Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (32 page)

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.”

John Stanzione and a handful of alums like Keith Bachmann, Nic Von Bank, and Russell Bloodworth sit upstairs in the balcony. Later that night, Bachmann, a med student and newly engaged, will admire the so-called Hullaba-hos, and midconversation will be momentarily distracted by the shortness of one girl’s skirt. “I took anatomy,” he’ll say. “And we’re very close to seeing her vagina.” Yes, the after-party would always be a big draw for the alums, but the B’hoos were surprised to see so many alums in attendance that night. Earlier in the year, Morgan Sword had sent a letter to the old guys asking for money. “The money wasn’t for anything in particular,” he says. It was more of a test-run than anything else. Which was good, because the Hullabahoos received exactly one check. The alums may have spurned the group’s request for funds, but they turned out en masse for the show, flying in from all over the country. It wasn’t a big discussion. A few e-mails had gone across the Hullabahoos’ alumni listserv. The alums just realized they hadn’t been back to campus in a while and so they mobilized.

While Morgan Sword, Joe Cassara, and the Hullabahoos stand backstage warming up with “People Get Ready,” a video they recorded (and edited) earlier unspools in the four-hundred-seat auditorium at McLeod Hall. The video was modeled on MTV’s
Jackass
, and the familiar black screen comes up, with simple white lettering that reads: BODY WAXING. The following scene plays out:

“We’re about to go to CVS and see if we can get some stuff to wax our chests,” Joe Cassara says to the camera. Once inside, he find a CVS employee—a woman with a southern accent thick as molasses—stocking the shelves. He interrupts. “My friend and I want to wax an
H
into our chest hair,” he says, lifting up his shirt. At first she ignores him, trying to contain a smile, but when he doesn’t walk away, she relents.

“Probably the easiest thing for you to do would be to use wax strips,” she says. The camera follows her to the appropriate aisle. “
Ah
you
shaw
you
wahnt
to do it?” she asks, sounding like some trailer park Blanche DuBois. He does. And so she removes the strips from the box and walks Joe through the process. “You warm them up between your hands like this,” she says, “and then you peel them apart. Apply ’em and then hold this kind of tight and pull it against the hair.” It’s gonna hurt, she warns.

“Will there be any bleeding?” Joe says.

“No,” she says, slowly, contemplatively, “but I would recommend that you only do it once. Don’t do it over and over and over again.”

The screen goes black. In white lettering, across the screen, it reads: “REMEMBER THAT: Only do it once. Don’t do it over and over and over again.”

The video flashes back to Joe, now standing on campus, a sunny day, with lots of people around him. “I love the Hullabahoos, ” he says to the camera. “That’s why I’m getting an
H
waxed into my chest hair.” With that, he lies down on the grass. An unseen body applies the wax to his chest, presses down on the strips, and yanks. Joe screams. The wax strip has pulled some hair—and skin—off, but there is no discernible
H
.

Off-screen someone shouts, “Do it again! More wax!”

The screen flashes back to the woman at CVS. “Don’t do it over and over and over again,” she says. Each time another attempt is made, and Joe screams, the screen flashes back to CVS, and the crowd applauds even louder. Finally, the screen goes black save for two words: HEY HULLABAHOOS! Upstairs in the balcony John Stanzione laughs.

Humor (in theory, anyway) has always been part of the Hullabahoos’ DNA. “In 1994,” John Stanzione says, “humor is what we were about. Music came second. We’d do a skit every three or four songs.” With so much output, invariably a few skits tanked. It was awkward. The Hullabahoos would stand onstage waiting for applause—applause that wasn’t coming. And so they came up with a solution. At the end of every skit (good or bad) the group would shout,
Hey, Hullabahoos!
“The
Hey
thing was a way to indicate to the audience that the skit was over,” Stanzione says, “and to overcome the deafening silence of tumbleweeds when things went badly.”

Tonight, the video screen disappears and the stage goes dark, with the exception of a single red light overhead. The Hullabahoos appear and Pete blows the pitch. Kyle Mihalcoe comes in first, singing,
“Nomina nomina nomina nomina.”
It builds from there, slowly, with more Hullabahoos coming in on their own parts as
“nomina nomina”
segues into the familiar strains of “One.” Pete wrote a new intro to the song, a gospel-tinged exercise to surprise the crowd and juice the Hullabahoos themselves. And it feels like the Hullabahoos are singing “One” for the first time. But would Brendon hit the harmony?

Patrick Lundquist and Brendon Mason (visibly stiff) stand on opposite sides of the stage as the group moves into the second verse. Brendon holds the mic tight. He isn’t making eye contact with the audience. They walk toward each other.

Patrick:
“Have you come here for forgiveness?”

Brendon echoes on:
“Have you come to raise the dead?”

Together:
“Have you come here to play—Jesus?”

The harmony is pitch-perfect. Brendon’s shoulders relax. He and Patrick keep singing, pausing almost imperceptibly to give each other a knowing smile. And the alumni—not aware of the backstory, most never having heard the Hullabahoos sing the song before—are on their feet. When the applause finally dies down, one of the alums shouts,
“Sing it again!”

It’s Joe Whitney’s turn at the mic. The microwave kid smiles that gawky smile of his and the Hullabahoos sing:
“Bwey-do bwaay-do // bwey-do bwaay do // aaaaaaaaaahhhh.”
The vocal percussion begins like a rocket taking flight,
"ssssssshhhhhhHH-HHHHHHHH. ”

Joe sings:
“It’s morning // And I wake up // The taste of
summer’s sweetness on my mind.”
Alex Chertok, one of the alums up in the balcony, says to no one in particular, “Who is
this
guy?” And just like that, a soloist is born.

The Hullabahoos experiment with something completely different in the second set, pulling three wooden stools from the side of the stage. Brian Duhon sits down and produces a guitar. “What’s that?” someone yells from the balcony. The alumni actually start booing. “Can’t you do that with your voice?” someone shouts.

“It’s my fault,” Pete says to the audience. “I liked it.”

The song is Jason Mraz’s “Sleeping to Dream.” And the worst part is that it’s fantastic. It’s not just that Chris Brown sings the solo with a lush sweetness, or that Pete’s harmony is pretty, or that the group backs them both with the angelic
ooooh
s and
aaah
s of a night around the campfire. Later James Gammon, who is producing their new album, sums it up: “The song inadvertently reminded people how silly a cappella can be. You start to miss the instruments when you hear the guitar.” But only an a cappella purist would care. There’s a rich history of collegiate a cappella groups from the sixties using guitar on folk tunes. Even the Beelzebubs, back in the seventies, used to have a singer-songrwriter on guitar in place of a guest group.

The night’s highlight, it turns out, isn’t about pitch or vocal histrionics, but rather a tradition: the senior solo. It’s not that Morgan Sword, Joe Cassara, or Alan Webb—the graduating seniors—sing all that well (they don’t). It’s the emotional reverence. Watching from the balcony, the alumni are pitched forward in their seats, as if they are holding their breath to see how it will end.

When Morgan—six foot two, quarterback for Hullabahoos B—steps up to the microphone to sing, his voice breaks. Perhaps it’s the alumni presence in the audience. Or the fact that Morgan’s girlfriend will be moving to Ohio in a few weeks to start a career while he goes off to Boston for a consulting gig. Maybe it’s the slowly sinking revelation that this is his final time on this stage.

Earlier that day, the Hullabahoos organized a picnic for the visiting alumni—which they held in a tulip-lined garden behind the Colonnade Club grounds. One of the B’hoos alums came into the garden with his wife and a stroller. “Hey,
fat old guys
!” he yelled out. Another alum, the owner of a Gold’s Gym franchise, showed up with his girlfriend, an equally jacked woman named Diesel. The barbecue had been slow in starting, cute almost. “This is like an eighth-grade dance,” Pete Seibert had said, what with the alums on one side and the undergraduates on the other. Finally, the ice thawed. The undergraduates had realized the essential truth about reunions like this. What these fat old guys wanted more than anything was to meet the young Hullabahoos—to hear their stories, to share their own, to establish the kind of connection that keeps one coming back. And onstage at his own final concert, the revelation hit Morgan like a ton of bricks.

The senior solo was Ben Folds’s “Still Fighting It”—a song about a father and his son, about birth (and death) really. Morgan sings the chorus, his voice cracking, the emotion finally taking hold:
“Everybody knows // It hurts to grow up // And everybody does // So weird to be back here // Let me tell you what // The years go on and we’re still fighting it // We’re still fighting it.”

Upstairs the alumni are quiet. The song could have been written about them, about how it feels to sit in the balcony and not be standing onstage, and how that’s both a relief and curse. It grows deadly quiet. Morgan sings, himself, in a sensitive falsetto:
“You try // and try // And one day // You’ll fly // Away from me. Good morning, son.”

For all the talk of Howard Spector, an hour after Big Spring Sing Thing XIX, there he was standing on the porch of the Hullaba-house sipping a beer. He was joined by his business partner (an Anjelica Huston type) and a handsome young man he referred to as his “assistant.” Howard wasn’t hard to miss. In a sea of khaki shorts and flip-flops, he was a guy in his forties wearing a destroyed cotton blazer with embroidery and contrast stitching. “The Hullabahoos still have it,” he says, smiling.

A few weeks after the show Howard Spector followed through on his promise, inviting the Hullabahoos to perform at the President’s Dinner—a mammoth fund-raiser set for June 13 at the Washington Convention Center. The gig would pay a few thousand dollars, but it wasn’t about the money. This was a warm-up for the Republican National Convention in 2008, Howard said.

The gig was simple enough. The Hullabahoos would sing an eleven-song set after dinner. Howard didn’t ask to see a set list. Just be smart, he said. “I don’t want to hear anyone say ‘The president sucks.’ Or anything about abortion.” He did have one request: He wanted Pete to arrange an invocation. “Something inspirational,” he said. And so Pete arranged a pop version of “Amazing Grace,” weaving in elements of “America the Beautiful. ” The B’hoos had already gone home for the summer, so they’d need to learn the music on their own. Pete recorded “Amazing Grace” on his computer—part by part—and e-mailed the tracks out to the group. And then, just before showtime, Howard had one more request. He asked them to sing the national anthem— alongside country star Jo Dee Messina. “It was probably the most stressful day of my life,” Pete says. There he was, working out the chords with Jo Dee’s keyboard player, teaching the B’hoos on the spot. Pete was starstruck. “Jo Dee Messina was talking to me about what I thought we should do musically,” he says. “Then I tripped over a speaker and she gave me a hug.” Pete needn’t have worried. The national anthem went off without a hitch (Jo Dee Messina blogged about it on her Web site), as did the group’s stand-alone set. Later that night, Matt Mooney made off with a full set of drinking glasses with Bush’s presidential seal—party favors left behind by some of the night’s guests. Pete, meanwhile, reports on the night saying, cryptically, “I made some bad decisions as the group was swarmed by many hot Republican intern girls.”