It is difficult to tell where Fred Stevens ends and the broccoli begins.
Stevens is a member of the second best barbershop chorus in the world, the Toronto Northern Lights. And while that’s quite the honour, Stevens and his harmonizing brethren want to be number one.
So all 72 chorus members are transforming into singing vegetables.
Stevens can’t fit the broccoli top in his car, so someone else drives it to rehearsal. He is busy — a nuclear operations specialist during the week, a paramedic on weekends, a guy who secretly rehearses at his Courtice home, where he looks into the mirror and sees a tragic vegetable staring back.
“Typically nobody eats their broccoli; nobody really likes broccoli,” the 53-year-old says. “If you’re ignored as a child, when you grow up, you become withdrawn and sad, everyone’s against you, and that’s how you portray yourself … My whole body language, I’m thinking about this all the time.”
“It’s quite an emotional burden, everyone treats him like a stalker,” a chorus member chimes in at rehearsal, with the exaggerated wink of a vaudeville performer cryogenically frozen in 1920.
The Toronto Northern Lights are so committed to method singing they panhandled before their acclaimed performance of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” — the silver medal winner in Nashville in 2001.
As melodious fellows from around the world arrive in Toronto for the Barbershop Harmony Society International Convention this week, they will wage very polite vocal warfare on the ACC stage, each aiming to impress the judges in three categories: music, presentation and singing.
The accountants, construction workers and IT guys in the Toronto chorus approach their quest with surgical precision. They spend hours rehearsing, debating just how dismissive their faces should be when acknowledging the lettuce.
“I thought we were sizing them up,” one man says on a Monday night rehearsal.
“You’re sizing them up, but you’re pretty darn sure they’re going to be terrible,” says Pat Brown, a presentation coach with a beet around his midsection.
There are teenagers and retired guys standing on the risers: the youngest is 18, the oldest is 74. Many are from the GTA, some come from as far away from Detroit and Buffalo.
Men who willingly transform into corncobs to sing ballads seems the stuff of a Christopher Guest mockumentary. But beneath their leafy exteriors, there is fraternity, soulfulness and joy. These men have laughed together over carefully planned hijinks, they have sung tearful songs at the funerals of fallen brothers. Because if you live barbershop, you die barbershop. The in-between parts are good clean fun. A little corny, but that’s the idea.
In barbershop singing, there are no instruments, only human voices to sing four-part harmony — the lead sings the melody, the tenor rises above, the bass fills out the low notes, and the baritone gets the leftovers.
When all four parts sync perfectly in certain chords, it’s like the internal mechanism of a combination lock clicks into place, creating a high note that “blisters above,” a note nobody is singing, explains chorus member Darryl Marchant. It is described as the “fifth voice,” a “ringing chord” or “expanded sound.”
“That chord is what the guys get hooked on. When you sing it in tune and hear the overtones it produces, that’s what you fall in love with,” he says. “Some people call it ‘angels that appear in the sound.’”
The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America was formed in 1938 by a group of Oklahoma men concerned that barbershop was falling out of favour, when the rise of radio popularized a different style of music.
“In this age of Dictators and Government control of everything, about the only privilege guaranteed by the Bill of Rights not in some way supervised and directed, is the art of Barber Shop Quartet singing,” the tongue in cheek missive reads in part, inviting a group of 14 men to come to a room at nearby hotel away from the “vulgar public.”
In 1941, a code of ethics set the tone. It is a ten commandments style proclamation that religion, politics and other controversial issues have no home in society affairs, that only “congenial men of good character” are acceptable, and that barbershoppers shall “refrain from forcing our songs on unsympathetic ears.”
Wardrobe malfunctions are scandalous. The men of Northern Lights wear sweat-wicking tights under their costumes. The tomato costume, well, it “ends a little early,” bass Jonathan Foster explains.
“Someone got a zero once,” he says.
Even their pranks are planned in good taste, like the time they kidnapped a rival director at an international convention.
“It was around the time of September 11, so we were very careful to make sure the water guns were brightly coloured,” choir director Steve Armstrong says.
Barbershop’s squeaky clean image makes it easy to lampoon. The latest salvo is on late night: Jimmy Fallon and his band of “Ragtime Gals” smile sweetly as they sing reggae songs, like Shaggy’s “It wasn’t me” in four part harmony.
Some barbershoppers find it funny, others lament the stereotypical image of striped suits and straw hats. They are understandably protective of their world.
Barbershop standards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: like “Hello my Baby,” “Sleepy Time Gal,” and “Coney Island Baby” are still popular, especially among traditionalists, who are called “kibbers” (an acronym for keep it barbershop).
“Some groups will do what we call ‘edgy,’ and it’s not anything you’d call edgy in the real word,” say Northern Lights member David McEachern.
Last year, the current champion quartet “made a splash” with a Beatles set which was “far out there” for some, explains Brian Lynch, Barbershop Harmony Society spokesman. It’s not so much the decade of music that’s important, but the adaptability. A melody has to be strong enough to “hang chords on.” It also has to be free from innuendo.
At his first barbershop chorus meeting at an East York Club in 1989, John Mallett noticed some of the men hugging at the break.
“I thought, ‘Have I stumbled into some kind of cult or quasi religious thing?” the accountant from Scarborough asks. “It gave me pause. They were so unbelievably friendly I just got swallowed up in it.”
In a world where nothing is sacred, some find it hokey.
“I think it’s charming,” David McEachern says.
Living and dying for harmony
McEachern is an unmistakable bass, with community theatre roots. He’s a presentation coach and six-foot-four sunflower in the chorus, and he’s at Wild Wing at Yonge and Finch with a few other guys for weekly beers and wings.
There is a mix of city and country, white and blue collars. The carrot from Cambridge has an easygoing inflection in his voice. When asked if he travels for his job, he says he “puts on a couple clicks.” The orange pepper from the Danforth has a 15-month-old daughter; he brings out his BlackBerry to show her off.
The average age of this chorus is somewhere in the 40s.
The chorus was younger back in 1998. That first year, they were having a lot of fun. They had just won a gold medal at a provincial competition: nobody was contemplating losing a member. Pete Hamlin, from London, was only in his 30s when he passed away from diabetes complications. He was buried in his chorus uniform, wearing the gold medal for eternity. The chorus sang “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring” at his funeral.
Brian Etmanski, a “heart and soul” guy from North Bay — the type to always crack wise at rehearsal, died in 2010, only 54. Almost all of the chorus members drove to North Bay for the funeral to sing his favourite song: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Mallett says, taking a break from fixing his onion costume, sticking an invisible dagger into his heart.
Mallett, who works as an accountant, had been taking a few years off at the time. He decided he needed to come back.
He is the group’s parody lyricist.
Comedy and needlework
Barbershop is a world built on the reveal, and “Taking carrot business” is the only punchline from the Weird Al-style medley that the chorus agreed to disclose prior to competition.
The song has been in the works for two years, and was originally about a meat and veggie stew with nationalistic tendencies. But simple works best.
“As much as I want to write something that’s like an episode of Frasier, it turns into America’s Funniest Home Videos,” he says.
The final concept, rewritten with some outside help, is a group of vegetables who fight all the time, and don’t trust each other because of their differences.
When the group went online to investigate costumes, they discovered adult carrot and pepper suits went for $800 a man.
On a recent Saturday, the costumes are still being perfected by a contingent of wives who have learned to spot corn silk in dollar-store hair extensions, sculpt lettuce out of thick fabric, and make broccoli florets with caulking. They are masters of turning household objects into legumes, buttressed by a local theatre group and a never-ending supply of hula hoops, thanks to the Marchants, who own a sporting goods store.
Judy Alexander volunteered to make her husband’s corn costume. The chorus liked it so much they asked her to do a few more.
“Then they changed my husband from corn to lettuce,” she laments.
A long history
The barbershop quartet is the most competitive division at international. This year, around 50 quartets — such as the Hot Air Buffoons, Velvet Hammer and Lemon Squeezy, are competing. Like any sport, they have qualified through districts, or won a wild-card spot. The acclaimed Musical Island Boys are coming all the way from New Zealand.
In 1953, the barbershop society held its first chorus competition. Since then, there have been well-known dynasties — like Vocal Majority out of Dallas — who have dominated. But dynasties are cyclical: once you win gold, you have to take two years off.
When Northern Lights first appeared on the scene, it was smaller than most groups — with 40 or 50 men. They have never won gold, but have many silver medals and a reputation for theatrics.
“The entire barbershop audience knows to expect something special, something big, something untried. It’s electric when the audience knows they’re coming on,” Lynch says.
Some choruses are just for fun, like house league baseball. The Northern Lights are like a competitive AA hockey team. About 100 guys haven’t made the cut. Broccoli Fred Stevens got in on his second attempt.
Attendance at rehearsal is more or less mandatory, and members drive from Detroit and Buffalo every week. Aside from knowing how to collectively pronounce certain vowels and sing certain words (singlish differs from English) you have to know where to stand, how to move, how to feel.
On a well-earned break at rehearsal, associate director Jordan Travis is sweating in his tomato costume, a potato is scrolling his smartphone, and an unidentified corncob sneezes.
The lights are dimmed. Armstrong announces that rival Westminster Chorus — a good-natured group of young guys from California — has produced a video that has started some “chatter” in the barbershop world. (Anything new tends to do that.)
Westminster is ranked number one in the world. Most of the guys are in their 20s. They won gold in 2007 and 2010. After a mandatory hiatus, they are back, a dormant plant ready to bloom gold.
As the Toronto crew sits in silence, they take in the glossy video, sort of an American Idol preview, of Westminster’s song choice. The chorus director, Justin Miller, explains that “Soliloquy,” from the musical Carousel, is about a man preparing to become a father.
“One day I turned around and realized that we have eight dads in the active chorus,” Miller says in the video, sitting on a sunny porch. He notes that the chorus is changing.
“You can see it in their eyes,” he says as chorus sings.
At the end of the video, one man holds up a sonogram photo.
“Your mom and I have been getting really excited. We can’t wait to meet you, this song is for you,” he says.
As the video ends, Armstrong smiles slyly.
“When somebody does a thing like that, we consider it a gift … so, inspired by that, we have another video to show you.”
It’s a surprise to most of the chorus guys — a bit of locker room motivation — but over the past few weeks, Mallett wrote a nearly identical heartfelt script about vegetables. Darryl Marchant bought a green screen and performed painstaking graphic magic on his computer to mimic Westminster’s porch.
The room erupts in laughter as a frame-for-frame parody plays.
“So generally, when someone thinks about the Toronto Northern Lights, they don’t think about a vegetable garden. I wondered, could a bunch of Canadians really pull this off?” Armstrong says earnestly in his ladybug costume. “And one day I turned around and realized, we have eight Americans in the active chorus.”
He talks about how the guys have changed emotionally.
“You can see it in their eyes,” he continues, as a corncob examines a jar of corn relish with horror.
McEachern, dressed as a sunflower, holds up a packet of sunflower seeds to the camera, and smiles a goofy grin. “This is gonna be so great. We can’t wait to meet you,” he says.
Barbershop is a small world. Armstrong emailed California to let them know it was coming.
“I just thought it was hilarious,” Westminster director Justin Miller says. “We created this video trying to be heartfelt, as soon as we saw their video, you kind of look back and see the absurdity of it all ... with the history of our two choruses, they would be the ones to do that.”
Everett Nau, a presentation judge who goes back to the days “when the Big Chicken Chorus out of Marietta, Georgia, would literally find out what other choruses were doing with their presentations and mock them with the own (performance),” calls the videos a healthy step for barbershop.
“If we’re moving more and more into the world of entertainment, it builds interest in the audience, it builds attendance,” he says from Iowa.
There are currently 24,000 barbershoppers in the U.S. and Canada, spread over 17 districts, like Sunshine, Johnny Appleseed, and the more traditionally named Ontario. The average age is 64.
More traditional members (the kibbers, if you’ll recall) might not like previews because it “might offend a sense of what is proper,” but those beliefs are rooted in a “society that’s long gone,” he says.
“It’s not 1938 anymore … hopefully we’re going to be able to be attractive to the younger men, and middle-aged men, and drive away some of the stereotypical images … we’re not limited to straw hats, canes and moustaches.”
This year’s fight is expected to be Westminster versus Toronto, with choruses from Virginia and Denver said to be strong contenders. This coming week, local hotels will radiate harmony as men and vegetable men sing the classics and rehearse songs in ballrooms.
Armstrong says his favourite song of all the lot is “Circle of Life,” the Lion King medley about intertwining lives. When he directs the chorus in that number, he makes eye contact with each guy for a few seconds, and reflects on the journey.
“Sometimes I’ll look at a guy and he’ll just start to well up with tears. We’ve shared so much over the years.”
For information about tickets and scheduling visit www.barbershopconvention.com
Reported by Toronto Star 4 hours ago.