Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (3 page)

A cappella groups have tremendous self-pride, playing up their differences in dress, musical style, and personality—much like a fraternity would. At the University of Virginia, the Hullabahoos perform in brightly colored robes. Their rivals, the Academical Village People, perform in gas-station-attendant shirts. That a cappella groups are similarly self-selecting and heterogeneous says as much about race relations on campus as a study of the Greek system.

But there are generalizations to be made: Collegiate a cappella groups are largely student-run, operating outside the often staid domain of university music programs. While some employ choreography, most just stand in a horseshoe—emulating guitars with a well-placed
jeer neer
. And almost every group has, at some point, featured A-Ha’s “Take on Me” in their repertoire. (The eighties were seminal for collegiate a cappella.) While professional a cappella groups like the House Jacks remain small—most pro groups have just five or six members—collegiate groups are made up of between nine and fifteen students. A cappella groups are easy to spot on campus, where they are known to invade the archways, serenading comely women. There is another generalization to be made: These groups make money, and, in some cases, lots of money. For a gig at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the UVA Hullabahoos were paid thirteen thousand dollars.

Still, a cappella is the vestige of college life that dare not speak its name. There is no shame, no real social stigma, in admitting you were a Sigma Chi. You might discuss it on a first date. You might even put it on a résumé. A cappella, however, is topic non grata. It reeks of that Folgers commercial.

But collegiate a cappella includes the drama kids and the jocks; it drives young women crazy, and some young men to violence. A cappella is a choice college students make, a choice to stand up and sing, to perform, to compete, to serenade, to profit, to hide, to seek truth, to find answers, and to commemorate. The experience is more surreal—more rewarding, more visceral—than one could imagine. And, as it turns out, painfully hard to give up. For every kid who can walk away at graduation, there are others destined to live in the past, wishing they were still up onstage snapping (likely to something by Journey). You can’t really blame them. After all, no one applauds you for showing up to the Monday-morning meeting at Goldman Sachs.

For answers—for some deeper understanding of this subculture (there’s that word again!)—we turn to three collegiate a cappella groups in the 2006-2007 school year, each at a crossroads. Divisi, an all-female group from the University of Oregon, had been the heavy favorites to win at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in 2005. But after a crippling loss in the finals, they took a year off to regroup. Now, back in competition with a near all-new roster of girls, could they return to the ICCAs and avenge their good name?

Elsewhere, the legendary Tufts Beelzebubs were founded in 1962, and they’d always been at the forefront of a cappella recording. But their 2003 album,
Code Red,
was a complete game-changer. In a cappella circles, people talk strictly in terms of before
Code Red
and after
Code Red
. Now the Bubs were back in the studio and the pressure was suffocating. Would this be just another album, or could they raise the bar again? In short: What do you do for an encore? And is forty years of history a blessing or a curse?

Finally, the University of Virginia’s own Hullabahoos may be the upstart bad boys of collegiate a cappella—breaking hearts along the eastern seaboard. As they approached their twentieth anniversary, a question arose: Could they establish themselves as a top-tier group like the Beelzebubs without sacrificing their laid-back soul? And did they even want to?

The curious, inspiring, triumphant, hilarious, and heartbreaking story of the quest for collegiate a cappella glory begins onstage at Lincoln Center.

CHAPTER ONE

DIVISI

Evynne Smith stands onstage at Manhattan’s Alice Tully Hall, the stately theater that regularly plays home to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the province of aging subscribers and PBS tote bags. Tonight, the scene is a little bit different.

It is Saturday evening, April 30, 2005, and the stage is empty save for twelve women dressed in identical black pants, buttoned-up black shirts, and red ties. Evynne describes their look as “sexy stewardess.” Their red lipstick (the kind, perhaps, favored by off-duty stewardesses) goes on like paint. These twelve women— perhaps refugees from some Olive Garden training center—hail from the University of Oregon. They’re called Divisi (pronounced dih-VEE-see) and they are among the nation’s most celebrated collegiate a cappella groups. Laugh if you must. But tonight’s concert is standing-room only. All eleven hundred tickets sold out weeks ago—at fifty dollars a pop. Still, a few people mill about outside the venue, hoping to snag a last-minute pass. Yes, it is an a cappella show, and people are trying to
scalp tickets
. One man holds up a homemade sign, scrawled in red marker, that reads: MY SON IS PERFORMING TONIGHT. GOT AN EXTRA? He’s lucky. A twentysomething girl hesitates before selling her ticket to this desperate man—for a whopping two hundred and fifty dollars. “I’m, like, an a cappella
fan
,” she says, hesitating. “But my rent is due on Monday and I could totally use the cash.”

It’s a tough crowd, what with the a cappella-
erati
in the house—including everyone from professionals like Rockapella’s Barry Carl to Deke Sharon, a Tufts University alum commonly referred to as the father of contemporary a cappella. Divisi is the final group to perform that night. And while the order was drawn entirely at random, it is also fitting. Ask anyone in the audience to pinpoint the exact moment Divisi won the hearts and minds of the crowd, and they will likely say the same thing: somewhere around minute eight and a half of the group’s twelve-minute, three-song set. The girls had already performed “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox and Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”—two well-executed, if highly predictable, endeavors. (Only Sarah McLachlan would have been more obvious.) But what came next was anything but expected.

The girls from Divisi stand in three rows, their heads bowed to the ground. Divisi’s music director, a tiny whip of a thing named Lisa Forkish, blows the starting pitch, counting off two-three -four. And then it happens. The girls sing,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”
—a total of seven times, building in intensity each time, eventually sustaining a G minor-9 chord. A ripple of recognition rolls through the younger members of tonight’s crowd, who, in near unison, sit up at attention.

The syllables go something like this:
Bee REE // bee REE // bee REE // bee REE.
Katie Hopkins steps to the mic, singing,
“Up in the club with my homey // trying to get a little ...”
Onstage at Lincoln Center, a female a cappella group (all white, by the way, not that there’s anything wrong with that) will make Usher’s signature track, “Yeah,” their own. Two minutes in, Evynne Smith steps out, grabs the mic, and unapologetically raps:
“Watch out // My outfit’s ridiculous! // Looking so conspicuous! // These women are on the prowl // Try to sing against us had to throw ’em the towel.”
Like Usher, Evynne Smith will not stop until she sees you in your birthday suit. She closes the rap with this bit of improv:
“You know you want a kiss when the lips so red!”

The crowd is on their feet. A middle-aged man in the audience holds a cardboard sign way above his head. It reads HOT LIPS!, which would be inappropriate in any other context. Right, context.

Evynne Smith and the ladies of Divisi (they call themselves Divisi Divas) are competing in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. The hard-core a cappella fans refer to this event as the ICK-ahs, though the rest just spell it out, as in the I-C-C-As. The competition—sort of like the a cappella Rose Bowl—began in 1995 but has quickly grown to include groups from as far as Canada, Western Europe, and, most recently, Asia. The whole thing is produced by an organization called Varsity Vocals, a five-person operation run out of (in part) a strip-mall storefront in Maine. Ignore the skeleton crew: The impact of the ICCAs is enormous. While the winning team will leave Lincoln Center with one thousand dollars in prize money (plus recording time), the competition is really about bragging rights. In the same way that winning an Oscar can bump an actor to the A-list, a win at the ICCAs can lead to bigger-paying gigs, a spike in album sales, and (perhaps most importantly) more friend requests for the group’s MySpace page. It’s no surprise that the backstage drama at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella plays out like the unintentionally hilarious scrum of a children’s beauty pageant.

For Evynne Smith and Divisi, the road to the ICCA finals has been paved with blood, sweat, and runny mascara.

Evynne Smith grew up in Eugene, down the road from the University of Oregon—once home to legendary track star Steve Prefontaine. Not that athletics was a draw for Evynne. She chose the school because it was close to home, and because it was affordable. It didn’t hurt that her high school sweetheart would enroll there too. Walking the halls of the music building one afternoon, Evynne—tall, blond, pretty—saw a flyer for a new a cappella group, Eight Ladies and a Beau Tie. She was intrigued. She went to the audition. She sang the national anthem. And while she could wail, the truth is, even if she couldn’t sing a lick, they probably would have taken her. The girls had a Beau Tie (a kid named Mike Peterson, their beatbox for hire) but not yet the titular Eight Ladies. Worse: Their Beau Tie was known around campus for another of his extracurricular activities. “He was the guy on the unicycle,” says Peter Hollens, founder of the University of Oregon’s all-male a cappella group, On the Rocks. It seems like every campus has one.

It was a rough semester for the nascent a cappella group. A couple of girls had quit. Then a few more. Worse, while most a cappella groups were singing contemporary pop music, Divisi was still singing traditionals like “Catch a Falling Star.” Those were the arrangements they could find—easily, and inexpensively. They also wore unfortunate-looking green-and-yellow scarves. In the spring, the ladies traveled to Stanford to watch On the Rocks compete in the regional semifinals of the ICCAs. While the Ivy League schools out east had a long tradition of a cappella, the scene at the University of Oregon was only just beginning, and the girls wanted to show their support for their brother group. But it would be a seminal moment for Divisi.

Seated in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford, the girls caught UC Berkeley’s California Golden Overtones. Most of the all-female groups Evynne had seen before had been a complete mess. For one thing, they showed too much skin. (“If you have to ask,” Evynne says, “you’re showing too much.”) Second, they spent much of their time on stage tucking their hair behind their ears. But the California Golden Overtones, well, they were like nothing Divisi had seen before. They had a
female
beatboxer. They wore neckties. Their hair was pulled back, swept neatly away from their faces. They sang the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” medley from
Moulin Rouge
. It was a wake-up call.

When Divisi returned to campus, they promptly dumped their Beau. Then they picked a new name. Sitting downstairs in their rehearsal space, Room 105 in the music building, Evynne pulled out a music dictionary, flipping through the pages, calling out musical terms. The girls very nearly became the Bel Cantos. But fairly quickly they settled on Divisi, which means “divided” in Italian. They
divide
music into parts, they figured. Evynne looked the room over. Of the original eight ladies, they were down to four. They needed bodies. And they needed a leader. On cue, a few weeks later, a pocket-size girl named Lisa Forkish walked into auditions.

Lisa Forkish wasn’t even in college yet. Actually, she was still finishing up her junior year at South Eugene High School. On a lark, her boyfriend (also a junior) had decided to audition for On the Rocks. He lived locally, and he figured if the guys from OTR liked him enough, maybe they’d figure out a way for a high school kid to join. Lisa had gone along for the ride. It was serendipitous. Divisi happened to be holding auditions down the hall. Like Evynne before her, Lisa sang the national anthem. The girls fell in love with her. Though Lisa was still technically a high school student, that fall she enrolled in a yoga class on campus and became a full-fledged member of Divisi. Her boyfriend, likewise, joined On the Rocks.

The fall of 2002 gave way to the fall of 2003. Lisa Forkish was now a full-time student, very likely the only freshman living in an off-campus apartment with seniors. That year Divisi competed in their first ICCAs. And in short, they had their fishnets handed to them. They sang Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” and quickly learned an unspoken ICCA rule: Don’t perform someone else’s signature song. Especially in competition. “We sang that Alanis song last year,” one of the girls from the USC Sirens said to Lisa after the show. Divisi did win one award that night: Most Testosterone. This was meant to be a compliment. There is a generally acknowledged bias against all-female groups in the a cappella community. People complain they sound shrill. Well, that’s because women are essentially missing an entire half of the keyboard. Men can sing high, floating into their falsetto (think Frankie Valli or Justin Timberlake). But a woman just can’t hit a low D. Actually, if a woman can hit a C below middle C, it’s notable. Two—count ’em, two—of the Divisi girls could comfortably (and consistently) hit that guttural C. Though the girls hadn’t placed in the competition, suddenly everyone was talking about the Divisi sound.

Lisa Forkish relished her time with Divisi, but truth be told, she’d never really wanted to go to the University of Oregon. She always saw herself at the Berklee College of Music in Boston (alums include John Mayer, Gillian Welch, and Branford Marsalis). But when she graduated from high school she wasn’t quite ready to leave Divisi behind. She’d been admitted to Berklee, but she deferred for a year. Now she deferred again. There was something about Divisi. She thought they had a good shot at taking the ICCA title and she wanted to be onstage when they did.