.

  “What key were we in?” Keeley asked after the show.

  “G,” Sarah said.

  It was a rhetorical question. “I meant we weren’t singing together, ” Keeley said. Worse: On the Rocks, the all-male group on campus and Divisi’s brother group—who would be their primary competition for the first round of the ICCAs—burned the house down. OTR’s music director, wearing a satin On the Rocks jacket, stepped forward to make a joke. “We have On the Rocks T-shirts for sale after the show,” he said to the crowd. “But these jackets ... they’re Members Only.”

  After watching the On the Rocks set, Keeley turned to the ladies of Divisi. Two groups from that first round of the ICCA competition would advance to the regional semifinals. “I guess we’ll be second,” she said. The ICCAs were starting to look like just another gig on Divisi’s calendar. Or maybe not.

  A few days before leaving for winter break, the girls threw a very Divisi Christmas party at Emmalee Almroth’s house. (Emmalee, one of the new girls, has been listening to Divisi and On the Rocks since she was in high school, and some nights, when the girls are hanging out with the boys of OTR, she still can’t believe she’s actually there.) Divisi organized Secret Santa—ten dollars or less—and each girl quietly placed her gift beneath the Christmas tree. But Keeley had her own game planned for that night. In a last-ditch effort to light a fire under the new girls, she’d brought the competition video with her, the one with Lisa Forkish and Divisi performing Usher’s “Yeah.” She popped it into the computer. It was eye-opening. Andrea Welsh, sipping her pink champagne, kept getting close to the screen and then stepping away again. “I’m so nervous,” she said. She didn’t use the F-word, but she was probably thinking it.

  Keeley saw the look in their eyes. And it wasn’t hunger—it was fear. Unfortunately, the one girl who might have inspired Divisi to rise to the challenge felt too out of place that night to say much of anything.

  Marissa Neitling, a fifth-year, is petite, with big bangs and bigger eyes. She’s a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore. Wacky things just sort of happen to her. Like freshman year, when she accidentally wound up living in the university’s lone designated twenty-four-hour -quiet dorm. “I was this little bubbly girl who likes to stay up late,” she says, “and I was living with these superquiet kids.” She joined Divisi in the victory lap year—the year after the ICCAs—and she loved it. Lisa Forkish was still running things. Even though Divisi wasn’t competing, “the hard work came first,” Marissa says. “Then the friendships.”

  There was so much Marissa wanted to say that night at the Christmas party—about unity, about the old Divisi, about what the new Divisi could be. “My mom always says to me, I’ve been your age but you haven’t been mine,” Marissa says. “And that’s how I felt.” But because Marissa is too polite, because she felt some of the new girls might misinterpret what she had to say, she kept quiet. Besides, having missed so much rehearsal herself that semester—she’d landed a featured role in the campus production of Sondheim’s Company—she wasn’t sure she’d earned the right to say anything.

  There was more to the story, of course, more going on behind the bangs.

  Marissa had been a precocious kid, always more of a tiny adult than a child. When she was in the first grade, she was called down to the principal’s office. “Your mother is here to pick you up,” the receptionist said. Marissa’s eyes welled up with tears. Her grandfather had been sick and now, walking out to her mom’s car, she feared the worst. “What happened?” Marissa said, opening the passenger-side door. “Get in quick!” her mom replied. “We’re going to miss the two-thirty showing of Edward Scissorhands.”

  Which sort of explains how Marissa ended up double-majoring in math and theater. Growing up, Marissa always loved to perform. She’s had many music teachers over the years, and they’ve all said the same thing: Don’t think, just sing. But quieting that analytical part of her brain, giving herself over to the performance entirely—that’s always been Marissa’s problem.

  This 2006-2007 year is Marissa’s final in Eugene, and she’s at work on her thesis—an autobiographical one-woman show that includes (among other things) the story of an ex-boyfriend, the first love who broke her heart in the way only that first one can, the one who just seven months after the breakup was already married. (He is Mormon.) But mostly, the play she is writing is about acceptance, about letting go.

  Ten years ago, Marissa’s dad, a brilliant orthopedic surgeon, had his license suspended. The official report said he’d been diverting all s
orts of medication from his patients, which was another way of saying he was an addict, smart enough to get drugs any way he could. But he went into a recovery program. And, just as suddenly it seemed, life proceeded, the incident destined to be just a footnote in Marissa’s childhood. Or so the family hoped. But in the summer of 2004 the dark times returned. Her father went to rehab again. It was terrible for all involved. Because the man was a highly functioning addict, he’d actually convinced his co-workers that his wife and kids were crazy. “We were the bad people,” Marissa’s mom says. He closed his practice—having lost his license, he had no other choice. And in February of 2005, without much warning, he served his wife with separation papers. Now, after rehearsals for Company, and her class work, and Divisi, there’s that manuscript on Marissa’s computer, that one-woman show about this man she no longer knows, this man she has not seen in over a year.

  On the night of the Divisi Christmas party, Marissa Neitling finally breaks down. It’s not what you think. “I don’t know what shoes means!” she blurts out. Marissa had missed the trip to Alaska. Someone clicks over to YouTube and shows her the video. And the conversation returns—as it often does—to the ICCAs.

  Keeley McCowan attempts to rally the troops. Forget the video. She’s enlisted the help of Lisa Forkish and Erica Barkett, legendary Divisi alums who will come back to campus in January to work with the girls on their competition set. Keeley has the best of intentions. But what she doesn’t know, what she can’t foresee, is that this, too, will end in tears.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wherein we pull back to explain the collegiate a cappella explosion of the late nineties, meet the self-proclaimed father of contemporary a cappella, and find out how an a cappella album can possibly be overproduced

  Deke Sharon is commonly referred to as the father of contemporary a cappella, and while he may have bestowed that title upon himself, the name rings true. In 1990, Deke started the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America (CASA) out of his dorm room at Tufts. The organization’s mission was (in part) to foster communication between all of the disparate a cappella groups popping up across the country. CASA began with the “Collegiate A Cappella Newsletter,” which featured album reviews and classified ads, where groups like the Bubs would offer their services to other schools. Like everything in a cappella, the newsletter was better known by an acronym, the “CAN.” (Letters to the editor were printed under the rubric KICK THE CAN.) When Deke graduated, so, too, did the “CAN,” which quickly expanded to include coverage of the professional a cappella scene, where groups like Rockapella (which grew out of the Brown University High Jinks) were suddenly thriving, touring as far as Japan. “The Collegiate A Cappella Newsletter” was reborn as “The Contemporary A Cappella Newsletter,” so as to keep the acronym. “The only reason this whole movement isn’t called modern a cappella,” Deke says, “is because I needed to use the letter C.”

  In 1992, Deke founded the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards—the CARAs. He started the ICCAs (then the NCCAs) with Adam Farb in 1995. He and Adam also created the BOCA series—the Best of College A Cappella compilation. If there’s an acronym in a cappella, Deke Sharon probably had something to do with it.

  In the mid-nineties, collegiate a cappella exploded from an Ivy League curiosity to a full-blown coed pursuit. “We went from two hundred and fifty groups to more than twelve hundred and fifty,” Deke says. He credits the growth spurt to a number of factors, from Boyz II Men to the Internet. Deke’s role is easier to quantify. While collegiate a cappella groups everywhere were singing four-part harmony reminiscent of the choral tradition, he began arranging music instead for a vocal band. In short, it was the difference between a bunch of guys singing an A chord or a bunch of guys singing the guitar part. This innovation might have remained a local phenomenon had Deke not figured out a way to get the music played on campuses across the country.

  While Deke may be a critical figure in contemporary a cappella, as an undergraduate at Tufts, the kid was rejected by the Beelzebubs. Twice.

  Deke grew up in San Francisco, a gawky kid with little control over his limbs. On weekends he’d troll the aisles at Revolver Records in the Haight, picking up recordings by a cappella groups like the Nylons. In what would be a seminal moment in his life, the Tufts Beelzebubs performed at Deke’s high school. Deke bought one of their LPs, Score, which he wore out playing “Ticket to Ride” and “Rainy Day Man.” A few years later, he enrolled at Tufts. And he was hard to miss. As a freshman in a sea of khaki, he was the kid in the orange T-shirt and leather mandals. “I was from northern California!” he says.

  The Bubs have a standard form they fill out for each prospective kid who auditions. At the bottom of the sheet there’s a line drawing of a penis. Or, rather, two penises—one erect, one flaccid. It’s Bubs shorthand. If they like a kid and want to see him again, they circle the erect penis. If the kid is rejected, he gets the flaccid penis. Neither was circled on Deke’s audition sheet. The Bubs called him back, but they weren’t yet ready to award him the erect penis. Why? He was too much of a fan. This was the era of the Bubs as comedians, and the guys were more interested in making people laugh than impressing them with their music. “And I came across as a total snot,” Deke says. He actually stopped his own audition to correct himself. “I sang a B instead of an A,” he said. “It worked in the chord, but it was wrong. It should have been a break F-sharp chord.” Deke was rejected a second time that spring. Finally, in the fall of his sophomore year, he was accepted—only after his roommate (a Beelzebub) vouched for him. “Deke’s not insane,” the guy testified. “He’s just eager.” Nine months later, in the spring of 1988, Deke was elected music director of the Bubs. And the changes he made there would impact all of collegiate a cappella.

  It started with a movie. Deke Sharon saw Say Anything on opening weekend—April 14, 1989. When John Cusack stood in the rain with the boom box above his head, blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” Deke knew he was seeing something big. “It was this obvious canonical moment,” he says. But how, exactly, could the Bubs do that song? “In Your Eyes” wasn’t built for the kind of four-part harmony the Bubs (and everyone else in collegiate a cappella) had been singing. But he didn’t want it to sound choral. Deke had an idea. He pulled a blank piece of orchestral paper from his desk, the kind of paper with musical staffs running clear down the page. “I imagined I was arranging the song for a vocal orchestra,” Deke says, breaking the song down by instrument. The first tenors would become the synthesizer, the second tenors the lead guitar. It was nothing short of a “Helen Keller at the well” moment. “Multiple standing ovations,” Deke recalls of the response.

  This change in arranging style—from choral to multi-textured—opened up doors (or the Doors) for the Bubs. Back then, collegiate a cappella groups performed the same music, classics like “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “In the Still of the Night.” It was like Name That Tune, Deke says. “We would sit in the back row of a show at UPenn and within the first three notes we’d know what the song was.” But the Bubs could suddenly do Prince. Adam Farb, who sang with the Brown Derbies in the early nineties and went on to create the ICCAs with Deke, remembers the first time he heard the new Bubs sound. “It was like the invention of rock ’n’ roll,” Farb says. “When the doo-wop groups first heard rock ’n’ roll, they were like, We could do this? Why are we doing this doo-wop shit?” The innovations continued. The Bubs soon introduced vocal percussion—the beatbox. Deke arranged a song for the Derbies. The Derbies saw the vocal percussion written out on the page but didn’t quite grasp what the notation meant. “The Derbies would be like, ‘You want me to sing Doof ka doof ka doof ka?’ ” Farb says. “ ‘I don’t get it.’ ”

  Deke went on to arrange “Rio” by Duran Duran that same way. He arranged Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” The Bubs took their act on the road, and they were cleaning up. Now, it’s important to remember that this happened pre-Internet. The revolution (and it was a revolu
tion) might have remained close to home had it not been for the Bubs’ incessant touring schedule. The Bubs were the rare collegiate group that would pile into a van, then drive overnight to schools like UNC and Duke to sing five songs. The Bubs kept a continuously updated file of contact information for some two hundred collegiate a cappella groups nationwide. (The list was compiled with the help of Rex Solomon, a Bubs supporter who may just have been the collegiate genre’s first superfan.) The Bubs placed an ad in the “CAN.” “We have a solid willingness to party. Can we sing at your show?” They were doing eight road trips every semester. “We were the Animal House of a cappella,” Deke says. Not surprisingly, Deke met his wife, Katy, on a road trip. She sang with Duke’s premier all-female a cappella group, Out of the Blue. Still, there were only so many road trips the Bubs could squeeze into a semester. It would take a Trojan horse to spread the love.

  In early December 1989, the Bubs invited the Princeton Katzen-jammers and UPenn’s Pennsylvania Six-5000 (among others) to perform on campus at Goddard Chapel. They contracted Bill Allen, Bubs ’83, then a sound engineer in New York, to record the show—which they’d release as a live album, The Beelzebubs Winter Invitational MCMLXXXIX. And it wouldn’t cost the Bubs a dime. The business model was genius. The Bubs convinced each of the four guest groups to buy four hundred albums at five dollars apiece—which basically covered the cost of recording and pressing the album. More than a moneymaker, it was a way to bring Beelzebubs music into the homes of unsuspecting Princeton students. (There was precedent: RCA Records had dabbled with a similar format way back in 1964 with a record called Campus Hootenanny—recorded live at Brown University and featuring five or six collegiate a cappella groups. “Disciplined and dedicated—and what a sound!” according to the liner notes.)