Deer Pants
How the most embarrassing moment of my life showed me my true calling
I’ve got a comedy show coming up in Norman, OK on January 18 with Michael Pasvar headlining and Stephanie Stephens hosting. Michael and I have been planning this for about six months and are really pumped that we secured The Opolis as our venue. I hope anyone in Norman/OKC can make it out.
I should have started my comedy career in Norman. I had always wanted to try stand-up comedy and I was a huge fan of it in high school and college. I won the Funniest Person award at my high school.
College is the time in your life to try new things, to take chances, to fail and laugh it off and try again.
I had a ton of friends who could have come and supported my shows. I had a very active social life that was ripe for creating material. And, since I put off all of my studying and projects until the very last minute, most days I had a good amount of free time to dedicate to writing jokes.
Plus, there was a clear opportunity to try it out with a captive audience of about 300 people: The Sig Ep/Tri Delt Coffee House.
This event was a yearly talent show at a fraternity house that drew people from all over campus to show off their talents. It was a really supportive, fun event that everyone wanted to attend.
Every year I would try to build up the courage to sign up as a stand-up comedian. I would write bits in my head, envision myself telling the jokes, and play through the different scenarios of what would happen if I did well or if I failed. I even tried to recruit a buddy of mine to do a two-man bit with me, both to have someone else involved so we’d have to do it, and to share the embarrassment if we failed.
My senior year, I finally gathered the courage and signed up for the Coffee House.
But not as a comedian…as a singer.
This story, like all life-changing stories, starts with reading the Bible.
One day I was reading Psalm 42:1:
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.
Suddenly I was struck by a revelation that felt divine.
I had found it. My true calling. My purpose. The thing that would make me go down in history.
Deer Pants
The perfect band name.
Immediately I texted my friends Sam and Estevan about my revelation. They agreed that it was perfect. We decided to start a band.
There was one problem.
Actually two.
Well, actually, way more than that.
Only Sam had any experience playing an instrument on stage. Estevan played guitar alone in his room. The only instrument I played was piano and I could only play “Ode to Joy” on it.
But it was my band name, so I had to be in it. I would be the singer.
You may be wondering, “Scott, can you sing? Did you have any experience singing?”
You see, it’s complicated.
I was in an a cappella group in college. That might shock people who didn’t know me then. I was the bass, obviously. The group was led by a guy who is now a world-renowned opera singer. He was in my fraternity and when he decided to start this group he encouraged me to audition. I told him I had no singing experience, but he liked my speaking voice and thought it’d be worth it for me to try it out. In the audition he told me to just sing as low as I could. “Folsom Prison Blues” has never sounded so somber.
I got picked for the group and when I showed up to our first practice I felt like a 7 foot tall kid from Africa who was given a basketball for the first time at age 16. I had no idea what was happening, I didn’t understand any of the terms, and I had trouble figuring out where I was supposed to be in the song. I defaulted to just staying as low as possible. But after a few practices and the patience of the experienced singers, I was able to fit in just fine.
We performed for a couple of years around campus. We were good. Like, really good. Not only did we have this unbelievably talented opera guy but we had 4-5 other dudes who were absolutely incredible. Ladies fawned over us.
And when I say “us” I say that in the same way that Tim Hardaway Jr. says he made the NBA Finals last season. Like, yeah, he was on the roster but if he was in the game it meant the game didn’t matter anymore. The team was all about Luka and Kyrie and the other really good players. No one cared about THJ coming in and making threes when the game was out of hand1.
That’s how I was in the a cappella group. They needed my bass so they nicely tolerated my lack of knowledge of singing, or music, or pitch, or rhythm. I did get one solo: I sang “Kiss the Girl” during our show-stopping Disney medley.
Yes, my only solo was a comedic song sung by a Jamaican crab.
But I was always curious if I was actually a talented singer with no training or if I was just the lowest voice they could find at the time. To once again use basketball terms, was I Hakeem Olajuwon or Hasheem Thabeet?
So in 2013, my senior year, I signed up for voice lessons as an elective course one semester. It was a group class led by a vocal major grad student. The first day we all sang in front of the class and he chose people he thought were good enough to do individual lessons with instead of class lessons. I got picked.
In our one-on-one lessons he said he had some trouble finding pieces that were low enough for me. That’s not bragging by any means. Essentially, my range is so limited that very few pieces have ever been written for someone like me. For some reason he wouldn’t let me sing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”
For my final exam I had to sing a song in front of 4-5 vocal major grad students and the other undergrads. The song I sang was called “Lasciatemi Morire.” I sang it and then one of the voice coaches came up to me in front of everyone and wanted to show me how to get more power out of my singing so she put her fist right under my sternum and asked me to sing again.
Lasciatemi morire is Italian for “let me die.”
There’s not a very big market for a capella adults, so after college I didn’t have anywhere to sing. My first job was a very stuck-up, boring, corporate environment. They were in the middle of doing that thing boring jobs do where they try to inject “culture” into the office by having a birthday celebration in the break room every two days. As the youngest in the office, I was often tasked with starting “Happy Birthday.”
That’s not the easiest song in the world, and it’s especially challenging with my limited range. If I start too low, where I can sound my best, everyone else is going to be messed up…and also sad. So I have to start it much too high for myself.
One time after I led the listless office drones in another round of the song, one of the higher ups at the company smiled at me and said in front of everyone, “Did you know you’re a terrible singer?”
That was 2014. But back in 2013, I was still riding the high of the a cappella success. The crowds going crazy for our group must have gotten to my head. I started to feel like maybe I should get a little shine myself.
Deer Pants was going to be my route to solo singing success. For whatever reason, Sam and Estevan were totally onboard. Sam had a lot of experience playing guitar and leading worship in church, so he would be our coach as we practiced and worked on our craft until we were ready to make our debut.
We’d practice and practice until everything was perfect. Maybe it’d be a year or two before we were ready to play live.
Just kidding. We practiced only one time before we played in front of 300 sorority girls and frat guys.
We signed up for the Coffee House a month before, but it wasn’t until a week before the event that we got together to actually see if we could perform. We settled on “Oklahoma Breakdown” by Mike Hosty as our song. Hosty is a Norman, OK legend and we wanted to pay him his proper respect in the first performance by our soon-to-be legendary band.
Sam would play acoustic guitar and sing harmonies, while Estevan was tasked with playing the electric guitar. The real song utilizes slide guitar heavily, including a slide solo, but Estevan and Sam were able to figure out a way for Estevan to play the solo well enough without a slide.
Estevan’s electric guitar was extremely punk rock. And by punk rock I mean…it was in terrible shape. The input was heavily duct taped, but it always worked with his amp in his room at our apartment.
For my part, the song is pretty easy to sing and Sam and I worked out our harmonies. After one hour of practice, Deer Pants was ready for our debut.
I started dating my wife Sami at the beginning of 2013. The Coffee House was in late February of that year. This was one of the biggest testing moments of our young relationship.
When we showed up to the frat house that night, she was a nervous wreck. Being the idiot that I am, I wasn’t really that worried about anything until I saw her. Suddenly I realized that I, a completely untrained singer, was about to sing in front of hundreds of people with my two buddies who had only practiced together for an hour.
For over an hour we watched as people with actual talent and experience performed for the crowd. Finally, it was our turn.
Estevan plugged the amp into his duct-taped guitar and…nothing happened. The sound guy jumped up to try and fix it. After so much anticipation, I was ready to finally get started and get this song over with. Instead, there I was, standing at a microphone with 300 people looking right at me.
As they were troubleshooting the guitar situation behind me, an innate feeling came over me, “These people need to be entertained.”
I just started riffing at the mic. I told the story of the origin of Deer Pants, setting it up like I was a very spiritual person and then revealing the ridiculous band name. I joked with some people I knew in the crowd. People were laughing and enjoying the delay. It felt great. Maybe I should have done the comedy thing.
“Uh, can you play it on acoustic guitar into this microphone?” the sound tech asked Estevan.
Estevan was nervous and flustered by the situation, so he agreed. But we didn’t have an extra acoustic guitar. Luckily, like 50 people in that room did. So I asked the crowd if we could borrow one and someone quickly volunteered his. We were relieved.
It was brought to the front and Estevan strapped it on. I looked at him and asked if all was good. He strummed it, paused for a second, stuck his bottom lip out a little, furrowed his brow, nodded his head, and gave me a confident thumbs up. Problem solved, time to get started.
What I didn’t know was that the guitar was tuned to Drop D tuning. We needed standard tuning for this song. That would turn out to be the least of our problems.
The first verse and chorus went fine, we got through them and we were rolling. Honestly, I started feeling pretty good about myself. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and any amount of nervous shake voice had gone away. Then it came time for Estevan’s guitar solo.
You know, the one that is supposed to be played with a slide on an electric guitar in standard tuning but he was about to pick on an acoustic guitar in Drop D?
That went as well as you might expect. Here, I’ll type out what it sounded like (you can add in the sound of the wrong tuning yourself).
ding ding ding dingdingdingggg ding ding ding. dingdingdinggggg
I avoided looking at anyone as this solo was happening. I was concentrating on making the finale epic. This was going to be the part people remembered: Sam and I were about to harmonize. My deep bass with his high tenor…woo boy, Sam was single at the time and we were convinced this moment was going to find him his future wife.
The second we started into the final chorus my microphone cut out. It stayed cut for the rest of the chorus. Sam was harmonizing to no one.
Have you ever heard someone harmonizing by themselves?
Me neither, because I was still singing, but the people in that frat house basement heard it and they’ve never been the same.
The microphone came back on just at the end. Finally, mercifully, the first and last performance of Deer Pants was over.
We were relieved, frustrated, and embarrassed.
Yet, people clapped. They complimented us. They laughed about the mishaps. No one told us we sucked. No one made fun of us.
Though, notably, no one told us we should perform again.
When I made my way to Sami, hiding in the back, I complained about the microphone cutting out on the last verse. She said, “Oh, wow I didn’t realize that happened.”
I said, “Wait, why did you think I wasn’t singing in the last chorus?”
“Well, I honestly just thought you got too nervous and stopped singing.”
Lasciatemi morire.
The point of all of this is that I should have tried comedy. It’s something I’m actually good at, it’s way more fun making people laugh than just hoping they’ll be impressed by your musical talent, and you don’t have to rely on anything except a microphone working2. The only part of the whole performance that went was was the time I was at the microphone entertaining people before the song. About ten years later I actually started comedy, but I should have learned my lesson from that performance and started earlier.
So, on January 18 I will be making my Norman, OK comedy debut, 12 years later. It’ll be extremely fun, I know of a bunch of people who have already bought tickets, and I’m really proud of the set that I’ve been working on lately. I think I’m starting to really find my unique voice in comedy.
I hope to see y’all there.
I guess all my a cappella metaphors are basketball related
though, I did a show last month where the sound tech actually forgot to set up a microphone and the first comic had to just come out onstage and talk loudly until he set it up.