Music Mondays: From UR to 'Killing the Bear'

“Dude, let’s form a band,” Cameron Snapp instigated. 

So, he and his roommate, Brian Pagels, ‘03, did. Soon after, they landed a weekly gig and were debuting original music. But this isn’t a story about Snapp. It isn’t even a story about their band. This is about Pagels, how he never gave up on music, and how the musicians around him never gave up on him. 

Pagels grew up in Freehold, N.J., a town on the periphery of the once-vibrant Asbury Park music scene. Pagels said his father played guitar, and his parents would recount going to local venues. 

“My mom went to high school with Springsteen,” Pagels said. “She went to see his first band play in the 60s at the local YMCA.”

For his third birthday, Pagel’s neighbors across the street bought him the ‘Thriller’ LP by Michael Jackson. Pagels said his earliest memories are just singing and dancing to it, taking pots and pans into his room and banging along. Soon after, he upgraded to a Smurfs’ drum set and started taking lessons at age 10. 

“We should jam,” his friend, Adam Richie, told him, and so they did. 

Pagels and Ritchie were close, mutually lamenting the lack of places to see live music like their parents were able to. 

“We’ve actually talked, half jokingly, about opening a club at some point, if we ever had the means and I guess patience for it,” Pagels said. “In Freehold or somewhere nearby to serve that need.”

Ritchie had picked up guitar first. Pagels, who started playing at thirteen, taught himself using the chord books his father had laying around. Soon after, he started writing songs and learning covers.

“I never really performed my original music until I was in college,” he said. 

It was during his time at the University of Richmond that Pagels met future bandmate and fellow guitarist Cameron Snapp. Pagels was percussionist for the wind ensemble and studied jazz percussion under Howard Curtis, who now lives in Austria. 

“If you want to make a living as a jazz musician, you got to move to Europe,” Pagels said with a chuckle.

Snapp and Pagels formed a series of bands throughout their college career. By their senior year, the two ended up right where they started: as a duo, and called themselves Through The Wall.

Through The Wall frequented Potter’s Pub, which used to be at the Village Shopping Center on Three Chopt Road. The two would get beers and watch an “old British dude named John Small” play. One night, he hosted an open mic. That was where the band got its start, but they wanted more. They wanted to play a proper show, so the venue told them to audition. 

“The audition they gave us was Superbowl Sunday,” Pagels said. “They had us set up to do the halftime show.”

When the duo entered Potter’s Pub, they found a little stage set up in front of a large TV screen. Pagels said he and Snapp set up as the TV projected the game behind them. 

“I don’t think the crowd really liked it,” Pagels said. “They were probably annoyed that they weren’t able to watch the actual halftime show, and thinking, ‘who are these jokers playing duo guitars.’ Somehow that worked and they gave us that weekly gig.”

During those gigs, Pagels would debut his original songs, along with a healthy mix of covers. By the end of the duo’s senior year, the band had filled a CD with their early demos. Pagels said it was something of a graduation present to all of his friends and the people who had supported him and Cameron. 

“That's the only place you can find those songs, those early songs,” Pagels said. “On that really old CD that we burned in our apartment.” 

After college, Pagels worked on his harmony singing in a different duo in D.C. Throughout his time in D.C., he joined a few other bands. 

“About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I joined a pretty established D.C. band called The Beanstalk Library,” he said. “I still play in that band.”

Before the pandemic, Pagels said he formed Brian K & The Parkway at the behest of drummer, producer and friend Stephen Russ. 

“[Russ’d] been encouraging me, for a couple years at that point, to make a solo album,” Pagels said. “Fast forward, that concept eventually evolved into us working together on a band project.”

This newest duo brought on some friends to fill in the gaps on bass and keyboard, ultimately forming the first iteration of the band. 

“It wasn’t really until Brian K & The Parkway formed that I was doing a whole album, a series of shows and touring [and] fronting my own band,” Pagels said. “This was gonna be a project where I was really gonna own the creative vision for the songwriting in its entirety, kind of for the first time in my life.”

It was hard to come up with a name, Pagels said. He wanted something that represented himself while also sounding like a “true band project,” citing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and even Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band as inspirations.

In 2020, before the name was finalized, Pagels was talking with Ritchie about how beautiful the George Washington Parkway was. That is when Ritchie said, “What about Brian K & The Parkway? That works,” and Pagels responded, “That does work.”

Naming the first album, released last year, was significantly easier, Pagels said. The name “Killing the Bear” came to him in a vision.   

“I was out for a drive one day, early 2020,” Pagels said. “I just had this image that popped into my mind, it wasn’t particularly gruesome or anything, of people killing a bear.”

As soon as he got home, he picked up his guitar and turned the idea into a song, he said. 

“This was the spark I was looking for,” he continued. “This is going to be the centerpiece of the album, and we are going to develop the other songs around that central theme.” 

“Killing the Bear” became the first demo that Pagels sent to Russ. 

“Funny enough, he wasn’t enthusiastic about it,” Pagels said. “He thought the song was ‘just ok’ at that point in time.”

Russ was, however, enthusiastic that Pagels was actually sending material over, and grew to love the song when it came together with the full band. Now, “Killing the Bear” has become a cornerstone of their live sets, Pagels said. 

With an album, almost all his own, under his belt, Pagels has been able to look back over his musical journey. 

Pagels recounted how it took Ritchie playing guitar to get him to do the same, it took Snapp’s urging for his original sounds to get on stage, and it took one final push from Russ for Brian K to form. 

“Those relationships gave the kick I needed to believe in myself,” Pagels said, but at the same time, “don’t try to please anyone but yourself.”

Contact opinions and columns editor Jonathan Sackett at jonathan.sackett@richmond.edu