Monday, October 5, 2009 10:02 PM CDT
Charleston teen screams her way to 'America's Got Talent'
By BONNIE CLARK, Features Writer
bclark@jg-tc.com
Click here to watch Ashley perform on the show.
CHARLESTON — Ashley Catastrophe, her friends call her.
It’s been a fitting nom de guerre for Ashley Groff, 18, who recently made somewhat dubious history as a performer on the NBC reality competition show “America’s Got Talent.”
The Charleston teen can laugh now about how wrong things went for her televised audition performance but, while she had her supporters, at first the negative, rude online comments had her reeling.
“It doesn’t bother me now like it did,” she said. “The bad comments just make me want to show them that I can do it.”
It also hasn’t hurt that radio and magazine interview requests, as well as band offers, have been pouring in since the show aired in July.
She has done interviews on radio stations from New York to Florida to California.
“Two nights after the show, she made ‘Clip of the Week’ on E! (entertainment news television),” said Ashley’s mother, Maria Groff. “They were calling her the ‘tone deaf teenager’.”
Groff got her chance to be on national TV when she found an “America’s Got Talent” bulletin on MySpace asking for people to submit audition videos.
“I made a YouTube video just for the heck of it,” she said. “I’m a death metal vocalist, so I scream and sing. I do other genres, too, like acoustic, but I really like death metal.”
She received an e-mail from the shows casting director saying the producers loved the video and wanted her to be on the show.
“They sent me a whole bunch of interview questions and asked me to send them a list of 10 songs that I wanted to do. I did, but none of the songs got approved, so they ended up picking one for me.”
Contestants have 90 seconds to perform, so an edited version of the song Groff would sing arrived the day before she flew to Los Angeles in March.
Upon her arrival at LAX Airport, Groff took a shuttle to her hotel, where she got a call from the casting director telling her to change into her performance outfit.
Performers were taken to a theater near the NBC Studio.
“There were about 20 of us,” she said. “We were all talking, but they wanted us to look nervous, so they filmed us walking around practicing. It wasn’t really that way.
“I was either number six or nine to be called. When I got backstage to do my interview with Nick Cannon (the show’s host), they hadn’t told me there was going to be an audience of 2,000 people.
“I had never watched ‘America’s Got Talent’,” she said, “and I thought it was going to be like ‘American Idol,’ with just me and the three judges.
“When they called me out to sing, they kind of counted to three and shoved me out on stage.”
Groff said the absence of monitors on stage and a “huge echo from people and the judges talking” contributed to her being unable to hear.
“I was off key when I started singing and I knew it, but I couldn’t get on key because I couldn’t hear myself.”
Her song was “Hate Me,” by Blue October. Not a favorite.
She got her first “X” from judge Piers Morgan. “It was loud and made me jump,” she said.
“On TV they showed Sharon Osborne ‘X-ing’ me, too, but when I was out there I didn’t see that. I think they edited it in later.”
She was allowed to finish her performance, which included a death metal scream. “Not everyone gets to finish,” she said.
“David Hasslehoff really liked the scream,” she said. “He thought it was kind of cool. He called me Linda Blair (of ‘The Exorcist’ film fame). Now I have another nickname, ‘exorcist girl’,” she said.
Groff’s family watched the show when it aired. Groff, remembering how off-key she had been, left the room when she began singing.
“We were mortified at first,” her mother said, “but 30 minutes after the show, she already had 650 messages, and every day there are hundreds more. It’s been a good experience for her.”
Death metal, a sub-genre of heavy metal music, is a good distance from mainstream, employing screaming, growling vocals; loud, distorted guitars; and fast and louder percussion.
A graduate of a Christian high school, Ashley said the school administration was “iffy” about her choice of music, relenting only after a thorough study of the songs she chooses to listen to and sing.
Groff is aware that many people don’t understand the genre or her attraction to it. And, although the term “Christian death metal bands” sounds like an oxymoron, she defends the music. Many people, she said, “just don’t get it.”
The death metal genre is a complicated music style characterized by chromatic chord progressions and sudden key changes.
“There’s a lot of jazz in the style,” Groff said. “It has time signature changes all the time — maybe two or three times in a verse. It’s really complicated and can take years to play well.
“I think there’s a lot of bad in death metal music,” Mrs. Groff said, “but for Ashley, I think it’s more of an instrumental attraction. She loves the music itself.
“I hear the music she listens to, and if I can tolerate it, that’s a pretty good sign.
“If Ashley didn’t have a good head on her shoulders, and a good upbringing, maybe I’d be more concerned, but she has never been in trouble, she doesn’t do drugs, and she graduated with honors. She has plans for her life, and sheknows what kinds of things will mess that up,” Mrs. Groff said.
“America’s Got Talent” brought back 10 acts for the season’s finale two weeks ago. Groff was one.
“We were there for six days and practiced a disco song for two hours every day,” she said. “I never thought I’d be doing disco. But we had so much fun, and we had time to take a Hollywood tour bus and walk around and see things.
“Overall, the whole experience was pretty cool.”
And the nickname Ashley Catastrophe?
Groff’s friends tagged her with the nickname early on, and it had nothing to do with her singing.
“Ashley’s very graceful,” her mother said, straight-faced for only a second.
“She has always been very accident prone, falling up and down school bus steps and tripping over things.
“One day at school, she fell down a couple flights of stairs and had to have her whole body CAT-scanned.”
Groff wants to continue in the music field and hopes to attend Musicians Institute, a contemporary music school in Hollywood next year.
“You can be successful and surprise everyone,” she said. “You never know.”
Contact Bonnie Clark at bclark@jg-tc.com or 238-6847.
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prairieguy wrote on Oct 5, 2009 8:45 AM: