Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  The Best of College A Cappella (BOCA) series was inspired by the Winter Invitational. Each edition of BOCA, now available on iTunes, regularly sells close to five thousand copies—a not-insignificant number. In the music business, if an indie band sells ten thousand copies of an album, it’s considered a success. Adam Farb and Deke Sharon never imagined the beast that BOCA would become. But suddenly, groups across the country could hear what their contemporaries were doing. Or more specifically, how they were doing it. There was a side effect to all of this sharing, the spawning of a new industry: the big-time (horribly expensive) a cappella producer. Deke Sharon actually likens the amping up of collegiate a cappella recording to the Soviet arms race.

  In many ways, the history of collegiate a cappella recording is the Bill Hare story. Bill Hare is sort of like the Dr. Dre of a cappella recording. He charges one hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour on weekends, one hundred and five dollars during the week. And the only thing he can’t do, he says, when it comes to a soundboard is make a crappy soloist outstanding. “But you can make a crappy soloist sound OK!” he says.

  It’s not like he set out to revolutionize a cappella recording. When the Stanford Mendicants walked into Bill Hare’s studio in northern California in the late eighties, he didn’t know what to make of them. “It was strange,” Bill says. “A glee club singing the Police!” He described their sound as “weird and dull.” Still, Bill Hare was recording a lot of hair bands back in the day, not to mention beatnik jazz groups, and the Mendicants were paying cash. And so they made an album together, Aquapella. The Mendicants, in turn, referred other a cappella groups to Bill Hare, but still, he didn’t think much of all this. “I didn’t even know there were a cappella groups outside of Stanford,” he says. “I just thought it was this weird thing happening here.”

  One day Bill had a simple thought that would (in not so simple ways) change the way people recorded collegiate a cappella music. Deke had begun arranging music for a vocal band. Similarly, Bill Hare realized, if the baritones were singing a guitar line, why not mic them like a guitar? Previously he’d just placed the groups around one microphone and hit Record. Suddenly he was running a microphone through a guitar amp. The first Mendicants album cost seven hundred and fifty dollars to produce and was recorded in a couple of days. This second album cost three thousand dollars and took much longer. But the difference in the sound was immeasurable. One day Bill Hare got a handwritten letter from some guy out in Boston who was starting the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America. It was Deke Sharon. Deke had heard the Mendicants album and was impressed. “I couldn’t believe someone in Boston had heard this album,” Bill Hare says. He finally began to see the growth potential of collegiate a cappella.

  Home recording—the advent of the desktop program Pro Tools and others—would drastically change the recording landscape both for indie artists and collegiate a cappella groups. Bill saw the writing on the wall. “In the seventies and eighties, you needed a hundred-thousand-dollar investment—minimum—to get a quasi-professional-sounding studio,” he says. By 1996, you could get the same results with a desktop computer, adding distortion, or dropping an octave with the stroke of a key. It was all digital. He’d also stopped recording groups all together—sixteen students at a time, say—recording them instead individually. And so Bill sold his huge studio and downgraded to a smaller space. The breakthrough album, he says, was the 1999 Stanford Harmonics disc, Insanity Laughs. “That’s when vocal percussion really started to sound more like a drum set than vocals,” Bill says. The challenge was invigorating. It was also lucrative. At this point Bill was making more money in a cappella than he could have ever made recording hair bands. “I had a student who used to drive up to the studio in an Aston Martin,” he says.

  Bill Hare would become the most influential a cappella producer in the business, landing tracks on every BOCA album since the series launched in 1995. “When I was first starting out,” says James Gammon, who records with the Hullabahoos, “I would listen to albums that Bill had mixed and I’d try to figure out how he did it.”

  The competition to land a track on BOCA is fierce. As such, a cottage industry has sprung up around collegiate a cappella. A handful of producers—guys like Freddie Feldman of Vocomotion in Evanston, Dave Sperandio of diovoce in Chapel Hill—now make a living solely producing collegiate a cappella music. Tat Tong, an alum of Cornell University’s Last Call, actually lives and works overseas in Asia, corresponding with his groups in the States via e-mail, posting unedited tracks on an FTP site. There’s Ed Boyer and John Clark of CB Productions—both Tufts alums (from the Bubs and the Amalgamates, respectively). These producers often e-mail with one another, comparing notes, discussing new talent. But it’s not all, ahem, collegial, and a healthy rivalry has sprung up. Freddie Feldman, an alum of the Northwestern group Purple Haze, takes issue with Boyer and Clark. “Those two over-Auto-Tune,” he says. “It’s too processed for my taste.” The height of this crime, he says, is the Hyannis Sound album Route 6. “If you’re just processing cover tunes to sound like the original,” Freddie says, “you might as well just listen to the original.” When the BOCA 2007 set list was released, featuring some collegiate a cappella groups no one had ever heard of before, some quietly started to wonder if hiring a guy like Bill Hare wasn’t just buying a spot on BOCA.

  If it sounds far-fetched, think harder. A cappella recording isn’t happening in a bubble. In fact, the same complaints that have plagued the legit music industry (overproduction, Auto-Tune) have spilled over into collegiate a cappella. For years, major-label producers, artists, and executives have been fighting the so-called Volume Wars. Even Bob Dylan weighed in, telling Rolling Stone in 2005, “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.” To oversimplify matters, the Volume Wars comes down to compression, one of the last steps in mastering an album. Compression eliminates a lot of the dynamics in a recording making everything even—and loud. Compression brings the song to the foreground and gives it that in-your-face feel. Back when engineers were still working with LPs, there was a limit to how far you could compress a song; if you pushed too hard, the needle would pop out of the groove. Bob Dylan’s complaint (and he’s right) is that the brain can’t process supercompressed sounds for too long. Without dynamics—without some soft to balance the loud—the ears get fatigued. (When people say they love vinyl, this is what they mean.) Big Music is convinced louder records sell more copies. Apparently, a cappella producers agree (or at least have recalibrated their ears to match the industry standard). “I’ve noticed that Dio’s albums are the loudest,” says Bill Hare, calling out Dave Sperandio of diovoce (and an alum of the UNC Clef Hangers).

  This new sound—arranging music for a vocal band, recording like a band—contributed to the explosion in collegiate a cappella. It was one thing to sing “In the Still of the Night.” It was quite another to go to a professional recording studio and lay down your own version of Radiohead’s “High & Dry.” In the mid-nineties the number of a cappella groups on U.S. collegiate soil spiked. Today, the list is conservatively numbered at twelve hundred and fifty—up from three hundred just fifteen years ago. And they are a diverse bunch. Take Penn Masala, the world’s first Hindi a cappella group. Or ReMix, an R & B a cappella group at UVA. There are many Jewish a cappella groups, including Pizmon at Columbia. Mayim Bialik, aka television’s Blossom, started her own Jewish a cappella group at UCLA. They called themselves Shir Bruin. Yes, Shir Bruin was a pun. Shir (pronounced sheer) is the Hebrew word meaning “song”; Bruin is the UCLA mascot. The group sang mostly traditional Jewish music, but Mayim had a sense of humor about the whole thing. She arranged a medley of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and a spiritual, “T’filah” (the word means “prayer” in Hebrew). Being observant Jews—and still trying to gig on weekends—proved challenging for the members
of Shir Bruin. Jewish law prohibits the use of instruments on the Sabbath, and the pitch pipe (which all a cappella groups use to get their starting note) is considered an instrument. Shir Bruin had a crafty solution. When you open and close a metal kippah clip—the sort of bobby pin that keeps a yarmulka on a guy’s head—it makes a noise. Or rather, a musical note. “The kippah clip opens on, like, an F-sharp or something,” Mayim says, laughing. On the Sabbath, this is how they found their starting pitch.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HULLABAHOOS

  Wherein the Hullabahoos’ origin story unfolds and the 2006-2007 lineup spends a chauffeur-driven weekend in Portland

  The Hullabahoos may be rising stars in the world of collegiate a cappella. But their founder, Halsted Sullivan, is surprised the group still exists. "The Hullabahoos almost folded after our first semester,” he says.

  A cappella groups frequently talk about their founders in hushed tones—as if these mystical men were endowed with some divinity. The Hullabahoos are no different. The current members of the B’hoos (even the ones who’ve never met Halsted) can recount stories of this man’s undergraduate sexual conquests— in unfortunate, graphic detail, often without prompting. The truth is, more often than not, these founders of a cappella groups were not divine, but rather rejects from existing a cappella groups. “That’s right,” says Halsted Sullivan, UVA class of 1989. “I was rejected from the Virginia Gentlemen. Twice.” Mark Lyons— the first music director of the Hullabahoos—was rejected from the VGs too.

  Despite the dismissal, Halsted was determined to sing in an a cappella group. And if the Virginia Gentlemen (a subset of the UVA glee club) wouldn’t have him, well, he’d start his own. In the fall of 1987, with the blessing of the music department, Halsted made his move. He placed an announcement in the school paper, The Cavalier Daily, that read, simply, CAN YOU SING IN THE SHOWER? The ad stressed the fact that, unlike the Virginia Gentlemen, this new a cappella group wouldn’t require its members to join the glee club. In fact, reading music would be strictly optional. The first auditions were held at Cabell Hall in January of 1988 and interest was tepid. Halsted actually had to fill the sign-up sheet with fake names. “I wanted to prime the pump,” he says. (Not a surprise, really, that Halsted would use a Reaganite phrase; his father had been the secretary of health and human services in President Bush I’s cabinet.) Despite the low turnout, Halsted was impressed with the talent that did show up. Though he admits they accepted a few guys who blatantly couldn’t sing. “We called them bait,” Mark Lyons says. “They were the good-looking guys.”

  Halsted and Mark wanted the Hullabahoos to be different from the Virginia Gentlemen, they just didn’t know exactly how. And so the two took a road trip—a reconnaissance mission, if you will—to the Cherry Tree Massacre, an annual a cappella festival put on by the Georgetown Chimes since 1974. There, the Hullabahoos would find their inspiration in a visiting a cappella group from Cornell University, Cayuga’s Waiters, a group that wore jeans and tie-dye T-shirts. It was nothing short of revelatory. “The Waiters matched,” Halsted says, “but weren’t identical. And they had this fantastic energy.” They were, he says, cool.

  On the drive back to Charlottesville, Halsted and Mark debated stealing the tie-dye thing. But the Hullabahoos weren’t sold on the idea. One of the new guys, Andy Erickson, suggested white tie and tails instead. That wasn’t quite right either. In the end they settled on multicolored robes, inspired by an honor society at Sewanee: the University of the South. With a two-thousand-dollar grant from the student senate’s appropriations committee, they promptly spent six hundred dollars on handmade robes from an upscale fabric shop on Barracks Road in downtown Charlottesville. Mark’s robe was red and gold. Halsted’s was a royal-blue plaid. It was a risk. “We looked like Color Me Badd,” Halsted says.

  Now they just needed a name. Not surprisingly, they considered an embarrassing number of puns. Someone suggested the Rotoondas—a takeoff on the campus’s signature piece of architecture, the rotunda. What about the Poe Boys? (Edgar Allan Poe was a UVA alum.) The Harmonticellos? (Jefferson’s residence, ten miles away, was Monticello.) The Jeffersongs, anybody? Halsted opened up the dictionary to the letter H. He was looking for some play on ’Hoos, as in the UVA Wahoos—a campus nickname dating back to the late 1800s. (Though any UVA student will proudly tell you that a wahoo is a fish that can drink twice its body weight, it seems the name actually originated with a Dartmouth cheer, Wah-Hoo-Wah.) Halsted came across the word hullabaloo—meaning “a din or uproar.” And so the Hullabahoos were born.

  Halsted was a conscientious founder and sent typewritten letters to a cappella groups around the country asking for advice. One group wrote back, “No Gilbert & Sullivan.” Another sent the Hullabahoos an arrangement of Squeeze’s “Black Coffee in Bed.” At their first rehearsal, the B’hoos learned “At the Hop.” Then came Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time.” They were quick, easy arrangements, which was good, because the Hullabahoos had just booked their first high-profile gig. They would be the guest group for the Virginia Belles, the university’s all-female a cappella group.

  It would be the Hullabahoos’ first legit university performance, though the show proved memorable for more than the music. “Phil Byers,” Halsted says, “broke his leg onstage.” It had something to do with the choreography. Halsted was too excited to care. After taking a bow, he told Phil to put himself on the bus to the UVA hospital.

  The show had been a success, but the Hullabahoos were still fighting the popular perception (not entirely unfounded) that they were nothing more than Virginia Gentlemen’s leftovers. Complicating matters, Mark Lyons (their music director) was graduating. Fearing the worst, three of the Hullabahoos secretly auditioned for the VGs—and got in. Halsted couldn’t blame them for seeking other options. “The Hullabahoos were too much of an unknown quantity,” he says. Even Halsted auditioned for the VGs again! But he withdrew his name.

  When the B’hoos returned to campus in the fall of 1988, their numbers had whittled down to just five. Chris Walker, then a second-year, stepped into the role of music director. No one knew Chris could read music, let alone that he was a prodigy. Salvation was nigh. In December, at Garrett Hall, the B’hoos held their first Christmas show. They even had Yuletide robes made. “It was a Peanuts pattern,” Halsted says. More impressively, they draped themselves in Christmas lights and extension cords. There was one problem. “Two songs in,” Halstead says, “the lights started to burn through the robes.”

  The group’s profile continued to grow, and it soon became popular for women on campus to steal the robes after bedding a Hullabahoo. Perhaps feeling the pressure of their new on-campus rival, the Virginia Gentlemen suddenly stopped requiring its members to join the glee club. But the B’hoos’ reputation really took shape at the end of their second year with the arrival of Paul Snow Hudgins—aka Snowdy. The guy had till then been a brother at Beta Theta Pi, before the fraternity was kicked off campus. A lapsed frat guy? He was perfect for the Hullabahoos.

  Just before Halsted graduated, the group received an invitation from the Waiters, the Cornell group that had inspired their cool ethos nearly two years before. The Waiters wanted the Hullabahoos to sing at their big show, Spring Fever—one of the largest a cappella shows in the nation, regularly filling Bailey Hall’s two-thousand -seat auditorium. It’s an unspoken rule in a cappella: Never invite a guest group who is better than you. The Waiters could not have been happy when a review of the concert appeared in The Cornell Daily Sun on March 13, 1989. Four paragraphs down, Krista Reid ’91 wrote the following about the visiting Hullabahoos: “Their appearance on stage was quickly followed with whispers and giggles from the women in the crowd. It was said by many that these guys were better looking than Waiters— could it be possible?”

  Since Halstead’s era, the Hullabahoos have had pockets of musical brilliance punctuated by mediocre (but raucous) good times. Andrew Renshaw’s version of “Wonderful Tonight” from the early
nineties is legendary, even on LimeWire (where it’s often mistakenly credited to Rockapella). But what has remained constant is the look: clean-cut, All-American, handsome. In off years, what they lacked in talent they made up for in charm. And luck.

  Howard Spector is the president of Ashley Entertainment, a Washington, D.C.-based event-planning firm. In 1995, he happened to walk by Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where the Hullabahoos (on their annual road trip, Fall Roll) were busking. Howard bought a CD, said he was interested in hiring the B’hoos, and handed a business card to John Stanzione, then the music director of the group. “Like most people we met who said they were somebody, ” Stanzione recalls, “we never expected to hear from him again.” But Howard did call, with a gig no less: He wanted the Hullabahoos to perform at Burger King’s annual corporate Christmas party in Miami. He offered airfare, accommodations, not to mention all the Burger King one could eat. Stanzione details his thought process: “You want to fly us to South Beach in the middle of finals and pay for us to eat and drink?” Stanzione pushed his luck. He told Howard they’d love to do the gig, but he’d need to fly in some “key alumni” to help out. Howard consented and the deal was done. Just out of curiosity, Stanzione said to Howard, who did the Burger King gig last year? “Bill Cosby,” Howard said. Stanzione wrote letters to relevant professors asking if the Hullabahoos could schedule make-up exams.

  It was likely the most lucrative gig in the short history of the Hullabahoos. But it came with its own unique demands. Howard wanted the Hullabahoos to learn the Burger King jingle. And so John Stanzione arranged “Aren’t You Hungry for Burger King Now?” the one that went “Aren’t You Hungry? Aren’t you hungry for Burger King now?” An hour before showtime, the Hullabahoos ran through their set for Howard. “I meant the other jingle!” Howard said. “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.” So Stanzione and Nick Geisinger (who’d flown in from Chicago) threw together a Burger King medley, which the B’hoos learned on the spot. Not surprisingly, the executives loved it. “Particularly the lady in marketing,” Stanzione says. “The woman who came up with the idea for the New Fries.”