Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

As Sean Zinsmeister ’06 had said, the Bubs needed to “respond to the critics.” And they would, in their own way. With Ed’s help, the Bubs find their voice that week, find a way to make something organic that still sounds full. Many of the arrangements this time out featured the Bubs singing actual words, as opposed to just jeer-neers for guitars and random oohs and aahs. Leading into the chorus on “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” the Bubs sing selfish love-aaaaaahhhhh. Later the group echoes the solo, singing have it all. It may sound simple, Alexander Koutzoukis says. “But these are textual things. If we’re singing words, like selfish love, it gives us a chance to emote and express the song. It’s singing words versus singing dim and wow. It allows us to embed that aspect of our live performance into the album.” It’s brilliant. No matter how much you tweak a guitar in Pro Tools, it ain’t gonna sing selfish love. The album would be produced, polished. But it would unmistakably be the product of the human voice. Which is, after all, what a cappella is all about.

  Ed Boyer has his own bag of tricks, his own bit of artistry to add. One afternoon, Ed sends Matt Michelson into the padded room, where he directs him to pluck out the notes to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by tapping his index finger against his teeth. Ed adjusts the speed of the recording. He adjusts the pitch. Colors flash on the screen. Lines bend. The Bubs call this noisemaking gilding.

  While one can’t exactly make out what’s going on in the background, this much is clear: When Ed places this track behind the trippy fifteen-second bridge of “Magical Mystery Tour,” for whatever reason, the song sounds better, fuller, more fleshed out. This is just one tool in Ed’s arsenal. “There should be just enough going on in the background where you hear something,” Ed says, “but you’re not sure exactly what the thing is.” There is a history of burying sounds in the background of Beelzebubs recordings. On Shedding’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” one can almost make out the name Guang Ming—a notorious Beelzebubs fan and a reviewer for RARB. It’s comical maybe, but is this any different different from Brian Wilson adding dog whistles over the intricate harmonies on the landmark 1966 Beach Boys album Pet Sounds? Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument. Weren’t the Bubs doing the same thing? (This is not a rhetorical question.) Still, it can get disturbingly out of hand.

  Ed hits PLAY on “Mystery Tour.” “We should add a bong noise here,” Ed says, mimicking the sound of bubbling water. Lucas Walker auditions his bong noise for the Bubs, and they unanimously approve, sending him into the booth. He gives it a good shot, but Ed interrupts. It turns out that—like the sound of tapping individual teeth—the sound of water bubbling actually has a pitch. You can do a bong noise on a G or an A or an F-sharp.

  “Do it again,” Ed says. “But pitched higher.”

  Lucas suggests adding “tickles” to the track. And so in the second room the Bubs tickle Nick Lamm for thirty seconds. Ed records it, tweaks the track, adds an echo, and then plays it back in reverse.

  “It sounds like seagulls,” someone says.

  “Try it without the echo.”

  Someone questions why the laughs are in reverse. “Is that weird just to be weird?”

  “Isn’t just weird the point?” Ed says, his right eye twitching— a sign that he’s concentrating. This is “Magical Mystery Tour.” The Beatles weren’t singing about candy canes and rainbows. Ed plays the laugh back again behind the seagulls and Michelson’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The group is unconvinced.

  “We’re beating a dead horse,” Ed says.

  “It doesn’t sound backward,” someone says.

  To recap: Seven people have just spent twenty minutes debating the merits of a laugh track that is more or less inaudible to the naked ear. Ed had worried about the Bubs not being invested. Perhaps they were too invested.

  They move on to Peter Gabriel’s “Diggin’ in the Dirt.” Someone says the emotion is missing, that the track “needs a raw human factor.” “Can we get someone to cry into the microphone?” Lucas asks.

  There were moments of levity that week, including dips in the Vaill family hot tub, not to mention an elaborate parlor game involving Tim Vaill’s electric dog fence. (In short: Two Bubs would each strap on a collar—you know, the one that not so gently zaps a dog when he’s strayed outside the property line—while the rest of the group would place bets on who could creep farther away without getting tasered.) But mostly it was a lot of hard studio work, and on the final sunset at Squam Lake, Ed looked the worse for wear, with big, heavy bags under his eyes and a few pounds on the waist.

  The Bubs settled on a title for the new album, Pandaemonium, inspired by Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (from which the Beelzebubs also derive their name). Pandaemonium was the capital city of Hell and the title was meant to be ironic, a commentary on their music, which was (unlike hell) controlled chaos. Though, considering how the year began, chaotic sounded about right.

  On the final night at Squam Lake, Ed Boyer sat down with the Bubs and played a rough mix of the album. And the group seemed pleased with what they heard, though Ed has his reservations about the album, describing it as “brighter” than the past few. “It’s too choral for my taste,” he says. “It sounds like a big group of guys singing, and to me, that aesthetic doesn’t change enough.” It was a valid point. Would this new organic sound come across as progressive, or would it sound like an a cappella album recorded twenty years ago? “We try not to think about the reviews, ” Alexander Koutzoukis says, though he admits the pressure is there. There was a more immediate problem in that the album was still missing a closer. The Bubs debated using “Living on the Edge” or “Ruby Falls” but neither felt quite right. When this conversation resumes two months later—during a spring-break trip to San Diego, no less—the Bubs will settle the matter by locking themselves in a room for eight hours.

  Perhaps the Bubs were right to debate these questions so heavily. Lord knows there were plenty of people bowing at the altar of the Beelzebubs. Bruce Leddy was one of those people.

  Herein, an a cappella true Hollywood story.

  While the Bubs were recording their new album, Bruce Leddy was trying to sell his movie, Shut Up and Sing—a Big Chill-type story (costarring Saturday Night Live’s Molly Shannon) set against the backdrop of a collegiate a cappella group reuniting for a friend’s wedding. The film opens with a flashback to the fictional a cappella group back in college, onstage at their final concert before graduation. They are singing Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home.” Or lip-synching really—to the Beelzebubs’ recording of “Take Me Home,” no less, which Ed Boyer had arranged and produced, featuring Travis Marshall as the soloist. The recording appeared on Code Red, not to mention the BOCA 2004 disc, which is where Bruce Leddy found it while doing research for his film.

  “There was no way I could do better than that recording,” Bruce Leddy says. “The record and the arrangement were spectacular. ” When Shut Up and Sing went before the cameras, Bruce enlisted Sean Altman (late of Rockapella) to coach his actors, to give their performances some measure of authenticity. But he had his heart set on using the original Bubs recording. And so, before filming began, Bruce Leddy e-mailed Ed Boyer requesting permission. The two worked out a deal: If anything ever happened with Shut Up and Sing, if it ever found its way to theaters or DVD, the Bubs would get a thousand dollars—plus royalties on any album sales. Bruce didn’t yet have a distribution deal for Shut Up and Sing, but, yes, he was already thinking about a possible soundtrack. He thought the album could mimic the success of the soundtrack to the Coen brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou?—which sold more than four million copies. “People didn’t know they liked bluegrass music until they saw O Brother,” Bruce says. “It could be the same with a cappella.”

  Shut Up and Sing premiered at the HBO/Aspen Comedy Festival in March of 2006, where it won the audience award (despite the fact that Variety called the film “trite”). To promote in Aspen, Bruce flew in a pro a cappella group called Extreme Measures, which stood around in the
cold wearing SHUT UP AND SING hats and trying to coax people into the theater. The film played at eight or nine film festivals that year but still hadn’t sold.

  Not surprisingly, Bruce Leddy was himself a singer. Years ago, as a student at Williams College, he was a member of the Williams Octet. “There were more than eight of us,” Leddy says, repeating a popular a cappella joke. Leddy graduated in 1983 and moved to Manhattan, where he and some friends continued to sing together, every now and again, under the name the Lemmings. They’d sing at a wedding once a year, maybe. Or they’d put on a little show for friends and family at Michael’s Pub on Fifty-fifth Street (the same watering hole where Woody Allen plays with his jazz combo). The experience inspired the screen-play for Shut Up and Sing.

  This was not Bruce’s first foray into Hollywood. He’d had some bad luck with the Hollywood studio system (he wrote a script for Paramount that’s still sitting on a shelf somewhere in the bowels of the building) and so when it came time to produce his a cappella script, he decided to go the indie route. “I was worried if I took it to a studio,” Bruce says, “they would have asked me to make it, like, a hip-hop group or something.”

  Much like the Bubs, the Williams Octet had developed their own shorthand, their own vocabulary. Their big running joke was Shut up!, which had become their universal greeting. They’d call each other on the phone. When the other guy picked up, the caller would shout, “Shut up!” The joke evolved from there. Soon it became “Be quiet!” (Eventually, though no one knows when or how, the greeting was reduced to “Die!”) Hence the title Shut Up and Sing. Now, this is where the story goes all wonky. Bruce Leddy’s film was called Shut Up and Sing. Until, that is, Harvey Weinstein bought a little movie out of the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, a documentary about the controversial politics of the Dixie Chicks, a movie called Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing.

  Bruce Leddy was incensed. “We’d been out for six months with that title,” he said. “And the title is intrinsic to the plot of my movie.” He sent an e-mail to that other film’s director, Barbara Kopple, a two-time Oscar-winning documentarian. She was sympathetic to a point. “We’re going to have that title,” she wrote. “It’s worse. Harvey Weinstein wants to drop Dixie Chicks from the title.” Now there were two films called Shut Up and Sing. And only one had a distribution deal.

  Bruce found an intellectual property lawyer who wanted a forty-thousand-dollar retainer fee to take on Harvey. “We’ve got an open-and-shut case,” the guy said. “We’ll nail them to the wall.” But an hour later the guy called back to say that, on second thought, Bruce Leddy didn’t have a shot in hell. Harvey Weinstein had waited until the last minute to announce the title change for a reason, the lawyer explained. “They’ve already spent millions on advertising buys and prints so they can win this argument, ” the lawyer said. “It’ll cost you a hundred thousand dollars by the end of the week.” The whole film didn’t cost much more than that.

  Bruce Leddy sent an e-mail to some friends asking them to suggest a new title for his movie. “What about The Wedding Weekend?” someone replied. Bruce eventually settled on Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace. Why? “Someone I know in marketing told me we needed a title like My Big Fat Greek Wedding . Something so long, so unruly, that people would remember it. The name does its own marketing.”

  Ed Boyer and a few of the Bubs went to check the film out when it played the Providence Film Festival in 2006. They were not impressed. “They’d taken out some of the more obvious studio elements of our recording,” Ed says. “But it was supposed to be six guys singing onstage and it sounded like there were at least twenty.” Ed never thought the film would see the light of day.

  In the midst of all this, Vince Vaughn’s movie The Break-Up opened to a one-weekend haul of thirty-nine million dollars. That film featured an a cappella subplot involving Jennifer Aniston’s on-screen brother. Bruce wasn’t worried about The Break-Up affecting his movie’s shot at a distribution deal—if anything, the a cappella exposure might help. Though, for the record, he didn’t care for that movie. “I was more annoyed that it played a cappella as the butt of a joke,” he says. “They made that guy out to be a loser because his hobby was a cappella. With my movie, we’re bringing audiences to the theater to see a Big Chill-type relationship movie. Then they’ll hear the a cappella and go, I had no idea a cappella was so cool.”

  Bruce continued to shop his film, Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace. Finally, nearly a year after its premiere on the festival circuit, Bruce Leddy struck a deal with a small distributor, Strand Releasing. They would open the film that spring, on April 27, 2007, in New York, Los Angeles and, fittingly, Boston, home of the Bubs. They chose late April because that was when My Big Fat Greek Wedding opened.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE HULLABAHOOS

  Wherein the Hullabahoos travel to Los Angeles for winter break 2007 and attempt to (among other things) gain admission to the Playboy Mansion

  On a Friday night in January, the Hullabahoos find themselves stuck in traffic. The boys are split between two sets of rent-a-wheels—a twelve-passenger van and a Dodge Caravan a few minutes apart. Not that it matters. The freeway, the fabled 101, may as well be a used-car lot.

  Tonight, at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, the Lakers are scheduled to face off against the Orlando Magic in front of twelve thousand fans, including regulars like Jack Nicholson and Tobey Maguire, not to mention the Los Angeles Laker Girls. Our beloved Hullabahoos booked this gig months ago—in fact, this whole trip to Los Angeles was built around their slot singing the national anthem at the Lakers game. (The five-day itinerary includes, among other stops, a gig for UVA alums, a tour of the Disney Concert Hall, and a couple of nights with the all-female a cappella group the USC Sirens.) The gig was Morgan Sword’s baby—and he spent nearly six months trying to wear down the booker for the Lakers, Lisa Estrada. He sent a press kit. He followed up with phone calls. And now, well, here they were, staring down miles of traffic.

  It is six-thirty P.M. The Hullabahoos are due to sound-check at seven. Joe Cassara calls the booker. According to Google Maps, he says, the trip is just 9.9 miles. They should still make it, right?

  “We can hold the game until seven thirty-two,” she says—a grace period of just two minutes. The Hullabahoos won’t get to sound-check, she says, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It’s happened before. She repeats the time. “Seven thirty-two. That’s the latest you can literally run on.”

  The Hullabahoos could see the Staples Center in the distance. After months of anticipation for tonight’s gig, the stadium sits there taunting them. Patrick Lundquist suggested they run there. He was only half kidding.

  The Hullabahoos had flown out to Los Angeles three days earlier. And the trip began with some emotional reverence. The founder of the Hullabahoos, Halsted Sullivan—now a television scribe in Los Angeles, last seen writing for ABC’s Carpoolers—agreed to host the group for a couple of nights at his duplex in West Hollywood. He’d even stocked the fridge. Over the years, Halsted has kept up with the Hullabahoos canon, though he hasn’t listened to much a cappella otherwise. “It’s sort of like cleaning up your own baby’s vomit,” he says. “You’d do that, but you wouldn’t clean up someone else’s.” He still has his Hullabahoos robe, by the way. It’s hanging in his bedroom closet. “Just in case,” he says, smiling. On the group’s second night in L.A., Halsted took the Hullabahoos to a karaoke bar in Koreatown. At one point, Joe Whitney, a freshman, turned to Halsted. “Hey,” he said, “I just realized something— you founded the group the year I was born!”

  That was not the only time the Hullabahoos would embarrass Halsted that week. The guy wasn’t just hosting the B’hoos, he’d set them up with a gig for the UVA alumni association in L.A. too. When it came time to close that show, the B’hoos invited their alumni—founding members Halsted and Mark Lyons—up onstage to sing a song with them. Halsted’s bowels sank. He’d told the Hullabahoos, specifically, that he didn’t want to sing
tonight. But standing there now, Halsted was pretty sure the group was about to launch into “Run Around Sue”—which had been Halsted’s big undergraduate solo all those years before. Fearing the worst, Halsted made a little speech to the audience about being out of practice, about how long it had been since he’d sung with the group. He needn’t have worried.

  “They called Mark and me up to sing some song with them we’d never heard,” Halsted says, confused. The founding members of the Hullabahoos just stood there, mouthing syllables and trying not to look stupid.

  This is as good a time as any for the big reveal. Considering the Hullabahoos’ reputation as swordsmen on campus, it’s ironic that the group was founded by two gay men. Both Halsted and Mark came out after college—and neither had suspected a thing.

  While the Hullabahoos had a number of gigs lined up, they couldn’t come to the West Coast and not hit Vegas. So, bright and early on Thursday the eleventh of January, the day before the Lakers game, the Hullabahoos set out for twenty-four hours in Sin City. Morgan had bought a guidebook, the Las Vegas Little Black Book, which described the Rio Hotel and Casino as “down-to -earth” and “not for high rollers,” which sounded about right. Hoping to save money, the seventeen Hullabahoos would cram into two standard rooms, which they’d booked on Orbitz. When it came time to check in, Morgan and Joe approached the front desk—while the Hullabahoos milled about behind them. It was fairly obvious what was going on here.

  “How many keys do you need?” the receptionist asked. Morgan looked at Joe. Joe looked back at Morgan. Both turned to the receptionist. “Uh, four?” Joe said.

  “Actually, make that eight,” Morgan said. “We’ll probably lose a couple.” Joe nodded. “Yeah, we’ll probably lose a couple.”

  The Hullabahoos were conspicuous everywhere they went. They managed to get into one casino undetected (it’s twenty-one and over to gamble in Vegas), but when Morgan sat down to play blackjack, there were ten Hullabahoos standing right behind him watching. To make matters worse, they all wore matching coats and ties. The dealer looked at the B’hoos and said—brutal, concise— “You boys should leave.”