All posts by Joe

Joe Perry is co-founder of the band Big Green and brother to Matt Perry, other co-founder of Big Green. Shall I go on?

THIS IS BIG GREEN: May 2013

Audio May 27, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Big Green cries mayday with the tenth installment of Ned Trek, three Big Green songs, discussion of killer chickens, and more. Go clockwise round the pole.

This is Big Green – May 2013. Features:

1) Ned Trek X: A Plea For Arms;
2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe rip the news straight out of the October 1941 Country Gentleman;
3) Song: Surprise Party, by Big Green;
4) Talk of Joe’s Korg Poly 800;
5) Scandalrama;
6) Song: Don’t Tell Rick, by Big Green;
7) Matt’s encounter with a cute kller chicken;
8. DEC talk and movies with exclamation points in the title;
9) Song: Dinos, by Big Green;
10) Once around the pole and out

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Usual Rubbish

Lookout: Cleveland.

May 25, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Is it coming round again? Hah. Some mad scientist YOU turned out to be. I could get better weather reports from an open window. Stupid Macaphee.

Yes, hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, located in upstate New York, once a land of relatively stable weather, but now … rollicking storms. Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a bowling alley, our sorry asses parked in the lanes. I keep wondering if all this atmospheric upheaval is in anyway related to that massive gizmo Mitch Macaphee is always messing with. He just built it last month, and it’s got dials and levers and wheels and lights, and it belches black smoke into the air above the mill. Just like old times, really. Then it rains like hell.

If my suspicions are correct, I suppose that means I owe you all an apology. Or at least Mitch does. Understand – we do not control Mitch, we just utilize his expertise from time to time. He can be quite handy with minor repairs on spacecraft, for instance, like that time when our ion drive went out halfway to Neptune, and we didn’t have a space buoy, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got automatonic space sickness and couldn’t do the EVA to fix our guidance tracking antenna, so we had to send Major West, and … well…

It gets more complicated after that. Suffice to say, Mitch means well, even if he is trying to destroy the planet (well … he put that on his bucket list, at least). We will try to keep you posted on new developments as Mitch continues to twirl knobs, throw switches, and rub his hands together in glee.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for our upcoming May podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which will feature another spellbinding episode of Ned Trek, some previously unreleased music tracks, and ridiculous conversation about killer chickens and other phenomena.

Keep an ear out, too. It’s really more about hearing than anything else.

Political Rants

On serving.

May 25, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

This is one for the veterans. I felt I had to write about this because of a story I heard on DemocracyNow! this week about wounded and PTSD soldiers receiving less-than-honorable discharges based on behavior attributable to their injuries … and in some cases, based on virtually nothing at all. This is one of the most maddening stories I have heard this year, but I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. It’s pretty much a given in this country that many of the people who fight our wars will be discarded after they’ve sacrificed dearly on our behalf. These past twelve years have brought us back to a place we hadn’t been since the end of the execrable Vietnam war – dealing with the aftermath of a prolonged, highly destructive conflict, and doing a very poor job of it.

Why do we – in the age of magnetic yellow ribbons – still suck so badly at this? A couple of things come to mind. First, this war is not broadly shared, so any improvement in our basic humanity since the end of the last war (and I like to think there has been some) is offset by the fact that, in the absence of conscription, only a tiny fraction of American families have any skin in this fight.

The second is an institutional/political reason. When a large institution like the United States military, as an instrument of American power, is very good at something, that’s usually because it’s deemed of great importance to those in power. The opposite is true of things they are really bad at. Our leaders look bad when many Americans are killed on the battlefield, so we’re really good at getting soldiers out alive. Once they’re out of the action, they become statistically insignificant to those in power. If they suffer, it doesn’t cost our leaders anything. If they die, no one is counting the way they do when soldiers die overseas.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to this bogus war. When my dad returned from World War II and the occupation of Europe, he evidently had PTSD – nightmares, sleeping with a gun under his pillow, etc. There was no help for him, just as there was none for those returning from Korea and Vietnam. The philosophy was, suck it up. It’s up to us to say that this is as unacceptable today as it was then.

Raise your voice about this. These people deserve better.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Fire away.

May 18, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Where did I leave my garlic press? Marvin? Marvin! Jesus. What kind of a dung hole is this, anyway?

Oh yeah … that kind of a dung hole. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill kind. A place where garlic presses go to die, apparently. This is the third one I’ve lost this month. And I used to have a blender, seems like, though our electrical service is a bit spotty anyway, so it hardly matters that that thing disappeared. Somebody around this mill has sticky fingers. I’m looking at you, mansized tuber! Oh, right. No fingers. Still … those roots seem a little grabby.

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is helping me today with my weekly chore of straightening out the kitchen. Don’t know if any of you have ever lived with a rock band, but let me tell you – no one wrecks a kitchen more completely than wayward musicians, down on their luck. Open cans of kipper snacks strewn about like poker chips. Half-eaten bowls of cereal. Do I have to draw you a picture?

It gets worse … particularly when we’re producing an album. People tend to keep strange hours … like ninety-seven o’clock (really strange hours). There’s a lot of work that goes into putting together an album as complex and nuanced as Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. You may think it’s just another crackpot enterprise, cooked up by a bunch of ass-clowns in upstate New York. And, well … you’re right, but (and this is important) there’s still a lot of work that goes into putting it together. (Is there an echo in here?)

Right now, the song count on this sucker is at 21. I can’t guarantee it will stay there, but if it does, it will be the longest album we ever made and maybe a little too long for a standard CD. Thank god those little discs are as archaic as dinosaurs! Digital releases mean no limits! Make it 35 songs! Quick, write 14 more!

All right, back to the search.

Political Rants

Hair on fire.

May 18, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Good lord almighty, Fox news must be in pig-heaven right now. Three running Obama administration scandals, each one ten times bigger than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined. This should be a solid excuse for Congress not to do anything about (1) creating jobs and infrastructure, (2) getting our national security state under control, and (3) doing something to fight global warming.

Let’s just examine these, one at a time:

Benghazi. This is bullshit. Quite frankly, the only reason why we are hearing anything about this incident eight months after the fact is because the Republican nominee decided to politicize it on the very day it occurred. Does anyone remember this? Romney jumped all over Obama’s shit because he claimed that the administration’s expressions of regret over that bogus pseudo-porn movie denigrating Muslims amounted to apologizing to the terrorists who blew up the consulate. That prompted the White House to get out in front of the investigation into what had happened … probably too far out in front, frankly. At the time, protests were occurring all over the Muslim world related to that video. They chose initially to come down on that side of what was then a cloudy issue.

IRS Targeting of Tea Party groups. Indefensible action on the part of the IRS. Though for all of those whose hair is on fire over this, it should be noted that all of the groups who applied, I believe, were ultimately given tax exempt status. Recall, too, that the IRS harassed anti war groups during W. Bush’s administration, but that wasn’t the end of it. There was domestic surveillance and infiltration of political organizations on the left. There were mass arrests and beatings. For chrissake, they even had the Defense Intelligence Agency spy on the Thomas Merton Center! Given the degree of governmental dysfunction that’s attributable to the tea party, it is a bit hard for me to get overly worked up. Wrong, yes … but on the scale of wrongs, this is kind of puny.

Justice Spying on the AP. Welcome to the national security state! We’ve only been living in it my entire life through. The last administration began the open practice of sweeping up all phone calls and email (not that the NSA wasn’t doing that before W). Bradley Manning is still in jail for telling the truth. This is a major problem, but not surprising, and basically the product of national security policies that have gone largely unchallenged by the now outraged corporate press.

Short answer: Don’t use this as an excuse for continued dysfunction. Mr. Boehner: never mind repealing Obamacare for the 27th time. Where the hell are the jobs?

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

End game.

May 11, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

I’ll hold the ingots, and you swing the hammer. No, wait. We have to heat them up first. Where’s my butane lighter? Left it on the stove, I think….

Oh, hi. Just caught the core members of Big Green (and its motley entourage) in the process of preparting our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, for publication and distribution. Very complicated process. You know how bizarrely complex our creative process can get; the very task of writing and recording these albums involves no less than 14,000 individual muscle actions per song (and that’s not including all the grimacing). Christ on a bike – by the time we got our last album International House to market in 2008, my face muscles were frozen in place until well after the holidays.

So, how does the manufacturing and distribution work? Simple. We melt down the .wav files into a slurry, pour them into rectangular forms, and cut them into shards – or “ingots” – about the size of a pack of cigarettes. We get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to sand the edges off of each block of music, then carefully insert them through the mail-slot like hole in the specialized distribution mechanism our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee fashioned for us during his last vaction in Barbados. (He was bored with all of the waterskiing.) That sends the ingots deep into cyberspace and the hungry ears of listeners all across the universe.

Now, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick presents a special challenge. Let me explain. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, had 13 tracks. International House had 16. Cowboy Scat promises to include no less than 21 tracks! An unheard of bonanza, true, but think of the ingots! So many corners to sand down… Poor Marvin! What’s more, because Cowboy Scat is rumored to be the soundtrack to a lost musical, each track is attributed to a different music group that sounds strangely like us. That simple fact complicates its distribution in ways that I cannot describe here … for reasons … I cannot describe here.

Anyway, none of these difficulties will dissuade us. We will release this album – you have Mitch’s personal guarantee. (Just leave me out of it, okay?)

Political Rants

High crimes and missed opportunities.

May 11, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Congressman Darryl Issa (“Step away from the vehicle!”) had his most excellent Benghazi hearing this week – a real blockbuster for the right. Bigger than Watergate, we’re told. A heinous coverup on the eve of a presidential election. What a scandal! Issa will leave no stone unturned, chasing down those responsible for providing false information about the nature of the attack on our consulate. After all, four people are dead – four! That’s nearly half as many as died on our side this week in Afghanistan. Nearly 1/10 the number killed in one of the more notorious drone strikes in Yemen a few years back. Nearly 0.0001% of the number of civilians likely killed in Iraq based on false testimony and obfuscation.

Sure … if you want to hold someone accountable in high places, that seems fair. Just put the Benghazi culprits in line at the Hague behind Bush and Cheney, whose deceptions led us into two wars, one of which is still raging. That, of course, will never happen. But there’s still no justification in being so selective in your enforcement of high crimes.

If you’re going to call the Obama administration on the carpet, why not do so for the unprecedented number of “signature” strikes they are conducting around the world, some of them on American citizens? Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of radical Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki, was summarily killed in a drone strike that tore up a restaurant in Yemen. Why not ask them about that, Issa? Why not call them out for killing people on the basis of behavioral profiles, not intelligence? Is it perhaps because that doesn’t bother you or your constituents? I thought so.

Sure, Obama’s foreign policy is abusive and murderous, just like all of his predecessors in my lifetime. The difference between them is a question of degree. During the Johnson/Nixon war on Vietnam, the same standard was applied as in the current drone war: if you were outside the wire in rural South Vietnam, you were assumed to be part of the Viet Cong (NLF) and therefore a target. The difference is that we killed hundreds of thousands there – probably in the million range – whereas in the current drone war, they take more of a retail approach.

Does that count for much? I suppose it counts for something. But when you split hairs over the numbers of innocents killed, you sacrifice your humanity on some level.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

April comes late.

May 4, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right … not the red button. Never hit the red button.

Mr. Ned and crew on the bridge Oh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It’s like a series of tubes, I’m told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself – like the internets – a machine.

As you may already know, we’ve just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month’s show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here’s a little rundown:

Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager. In this thrilling episode of the adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned on board the starship Free Enterprise, Willard and his crew of severe conservatives (and George Takei) are faced with their greatest challenge yet: making small talk with an audio-animatronic Richard Nixon. Oh, and there’s Edward Teller’s all-consuming Emergency Manager 9000, an ultimate computer bent on taking over the universe. That, too.

Music: We revisit the “live” duet version of our song “You’re Edward Teller”, in honor of the physicist’s appearance on Ned Trek. We dredge up another demo from the International House project – a scratch version of the song “Do It (Every Time)”. A bit later on, you’ll hear our more recent (still unreleased) recording of Matt’s song “Jit Jaguar”, one of my favorite Big Green recordings ever, owing to its primitive simplicity. (Easy to please, what can I say?). We close out with an adhoc rendering of “Special Kind of Blood”.

Gab fest: In our “Put The Phone Down” segment we engage in a wide ranging discussion of the late Ritchie Havens’ amazing thumb, Margaret Thatcher’s departure, the press response to the Boston Marathon bombing, our old-school recording methods, and other pointless drivel.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments always welcome. We’ll read anything on the podcast, anything. Be our guest, for chrissake. More later.

Political Rants

Guantanahole.

May 4, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

I’m going to write about a topic I haven’t visited for some time in the vain hope that it would be corrected, now that we have left the George W. Bush administration in its deserved dustbin of history. (Save, that is, for within the W. Library, which is a central repository for the disastrous idiocy that was that presidency writ large, but I digress.) The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has re-entered the news cycle once again, owing in large part to an organized protest – a hunger strike – undertaken by more than 100 of its inmates. I have a few things to say about this shit hole, and I’ll keep it brief.

First: Why the hell is this place still open? I know, I know – Congress demagogue’d the issue of closing it down and bringing some of the still-accused to the U.S. for trial and likely eventual imprisonment. (There’s a surprise – they demagogue everything!) The thing is, Obama has options, particularly with regard to those prisoners cleared for release. There are third countries they can most certainly be sent to. Obama is avoiding this option because it will garner criticism, most likely. Not a good reason at all.

Second: The hunger strike is a manufactured crisis, by all appearances. They have generally been presenting it as a difficult situation being handled by the Army as best they can, but the fact is that conditions at the prison turned decidedly worse when the Navy handed over control to the Army early this year. The prisoners were searched, their Korans pored over by investigators, and the prisioners’ communal priviliges were taken away. They are now kept in isolation 22 hours a day or so. Here’s a possible solution to the hunger strike: rotate the Army unit out and bring back the freaking Navy team that was running it before.

Third: If half of these men have never been charged with anything, have been determined to be of no danger to the U.S., why the hell are they being held … and while they’re being held, why are they being kept in prison-like conditions? Many have been there for 11 years. For chrissake, if they’re innocent, build them a freaking house in Guantanamo Bay and let them live like human beings until they are released. What kind of warped sense of justice is at work here?

Finally, if any of these men die while protesting their ill-treatment, it is going to exponentially increase Guantanamo’s value as a jihadist recruitment tool. Add that to your security considerations, Barry.

luv u,

P.S. – Happy May Day. Invented in America, celebrated elsewhere. Ask why.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: April Breakout 2013

Audio May 1, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Big Green puts the ape in April with another episode of Ned Trek, three unreleased Big Green songs, some odd muttering, and more. Dress appropriately.

This is Big Green – April Breakout 2013. Features: 1) Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager; 2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe bring up the news like a cheap hotdog; 3) The rejected theme song; 4) Song: You’re Edward Teller, by Big Green; 5) How we used to record: the ugly truth; 6) Song: Do it every time (demo version), by Big Green; 7) On John King and other great journalists; 8) Remembering Margaret Thatcher, for real; 9) Song: Jit Jaguar, by Big Green; 10) Richie Havens and his thumb; 11) Ending with the immortal

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Official site of the band Big Green