Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory

by Mickey Rapkin

  At the end of his freshman year, Dr. Miller auditioned for the Bubs. He brought his guitar with him to the audition and played something from Carole King’s Tapestry. “You couldn’t walk by any dorm on campus that year without hearing Carole King,” he says. He was accepted into the group, which took some of the weight off. “The Bubs created a focus for my time in college,” he says. “It was a very engaging creative outlet.”

  Dr. Miller remembers getting that call from his son back in September of 2007. “He was so hurt,” he says. “It was a character-building moment for both of us.”

  Meanwhile, Jon Miller took Michelson’s advice. He invested in voice lessons. He recorded himself again and again, working to iron out the kinks in his voice. He also started going to the gym. It was nothing short of a regimented extreme makeover.

  In the spring, Jon returned to the Bub room for auditions. He sang an Incubus song, “Here in My Room,” which he’d gone over with his voice teacher. He’d called his father on the way to the audition that night, and again after for a debriefing. Jon Miller got a phone call that night. He was at a party, it was loud, and he couldn’t make out exactly what Arkady said. But he picked up enough to know he’d gotten a call back. He was due at the Bub Room for a second audition at 10:40 P.M. “I’ll never figure out why the Bubs do auditions so late at night,” Dr. Miller said. But he was relieved for his son.

  The Bubs taught Jon Miller the bass part to “Ruby Falls.” The whole thing was surreal. “I was singing with the Bubs,” he says. Finally it came time to sing in a quartet. It’s an exercise to see if your voice will blend with the group. However, the Bubs don’t make it easy. Rather, they actively try to throw the kids off. “The Bubs like to mimic a crowd,” Jon says. “During my audition they were making crying-baby noises. And Michelson kept calling my cell phone.”

  At home, meanwhile, Dr. and Mrs. Miller watched the clock. His son called again at one in the morning. It would be a long night.

  Dr. Miller was anxious, and he felt like he’d let his son down. “I felt some responsibility for creating the idea of this iconic experience—that if he didn’t have this opportunity it would somehow leave him missing out on some crucial experience in life. I said to Jonathan, This is just a bunch of college kids singing. It’s a wonderful thing. But it’s not like playing the cello all your life and not making it into the New York Philharmonic. There are a lot of great experiences in life.”

  At three A.M., the younger Miller received a phone call from the Bubs. They wanted to see him—one last time—for what they promised would be the final round of auditions. What happened next is only for the Beelzebubs to know, but at some point in the next few hours Jon Miller fulfilled a long-standing Bubs tradition, and in the depths of Ballou Hall, he became a Beelzebub.

  At six-thirty in the morning, the Bubs pulled into Bickford’s—a diner—for breakfast. Jon Miller called his dad with the good news. Dr. Miller actually already knew—Michelson had called to invite him to Bickford’s, in case he wanted to surprise his son; Dr. Miller declined the invite, wanting to let his son enjoy the moment. But that night, the good doctor came to campus to celebrate with his son. “I bought him a burrito,” Dr. Miller says. What else could he do?

  A few days later Dr. Miller came back to campus for Bubs in the Pub. Sometime in the eighties the Bubs decided that for this final show the group should sing every song they learned that school year. Tonight they perform twenty-one songs. The arrangements were uniformly solid—and varied, because they’d been done by at least ten different people (many of them alums). Unfortunately, the acoustics in Dewick-MacPhie were shameful. Worse: The Bubs, slaves to tradition, were still hiring the same guy to do the sound. The Bubs spent unheard of hours perfecting their blend. But past the tenth row, their intricate arrangements just sounded muddled.

  Danny Lichtenfeld ’93 sat in the audience. In regard to the venue he said: “I’d hate them to be following tradition for tradition’s sake.” The same could be said of elections. A few weeks prior to the show Danny received phone calls—like clockwork— from the Bubs running for president. Lichtenfeld is happy to talk to these kids and admits he’d be miffed if they didn’t ring him up. But he’d be just as happy if someone called and said, “With all due respect, I’m in the Bubs now and I have my own ideas about how to run it.”

  Bubs in the Pub was a brutal three-plus hours. Lucas was dressed as Che Guevara. “I’m the hero of privileged suburban kids everywhere,” he says. Michelson was, of all things, a flamingo, in black leggings and a pink bodice. Arkady was (true to form) dressed as a baby, in little more than a diaper. There were senior speeches—private jokes about things the audience didn’t understand that went on and on. There were standing ovations from the Bub alums. During the speeches, a policewoman approached the stage. Michelson—the flamingo—bent down to find out what could possibly be so pressing. Following the speech, he took the mic: “Uh, whoever has the red Kia needs to move it.”

  As the concert came to a close, the Beelzebubs invited all of the gathered alumni up onstage to sing “Brothers in Song.” Jon Miller, naturally, stood next to his father. And later that night, at the postshow party, father and son drank a beer together out of a funnel.

  In the week after the audition, Jon Miller’s in-box was flooded with e-mails from past Beelzebubs, welcoming him to the fold. He’d already picked up on some of the Bubs’ language. Ask him how he feels about the whole experience, he responds as only a Bub could: “It hooks you.”

  Bubs in the Pub doubled as the release party for Pandaemonium. Though the Bubs had heard rough mixes of the new album a few months ago, they hadn’t heard the final product. They hadn’t even seen the final product. With the exception of the music director and the president, none of the Bubs is allowed to see the artwork until the group cracks open the boxes the week of Pub. (For the record, the cover art looked like the white-on-white Travis album The Man Who.) The only question left was: where to listen to the thing. Which is how the Bubs ended up at the Best Buy in Waltham, Massachusetts, taking over the high-end speaker room, the one with the big circular couch in the center and woofers lining the wall. The Bubs said they were shopping for a speaker for their rehearsal room. (Not true.) The salesman would stop the CD to change speakers. “Uh, can we hear the album continuously?” Matt Michelson said, interrupting the man. “I think at that point he caught on,” Michelson says. Because after that he walked away.

  Though the official reviews for Pandaemonium would not be posted for five months, it didn’t take long for the message boards at RARB to light up with chatter once the album was out. Matt Emery, the music director of the Duke a cappella group, Rhythm & Blue, started the thread with a one-word entry: “Wow.” Matthew Bolling, an alum of Virginia Tech’s Juxtaposition, pointed out the change in the Bubs’ sound. “The CD is solid,” he wrote. “It has a surprisingly small amount of production and really sounds like it thrives from the raw voice. This is something that a lot of male groups could just not achieve.” The conversation went on for weeks.

  Almost no one mentioned “Come Sail Away” or “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Or, for that matter, much of anything the Bubs had debated internally.

  Matt Michelson and Alexander Koutzoukis did fly out to Bill Hare’s studio in northern California to watch the legendary a cappella producer mix the album. They brought their notes with them—this solo should be louder, this bass section is too quiet— but for all the man-hours spent arguing in the Super 8 over spring break, the two still managed to sleep through some of the mixing sessions, betraying their compatriots back home. The truth is, there wasn’t much they could have done out there anyway. Ed was right. They’d hired Bill Hare for a reason. Collegiate a cappella recording had, in many ways, gotten out of hand. Still, working within that framework, the Bubs managed to record an accomplished album that was inarguably, at its deepest level, the product of the human voice. And it had nothing to do with Pro Tools, and everything to do with the music itself. Th
ough one gets the sense that it might have been a better learning experience if they’d really produced it on their own—instead of paid for it on their own. That might be their next evolution.

  At its heart Pandaemonium—could they have picked a better title for this year?—was something of a middle finger to the a cappella establishment and RARB itself, even. The twelve tracks on Pandaemonium were masterfully done—with top-tier production values and the bells and whistles you’d expect from the Bubs, but for all the polish you’d never mistake them for the original recordings (as you could easily do when listening to much of Code Red). “Come Sail Away” would be the album’s real triumph. It begins with a little trio singing, “Ding ding DING ding ding // Ding ding DING ding ding // dee deedl-lee-dee.” Matt Michelson’s solo is clean and clear, seemingly untouched. (Ed Boyer would say the technology is transparent—Michelson’s voice is just as computer tweaked as the rest of the album, it’s just not noticeable.) Matt sings: “I’m sailing away // set an open course for the virgin sea.” He’s even got a sweet vibrato.

  But then, four minutes and five seconds in, the song takes a left turn. The Bubs build to an eight-second wall of sound, a loud aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh, mechanical, distorted. Listen to the original song. It’s there—that cluster-chord banged out on the synthesizer, modulating down. It sounds like you took both hands and slammed them down on the keyboard. To get that effect a cappella, Ed had the Bubs each sing a different note—hold it out, and then slide down. Aaaaaahhhhhhhh. Like the sound of a guy falling down a well. The Bubs were triple-tracked and delayed. What you hear on the album is forty-five Bubs, really, at different speeds, on different notes. With the reverb, it feels like even more.

  The listener doesn’t know exactly what’s happened, but the chord leads into a big guitar solo. To get that Eddie Van Halen sound—that pecking out of notes—Matt Michelson sang each note of the guitar solo individually. Bill Hare then chopped the notes into pieces and each became a tap on the fret. He lined the notes up in Pro Tools, ran it through a guitar amp simulator, and, well, there you have it. Bill Hare summarizes: “The end to ‘Come Sail Away’ is this reminder of what the Bubs can do. That after all this great, raw singing on the album, we close with this little snippet of ear candy. It’s this little spot to show that the Bubs could still do it”—could still do the Code Red aesthetic they’d standardized—“but they chose to do something else.”

  Pandaemonium had responded to the call of Code Red. It received straight fives—the top rating—from the reviewers at RARB. And the Bubs had predicted a changing tide in a cappella recording. When the Hullabahoos released their own new album in December of 2007, Varsity Sing Team, the liner notes came with a note: “On this album, we tried to stay away from what has become the a cappella standard: pushing computer production to its limits. Instead, we aimed for a more classic, natural sound that we hope will stand the test of time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE HULLABAHOOS

  Wherein the Hullabahoos reconnect with an old friend in the spring of 2007—and come face-to-face with a new one

  It was months before the Hullabahoos received a reply from Howard Spector. But one day, there it was. The man who had booked the group for some of its most lucrative gigs—Burger King, the Republican National Convention—was curious to hear how the Hullabahoos sounded these days. And so it was set: Howard would drive down to Charlottesville for the Hullabahoos’ Big Spring Sing Thing XIX, their final show of the 2006-2007 school year. Perhaps the time was right for a reunion. Howard’s event-planning firm, Ashley Entertainment, had a gig coming up—an annual GOP fund-raiser called the President’s Dinner, which, in 2006, raised twenty-seven million dollars for Republican congressional candidates. The dinner was scheduled for June. If the Hullabahoos could impress Howard enough to land the President’s Dinner gig, they might have a shot at booking the lucrative 2008 Republican National Convention.

  Just days before Big Spring Sing Thing, the Hullabahoos were still learning new music for the show. And they were still dealing, really, with the fallout from the gig at Washington and Lee—where Exit 245 had proved a formidable competitor to the cocky Hullabahoos. While the gig didn’t do much to dent their sense of self (impossible, really), they couldn’t ignore what had happened with U2’s "One.” A few days after returning to campus, the Hullabahoos got their hands on a recording of that show. Patrick Lundquist and Brendon Mason were eager to find out just who’d messed up the harmony on “Jesus”—so loudly and embarrassingly, at that. Judging from the audio, it was obvious that Brendon was to blame. He didn’t take it well. In fact, he soon developed a mental block—like a major league baseball pitcher who suddenly couldn’t throw to home plate. The Hullabahoos had sung “One” a few times since then, but Brendon missed the harmony every time. At one recent show he had skipped the phrase entirely, letting Patrick belt the line alone. It didn’t pack nearly the same punch, and one of the Silhooettes caught the mistake, shouting, “You suck!” At a sorority gig one night a couple of the Hullabahoos asked Pete Seibert (the music director) to drop the song from the Big Spring Sing Thing set list entirely. “It was that bad,” Pete says.

  This is the first time the Hullabahoos have seen Brendon rattled. And frankly it’s uncomfortable. “I’ve been walking around campus with my headphones on, listening to ‘Jesus’ again and again,” Brendon says. Minutes before Big Spring Sing Thing XIX, he is still listening to the song, singing the note quietly to himself.

  The show at Washington and Lee didn’t tell Pete anything he hadn’t already known about the Hullabahoos and their music. His arrangements were too similar. Even he was tired of them. “I was sick of the shedula-shets,” he says, mocking the syllables he so frequently employs. Pete enlisted the help of his fellow B’hoos. Matt Mooney (a freshman) did two arrangements for the show: Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Sleeping to Dream,” by Jason Mraz. Myles Glancy arranged Chris Daughtry’s “Home.” It’s not that it took so much of the pressure off (Pete still tweaked all three arrangements) but it did introduce some variety into their repertoire. Pete even mixed up his own style, bringing in new syllables, opening Rob Thomas’s “Street-corner Symphony” with bwey-do bwaay-do.

  The group had other concerns. There were final exams to prepare for. Blake Segal, never without a book, appeared to have been entombed. Pete Seibert pulled a few all-nighters in the days leading up to the show, writing some music of his own. The conductor of the UVA orchestra had sent out a blanket call for entries to the music school. If a student submitted an original score, she said, the orchestra would play it. “I didn’t have an orchestral score that I was really proud of,” Pete says, “so I thought I’d better write one.” He called the piece “Daybreak,” because he finished it at seven-thirty in the morning. The Hullabahoos would turn out in force to hear the seventy-piece orchestra play Pete’s five-minute composition. The Hullabahoos didn’t know much about classical music, but Morgan Sword offered this review: “I feel like success has a lot to do with how many times you use the chimes.” For the record, Hullabahoos B, the group’s intramural football team, wrapped up their season then, too, finishing third in the Independent circuit. Morgan sustained a crippling finger injury in the final game, which sidelined him from two drives. But he rallied. “This was the highest known ranking for any a cappella group ever,” Joe Cassara says.

  If the Hullabahoos were stressed out about final exams, or impressing Howard Spector, something would happen five days before Big Spring Sing Thing to put it all in perspective. It was April 16, 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho opened fire on Virginia Tech’s campus, killing thirty-two people and wounding another twenty-five before committing suicide in the deadliest school rampage in U.S. history. Joe Cassara, the president of the Hullabahoos, had gone to elementary school with Seung-Hui Cho. More distressing: Joe’s younger brother was a junior at Tech. His kid brother was safe in his dorm, but too many of their peers were affected, too many felt bruised themselves.
The a cappella community at large quickly responded with a two-disc compilation of local Virginia a cappella groups organized by Matthew Bolling, a Tech alum who sang with the VT Juxtaposition. The disc, For Today, We Are All Hokies, would go on to sell one thousand copies, making close to twenty thousand dollars for the families affected by the shooting. But the B’hoos wanted to address the tragedy at their own concert. And so, visible beneath their robes at Big Spring Sing Thing, one would see a mix of red and orange neckties—a subtle, gentle reminder that their thoughts were with the families.

  In a way, the tragedy cut through all of the bullshit. In a few weeks Dane Blackburn would quit the Hullabahoos. No one was surprised. For one thing, he wanted to make his own music. And that was fine. But more than that, he didn’t seem to be having fun anymore. And for all of the rehearsing, and the recording, the Hullabahoos were more of a fraternity than anything else. Morgan Sword would graduate in a few weeks and he’d miss the singing. But really he’d mourn for something else—the feeling of sitting in that room on the west side of the Lawn, never knowing which of the Hullabahoos was going to come through the door next.

  Backstage, the night of Big Spring Sing Thing XIX, the Hullabahoos stand in a circle, with their arms around one another— and it brings them full circle, back to the memory of the morning each was accepted into the Hullabahoos, that morning, as tradition dictates, they were awakened in their dorm late at night and driven up to the hill at the apple orchard, where they stood just like this as one of the seniors in the Hullabahoos told them their life was about to change. And it had. Tonight, Pete blows the note and they sing, “All aboard // get on board.”