Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (9 page)

When a cappella is done right, it can be awe-inspiring. But when it’s done badly, it can make you want to scratch your eyes out. Even if the soloist is phenomenal, it’s really all about blend, not just in the notes but with the vowels. And if the background singing is off, if the chord goes flat, the whole thing is sunk. Which is what’s so incredible about the Hullabahoos tonight. This is the kind of vocal acrobatics that makes one think, How the hell did they just do that? As Patrick sings, one of the B’hoos steps out from the group and quickly—with his hands in midair—pretends to draw a square box behind Patrick. The B’hoos do this often in a concert.
Box
is a slang term for the female anatomy. And this bit of sign language means that whoever is singing right then just did something so spectacular, so worthy of celebrating, that inevitably that night a stranger will offer him, well, her box.

The Hullabahoos close their two-song set with Marc Broussard’s “Home.” It starts with an open fifth chord—another musical cliché, this one courtesy of the Academy Award-winning composer James Horner. “He uses it all the time,” Pete says. “He does it to make a classical piece sound modern. It’s a jazz thing.” And if it’s good enough for
Titanic
, Pete reasons, it’s good enough for the Hullabahoos.

After the show, the boys mingle on the side of the stage, shamelessly flirting with fans. Two freshmen girls corner Patrick. “Are you roommates?” he asks.
“Noooooo,”
one girl says, looking down at her feet awkwardly.

Morgan’s girlfriend, Lindsay Friedman, who transferred to UVA as a sophomore, has a unique perspective on the so-called Hullaba-hos. “I understand the impulse,” she says, “but as a woman it’s hard to see other women throwing themselves at these boys.”

CHAPTER FOUR

DIVISI

It seems hard to believe, considering all that has happened since. But when Adam Farb launched the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella back in 1995 (later the ICCAs), he was worried no one would participate. “Competition just wasn’t in the spirit of collegiate a cappella,” he says. “A cappella was about goofing off.” Farb sang with the Brown Derbies as an undergraduate in the early nineties. He talks about traveling to the Green Eggs and Jam at Washington University, or Smith College’s Winter Weekend—big annual concerts where five or six a cappella groups would perform together. The show was never about one-upsmanship, at least not musically. “You were performing for the girls,” Farb says. “The ones you were hoping to hook up with.”

Competition was, of course, a vital part of a cappella history, notably (if a bit of a non sequitur here) among Zulu tribes in Africa. The men, mostly migrant workers far removed from their families, needed entertainment and camaraderie. And so they’d gather nightly to sing music called
isicathamiya
. In the sixties and seventies, groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo competed regularly in Saturday-night a cappella competitions in Durban and Johannesburg. It was a mash-up of fashion show (with prizes for the best-dressed man and woman) and vocal competition, which ran through the night, often finishing up after sunrise. If the crowd didn’t like the music, well, much like a college crowd at a karaoke bar, they showed their displeasure by noisily drinking through the set.

Farb graduated from Brown in 1994, but he wasn’t ready to let a cappella go. He kept coming back to the idea of an a cappella competition. Competing for women was one thing. But score sheets? It felt so foreign to his drunken memories of the Green Eggs and Jam. Why would anybody want to compete? he wondered. Until he hit upon an idea: If he held the finals at Lincoln Center, the
venue
would be the draw.

“People told me I was nuts,” Farb says. Which didn’t stop him from writing a check for seven thousand dollars to reserve the twenty-seven-hundred-seat Avery Fisher Hall. It would cost thirty-five thousand dollars to produce the finals alone, he figured. Believe it or not, that budget included money to fly in the competing West Coast groups. He’d even include hotel rooms. Farb felt that minimizing (or even eliminating) travel costs was key to the nascent competition’s success. He just didn’t think a college group was going to pay to fly fifteen members out to New York to compete. How very wrong he would turn out to be.

With Lincoln Center booked, Farb hit the road to spread the word. “I remember trudging through the snow at Cornell in February, ” Farb says, “promoting one of the first quarterfinal rounds.” The big-name a cappella groups turned him down. They didn’t have anything to prove. But the younger groups greeted him with open arms. And Farb embraced the adulation. “I was twenty-three years old,” Farb says. “I had long hair. I was like a rock star.”

If the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella was going to stay true to its roots, Farb felt strongly that there be very few rules. These days, each group is allotted exactly twelve minutes onstage. The clock begins, according to the guidebook, from “the first musical idea.” Whatever that means. But that first year was practically anarchy by comparison. “We even let the groups do skits,” Farb says. (These skits actually inspired an ill-fated album,
Wasting Our Parents’ Money: The Best of College A Cappella Humor,
released in October of 1999, featuring tracks like “Taco Bell Canon,” by Michigan’s Amazin’ Blue, and “Walk of Shame,” by Connecticut College’s Williams Street Mix.) The judging itself was similarly lax. Farb and his cofounder, Deke Sharon (more of an idea man in this operation), had similar philosophies on judging a cappella. “Music is so subjective,” Farb says. Whatever system you use, he figured, didn’t really matter as long as the results made sense. As long as the audience didn’t leave thinking, How did
that
group win? And so they kept the process intentionally vague. There were no score sheets, no points for choreography, intonation, or repertoire. The judges just picked the group they liked the best. Even the name for the tournament was a joke. They called it the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, or the NCCAs. "It was a takeoff on the NCAAs,” Deke Sharon says. “We wanted it to be like March Madness. No one cares about college basketball at any other time of the year. But they obsess over March Madness. We wanted that kind of exposure for a cappella.”

The first finals were held in the spring of 1996, and it came down to the UNC Loreleis and the Yale Duke’s Men. (Footnote: Ask a member of the Tufts Beelzebubs why they don’t compete anymore and they’ll tell you it’s because they won the first-ever ICCAs in 1993, but for the record, that was a wholely separate competetion, and even more of a joke.) Farb still remembers the first year of the NCCAs, how Catalina Joos from the Loreleis tore through “Fame.” The Duke’s Men, meanwhile, were more in the Ivy League tradition of close harmony eschewing pop music for barbershop standards. Farb had lined up four judges for Lincoln Center, including Paul Pampinella from the pro a cappella group Vox One. Unfortunately, when it came time to vote, the judges were split down the middle. The Whiffenpoofs performed while the judges deliberated—and the Whiffs were running out of material. But the four were deadlocked. “They would not budge,” Farb says. “We’d never had this problem at the earlier shows, where we had three judges.” It came down to a choice between contemporary a cappella and barbershop, pop versus classic. In the end, Farb would cast the deciding vote—a fact that has remained largely a secret until now. “I never thought we’d have an all-female group win the whole thing,” Farb said. Neither did the Duke’s Men, who were outraged when Farb crowned the UNC Loreleis the first-ever champions of the NCCAs.

Farb sold nearly a thousand tickets that night and just about broke even. More importantly, the NCCAs had momentum. The morning after the show, Farb called Lincoln Center to book the hall for the following spring. No luck. They were booked—solid. But Carnegie Hall
was
available. More than just the venue would change that second year. Farb and the NCCAs had sponsored the first after-party. “I was buying kegs,” Farb says. “But my insurance guy told me I couldn’t do that anymore. There was a lot of liability. I started to realize this was a business.”

By the third year Farb was selling twenty-three hundred tickets to the finals. He’d make upward of thirty thousand dollars off that show. Even the earlier rounds were coming close to selling out, in venues as varied as five hundred seats to two thousand seats. But Farb started to notice something. “The encores were almost always better than the competition sets,” Farb says, “because the groups were relaxed. They got to sing with their hair down. They’d tell jokes. They’d be goofballs. It was much closer to the spirit of a cappella.” Farb never imagined that a collegiate a cappella group would spend an entire semester perfecting three songs. But that’s what happened. For better or worse, Farb says, “the competition had legs.”

It’s worth nothing: No all-female group has won the competition since that first year. Which brings us back to Divisi and the fall of 2006.

That Michaela Cordova worked summers at Urban Outfitters shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. When a girl grows up in Portland reading skateboarding magazines, dying her hair black, and collecting piercings, Urban Outfitters is sort of like the mothership calling its disaffected youth home. Michaela had always known she could sing. She’d gone to private school as a kid, a hippie eat-paste-if-you-got-it institution where students call their teachers by their first names. In kindergarten, Delilah (her teacher) pulled little Michaela aside. “You have the voice of an angel!” she said. Michaela, in her darkest moments (of which there have been many of late), often thinks back to this moment.

The girl was a born performer. There’s a famous Cordova family photo of a three-year-old Michaela playing Snow White. She’d walked into the family room, taken a bite out of an apple, and dramatically dropped to the floor. At age twelve, Michaela cashed her first professional paycheck as an extra on the set of
The Hunted
, a Benicio Del Toro vehicle. Benicio made seven figures; Michaela made twelve fifty an hour. Still, she was hooked. Michaela later starred as Eponine in her high school’s production of
Les Misérables
. (Don’t use the word
amateur
—the school has a revolving set.)

When it came time to apply to college, Michaela chose a handful of music conservatories. But some personal problems— an eating disorder, depression—had over time ravaged her confidence. Her mother had long insisted on a backup plan, which is how Michaela ended up at the University of Oregon.

As fate would have it, Michaela’s onetime
Les Misérables
co-star, Brenton Agena, had gone to Oregon too. While Michaela spent freshman year quietly putting herself back together, Brenton joined the all-male a cappella group On the Rocks. When Michaela finally came up for air, Brenton convinced her to audition for Divisi. And, well, you couldn’t miss her that day in the fall of 2006. For one thing, she rode up to the music building on her skateboard, dressed in pencil-thin jeans and a hoodie. Then there was the copy of
Transworld Skateboarding
magazine she pulled from her bag. “The other girls were wearing skirts,” Michaela says. “I felt like such a douche.” Exactly one girl talked to her that day. “She was like, ‘What are you reading?’ It was nice of her to pretend she was interested.” Michaela had a cold that day. Rather than make excuses—not her style—she auditioned with Fiona Apple’s “Sullen Girl,” which played to her suddenly bluesy pipes. The women of Divisi could look past the lip ring. This girl was too good to pass up.

That very same afternoon, Andrea Welsh showed up at Michaela’s room to take the newest member of Divisi shopping for the group’s uniform—a black tuxedo shirt, black pinstripe pants, signature red tie, and pearl earrings. Andrea talked the whole way. “Are you
excited
?” she said, pausing to take a sip of tea from her silver travel mug. “I hope you are. Because we’re
really
excited to have you. You’re excited, right? I knew you would be!” It wasn’t an act. Andrea Welsh was excited about being a new member herself, having been accepted into Divisi just a few months earlier, in May, at the end of her own freshman year.

Some days, Andrea can’t believe she’s really wearing Divisi’s red necktie, that she’s actually one of the ladies. Women, ladies— call them anything but
girls
. “Girls,” Andrea says, shaking her head. That’s what’s wrong with female a cappella. “That it sounds
girly
. We’re women!” At the Spring Show last year, just a few days after joining Divisi herself, Andrea Welsh sat in the back row of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Eugene alongside the other new girls. The crowd was standing-room only, a testament to both Divisi’s popularity and their poor planning. (The ladies had printed—and sold—more than eight hundred tickets; the church seated far fewer.) Toward the end of the show, the brand-new members of Divisi were invited to join the group onstage for one song. Andrea’s heart was pounding. “You don’t understand,” she says. “When they invited us new girls up, the entire audience turned around to look at us. You could feel the wind!” Together they sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Everyone but Andrea, anyway. “I mouthed the whole thing,” she says. Blame nerves. She couldn’t get a note out. Andrea has since found her place in the group—she’s very quickly become Divisi’s den mother. (She has been known to cut up crudités for short car trips, you know, in case the girls get hungry.) This is as good a time as any to reveal that Andrea Welsh has never once uttered the F-word. Not even to herself. Not even in private. “I just don’t see the point of using that word,” she says matter-of-factly. Andrea will, however, cop to sipping alcohol now and again—though only pink champagne.

If Michaela Cordova and Andrea Welsh seem like polar opposites, well, welcome to the new Divisi.

Though Sarah Klein, one of just two girls who remain of the original Divisi squad, has been running the show for a few months now, she hasn’t yet grown into the role of disciplinarian. (It’s Keeley McCowan—the other vet—who regularly plays bad cop.) Where Lisa Forkish had been definitive and exact, Sarah too often asks the girls what they think. And, so far, they’re taking advantage of her easy-breezy attitude. In October, Divisi was invited to perform in a night of barbershop, a fund-raiser at the Hillsboro Armory outside Portland. It was a two-hour drive (not good), but when the organizers offered to pay Divisi five hundred dollars they consented. The ladies of Divisi were on their own in terms of scheduling. Sarah merely said: “Be at the Armory at seven P.M.”