Barbershopping: How I Got Started in Barbershop

Barbershop Life

I could easily blame my friend, colleague and former boss Mike Morgan for getting me into barbershop singing. But actually, my start came earlier than that, when I was a junior at Kahuku High School on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii. Dr. James Smith, father of my good friend Mike (another Mike), rounded up four of us to perform in a high school talent show. It was Mike on bass, Don Carey on lead, and Hekili Oleole singing tenor (his voice hadn't changed yet), and me on baritone. We only learned two songs, and only performed one at the talent show, but the experience left me wanting more. It would be about 10 years before I would get a chance to sing barbershop again.

I can't move on without telling the best story about that first quartet. As far as talent show entries go, it was pretty well received—with the notable exception of the students from Kamehameha High School, a very rich, very snooty private school exclusively for "native" Hawaiians. The song we performed, "My Mustache," was a comedy song arranged by one of Dr. Smith's buddies from grad school in Texas. It talked about a guy trying to grow a mustache (and was made even funnier by the fact that not one of us had a hair on our chinny-chin-chins). By pure coincidence, the song just happened to also be set to the tune of Kamehameha School's alma mater. Needless to say, the Kamehameha students were less than pleased.

Chorusing and Quartetting in Logan

Okay, back to shifting the blame to Mike Morgan. In 1997 or 1998, when we both worked at Sorenson Vision in Logan, Utah, Mike invited me to sing with the Bridgerland chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). I started out singing lead, and enjoyed it a lot. It was great spending an evening a week with a bunch of guys, having good clean fun. I didn't initially join the Society, and started off as a more or less "casual" singer. It was actually a year or so later, when I began quarteting—with Mike (who sings bass), baritone Rich Hutchison, and various other fourths—that I really got hooked on barbershop harmony.

With that first quartet, I sang lead and the tenor part was provided by one of our Sorenson co-workers. He decided almost immediately that tenor wasn't his bag, so we went looking for someone else. We ended up finding a baritone who wanted to sing lead, so I switched to tenor and found I enjoyed it. "Indefinite Article" was never an official Society quartet. We came up with the name after being listed on the program for our first gig as "A Barbershop Quartet." I joked with Mike that it was very telling that they used an indefinite article ("A") rather than a definite article ("The") to describe us. Mike suggested that as our name, and it stuck.

We sang together for roughly six or eight months, then disbanded when our lead moved to Georgia. To replace him, we recruited Luke, who was an intern at Sorenson and full-time student at Utah State University. In spite of not having a whole lot of extra time on his hands, Luke had a beautiful voice and a very good range.

In February, 2001—just a few weeks after we reformed the quartet—Mike, Luke and I were all laid off when Sorenson Vision shut its doors. This was right about the time the original Survivor show was playing out on television, and Mike and I joked about Rich being the "sole survivor." (Rich actually worked for the local newspaper, so I guess he had immunity in the layoffs.) We dubbed the quartet "Voted Off the Island."

Voted Off the Island sang together for a couple of years, and saw its ups and downs. Our biggest problem was Luke's availability. We'd sometimes go a whole month without being able to practice. But when Luke could be with us, we managed to get some good work done. None of us in the quartet had extensive quartet experience, so we kind of felt our way—both in how we sang and what we sang. In the beginning, we did small gigs: church parties, family picnics, county fairs. We delivered singing valentines, and performed the national anthem at the Preston, Idaho, rodeo. We also sang on a couple of Bridgerland chapter concerts.

In the spring of 2002, we decided to go to our first district competition. We traveled as a quartet down to Cedar City, Utah, where the Rocky Mountain district contest was held. Every time we stopped along the way, we sang to someone (usually the prettiest girl we could find). In actual competition, we didn't do quite so well. It turned out that one of the songs we'd chosen, "Since My Canary Died," wasn't "pure barbershop." One of the music judges gave us a zero for that song, which put us almost dead last in the contest. Point taken, lesson learned. It was still a valuable and enjoyable experience.

Our quartet's career peaked in the summer of 2002, when we gave our own concert as part of the Logan Tabernacle's summer concert series. We didn't exactly pack them in, but we felt we did a pretty good show. Soon afterward, Mike and I were laid off again when our new company shut down its marketing department. Just a few weeks later, as Mike and I were in full "job search" mode, VOTI auditioned to sing the national anthem at a Utah Jazz game. After sitting through almost 20 really bad renditions of "The Star Spangled Banner" by Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake wannabes, we did our thing. A couple of weeks later, the Jazz organization called to let us know that we had been assigned a game in December.

In the intervening months, I ended up interviewing for and accepting a job in Farmington, New Mexico. So the Jazz gig would be our last hurrah. To make the gig, I left work and drove all day to Salt Lake City. There, we met at the mall adjacent to Temple Square. We rehearsed a bit, then suited up. Waiting in the tunnel to sing in front of 16,000-some-odd people in the Delta Center, we felt remarkably relaxed. You can view the video from our performance here.

For the record, the New Orleans Hornets beat the Utah Jazz that night, 93-88, mostly because Utah couldn't shut down the Hornets' outside shooters. We felt proud to have been able to contribute to a game during the final season that John Stockton and Karl Malone played for the Jazz.

What's New?

If you don't know me, or don't know me well, you can get a pretty good picture of who I am and what I do from snooping around in this site.

How I pay the bills:
DriveTime
Eclectic Interactive

What I do for fun:
Equinox
Spirit of Phoenix