3RDegree
3rdegree is a New Jersey-based prog band, though with members across the country. They blend jazz-pop, hard rock and prog rock in an unusual way.
In this podcast, we chat with band guru Robert Pashman, and hear two tracks from the band.
Ben: This is Ben Sommer from bandslikerush.com. I’m here with Robert Pashman with the band, 3rd Degree. I mix it up because your website address has a lot of those additives “online”. Your band isn’t 3rd Degree Online. It’s 3rd Degree.
Robert: Right.
Ben: I can tell from your bio and profile that you’re a or the lead guy. Honestly, I had trouble figuring out who’s the lead singer, who’s the guitarist. You’re a guitarist, but what’s your role in the band?
Robert: That’s about the only thing I don’t play in guitar. I’m bass. Additional keyboards I would say; mostly synthesizers. The main keys, the main meat and potatoes sort of piano, electric piano and stuff like that is the lead singer, George Dobbs. I was only the lead singer on the very first album in ’93.
We got George for the second album in ’96, then the comeback album in ’08. We’re working on our fourth record right now. The lineup went from a trio to a quartet for the second album.
I’m the holding down the fort, manager sort of dude in the band. But I’m the recording’s packing vocals, bass, and some extra keyboards.
Ben: Cool. Your bio shows a long history. You guys were old high school buds. You started out way back and you’re still together through various iterations, right?
Robert: The drummer I was working with up until just recently I got together with in the middle of my four years of college. Then Pat, the guitarist, who is currently in the band, he’s two years younger and he was just starting college. It was definitely around college, although none of us ever went together to the same school.
Ben: Tell me about some of your musical influences. In the podcast, I always include one or two track so people can judge for themselves. I’ll pick and choose my favorites. I had a few ideas when we exchanged emails first. It sounded like I was kind of on track with the prog and alternative jazz, pop maybe influences. But what you do dig and what do you think you feel or hear in your own music?
Robert: When I started out in the band, it sort of preceded that I took a few songs from to start 3rd Degree with in 1990, the very end of 1990. It was Rush. It was all the usual suspect prog bands. I was maybe at that point just getting into maybe Gentle Giant, finally sort of acquiring that taste of their complexity, which deluded me for a few years prior.
But I was into the normal bands: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson – definitely the 80s King Crimson was something I liked a little better; Red, I would say.
We added Pat. It was 1991. We couldn’t help but be a little bit touched by the whole grunge movement, so a lot of the guitar in our first two records, I would say, was influenced by a lot of what was going on there, like Sound Garden and Pearl Jam; Sound Garden the most because they’re, in a way, prog. They play in odd times signatures. I always found them to be the best of the bunch.
There was a weird juxtaposition of my 80s, digital, synthi hangover into the grunge. We were always big on having a strong hook and some good melodies and lyrics. That’s sort of what the first record was all about.
You had my vocals, which probably didn’t sound like him, but I was very influenced just by the melodic feel that Geddy Lee had. To me, the first record sounded a little bit like Rush meets some of the grunge things that are going on, along with the more synthy side of Rush which they were sort of moving out of at the time as well.
The mid-80s period Rush was a big touchstone for where we were going.
By the second record, I think you had the guitar ticking a little bit more, the keyboards with us being a little more additive. And we had a much, much more soulful lead vocalist on our second album, a very strong soulfully vocalist that even muddied the waters even more. He didn’t write that much on that album, so just his vocals you get that soulful, Stevie Wonder, 70s, Steely Dan kind of thing coming in.
But I think with our album that came out two years ago, a lot of those songs started right at the tail end before we broke up in ’97. A lot of that you hear a lot more because George wrote a lot more of that stuff, so you hear more of where he’s coming from with the songwriting, a lot of those people he might sound like when he sings.
That’s where we start sounding even less like Rush and people say sort of a west coast sound, like a slick – Ambrosia is a good thing to think about because they were a prog band that was west coast. But they were slick as any Super Tramp album. A lot of that sort of stuff.
Then in the 90s, beyond grunge, we were picking up a lot of the retro guys like Jellyfish and Jason Faulkner and a few of those bands that were out in the mid-90s.
Ben: You have more exposure to more prog than I do probably, because when you talk about west coast-produced prog which you’re probably right, although since Steely Dan is closest to me, when I hear these odd and abrupt harmonic changes particularly, I don’t usually associate that kind of thing with too much prog and more complex harmonies, and a little bit of the funky soulful almost jazz vocal turns sometimes. That’s what I was hearing. The stuff that’s on your website is the most current stuff.
Robert: I’m forgetting a very big influence. King’s X. In King’s X, you have the soulfulest guy in the world singing on top of the heavy metal band that’s tight as can be. Beyond one or two albums, they didn’t really go with the song lengths too far past the four or five minute mark.
That’s one of the only things I don’t think we’ve done. We haven’t really gone past six minutes, but with our new album, I think we’re going to get beyond seven with maybe four songs. We’re definitely stretching more out because we know where our audience is now.
Ben: Where is your audience? What do you mean?
Robert: We’ve made in roads, let’s just say, in the online prog community that resides on a few different websites, the different websites that review different bands that are still out there doing prog. There’s symphonic prog, there’s eclectic prog, there are all different branches of prog and there’s festivals. We’re down to about four festivals that are yearly festivals around mostly Europe and the U.S.
Ben: That’s interesting. I heard the same story from this other band I interviewed, Mars Hollow.
Robert: Oh yeah, they’re cool.
Ben: They’re playing the festival circuit all the time.
Robert: They got two festivals this year.
Ben: So you know about them?
Robert: Yeah, they got on Prog Day which we were on a year earlier in ’09. Then they got ROSFest, which is a little better. Probably the second-most attended festival.
Ben: Was this the one in Mexico?
Robert: Oh, that’s right. They did that one. I don’t even count that one. Yeah, then three. But ROSFest is the one in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The big one NEARfest in Bethlehem every June. That’s a tough one to get into. It’s not even being a good band. It’s very international. So if there are eight bands, maybe two of them are American. They like to mix it up, and everybody really appreciates that. They’ll have one sort of prog band at 11:00 a.m. and then after lunch, they’ll have some other Zappa-like band. They really mix it up.
It’s all up to the people who run the festival. It’s their money on the line and they can choose who they want. We were kind of surprised when Prog Day called us. We definitely gave them our stuff. We give all the festivals our stuff and say, “Hope you like it.”
I hadn’t known anybody personally from just meeting people from that festival at all. I didn’t really know anybody, telling them about us or anything. Lo and behold, they called us and said, “Come play Labor Day weekend.”
Ben: You described you’re carving out a bit of a niche, engaging fans in that niche. You’re touring. Are you guys making a living at this?
Robert: No.
Ben: Do you want to? Is that your objective?
Robert: No, not at this point. I think in the 90s, and it might have been what broke us up, that might have been the goal then, to “make it.” We were just getting so hard on ourselves that, at some point, we just broke up. It was too much weight on our shoulders that was put upon ourselves.
And it was pre-Internet. We broke up in ’97 right when people started getting email addresses and getting much more web savvy. It was really hard. Even though we’re right outside Manhattan, it is very hard to find the people who would like us. We were just throwing shots in the dark playing in New York City, New Jersey. We went all over. Not as much as do now, but we went all over the place trying to just play places, but we weren’t finding anybody.
Ben: This is what I hear from people. Online, there are so many tools and ways to locate and pinpoint where your fans are. Do you just go where the fans are now to play?
Robert: Yeah. If somebody buys something from me and I have to send them something, I make a note of their address and they join the mailing list. I can tell that way. Facebook is really great. You could send out an announcement on Facebook to just people in certain states. You don’t want to have to bother everybody about a certain show that nobody is going to go to because it’s too far away. So you could do things like that. ReverbNation.com is really good about that. Those are some of the best sites.
We just played up in Connecticut. It was a two and a half hour drive north. We played down just south of D.C. Those are the two shows we did this year. The Connecticut one was a little less attended because we had to do an early show on that. They stuck us between two bands from around D.C. It was 8:00 p.m. show and we went on at 9:30 in between two bands in the area. We drew pretty well. It just so happens a lot of the people that like prog, there seemed to be in the corridor, the BosNYWash corridor – Boston/New York/Washington.
Then of course Prog Day is down in North Carolina. Even if you stretch it that far, it’s still all within a reasonable driving distance. If you know you can play it, 100 people, they’re prone to like prog in general, then you’re at a pretty good starting point. That was not happening in the 90s.
Ben: It just wasn’t happening or no way to find out about it.
Robert: There were festivals that started up in the mid 90s. There was Progression Magazine. There was another one; I forget. Some in New York. There were magazines, physical magazines, that would come out bi-yearly. We would actually send them our stuff, but it just wasn’t as many websites and as many people.
I think a lot of people lost track and thought that there wasn’t much going on. A lot of people now that are into prog, they’ll have stories where they’re like, “Oh, in 2000, I got on the net more, I got a computer. I just found out all these bands were still doing things in the 90s from the 80s.”
Echolyn was the big band. In ’95 they got signed to Sony and we were all thinking that was a very cool thing that happened. That didn’t work out too well, but a lot of people know who they are, so they got a pretty big profile. Discipline was a big American prog band in the 90s out of Detroit.
But I don’t remember a whole lot about the bands out there. We were doing it too, to a lot less success than the two bands I just mentioned, but they’re sort of peers and they’re of similar ages; those two bands.
Then I guess Spock’s Beard came in the late 90s. By that point, I think people were on the Net and just able to find what they liked, basically.
Ben: True. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s the way things are shaped up now with technology, and able to find fans even if you’re in this obscure, largely-ignored niche, it’s a great time to be doing what we’re doing. Don’t you think?
Robert: Yeah, definitely.
Ben: This has been great talking to you. Do you have any events? I know you had a release a couple of years ago. Anything coming up you want to advertise, or at least just plug your website even? Go right ahead.
Robert: The website is 3rdegree. No double D’s. 3rdegreeonline.com. From there, you can connect all the other sites where you can friend us, follow us, etc. The new album is about two years old now. It’s called Narrow Caster. We’re working on the follow up.
We’re debating over releasing songs one by one as we finish them, rather than a whole record, although those songs could end up on our proper CD at some point. We’re just debating that whole thing.
It’s kind of weird. I think that most of the people that are into us would see a download and be like, “I’ll just wait and get the whole album.”
Ben: Interesting. I can give you some insight. I did the same. Well, I’ve never released an album, but I just did it dribs and drabs, a track every month or so. Then just this weekend, I’m going to finally publish the CD and make the whole thing available for paid download.
Who knows what it would be like if I had a following to start with like you do. It’s definitely worth experimenting with. It keeps the trail warm, versus it’s hot for a little while, then it’s cold for a long time.
Robert: It’s debatable. We’re going to be on a Yes! Tribute CD out of Italy early next year. Those are little things. Not a whole lot of people are privy to them.
You’ve got to figure out what’s worth your time to do. A band like us, we’re busy. It takes us so long to do stuff because we’re scattered around the country. Our guitarist is in L.A. We just work slowly because of real-life events. We really got to think is it worth to spend a few months recording a cover song for a tribute album. Will the exposure from that be worth it or should we get our own album done three months earlier?
It’s weird tradeoffs you’ve got to think about. With a few of the things we’ve done lately, we’ve got to push back this new album. It’s really something we need to focus in on.
Ben: I wish you luck, man. Thanks for again for talking. This has been great.
Robert: Same here.
Posted in Interviews | No Comments »