Oregon State soil science professor James Cassidy comes from a musical background.

Back in the 1970s, somewhere in the barren concrete metropolis in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minn., high school students played in garage bands and began listening to the new wave of electronic music flowing in from the post-disco era.

There also existed a student who played the banjo and bass in heavy metal bands. His name is James Cassidy, known now as an Oregon State University instructor of soils.

Following high school, Cassidy continued on with his music.

A local band brought Cassidy on to perform a banjo solo in their rock band.

Cassidy’s debut solo banjo performance turned out to be his only banjo performance with the group. They did, however, hire him as their lighting director.

But since Cassidy hung around, he eventually joined the group. Cassidy was the bassist for Information Society, a synthpop-freestyle band. He joined Paul Robb, a synthesizer player, and vocalist Kurt Harland.

It took many years to cultivate the band’s cohesiveness in its sound and style.

The band members broke up, made up, broke up, made up and broke up again.

“Then all the rats came back to the sinking ship in Minneapolis and that’s when we had our first breakthrough song that allowed us to start doing dates,” Robb said.

They played shows around Minnesota until they decided to make the big move to New York City to gauge their stardom.

In NYC, an unknown DJ named Little Louie Vega got a copy of Information Society’s record. He played it at the clubs, which launched him and the band to soaring success in the nouveau wave of 1980s electronic pop music. Something called MTV had begun, aiding Cassidy and the band to become global rock stars.

After the rock, came the dirt.

Following many years of traveling and playing, some band members wanted to have children and some had grown tired.

At age 30, Cassidy quit the music business cold turkey after his last show in Oregon. He found himself living out west without a clue about what direction his life was going.

Cassidy took a field trip to the public library to peruse through the career catalogs.

From this search, he intuited that the outdoors was where he wanted to be, so he registered for classes at Mt. Hood Community College in fisheries science.

As a straight “A” student, Cassidy was funded to attend school.

“I was a ‘D-plus’ student in high school,” Cassidy said. “I did a different kind of high school, the school of rock ‘n’ roll, metal and being a stoner.”

Inspired by his collegiate success, Cassidy continued going and eventually transferred to Oregon State University to complete a degree in fisheries science. He soon learned about fresh water and discovered it’s all about soil.

“Every step you take in your life, literally — not figuratively — is dictated by the soil that is beneath under your feet,” Cassidy said. “It is the reason that you’re there. If you’re chopping, its because that is where the soils are that are good for that type of activity or if you are recreating or you are living in a place.”

One simply cannot escape a conversation with Cassidy without discussing the majesty of soils, former bandmate Robb said.

“He’s insufferable,” Robb said.

Getting down and dirty teaching soil science and still producing albums with a long list of fluctuating members in the band throughout the 1990s and through the 2000s, Cassidy and Robb reconnected in 2007 and have since played shows together throughout the world at famous venues like Madison Square Garden.

“Every time we go out on the road with the band now, it basically becomes an extended soil lecture,” Robb said.

Nate Tisdell, a master’s student in the soils department and teaching assistant for Cassidy, agrees with Robb on the man’s enthusiasm for soils.

For Tisdell, the root of the matter is that Cassidy inspires others to be open to other opinions and ideas about what you had preconceived.

“From James, we learn to be excited about taking care of the environment and the ground we walk upon,” Tisdell said. “With the passion that he brings to his class, he’s able to almost infectiously spread it out to his students — in every turn, you get a whole ‘nother 200 converts to his cult of soils.”

Information Society plays in Brazil this month for a couple of weeks and will return to South America in May for some more shows in Colombia.

Come summer, Cassidy and Information Society will spend time playing music in New York City.

The cornerstone show will be a birthday for DJ Little Louie Vega.

Cassidy is the only OSU instructor scheduled to play at Radio City Music Hall this year.

Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova

Science reporter

managing@dailybarometer.com