Vegas Archive – 3rd Man In – Discography 1998-2001

Jan 6, 2014 Posted by Guest In Vegas Archive Tagged 3rd man in Comments 3

Click here to download When Balloon Animals Attack

Click here to download Forget What You Know

[ezcol_2third]Welcome to Vegas Archive, a feature where we re-release music from local bands that are gone, but certainly not forgotten.

Today we’re bringing you ‘When Balloon Animals Attack’ and ‘Forget What You Know’ from local punk rock band 3rd Man In, who were active from 1998 to 2001.

For more information about the band and these records, read the commentary from 3rd Man In guitarist Mark Grothman.

I don’t have the greatest memory so I’ll do my best at recalling everything important.

The true beginning of the band began with Mike Reilly getting his first drum set for Christmas back in ’98.

Mike was friends with Dave Hardy through school and Mike and Dave would just mess around with Dave playing Mike’s little brother’s guitar which I had just recently started showing Dave how to play. Then Dave, who had been a close friend of mine since I met him through hockey a few years back had asked me to come over and play with them just for fun. Mike had just got his drums, Dave had been only learning the guitar for a couple months and I had started playing the guitar only the summer previous so you can imagine how everything went in Mike’s garage back in early February of ’99. We started to get a little more serious about actually trying this whole “band” thing out. Our first try at a song was a cover of the Men Without Hats song “The Safety Dance.” So yeah, we sucked, really bad.

And to add to the mess we didn’t even have a bass player. So next came Brian Addeo, who Mike had known from school and asked him to come over and practice with us. Brian had only been playing bass for a little bit before we picked him up but he had played the guitar and he was as good as we could hope for. And that is the beginning of the band. The band was actually called “The Peenutz” back then. Thank god we got rid of that. We then played our first show ever at a party for Dave’s birthday at his house. Well it went pretty bad. We got a dose of how much we sucked but just grinned and bared it.

We just practiced a lot that summer and didn’t play really any shows till August 20th when we played The Castle for the first time. We had improved a lot since our first show and it showed as we did better the second time around and kinda sparked the flame for us and we have been maturing as a band (musically that is) since, resulting in us playing some rad shows with Thrice (one of their earliest shows out of California), 7 Foot Midget, Happy Campers, Ensign, Faded Grey, Curl Up and Die, Allister, The Benjamins, Swingin’ Utters, Youth Brigage and a bunch more.

During this time we recorded two EPs. The first, Balloon Animals, was recorded in 2000 at The Bomb Shelter. Adam “Bomb” Segal, who was in the bands 2 Cents Worth, The End and The Faction mixed and mastered the songs. We returned to The Bomb Shelter a year later to work with Segal on another EP called Forget What You Know.

Eventually as our tastes began to change and our skills as musicians improved we adjusted the lineup a little, adding Jordan Pfueger on guitars and changing our name to Mercury Sky.

-Mark Grothman