Dolly Parton is quoted as having said, “You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap.” That is so “Dolly,” humble and self-deprecating … and funny.
If I could borrow from her insight, I would paraphrase that you’d be surprised how much effort it takes to look effortless or how much agony and angst goes into being funny. Setting out to be a performing Barbershop quartet is, like marriage, an easy commitment to make but a difficult one to keep, and it doesn’t take too long before the sacrifices that are required start to signal that the honeymoon is over.
Four personalities, four families, four jobs, four schedules, four different talents, and four different sets of goals, not to mention four sets of anxieties, four egos, four different health issues, all the permutations of these factors conspire against success as a quartet. That any quartet ever succeeds at performing well is a wonder, just given the difficulty of the craft itself, but if one of them achieves notoriety and comes to be in demand for shows, well that borders on the miraculous. Yet, that’s what happened to the Fun Addicts.
Lest you should be tempted to fall into the trap of thinking “hey, that sounds like fun,” I’d like to tell you about the times we spent off stage, getting ready to perform.
A typical week involved all the demands of being an employee, a husband and a father that other “normal” people experience plus a chorus rehearsal once a week because we were all members of a chapter that had a performing chorus. We came together as a quartet because of being members of that chapter and chorus, so we had an obligation to give back to the organization that spawned us. For our chapter, the meeting was on Monday night and it usually lasted about 3 hours, with a short break somewhere around the middle. During the break, individuals would often get together and woodshed or match up to see if a particular combination of voices could achieve a blend that was pleasing. Around 10:00 or 10:30 p.m., the chapter meeting would end and the “afterglow” would begin. Although afterglows were optional, at least the ones after the chapter meetings, they were a time to unwind with a beer and continue enjoying the fellowship. Sometimes these post-meeting-meetings would break up after midnight, and you’d arrive home pretty exhausted and too often inebriated. So that night was lost to performing your conjugal obligations. Score one for the strains on the husband and wife relationship.
But being a quartet, particularly a good quartet with a large repertoire, took more time than you could snatch for practice at a Monday night chorus rehearsal. You had to meet again on another night of the week so your group could devote some time to learning and perfecting the music that you sang as a quartet. It wasn’t enough to have the chorus numbers as your repertoire, a performing quartet needed its own special repertoire. So in normal times, we would meet on a Thursday night for anywhere from two to four hours to practice, learn and plan our performances. At the end of that time, we were again pooped. Scratch Thursdays for conjugal obligations and score another one for marital strains.
If you successfully navigated these troubled waters and got to be pretty good, you might get lucky and have a performance locally or on another chapter’s annual show. So that meant, you’d have to commit the upcoming weekend to traveling to, performing at the one or two night show, and this time at the obligatory afterglow for the show, which as it turns out required an almost entirely different repertoire. Scratch Friday and Saturday for conjugal obligations and score two more for marital strains. Soon the kids began asking their mother, “Mommy, who is that guy who shows up at our house from time to time.”
But the real Holy Grail for many quartets was to gain national fame by competing in an International contest in the hope of being crowned the International Champion Barbershop Quartet, so you could get more show engagements and achieve more acclaim. In preparation for that opportunity, there were two annual local district competitions. One of them in the Fall chose the chorus (of which we were members of course) that would represent the district in the International Chorus competition, and the other in the Spring chose the quartet that would represent the district in the International Quartet competition. As those competitions got closer, extra practices were often deemed necessary. So a Tuesday or Wednesday might be also committed to additional practices. You got it, scratch Tuesday or Wednesday for conjugal obligations and score another one for marital strain. It’s a wonder that any of us sex-starved quartet members ever managed to maintain our marriages!
The other annual commitment we made, particularly as we prepared for the Spring district contest where a quartet representative would be chosen, was to try to meet with a coach who could help us improve our craft. We would identify someone whose advice we trusted to come in town for a special practice with us for a coaching session. These sessions were often intense rehearsals where the coach would listen and critique our performance and suggest variations that might increase our chances of winning a contest. In fact, during one summer we took a week out of our lives and attended Harmony College near St. Joseph, MO., where we received coaching from the best coaches in the Society. That event did more to help us improve than nearly anything we ever did as a quartet. Yet it was another week out of our family lives and another strike at marital strain.
One final note about what it took off stage to achieve an apparently effortless performance on stage. Repetition. Someone once said to us that you’ll never sing a song well until you are sick of it. And that was true in our experience. My buddy Juan Gutierrez recently commented that the old phrase “practice makes perfect” is only true if you practice right. But that practice makes permanent is without dispute. Learning to practice our songs and routines well was a constant struggle. Repeating sloppy habits over and over only ingrained sloppiness into our repertoire, so recording our practices and listening with a hyper-critical ear to what we were doing became one of the better tools that we ever employed.
You’d think, I guess, from this cataloging of the demands of what it takes to become a good quartet, that it was more trouble than it was worth. Yet the truth is, for me at least, that it was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever been a part of. Somehow amid the effort required, the sometimes frayed nerves with each other’s mistakes or lack of attention to detail, and the occasional conflict with the spouse, the bond that we formed as a group created a fellowship, a brotherhood almost, that is unlike anything else I have ever experienced.
This whole scenario sort of reminds me of that old story about the two guys who wanted to take a cruise, but they wanted to do it on the cheap. So they booked one and found that when they got on board, they were sent below decks and chained to a set of oars. Some guy up front began pounding on a drum and they were expected to row in time with the drum beats. After several hours of this strenuous effort, one of them looked at the other and said, “Do you think we are expected to tip the drummer?” A voice from a few rows ahead of them replied, “We didn’t last year.”
But surely that wasn’t the case. It must have been that they thought we were so entertaining that they didn’t want to compete with us for the audience’s approval after our stellar performance. Surely!