Envision it: You are working your way through the buffet line at your favorite neighborhood restaurant when suddenly the five guys ahead of you burst into a finger-snapping, doo-wop a cappella over the salad and croutons.
If you are in Antioch, this mellifluous outburst can mean only one thing: The Discords are in the house.
Who ARE these guys?
Artistically, they are one of Lake County’s brightest stars and best-kept secrets, a young and ambitious quintet with clean-cut good looks, goofy humor and a penchant for breaking into song in unlikely places–restaurants, hotel lobbies, shopping malls. It seems that wherever they go, a feel-good tune in crisp, five-part harmony almost always follows. For the uninitiated, the Discords’ brand of music, a cappella, is based on vocal harmony without instrumental accompaniment.
While their fellow Generation Xers are plugged into the angst-ridden musings and high-tech sounds typical of today bands, the Discords are happier when locked into a vocally driven, undulating ’50s beat or mellow ’60s groove.
Their musical repertoire is an eclectic mix of classic oldies such as “In the Still of the Night” and “Love Potion No. 9,” ’70s pop favorites, quirky novelty songs by the Kingston Trio and Weird Al Yankovic, plus their own original material.
Individually, they are Steve Newcomb, 24 (tenor); George Roberts IV, 23 (tenor tone); Rich Meltzer, 22 (counter-tenor); Aaron Bernau, 22 (bass); and Dave Debenham, 21 (baritone).
Together, they are friends and collaborators whose musical union has spanned nearly a decade, resulting in four albums, their own record company, awards in local, state and international talent competitions and salvos of praise wherever they perform.
They cast a wide but discriminating net in and around Lake County in order to attract an audience. They have eschewed bars in favor of what they consider more wholesome performance venues: private corporate events, park district summer concerts and local community festivals such as the Taste of Antioch.
They also are generous to a fault, donating their time, money and talent to area schools, summer music camps and nursing homes. Bottom line: Kids love them and so do their grandmothers.
Despite their success, however, they are not exactly a household name outside of Lake County–yet.
“We’ve been approached by so many people promising to make us stars the next day, and you wonder sometimes if it could happen,” said Bernau, the group’s promotional voice. “There were a few offers that sounded tempting, but the agents wanted some kind of exclusive or ownership in the group, and we’re not ready for that.”
“We’ve talked to experts in the business, and they’ve told us not to go to the big cities looking to get famous,” Newcomb said. “They’ve told us to stay where we are and develop a local following first. We’re famous in our town.”
And they are. Stop by Scotty’s Hot Dog Stand in Round Lake, and their music is being piped through the speakers. Head over to RJ’s Eatery in Lindenhurst, and their CD is playing on the jukebox.
“Their CD has been in our jukebox for about a year, and it really gets a lot of play,” said RJ’s manager Robin Videone, who counts herself among the Discords’ fans.
“I enjoy their music because it’s (like going) back to the past,” said another fan, Jeff Benes, 24, of Antioch. “They rely solely on vocals. It’s a refreshing change from the synthetic music we hear nowadays.”
“There are people who come to every one of our shows,” Newcomb said. “People recognize us in the grocery store, and little kids have our tapes memorized better than we do.”
Because they all agree that fame can be fickle, however, they’re not just waiting to be discovered. Newcomb is married and works as a voice teacher at Lakes Area Music Center in Antioch while studying music education at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha; Bernau is a senior studying business at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.; Meltzer also is married and works for the Antioch Fire Department while studying acoustical design at Chicago’s Columbia College; Debenham is a certified flight instructor majoring in aviation at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks; and Roberts is studying computer science and law enforcement at the College of Lake County in Grayslake.
The seeds for the Discords were sown back in 1988, when Newcomb, Bernau and Debenham were all choir students at Antioch Community High School and the choral director asked them to perform an a cappella Christmas song in the holiday concert.
According to Newcomb, the group’s name was born of irony during a pre-concert rehearsal. “We were trying to hold this chord and it sounded just awful,” he said with a chuckle, “so I yelled out `dischord,’ and we all laughed about it.” The group decided to drop the “h” from the word and the name stuck.
The audience’s response to their initial performance was sensational, Bernau remembered. “They went crazy. They were clapping and screaming for the longest time. That night we knew we had to do something more.”
The three recruited Meltzer, a friend and fellow student who typically worked behind the scenes, and they formed a quartet. They began by singing barbershop music, then gradually introduced doo-wop into the mix. Bernau estimated that the Discords currently have more than 120 songs in their repertoire. “We never know what we’re going to do when we get on stage,” he explained. “Every night is a different show.”
“In Europe, it’s very acceptable for guys to sing in the chorus,” said Antioch High School choral director Keith Cox. “In America, there’s a bit of a stigma, especially at the junior high level when the guys are going through a voice change. People tell them that it’s not masculine to sing.”
But Cox said the Discords have debunked that myth, and contemporary groups such as Boyz II Men have made a cappella music a hot property.
“We see these troubled kids, kids who don’t look like they’d pick up on any kind of choir,” Bernau said. “Then they hear that Aaron and Steve played football and Dave was a wrestler, and they start relating to us.”
Newcomb later met Roberts, a graduate of Wauconda High School, while the two were attending college at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Newcomb heard Roberts sing in church and was impressed with his voice and sight-reading ability.
“I told him about our group and gave him a copy of our tape,” Newcomb said. “He went home and developed a fifth-part harmony. I asked him to sing with us before even asking the rest of the guys, but he fit right in.”
In 1992, the year Roberts joined the Discords, they delivered a first-place performance during the amateur talent competition at the Lake County Fair in Grayslake, then placed third in a similar competition at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield later that year.
As a result of their county fair victory, the five singers were one of 16 acts selected out of 18,000 preliminary entries to compete in 1993’s Youth Talent International, the world’s largest amateur youth talent contest, held in Memphis. The stakes were high as contestants vied for $5,000 in cash and an audition with the entire NBC casting department in Hollywood.
“I know people in show business who would kill for that,” said John W. Lynn, the Lake County Fair’s talent competition director who accompanied the group to Memphis with an entourage of supportive friends, fans and family members.
“They went down there with the most beautiful attitude,” said Lynn, who is also the founder and artistic director of the Kirk Players in Mundelein. “They sang as well as they could, and the crowd loved them. I felt so good for them. As far as the scoring, I’m surprised they didn’t do even better than they did.”
The Discords left Memphis with the third-place, $1,000 cash prize.
When members of the group needed to sharpen their choreography before the competition, they had looked to Pat Jamison, artistic director of the Magic Box Theater Company in Zion.
“I helped them clean it up so it wasn’t overpowering,” said Jamison, a vocal coach whose own resume includes several stints on Broadway. “Their movements are much less stylized now (with more emphasis on music instead of movement), and their intonation is extreme and really wonderful.”
The Discords’ actual song-development process seems at once both tedious and fascinating.
“Whoever plans to sing the lead memorizes the words and melody, then the lead sings the melody over and over again, and we each try to find our own part,” Newcomb said. The group then infuses the song with their own “instrumental” arrangement, adding bass or percussion by vocally duplicating the thumping of a bass guitar or the beating of a drum.
Newcomb, Roberts and Bernau write most of the original songs for the group. “I have the least amount of songs, but mine are the best,” Bernau kidded.
With five very different personalities, putting up with each other’s idiosyncrasies during rehearsals can sometimes be a challenge.
For example, Roberts is always late. Meltzer can’t get out of bed in the morning. Debenham’s generally occurs outside rehearsals: He’s a flirt.
Their differences have never gotten out of hand, thanks in part to the group’s “glue girl.” Newcomb’s wife, Lauren, who just happens to be Bernau’s sister, keeps them organized. She has done their bookings, designed their logo, shot their photographs and lugged their Discords T-shirts, caps and CDs to concerts. In return, the guys like to embarrass her, such as the time they broke out singing at the buffet in a restaurant.
When the Discords first began, she said, she used to book their shows in nursing homes because she wanted to keep them grounded. “I wanted to counterbalance the screaming girls at the high schools. These seniors really enjoyed listening to the guys sing, and it seemed they were happier leaving those shows than the other ones.”
Without a doubt, the Discords’ most dynamic inspirations to date have been Toronto-based a cappella recording artists the Nylons. The group’s signature song, “Kiss Him Goodbye”–remember “Na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na, hey-hey, goodbye”?–became almost as popular as the national anthem at baseball games. When the Nylons performed at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, the Discords stood outside their dressing room window after the show and churned out doo-wop tunes until Nylons member Micah Barnes came out and joined in the singing.
“It was like meeting Elvis,” Bernau said of singing with Barnes, who has since left the Nylons.
Mark Daoust, the Nylons’ road manager, suggested that the Discords continue to diversify in order to keep their music fresh. In his opinion, taking musical risks has been key to the Nylons’ 15-year success. During the last few years, for example, the group has occasionally introduced instrumentation into its music; in the near future, they are scheduled to perform with Canada’s Vancouver Symphony.
“Whether (the Discords) pull it off or not, the fact that they do it puts them over and above others doing the same old thing,” said Sean Bettam, a spokesman for Bat Cave Productions, the Nylons’ management firm.
The Discords did take a risk with their third album, “Harmonology,” which features all-original music.
” It didn’t sell very well, but we were pleased with it,” Bernau said.
Securing radio air play for their type of music is tough, Meltzer said. “We don’t really fit into any format. We’re not rock, we’re not easy listening, we’re oldies but we’re not.”
The Discords hit upon a stroke of luck when they met John Perry, music director at WIIL-FM in Kenosha, while performing at last year’s Taste of Antioch festival. Perry took a copy of their compact disc “Utterly A Cappella” and included it on his Sunday night spot, 95.1 WIIL Rock the Neighborhood, which showcases local talent.
“It’s good music, but I don’t know if it has mainstream appeal,” Perry said. “I think you can appreciate them more when you see them live.”
About 1 1/2 years ago, members of the group pooled their financial resources and formed Diamond Vision Records. “It’s easier as a record company to work with copyrights,” Bernau said. “It also discourages agents who don’t know what they’re doing. Serious investors wouldn’t be intimidated by a label, and 99 percent of the radio stations won’t play you if you don’t have a label.”
Expenses come out of their own pockets, but so far the group said it hasn’t been a problem. Newcomb said they have sold about 4,000 albums total, most of them at concerts. “We’ve broken even and then some,” he said. “We’ve got a lot invested in CDs and tapes, but we’ll sell them off eventually. We give a lot away too.”
Their single biggest investment to date has been $7,000 to cover printing and production costs on their most current CD. “But we’ve been able to manage that,” Bernau said. “We set up four or five shows and got the bulk of it paid for.”
“They’ve been pretty self-supporting,” said Newcomb’s mother, Linda. “The Discords have their own bank account, and we haven’t had to put any money into it. I’m really proud of them.”
Jamison said that if the Discords really want to make it in the music business, they need to “shuck everything they’re doing here” and hit the road singing. “To break into this business, you’ve got to be the opening act in I don’t know how many places in order to get recognized,” she said. “Their dedication to their families and to finishing their educations is a strength, but it’s also the weakness that keeps them from moving ahead in their music.”
The Discords say the opportunity will have to be “really big” to woo them away from their hometown. As for the future, they’re staying realistic.
“I think music will always play a part in all our lives, but we’ll take it day by day,” Bernau said. “It’s always been a dream, but it’s not necessarily our No. 1 dream. We do it for fun. When it isn’t fun anymore, we probably won’t do it.”
