Rock Bottom headlines Butler County Symphony Orchestra summer concert
The Butler County Symphony Orchestra welcomed local a cappella group Rock Bottom on Friday afternoon, June 30, for the fifth show of its Summer Concert Series.
Visitors to the symphony building were treated to a mix of traditional barbershop standards and decades-old popular music, everything from “God Bless America” to Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.
Rock Bottom formed in 2002 as the Slippery Rock University Barbershop Quartet, originally comprised of music students at SRU. That quartet later evolved into a quintet, and at least 12 different musicians have been part of the band since its formation.
The group consists of Mike Sypien, Jeff Frankenstein, Austin Wolford, Kit Keiper and Bryan Helsel. All five members of the group are music instructors, and except for Helsel, all attended SRU at some point.
“Everybody’s pretty busy with their music-teaching lives,” said Helsel, who is a music instructor at Youngstown State University. “We’re all music teachers, and this is what we do for fun sometimes.”
Wolford, lead/baritone and the youngest of the five, is young enough to have had one of his four bandmates as his choir director at Knoch High School.
