When Devine, Claypool, and original bass Drew Harrah started OC Times in the spring of 2003, coolness wasn’t their priority. They just wanted to sing with guys their own age. All four were members of the Barbershop Harmony Society, a nationwide organization with almost 30,000 members and an average age in the early 60s. Claypool was intro­ duced to the BHS by his grand­ father, and Devine and York both got interested as teens—Devine because his high­school choir director put together an all­male quartet, and York because he saw a bumper sticker reading WANT TO SING BARBERSHOP? CALL 1-800- 876-SING and followed up on a lark. Being a young barbershop­ per is a little like being a female Trekkie, so when the guys met at a local barbershop meeting, they became fast friends and decided to compete in the next BHS quar­ tet contest. “There wasn’t much planning behind it,” recalls York. “It was like, ‘Let’s put together this quartet of young guys and see where it goes.’ ”

The nascent OC Times decid­ ed to keep things simple by wear­

ing black tuxedos and singing standards like “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair” and “No One Loves You Any Better Than Your M­A­Double­M­Y.” They incor­ porated the vaudevillian hand gestures and mawkish facial ex­ pressions typical of older barber­ shop groups, and although this approach served them relatively well in their first international competition—they finished 18th out of 52 quartets—something felt wrong. “We were doing things the way we had seen other quartets do them,” says Devine. “It just wasn’t working for us.”

In January 2005, when Harrah was replaced by Hunt, then a 20­year­old prodigy from Reno, Nevada, OC Times decided to retool their image. They worked with Mark Hale, a veteran barbershop coach from Long Beach, California, who immediately spotted the group’s problem. “OC Times had been trying to do this boys­ next­door thing,” recalls Hale. “And I thought, here are four good­looking guys. They’re not the boys next door. They’re the boys you screw around with when your parents aren’t looking. Why fight that image? Why not embrace it?”

That spring, under Hale’s guidance, OC Times began their barberpop experiment. Out went the tuxes, in came sleek Italian suits with

open­collar shirts befitting cocktail hour at the Cabana Club. Out went the Stephen Foster bal­ lads, in came country songs, Michael Bublé cov­ ers, and “Grow Old With You,” Adam Sandler’s goofy love song from The Wedding Singer. The sexed­up OC Times began to rise through the barbershop ranks, jumping to fifth place in the 2005 contest. In 2006, they placed third, then second in 2007. Last summer, at the annual International Barbershop Convention held near BHS headquarters in Nashville, they beat out 50 other groups to cement their status as the No. 1 quartet in the world.

Watching OC Times work the crowd at that convention, you’d think you were seeing New Kids on the Block circa 1990. In the lobby of the Nashville Hilton, a gaggle of teen boys clustered around them while barbershop wives approached them for autographs, tittering like schoolgirls. Actual schoolgirls—mainly daughters and grand­ daughters of older singers—wore OC Times tem­ porary tattoos on their cheeks and debated the relative cuteness of each member. During the final round of the three­round contest, one row of the city’s 10,000­seat Sommet Center was occupied by bare­chested fanboys whose painted torsos spelled out I ❤ OC TIMES.

“We worked so hard to win that contest,” says Hunt. “And then to do it? And to have all this fame and excitement on top of it? It’s totally overwhelming.”

“It’s weird, man,” says Claypool, who swapped shifts with a restaurant coworker to attend the competition. “Monday through Fri­ day, we’re regular joes. Then we come to these contests, and all of a sudden we’re kings.”

By any mainstream standard, of course, OC Times are still a minor act. Other than the BHS’s popular annual contest, the group per­ form mostly in high school auditoriums and converted hotel ballrooms for crowds num­ bering in the hundreds. They’ve never been approached about a record deal; they make just enough money from gigs to pay their expenses; and their latest album, 2007’s Let’s Fly, has sold about 10,000 copies. But inside the barbershop bubble, their impact has been inestimable. In their five­year existence, OC Times have been hired for gigs in places as far­flung as Hawaii and Helsinki. They’ve done New York City’s Lin­ coln Center, starred in the soon­to­be­released documentary American Harmony, and been propositioned by real, live backstage Bettys. (York is married, but when I ask the other three whether they’ve indulged, Devine cops to hav­ ing done “a little of that, once upon a time.”)

Barbershop micro­fame aside, the mem­ bers of OC Times are rigorously normal dudes. Devine, Hunt, and Claypool list Jason Mraz, Ben Harper, and Dave Matthews as their favor­ ite musicians; for York, it’s country singers Josh Turner and Carrie Underwood. They play soft­ ball, spend lazy afternoons at the beach, and list Anchorman on their Facebook profiles. And when it comes to barbershop, they tend to keep

their quasi superstardom out of public view.

“I don’t tell everyone I know about the quar­ tet,” says Hunt, who estimates that of his non­ barbershop friends, only half have ever seen him sing. “Most people just don’t understand. Explaining barbershop is more trouble than it’s worth.”

“It’s sort of embarrassing, too,” says Claypool. “Like, I’ll be at work, and one of my coworkers who knows about OC Times will bust out her iPhone to show someone else, and pretty soon, everyone is gathered around her, watching me sing on You Tube and not really knowing what to make of it. So I try to keep the music part of my life pretty quiet.”

“We all do,” muses York. “It’s sort of like that movie about the MIT students who go to Vegas on the weekends. They win all this money by counting cards in blackjack, they get treated like huge high rollers, and then they go back to school on Monday and no one knows about it.”

“It’s not exactly like that,” says Claypool, smiling as he polishes off his beer. “Those guys gambled millions of dollars. We sing in a freak­ ing barbershop quartet.”

 

“GENTLEMEN,
YOU KNOW THE STORY.
As we face a declining
membership, we have two
options. We can keep
doing what we’re doing
and disappear, or
WE CAN CHANGE,

EVOLVE, AND KEEP
OURSELVES ALIVE.”

THE MOOD WAS SULLEN AT THE BARBERSHOP Harmony Society’s annual board meeting, held in a hotel conference room during the Nashville convention. The board had just been presented with a sobering statistic: Today’s BHS member­ ship is down to around 27,000, with a net loss of more than 1,000 members a year. The BHS has been shrinking for a while, but never at such a rapid pace, and to everyone in the room, the obvious mathematical conclusion landed with a thud: If current trends continue, in 15 years, barbershop will be nearly extinct.

Organized barbershop dates back to 1938, when a group of Oklahoma businessmen decided to pay tribute to the Tin Pan Alley songs of their youth—which were often sung in actual barbershops—by forming the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, or SPEBSQSA. (The unwieldy acronym was meant to lam­ poon FDR’s New Deal agencies.) Over the next few decades, barbershop’s popularity surged. The number of singers nationwide swelled to almost 40,000, and SPEBSQSA headquarters

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