Free Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin Page A

sure Joe was about to blow something up.
    “Oh,” Joe said. “I’m going to cook!”
    With that, Joe Whitney opened up his backpack and pulled out some peanut butter, graham crackers, Marshmallow Fluff, and chocolate bars. He used to make this snack when he was a kid, he told the Hullabahoos. He proceeded to nuke the fluff, which he then spread over the graham crackers. He handed the s’mores out to the Hullabahoos one by one. But he was not done. Just as the B’hoos were finishing up their snack, Joe Whitney removed his sweater to reveal a white T-shirt underneath. In black marker on the T-shirt he’d scrawled the words SECRET INGREDIENT, with a giant arrow pointing down to his crotch. Needless to say he was accepted.
    When the audition week was up, the Hullabahoos took five new guys. Very quickly, four accepted the invitations. Joe Whitney (and his microwave) was the final holdout. He’d been leaning toward the more classic Virginia Gentlemen. What changed his mind? First, the Hullabahoos’ “wall of sound,” he says. Two? “Every girl I asked told me the Hullabahoos were better than the Virginia Gentlemen.” What did the girls say, exactly? “AVP is the group you want to show to your little brother. The Virginia Gentlemen are the group you want to show to your mom. And the Hullabahoos are the group you don’t want to show to your girlfriend.”
    The Hullabahoos are, in many ways, the anti-Beelzebubs. For one thing, they don’t have that kind of discipline—and they wear their laziness as a badge of honor. Their music director, Pete Seibert (a genial kid from West Virginia who recently lost ten pounds by spending money on alcohol rather than food), often ends disagreements in rehearsal by saying, “It’s just a cappella!” Also: They’d sooner disband than do choreography. About the only thing the Bubs and the Hullabahoos would agree on is the foolishness of competing in something like the ICCAs. Which is easy to say when you’ve already got a national reputation.
    The Beelzebubs have nearly five decades of alumni experience to draw on—with alums regularly arranging new music for the group. The Beelzebubs may have an off year now and again (see the mid-seventies, or the early aughts) but what they lack in standout soloists they make up for in energy, sheer force, and dedication. The Hullabahoos, not so much. Their founder, Halsted Sullivan, remembers coming to the Hullabahoos’ fifteenth anniversary show in 2003. “The group was pretty terrible,” he says. It doesn’t help that most of the Hullabahoos don’t read music. In fact, several never sang before college.
    The lax Hullabahoos attitude can come back to bite them. A few years ago, the Hullabahoos were four thousand dollars in the red. They’d recorded an album, Jacked, and were borrowing money from their families to pay the printing costs. “Poor planning,” says Keith Bachmann, who was music director at the time.
    The B’hoos have frequently flirted with insolvency, spending twenty-five thousand dollars on their 2006 album Off the Dock . The album has since sold more than a thousand copies at fifteen dollars apiece—which still leaves them in the red. Worse, the sales are likely illegal. Collegiate groups have only just begun paying royalties for the rights to these songs, figuring the U.S. government won’t crack down on a bunch of college kids. Of late, some production warehouses—the people who actually print these CDs—have started to ask the groups to provide verification that they’ve secured all clearances. (The Harry Fox Agency in New York has carved out a niche securing what’s called mechanical rights for bands—including a cappella groups—so that U2 actually gets a couple of pennies every time someone sells a cover of “With or Without You.”) Not that the Hullabahoos worry much about the IRS, the RIAA, or anyone else. Actually, the only thing they’re worried about is cannibalizing their own sales. They’ve