John Neal was a tough-talking British expat living out in the Bay Area. He’d started out as a theater producer and a talent manager. He was also the owner and operator of the Harmony Sweepstakes—like the ICCAs for professional a cappella groups. There were negotiations. John Neal agreed to run the Primarily A Cappella catalog in exchange for a whopping sixty percent ownership of the company. Begrudgingly, Don Gooding agreed, retaining forty percent for himself. “John Neal was the only game in town,” Don says. In October of 1993, Don got on a plane and hand-delivered his entire inventory of CDs—of the Blenders, the Bobs, the Real Group—to John Neal out West.
Don had, in time, become a partner at Accel. But he was burning out on the venture capital game. “Venture capital is about manipulating people,” Don says (and, in light of his a cappella dealings, what comes next will strike some as ironic). “It took many years and a bruised ego to realize I wasn’t good at this. I’m really an entrepreneur at heart.” In 1997 he quit the firm entirely and turned his attentions to Primarily A Cappella, which Neal had taken good care of in his stead. In fact, Primarily A Cappella was just starting to make money. You can see where this is going.
“Now that I was focusing on the a cappella business full-time, ” Don says, “I could no longer ignore the human being that is John Neal.” Some say Neal regularly skimmed a little off the top from his collegiate a cappella groups—claims that he denies. (Adam Farb describes John Neal alternately as a “scumbag” and “hilarious.” “John is like every record producer in Hollywood,” Adam says. “Just a little less tactful. That’s why he’s in this small subculture and not in Hollywood. But he’s no more of a freak than I was or Deke is.”)
Regardless, Don Gooding tried to take back ownership of Primarily A Cappella. John Neal still remembers their last conversation. “Our last conversation that didn’t involve lawyers, anyway!” he says. It was a disagreement over collegiate a cappella groups. John Neal was tired of the turnover in college groups. “I’d spend a year training a business manager to do his job,” Neal says, “and then they’d graduate.” The new business manager would want to know why the group hadn’t been paid. “I don’t care that you’re so-and-so from whatever Yale group,” Neal says, “you didn’t send an invoice!”
When those talks dissolved, Don Gooding’s wife suggested he start a new company. And so he did. He called it Mainely A Cappella. It’s not a typo. “We live in Maine,” he says. Both companies sell sheet music and a cappella paraphernalia, plus CDs and MP3 downloads of collegiate recordings. Two firms, Primarily A Cappella and Mainely A Cappella, doing the exact same thing. Was there room for two companies? “No,” Don Gooding says flatly. In 2006, Don Gooding’s company did $1 million in business—from a-cappella.com and from an a cappella storefront run out of a strip mall in Maine.
John Neal declines to comment on the earnings at his own Primarily A Cappella. “Don Gooding is a businessman,” he says. “Me, as long as the lights are still on and I can pay my employees and I’ve got my house, I’m not concerned with what the bottom line is.”
II. Don Gooding versus Mike Mendyke
Mike Mendyke and Don Gooding, both CASA board members, had issues dating back nearly a decade. To make a long story short, in the late nineties, Don Gooding started an a cappella record label, Hot Lips Records. He’d briefly signed the Boston-based pro group Five O’Clock Shadow. Mendyke, a longtime member of Five O’Clock Shadow, was soon forced out. Blame that old rub—creative differences. Mendyke sued FOCS. (Don Gooding funded the FOCS defense.) The group had been paid just north of ten thousand dollars to record 1998’s So There. It was a standard record deal. The money wasn’t really theirs—it was an upfront payment against future royalties. Mike had written an original song for the album and was never paid. It was just one symptom of the mismanagement, Mendyke claims. Don contracted Five O’Clock Shadow to do a four-city tour with the Nylons. “We’d show up at these huge venues,” Mendyke says, “and fifty people would be in the audience. He didn’t know how to run a record label.”
Don Gooding isn’t amused. “Mike Mendyke has been a thorn in my side for ten years,” he says. “And he was fired because he couldn’t sing on pitch. He cost me ten thousand dollars in legal fees.” In Mendyke’s defense, if he couldn’t sing, he hid it well. Mendyke would go on to sing in a part-time a cappella group with Dick Van Dyke called (yes) the Vantastix. Still, Don Gooding shuttered Hot Lips Records after releasing just a handful of titles.
The two would clash a second time in the fall of 2006 when Mike Mendyke launched acaTunes—The Digital A Cappella Music Store. The site is exactly what it sounds like: iTunes for a cappella with individual tracks selling for one dollar. Mendyke’s business partner was Freddie Feldman, a computer science guy and an alum of the Northwestern Purple Haze—also a CASA board member. Feldman owns an a cappella recording studio in Evanston and once helped a friend record an a cappella version of the entire Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album. (At the launch party for the album, they played the a cappella disc alongside The Wizard of Oz. It synced up perfectly.)
Don Gooding saw acaTunes as a direct attack on his own business, Mainely A Cappella. “Mike Mendyke,” Don says, “he’s sort of got a Don Quixote thing—going after me in six different ways over ten years.” But Don quickly started selling MP3s in response. “Competition keeps you on your toes,” he says.
Though acaTunes worked brilliantly, business was slower than Mike and Freddie had projected. Still, they soldiered on (acquiring distribution rights to a popular a cappella podcast, A Cappella U, hosted by the infectious superfan, Joey C, aka Joseph Campagna). In December of 2006, Mendyke sent Don an e-mail: We’ve sold 1,000 tracks at acaTunes!
“So what!” Don says. “So in six months they made a thousand dollars. That’s not a business, that’s a hobby.”
The final straw was Mendyke’s investment in an a cappella competition with designs on taking down Don Gooding’s own ICCAs. The competition was conceived by Mark Surprenant, a former member of the University of Michigan Compulsive Lyres. “The Compulsive Lyres,” Don Gooding says. “That’s fitting!” At CASA board meetings (which took place monthly over the Internet) , Mike Mendyke pushed his agenda hard, desperate for the organization’s imprimatur on this just-launched competition, feeling it would help them attract participants. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. That competition would fold abruptly one month before its first finals, set for May 2006 at Epcot. Mendyke lost his entire investment. It was another victory for Don Gooding.
III. Don Gooding versus Adam Farb
In 1998, after three years at the helm of the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella—the competition he’d willed into being—Adam Farb wanted out. It wasn’t just the traveling. Though it was that too. (He was producing twenty-five a cappella shows in two and a half months, and the miles quickly wore him down.) He was running BOCA on the side, having started a small a cappella record label, Smokin’ Fish Records (named for an inside joke with the Brown Derbies), to distribute the disc. Farb hired Liana Tang, an alum of NYU’s APC Rhythm, to assist him with the NCCAs. “I couldn’t run the show out of Kinkos anymore, ” he says. In the fall of 1998, he called Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center—both were booked for April. Farb was lost. “If I did the show that year,” Farb says, “I was either going to kill myself or someone else.” And so he cancelled the finals. In a cappella circles, 1999 would become known as the Lost Year. “A lot of people were pissed at me,” he says.
Both Farb and the NCCAs were at a crossroads. The show had momentum, but like any burgeoning business, it needed capital: a hundred thousand dollars by Farb’s own estimation. The NCCAs needed their own equipment, plus a big marketing push. Farb wanted to staff up. And to make matters worse, the constant turnover (read: graduation) among the competitors wreaked havoc on the system. “What’s unique about a cappella is that there’s no institutional memory,” Farb says. “Every year kids graduated and you had to start over.” Farb didn’t have the m
oney or, frankly, the drive to continue. “I was fried,” he says. When Don Gooding offered to buy him out, Farb was thrilled. Don had been a venture capitalist and a member of the Yale Whiffenpoofs. “He could bring the infrastructure the organization needed,” Farb says. In 1999, Farb agreed to sell his stake in the NCCAs and the BOCA compilation to Don Gooding. It would not be a smooth transaction.
Don Gooding says he bought the rights to both for a flat fee of twenty-five thousand dollars.
Farb says Don promised him close to seventy thousand (which included a “declining stake in future profits” from the competition) . The deal was contentious—and very nearly litigious. The frustration ate away at Farb. To make matters worse, he watched as Don did nothing to improve the NCCAs. “I thought he had plans,” Farb says. “But I just think he didn’t know what to do with the thing.” Eventually Farb stopped caring, and he gave up all attempts to rectify the financial disparity. “At some point, I just said, Fuck it. I’ve got better things to worry about. You have to move on.” By 2001, Farb had dropped out of the a cappella scene entirely. He even tried to give his collection of a cappella recordings away to his alma mater, the Brown Derbies. They declined the gift. “Even Deke didn’t want them,” Farb says.
If the a cappella crowd had its own version of Us Weekly—and clearly it warranted one—it would be the forums at rarb.org, the Recorded A Cappella Review Board. “It’s the gossip column of a cappella,” says Dave Sperandio. He would know. He’s banned from posting to the RARB message boards. (More on that soon.)
It started innocently enough. Like most Web sites worth their column inches, RARB was launched from a dorm room back in 1993, the brainchild of Washington University students Seth Golub and Chris Tess, both onetime members of the all-male a cappella group the Pikers. Seth, now a Google employee working on artificial intelligence, built the site. And the concept was simple—almost altruistic. It was a place where collegiate a cappella groups could have their albums reviewed by professionals (mostly collegiate a cappella alums and members of CASA) on a scale of one to five (five being the best). In the first year, nearly thirty albums were reviewed. These days it’s closer to a hundred annually. And it’s deadly serious business. Groups know the veteran RARB reviewers by name and even request specific reviewers. Elie Landau and Rebecca Christie have been reviewing since the late nineties. “They tend to prefer a more natural sound,” says Ben Stevens, the RARB coordinator. “The newer reviewers— Robert Dietz, Ryan Joyce—they’re from the Bill Hare school.”
For all the talk about RARB, the nonprofit has an operating cost of twelve dollars a year—for Web hosting; reviewers are paid in albums. But the real genius—or the real curse—of RARB isn’t the reviews, but rather the forums, where some thousand registered members discuss the reviews (among other things) ad nauseam. Upward of twenty thousand messages have been posted since 1998, on close to two thousand topics. It’s Ben’s job to (among other things) police the forums, which tend to spike around the ICCAs and the BOCA announcements. For example, when Divisi lost in the finals of the ICCAs in 2005, it inspired pages of back-and-forth talk on the judging.
In 2003, producer Dave Sperandio really did lose his posting privileges, after referring to RARB founder Seth Golub as a “slack ass” in an online argument about why RARB didn’t yet offer emoticons and avatars in the forums. In late 2007, someone posted a note saying they missed Dio on the forums, and could a resolution be reached. Which is sort of funny because Dio cops to posting under an assumed name since the smackdown.
If there was any doubt, collegiate a cappella had become a serious business. Perhaps nothing underscored the incestuous, self-destructive nature of this subculture more than the Wikipedia pogrom of February 2007. The bloodletting was initiated by a Dartmouth University student named Shane Avidan, who was working as a part-time administrator for Wikipedia. He began deletion proceedings against a smattering of a cappella stubs, including entries for Andrew Chaiken (a beatboxer who goes by the name Kid Beyond), the House Jacks, BOCA, CASA, the ICCAS and, yes, even Deke Sharon himself. The administrator argued that the a cappella community was bordering on a pyramid scheme. Julia Hoffman from the CARAs was one of the few people to see the humor. “It’s rare you encounter a cappella terrorists! ” she said.
The only group to survive the mass deletion campaign was Rockapella. It was tough to argue with the relevance of their legacy as the house band on PBS’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE BEELZEBUBS
Wherein the Beelzebubs travel west for spring break
Unlike most a cappella groups, the Beelzebubs begin each rehearsal with the historian (an elected position) telling an old Bubs story—some dating back to the group’s founding. These legends cover the derivation of words in the Beelze-lexicon, a continuously updated dictionary of terms the Bubs have invented (and use frequently). Other stories recount road trips of yore. There’s a by-product to all of this self-study—and it’s expectations. When the Bubs traveled to Los Angeles on spring break in March 2007, Doug Terry (who’d organized the trip) had a plan: the Bubs would talk their way onstage during a live taping of CBS’s Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. “We thought it might happen,” Doug says.
Why was he so sure? Because it had happened before.
On May 20, 1999, a Beelzebub named Jeremy Cramer came face-to -face with David Letterman—yes, that David Letterman. The confrontation aired on national television, and though it didn’t last very long, Letterman did manage to get in a few zingers. “Letterman called me a squirrelly little kid,” Cramer says.
For all the talk of a late-night war, Jay Leno regularly trounces Letterman in the ratings. In 1999, in an effort to boost market share across the country, Letterman’s people implemented a plan. It was fairly simple: They’d fly hundreds of Bostonians in for the night, give them tickets to the show, and promote it back in Bean Town as Boston Night. (Some eight thousand Bostonians sent postcards to Letterman, hoping to win tickets.) Rob Burnett, an executive producer of Late Night with David Letterman, is a Tufts alum. He wanted to do his part for his alma mater, and so he called the Tufts PR office and sent over twenty-five tickets. The university, quite smartly, gave fifteen of those tickets to its best ambassadors—Jeremy Cramer and the Tufts Beelzebubs.
A Bubs performance at Logan Airport—as the New York- bound Letterman flights boarded—was caught by a CBS affiliate. And lo and behold, the Bubs—dressed in Tufts gear, no less— found themselves seated in the front rows of the Ed Sullivan Theater for the taping. That night’s guests: Natalie Portman and the newly reunited J. Geils Band.
Before the show begins, as is customary, Letterman comes out in his gray double-breasted suit. He fiddles with a button. He says hello to the audience, makes a Boston joke, and asks if anyone in the crowd has any questions. A few hands go up. Letterman calls on Jeremy Cramer. “I’m here with the Tufts University Beelzebubs, the university’s oldest all-male a cappella group,” Jeremy says. “Natalie Portman goes to Harvard and we’d really like to serenade her with—”
Letterman abruptly cuts him off. “Shut up, kid,” he says. “I run the show here. I don’t have time for your a cappella music.” Letterman wasn’t kidding, Jeremy says. “He was nasty.” Jeremy Cramer sits back down with the rest of the Bubs. He’s pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. Oh, had it ended there.
Letterman retreats backstage and the taping is about to begin. Paul Shaffer strikes up the CBS Orchestra. “Live from New York—where everyone in the audience is from Boston!” the announcer says. “It’s the Late Show with David Letterman.”
Letterman comes out for the opening monologue and immediately deviates from the script. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, ” he says. “Welcome to the show. Had a fascinating conversation with a kid from the audience before the show began. ” Here Letterman affects a high-pitched nerd voice. “Ah, yes, Dave, we’re part of an a cappella singing group. What we’d really like to do is
come up onstage and sing for the audience.” The camera flashes to Jeremy Cramer. Letterman says, “Here’s what you do ... you get Regis to invite you to his show—you can sing all you want.”
The show comes back from commercial break and Letterman is seated at his desk. He wipes his lip with an exaggerated gesture, and starts in again. “Thank you very much,” he says. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our big Boston show. We’ve been thinking this over—before the program a kid, a frankly, a squirrelly little kid stands up, and he says, Well, we’d really rather just sing. And I tried to explain to him, well, we have a show lined up for you already. And I don’t know that there is a position in the show for”—Dave uses air quotes for emphasis— “a cappella music.”
Cue audience applause. The camera cuts to Jeremy Cramer, who blows Letterman a kiss. “Not very Ivy League, is it,” Letterman says, mimicking the air kiss. “Hi, how you doin? Kind of hip, Beverly Hills a little. So, we’re trying to work these kids into the show, because what television show would be complete without a little”—he pauses again—“a cappella music. Paul, you have any suggestions?”PAUL SHAFFER: “For an a cappella piece?”
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory Page 18