The complete history of 3rd Try Productions.
From time to time I am asked where the name "3rd Try Productions" came from, and as I do love to tell a story (usually a long, convoluted, boring story) I have decided to finally sit down and put it all in writing, because obviously this is the single most important thing anyone could care about…right?
Around 1981 or 1982 I heard my first Weird Al Yankovic song on the radio. We were sitting in the car waiting for my mother to come out from getting her hair done and KDKA, Pittsburgh, played "Another One Rides the Bus". Instantly the crazy spark in me was ignited! Not long after I heard a little ditty called "Shaddup a you face" by Joe Dolce and I knew what I wanted to do with my life! LOL! I bought Al's first LP (ahhh…vinyl) and my love of all things weird took off from there.
By the next year I was staying up until midnight on Sundays to not only listen to, but to record on 90 minute cassette tapes, The Dr. Demento Show! Two hours of the strangest, greatest music I had ever heard!
When I started high school I was a bit shy and the way I was trying to come out of my shell was writing these silly song parodies like Weird Al did. Of course you had to have a band name to do that so I, along with another freshman (who will remain nameless for two reasons: 1) He probably doesn't remember it at all and 2) He works for the government now!) started The Fools, complete with a backward "S" to make us even sillier. (Give me a break we were 13 years old!) Unfortunately, that year there was a one-hit wonder group that called themselves"The Fools" that had a moderate hit with a remake of Do-Wa-Diddy" so that name had to go. (btw: Thank goodness for the internet! I can't believe they have their own website!)
The next clever little name we came up with was "The Flip-Sides" (this time with 2 backward "S"'s!) Unfortunately a female friend, who had seen the horrible stuff we were writing, told me there was a Saturday morning show running where the stars would go through a magic mirror to "the flip side" and I decided that was close enough to call for another name change…and this time I had a brain storm! Rather than trying to come up with clever names every year I would call the band "3rd Try", then if someone took that name I'd go with "4th Try", "5th Try" and so on! Brilliant! Of course no one ever took that name so it stuck!
Gradually I realized I was NOT going to make a career out of being weird, but the weird songs kept creeping into my head! I've tried to explain to my wife and friends that I just hear things differently then other people. When I heard Gretchen Wilson's "Here for the Party" for the first time, in my head I heard "Here for the Buffet"…it's just the way it goes! So I kept writing my little songs and gradually got into writing little comedy bits in the styling of the people I had been stealing material from for the previous four years: Benny Hill, Dave Allen, Kenney Everett,Monty Python, etc. See, I must have been the only guy watching WQED or WPGH late at night hoping to see these old English comedians! So I would copy their jokes, Americanize them, and take them to school with me the next day!
All of this led up to my starting college. Any progress I had made with my personality was immediately lost during this time! Years of getting by on memory alone did me no good in a situation where you actually had to work…and study! Freshman year was a nightmare of struggling with classes and trying to find any kind of niche where I could fit in.
Originally I was going to school to be an accountant.
Two things were working against me:
1) I found the workSO INCREDIBLY BORING that I couldn't concentrate enough to learn anything. I mean my accounting class (at 8:30am every Tuesday and Thursday) was led by a guy who was a whiz at law…but couldn't add! He would be at the board and add 2+2 and get 5!
2) That weird part of brain refused to go away. So by the middle of my second semester I had decided to change majors. By this time I somehow found people who were snowed enough to my "friends" and one invited me to a pizza party that was being held by the Communication Program on campus. Now this program was so small it was not even its own department on campus. The department head was actually at our sister college. The man who ran the program, Fr. Andrew Campbell, was so great I knew I had to try it.
I had always had an inclination that radio would be fun, so I chose to follow the mass media path though the program. Sophomore year I started a show with one of my friends called "The Midnight Special" and from10:00pm-12:00am every Wednesday we spun records and tried to be entertaining…emphasis on "tried". We sucked! LOL! But it was the beginning of a love affair with radio that lives in me today. Given the opportunity I would be on the air right now…which is why I love posting all the old stuff I still have, but I'll get to that later.
The songs kept coming to me and gradually "3rd Try" the group evolved into "3rd Try Productions" covering all the media I was producing including the radio show. Other items fell under the 3rd Try banner also including the heavy metal group: Dead Silence. Dead Silence had seven albums, a greatest hits and a Christmas album. Hits included: "That Woman's a Nun", "Too Short for Sex" and "Get off my Crutch". The hook? Dead Silence was exactly that. Not a note was played, not a word was sung. The only thing we came up with was titles.
Also by senior year we were making our own television show! Fr. Andrew had hired me to be his assistant during the school year and that gave me a key and access to the television studio (such as it was) whenever I wanted. There was a lip-sync contest on campus twice a year. I videotaped one and was deluged with request for copies. Rather than make 100 copies I announced that we would replay the tape on WSVC Channel 30, the closed circuit channel on campus. We even broke the videos up and "hosted" the replay! When I say "we" it was me as the host and my good friend Greg as he producer. And when I say "producer" I mean we set up one camera in the studio and did everything live! A copy of that first show exists, but I refuse to let anyone see it!
Also this is where the name "The Glenn" comes from. Fr. Andrew said I did such a wonderful job that from that point forward anyone who filled that position would be called "The Glenn". I assume he had other favorites after that as I have seen other graduates from SVC's communication program with similar nicknames!
We called the show "You Did It" and it was one of two regular broadcasts on channel 30. The other, "The Flying Zambruno Show", I unfortunately do not have any copies of as I was not part of that show. Somehow I got convinced that "You Did It" could be done on a regular basis. So along with taking 15 credits, working 30 hours a week on campus, and starting my internship, I was going to create and produce a television show once a week? Sure! Why not! With the help of several friends we developed a simple game plan: Each week there would be a different host, chosen from the students on campus. The hosts picked their own theme music. We did all the stuff that would be on the show and ran the cameras, etc. Each week there were different segments…some were pretty funny, some just plain sucked…but we had a blast most of the time anyway.
By the fourth show I was completely burned out from all the editing and pressure of getting this on the air every week, so we blew off a show but came back a few more episodes…most of which I started to make available on line just to entertain myself and the few people who worked on it!
So since we were now doing records, radio and television I decided that "3rd Try Productions" would be the umbrella to cover all of these various enterprises. Hell(rais)er Video did all the television stuff for example and everything was a © of 3rd Try Productions.
After college I got a job full-time in radio and all the bits and lists and funny stuff in my head had the opportunity to come flowing out. Four years after that I was out of radio and had no outlet for that creativity…but marriage, two kids and a few jobs later I can use all this wonderful new technology to be creative again to a wider audience than my loving and patient wife who I cannot thank enough for being my audience of one for all these years!
In 1996 my wife and I got our first computer and I got online for the first time also. When we set up our first email account I used 3rd Try Productions as the name because I figured that if by that time no one had taken it that I needed something to prove it was mine! And since then from YouTube to wedding video production I have continued to expand the usage.
So there you have it.
The ramblings of a mad man…er, I mean the history of 3rd Try Productions up until this point in time, May 15th, 2007. Hopefully I can create more stuff in the future…heck, maybe even make money off it! Either way I feel better now, don't you?
~ Glenn
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