On the Rocks celebrates 25 years of a cappella ‘brotherhood’

On the Rocks, the University of Oregon male a cappella group, celebrates its 25th anniversary Saturday with a show featuring current and past members — but if a vote of its founding members had gone another way in 1999, the concert could be marking the anniversary of a group called Jell-O Date.

Peter Hollens, one of the group’s co-founders, says it’s true: On the Rocks, which has recorded nine albums, competed in 2010 in NBC’s competition show “The Sing-Off,” and still performs most every Friday on the UO campus, came within a whisker of being dubbed Jell-O Date.

Wiser heads prevailed. The name On the Rocks carried the day, pitched as it was by the group’s other co-founder, Leo DaSilva, who intended it as a shoutout to Straight No Chaser, the male a cappella group founded in the mid-1990s at Indiana University.

Hollens and DaSilva are among the 60 or so On the Rocks alumni returning for Saturday’s show at the Shedd Institute for the Arts. Current members will perform with other incarnations of the group — and all the singers will join together to perform the four songs that have been part of the repertoire of every edition of the group.

Hollens said he and DaSilva united in 1999 at UO over a mutual love of men’s a cappella ensembles, and handpicked four additional singers for the first incarnation of On the Rocks.

The following year, they added another six singers through auditions and On the Rocks really started to take off, raising $35,000 to record the first of its albums and starting to place in competitions like the ones (barely) fictionalized in the movie “Pitch Perfect.”

“You know, we didn’t really know what we were doing until we did it,” Hollens said. “I feel like that entrepreneurial spirit really helped a lot of these kids, myself included, how to be successful in life, because we were living and breathing it.”

Many details of the Saturday show have been shepherded by a current member of the group, Adem Abdulhayoglu, a 22-year-old accounting major at the University of Oregon who also serves as the group’s business manager. 

The music is important, obviously, but both Hollens and Abdulhayoglu emphasized another aspect of On the Rocks that has helped it endure for a quarter-century.

“I think the biggest thing is the brotherhood,” Abdulhayoglu said. “And I think that really shines through even when we’re performing. I think you can really tell that we’re having a good time; it’s like we never have to fake it.”

Abdulhayoglu caught the On the Rocks bug as a high school student at West Linn High School, where the group performed as part of a recruitment tour. 

“For me, joining when the group was already 21 years old, it seemed like such a big legacy,” he said. “It’s just been the passion that all the generations and people who have joined over the years have put into it.”

For the alumni show, Abdulhayoglu had to winnow down the dozens of potential On the Rocks tracks to the 30 or so tunes that will be performed Saturday night. He started by emailing members to ask them to pick their favorites from the albums on which they performed. 

“So we have a couple of songs from each album, and we’re going to do them in chronological order,” he said. The current members of the group will perform those songs with the alumni who first recorded them years ago — “so the alumni don’t have to worry too much about being perfect on their parts.”

Abdulhayoglu said he’s looking forward to hearing On the Rocks songs performed by a larger number of voices than is usual for one of the group’s concerts: “I’m really excited just to be part of that sound.”

And when all the alumni and current members — all 60 or so of them — team up on those four songs they all know, “that’s what I look forward to the most,” Hollens said. “I think that sheer volume and wall of male sound and harmony is such a treat and not something that many people get to experience. And with intention and love and memories behind it, it’s just special. It’s a special moment.”

By the way, here are the four songs: “The Longest Time” and “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel),” both by Billy Joel, “Insomniac,” by Billy Pilgrim and “Brown Eyed Girl,” by Van Morrison. 

If you go 

The On the Rocks 25th Anniversary Show is 7 p.m. Saturday, April 26, in the Jaqua Concert Hall at the Shedd Institute for the Arts, 285 E. Broadway in Eugene. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for students and seniors and can be ordered online at the Shedd’s website.