Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (11 page)

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 revolution) 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.)

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.