Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin Read Free Book Online

World” instead. Bacow’s assistant didn’t get the joke. Left with little choice, the Bubs went back to the well and sang “Tuftonia’s Day,” the school fight song.
    In the seventies, Peter Gallagher of Fox’s The O.C. was a member of the Beelzebubs, and he looks back on his college days fondly. “The Bubs would have these beer-soaked road trips to Williams College,” he says. “And they’d always start full of expectations. But invariably it would end up with you sitting on the curb with your fifth beer thinking, Maybe we should go to bed. And there’d be ten of us sleeping in some dorm room.” Why weren’t the Bubs more successful with the ladies? “All of the women wanted to be with Harvard men,” Gallagher says, “from the Krokodiloes.” Or maybe it was because the Bubs just weren’t that good back then. Gallagher was a member of what the Bubs refer to as “the shitty Bubs,” or “the Dark Years.” Gallagher is defensive: It was a politically active era, he says, and students had more to think about than a cappella music. Still, the Bubs rebounded nicely. And they’ve since become perhaps the most famous collegiate a cappella group after the Yale Whiffenpoofs. The Bubs also have the distinction of being the only collegiate a cappella group whose music has been played in outer space. A Tufts alum, Rick Hauck, piloted NASA’s STS-7 mission—the seventh flight of the space shuttle—and on June 20, 1983, the Bubs recording of “Tuftonia’s Day” was used as the astronauts’ wake-up call. There was another first on that mission; her name was Sally Ride.
    The Bubs pride themselves on setting the pace of collegiate a cappella. But it wasn’t always expensive recording studios and the like for the men from Tufts. Tracks for the very first Bubs record, Brothers in Song, were laid down in the dining room of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house in 1964. The Bubs recorded standards like Grieg’s “Brothers, Sing On!” “Ride the Chariot,” and “Daddy, Get Your Baby Out of Jail”—most in one take, and the entire album was finished in an afternoon or two. But even then the Bubs were innovators. Dr. Dwight W. Batteau, a professor from the engineering department, recorded Brothers in Song free of charge because he had some new equipment to test out. He’d been working on advancing an experimental method known as binaural recording, which involves, improbably, singing into an actual dummy head with microphones stuck into its ears. The science (hopelessly simplified here) says that the outer and inner ears encode music in three dimensions. A binaural recording is immersive—if played back correctly, it will sound as if, in this case, the Bubs were serenading you. Unfortunately, that effect can’t be reproduced without headphones. And for that reason (and others more complex) binaural recording is rare these days, though there is an underground community of audiophiles who still worship the method. In 2000, Pearl Jam even released an album called Binaural .
    The Bubs have released twenty-three studio albums since their founding (not including live albums) and have sold more than forty thousand copies. (The 2006-2007 Bubs are charged with recording the twenty-fourth.) Their reach is pervasive. Proof: The 1991 Bubs album Foster Street , featuring “Rio” and “Pinball Wizard,” is credited with introducing vocal percussion— the beatbox—to collegiate a cappella. For the record, Long View Farms was not the first high-profile studio they’d recorded in. Foster Street was laid down at RCA Studios in Manhattan in January 1991, where, just down the hall, Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic were recording Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
    There have been times, however, when the Bubs have fallen behind the curve. In 2001, the Bubs released Next . “It was fashionable to be perfect,” Ed Boyer ’04 says. “And Next was not.” There were tuning problems. There were issues with