Up, Up And Away by The Fifth Dimension

Stories about those moments in college that you will never forget seem to be part of college experience for almost everybody. These are the moments outside of class doing things that can only be understood with “college logic” that define not only the college experience but who we are as people.

That may be laying it on a bit thick, because if that’s the case than The Fifth Dimension, an adult contemporary group from the late 1960s helped defined who I am. Now that’s a scary thought.

On December 2nd, of my Junior year in college a group of my fraternity brother and I performed “Up, Up And Away” by the Fifth Dimension (complete with choreography) in front of a full audience in Lutkin Hall at Northwestern University.

During college, I was a member of the Iota Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a music themed fraternity. We did similar activities to other fraternities but we also had a men’s choir, various other musical ensembles and put on recitals once a quarter. Many of us were good friends with the Beta Chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota (my wife was a member), which was a music fraternity for woman. They had a choir as well and other musical groups. Socially and professionally, the two organizations supported each other, going to each other’s events and having joint recitals and other events.

So when we found an men's choir arrangement of “Up, Up And Away” in a library sale, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do a parody of Sigma Alpha Iota’s a capella group, Ladies In Red. In that moment the group Men In Black was born.

Where Ladies In Red, worked hard to do legitimate a capella arrangements of current pop songs, we were working off a four part arrangement of a song that perfectly combined the watered down musicality of adult contemporary music with the bland non-offensive sound of easy listening. “Up, Up And Away” was an enormously popular song which won four Grammy’s including record and song of the year. This song clearly deserved it winning over other songs that came out in 1967 like “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix and “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones. Oh, Grammy's does your irrelevance ever fail to surprise us?

We enlisted the help of a couple more fraternity brothers and began rehearsing. This was not the easiest song to sing. Between the four key changes and thick harmonies there was quite a bit of work to do. Even though, as one of my friends put it, “the Eagles were more black than the Fifth Dimension,” they sang with a beautiful blend of and great harmonies.

Now you remember that I mentioned that the audience was full when were performed “Up, Up And Away?” That wasn’t the norm for our recitals. Usually the audience of Phi Mu Alpha recitals was primarily made up from woman from Sigma Alpha Iota. We were trying to figure out ways to get a bigger audience so we made a deal with the Northwestern School Of Music. We would promote their series of chamber music concerts and have two of the School Of Music chamber groups perform in our recital and the School Of Music would list us as part of their chamber music series.

Back then, there was a requirement that School Of Music, that all students had to go to certain number of performances as part of their grade. Towards the end of the quarter students would realize that they haven’t been to enough concerts and this joint venture between the School Of Music and Phi Mu Alpha was one of the last music concerts of that quarter.

It would have been one thing if we performed “Up, Up And Away” in front of friends but the fact that we did it in front of music majors was something different altogether. We performed right after a Beethoven string quartet and I remember right before starting the song, looking out at this audience thinking what a horrible idea this was, but once we started it was a blast and believe it or not the audience loved it.

Men In Black performed a couple more times, but nothing matched the magic of our first performance. There was something so spur of the moment and exciting about doing something fun for no other reasons but to be silly. Music can do a lot of things and “Up, Up And Away” helped me take myself less seriously as a “Music Major” and realize that sometimes the music itself isn’t the most important thing but it is the experience that you share with friends that is most meaningful.

On second thought, I think I would be up for performing this "Up, Up And Away" again, but only with the Men In Black.