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?
Usual Rubbish

Helladay house.

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What? What time is it? It’s too early, tubey. You’ll get your Miracle Gro at 9:00 and not before. Christ on a bike.

Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)

Excuse that digression. Hope you had a wonderful, glorious Thanksgiving, full of holiday cheer and/or anticipation (if you spent most of it queueing up in front of Wal-Mart or Best Buy). Perhaps you spent part of your morning watching the bizarre spectacle known as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I certainly did. It’s kind of a tradition around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where you don’t ordinarily get exposed to a lot of unfiltered promotional messages (aside from the ones that come on soup can labels).

Little known fact about the Hammer Mill: This is actually the end-point of the T-day parade. It’s a lot longer a procession than most people think. Folks get the mistaken impression that the march ends with the arrival of ersatz Santa Claus in front of Macy’s. Not true. For most of the next day and a half, the floats and balloons come marching up the West Side Highway, take the G.W. Bridge over to the Palisades Parkway, then pick up the NYS Thruway and process all the way up to the Little Falls exit. In a gesture of magnanimous welcome, we throw the compound doors open to them and allow them into the Hammer Mill courtyard for a little R&R. Then Mitch Macaphee and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) aid their technicians in deflating the enormous parade balloons and packing them away for another year. True* story.

Sure, you thought Christmas was just a throwaway songwriting theme for us. Oh ye of little faith.

* Note: veracity of story subject to unverifiable truth conditions. Contact Big Green for details.

Political Rants

Gaza misery.

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All-out war has been averted in Gaza. That’s a good thing. The bad thing? More than 160 Palestinians were killed over the last week, more than half of them (in excess of 90 individuals) were civilians. Speaking on Public Radio International, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that “most of the people hit in Gaza deserved it“. Earlier today, with the cease-fire in place, a Palestinian man was shot along the border of Gaza inside what the IDF terms a “no-go” zone, but also in an area transited by Palestinian farmers on the way to their fields. This is not an unusual occurrence and is probably only being reported in the U.S. because of the conflict/cease fire story. This happens all the freaking time.

You don’t have to be a cynic to believe that Netanyahu wanted this flare-up, with elections just weeks away. He is following in a long tradition of Israeli political leaders who know that the iron fist earns votes. Already he has reconfigured his political coalition from a center-right to a more extreme right grouping, including the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party headed by current Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, a man who wants all Israeli Arabs – 20% of Israel’s population – to sign loyalty oaths and who has openly advocated for their expulsion. The bet appears to have paid off politically – a large majority in Israel favored the attack on Gaza. They have their problems, we have ours, it seems.

I am encouraged, at least, that the Palestinians in Gaza are getting their story told to some degree in the United States, the land where the money for Israel’s military comes from. I have heard in-depth commentary and reporting on Gaza over the last week that simply did not exist on cable television four years ago when the last murderous campaign (“Cast Lead”) ensued. Still, I’m doubtful that the majority of Americans understand the degree to which this is not a conflict between equals. Israel has had the Palestinians in Gaza under sustained attack for six years now, not that what came before was any bed of roses. Hamas may have a rudimentary offensive missile capability, but it’s nothing against the fourth most powerful military in the world. And anyone who distinguishes the lot of Gazans from that of Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, who are being steadily bereft of their land, acre by acre, day by day, is simply not confronting reality.

In Gaza, the battle may be over, but the war is their daily life. They deserve our attention and our non-violent support.

luv u,

jp

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This Is Big Green: Thanksgaffing 2012

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This Is Big Green:
Thanksgaffing (November) 2012

Big Green celebrates the harvest feasting season with a rich menu that includes two previously unreleased Big Green rough tracks, an extended Mr. Ned in Space episode, and more. Over the river … and out.

Features: 1) Song: My Bed, by Big Green; 2) Mr. Ned, Romney’s Dancing Horse, Episode 4; 3) Put the phone down: Election post-mortem with Matt; 4) Excoriating, John McCain; 5) Song: Box of Crackers, by Big Green; 6) Matt lectures at Gander Mountain, looks ahead to hunting season; 7) Remembering George McGovern; 8.) Song: It should’ve been me, by Rick Perry and the Dapper Dudes; 9) Time for us to go

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Usual Rubbish

Splitting Lincoln.

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I think I left my guitar plugged in. I’ve been hearing that buzzing all night freaking long. What’s that? It’s the orgone generating device? Jesus on a bike … that thing again?

Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.

Never can tell what’ going to happen with mad science technology. Just ask Mitch Macaphee – he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant) after all. Anyway, anti-Lincoln must have dialed the wrong settings into that orgone generating device because it split him into two equal parts: Jerry Lewis and Doris Day. Close, right? Fortunately, that thing has an undo button. I like the 1950s as much as any man (which may, in fact, amount to not at all) but I don’t want dead decades following me around like  a zombie. Ever have that problem? Thought so.

Well, we’ve got another podcast in the can. Another groundbreaking episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring as many as three songs (including one previously unreleased Rick Perry number), a rather lengthy and convoluted episode of Ned, the Talking Dressage Horse, and the usual copious amount of pointless blather my illustrious brother and I put forth on a monthly basis. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost much … in fact, it doesn’t cost anything at all. Free media! Liberty! That’s what podcasting is all about, right? That’s why we’re aboard her…… Oh, right. I should keep the Star Trek quotes to a minimum. My apologies.

Best move along. We’re expecting workmen any minute. There are still a few copper pipes left in the hammer mill, so they’ll be stopping by to remove them. (In lieu of rent.)

Political Rants

The admiral.

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A little more than a week after the election, and McCain is at it again. God, I wish he would stick to making frozen sweet potato french fries! (That’s not him? My bad.) He is vowing to get to the bottom of this … my word … bigger than average scandal surrounding the attack on the Benghazi consulate and the killing of ambassador Chris Stevens and his security detail. The Senator is so determined that he held a press conference while the committee he chairs was receiving testimony from the CIA in closed session. That’s right … he skipped the session where details of the attack were being disclosed to complain that the administration has refused to disclose details of the attack.

Seemingly freakish and perhaps the product of a superannuated brain, McCain is simply clinging to the mast of the ship he’s been commanding since his arrival in the Senate. The Benghazi controversy was cooked up during the campaign to try to drive a wedge into Obama’s national security advantage. The biggest mistake the administration made was likely one of too much disclosure as opposed to too little – while Romney was railing against them for “apologizing” to the killers of Chris Stevens, the administration attempted to quell the issue by releasing more details than anyone could have confidently claimed were reliable at the time. Now that Romney has lost, McCain is left with the issue, defending his ground to the last.

Of course, Obama’s pushback during his news conference got McCain’s famous temper going, and he’s been yelling at Obama to get off of his lawn ever since. This is kind of pathetic, frankly. The man is clinging to his tattered reputation as a foreign policy hawk, throwing bombs wildly and somewhat inaccurately. (My guess is that his bombing runs over North Vietnam were a bit scattershot as well.) The admiral needs to calm down, take his pill, and think about his constituents for five minutes.

Both of Obama’s presidential election opponents were heard from this week. But even with Romney’s doubling-down on his 47% sentiment to his donors, he sounded like less of a crank than his predecessor from four years earlier. We dodged a bullet both times, but particularly in 2008.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Honest, Abe?

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No, no. Not that hat. That’s a porkpie hat. Don’t you know anything? The great emancipator would never have worn a hat like that. Not unless he played the saxophone. (Did he play the saxophone? Best ask.)

Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)

Anyway, there was that. Then there was the new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lincoln. That naturally perked up more than a few ears around this hammer mill, let me tell you … four ears in particular: the ones on Lincoln and his anti-matter doppelganger, Anti-Lincoln, both still acting as historical figures in residence with Big Green. Well, naturally enough, Lincoln (the positive one) took issue with some of the historical details in the new film. “I never said that!” I could hear him exclaim as he watched his pirated copy. “And that crap about vampires – none of that ever happened!” (I  think he got his hands on the wrong DVD, frankly, but… it’s not my place to say anything.)

Anti-Lincoln, on the other hand, was strangely pensive about the whole matter. I thought for sure, with his irrepressible temper, that he would blow sky high, rail at the heavens, demanding justice and revenge. Nothing of the sort. He’s been doing a Lincoln Memorial imitation now for the last three days. I just can’t get a rise out of him. I’ll tell you, nature abhors a vacuum, so it may not surprise you that some of the other denizens and hangers-on we have around the hammer mill are getting into the Lincoln act, trying to channel Anti-Lincoln’s stifled rage. Mansized tuber is one, though he can’t get the hat quite right. And don’t even ask about Marvin’s dime store beard.

Well, we’ll work it all out, I’m certain. Now … back to the podcast hellscape.

Political Rants

Better than worse.

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Election’s over. Dodged another bullet there. That was close … sort of… if three million human votes and about 100 electoral votes is a thin margin. Thank you, black people, brown people, and women for saving us (i.e. white men) from ourselves once again. Without your help, John Bolton would likely be the next secretary of state. You should be very, very proud of what you kept us from doing – that being, quite literally, driving this country into yet another war. Now it’s merely possible that we will have a war with Iran, not likely. A dangerous state of affairs, to be sure, but not a guaranteed catastrophe. Nice work.

Post-election used to be a time to reflect on what happened, what was decided. There appears to be some of that going on, though probably not enough. Suffice to say that the predictions on the center-left were far more accurate than those on the popular right. It was more than a little cheering to see Karl Rove scrambling for data on Fox News after Ohio was called for Obama. This can’t be right! It would mean all of our assumptions are massively skewed! Welcome to the world of fact, fat boy. Couldn’t happen to a better guy. Wish I could be a fly on the wall the next time he speaks with Sheldon Adelson and some of the other rich wing-nuts who gave him millions of dollars to crush Obama, Sherrod Brown, and others.

Right. So… what we’ve got is something very much the same as we had before, minus some very bad actors – namely congress members Joe Walsh, Allen West (it appears), and so on. The administration still has its many problems, namely targeted killing, extralegal detention, craven lack of effort on Israel/Palestine, soft commitment to expanding employment, etc. But as I’ve said many times to friends and family, same is better than worse. That’s enough reason to vote. I think many, many Americans were smart enough to see that this was the case, and many stood in lines for ridiculous stretches of time to cast their votes.

God bless them. They saved our sorry asses to fight another day. That’s something to celebrate.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Songageddon.

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Are you all right? You sure? Good, good. Yeah, we’re okay. Head above water, you know. Always a good thing.

Oh, sorry. I was just on the phone with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who wisely chose this week to travel to Madagascar for a conference on … I don’t know, monster-making best practices, something like that. Good time to leave, what with the hurricane and all that. Up here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we implemented our disaster preparedness plan. Basically that involves closing the windows, drawing the curtains, and blocking our ears. Occasionally someone lights a candle. (When it comes to disasters, we’re not good.)

Fortunately, the gods of rock and water were smiling down upon us this past Monday-Tuesday. That monster storm took an extreme left hook and missed us clean, somehow. Not that you could tell that was the case by looking at this Hammer Mill. It appears as though it’s been through hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and pestilence. (Some would argue we qualify as pestilence, but what do they know? Them and their stinking badges.) One could hardly imagine how this place would handle high winds and higher water, and here we are on the banks of the mighty Mohawk River, just waiting to get clobbered.

We didn’t have anything like a hurricane party. Still working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Matt and I have been mixing for the most part over the last few weeks, but this week we worked on a new Rick song, possibly the closer for the album. To my count, that makes about 47 Rick Perry songs written and recorded over the past year. (That may be a little high, but then…. so are you, most likely. That’s right – I’m looking at YOU, stoner!) If you want to do your own unofficial census, just play back some of our podcast episodes from the last year. We’ve been posting rough drafts since last September or so – half-recorded songs, to be embellished later. Why do this? Input! We want to hear from you. (That’s right, stoner … I’m talking to you…)

Hope you got through the storm in one piece. I’d better get back to Mitch. Don’t want to keep him on hold too long, or he might invent something dangerous.

Political Rants

W.B.G. (We’ll be gone)

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Back before the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the guiding principle of Wall Street bankers was i.b.g./y.b.g. – when the whole thing comes crashing down, “I’ll be gone and you’ll be gone.” We will get away with it. That was prescient, to say the least. They pretty much did get away from it, except a handful of bad actors that hurt the wealthy as well as the ordinary. (Bernie Madoff is one of those.)

As we stand at the cusp of another presidential election, witnessing the terrifying aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it’s clear that for the “conservative” (i.e. statist reactionary) side of the political equation, i.b.g./y.b.g. appears to apply to the climate crisis as well. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has adopted his party’s Luddite stance on global warming, advocating massive expansion of fossil fuel extraction, processing, and use and joining the crackpot consensus on the right that sees extreme weather as a series of unfortunate (and wholly unrelated) accidents best ignored.

That the G.O.P. standard bearer can maintain this position after a year of unprecedented extreme weather is remarkable. That he can do it in the wake of Sandy’s devastation is pathological. Madness though it may be, it has a goal: profit. Romney is fighting for his class, and fighting hard. He is the champion of short-term gain, narrowly shared.

His beloved Keystone pipeline is case in point. Romney speaks of this project as a means of “energy independence”. I’m guessing he’s not ignorant enough of global markets to think that any resulting fuel would simply be shared amongst Americans. Any oil produced in the U.S. goes into the global market. Even more importantly, Keystone would carry tar-sands sludge, mixed with toxic chemicals, down to refineries on the Gulf coast where it would be refined into diesel fuel and shipped to China. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Who cares if it contributes mightily to the collapse of our ecosystem? They make their money, then i.b.g. / y.b.g., right?

Trouble is, w.b.g. (we’ll be gone), too. That plainly won’t do. Do the right thing on Tuesday, and send Romney back to his mansion and his $100 million I.R.A.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

The month that was.

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Wait, shhh… Did you hear that sound? Yeah, that sound. That’s the sound of another podcast being posted. Praise be.

What’s in the program this month? Well…. pretty much anything we could find lying about the Hammer Mill. Bits and bobs, as they say. Is it lame? You be the judge! My lips are sealed on the quality issue. But I will talk about what’s in the bulging box that is THIS IS BIG GREEN – OCTOBERCAST 2012. An hour and twenty of sheer audio madness, featuring:

Mr. Ned, Romney’s Talking Horse – Episode 3: Ned Trek. The most ambitious in the Mr. Ned series yet, Romney’s famous talking dressage horse takes Willard on a journey through a space/time wormhole to an alternative dimension of television mediocrity. Yes, Mitt is made commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and he and his crew of neocons take on an extraterrestrial threat that only a cash-starved special effects department could conjure. Hi-jinx ensue. (Special guest appearance by former president Richard Nixon.)

Song: Paradise. This is a rough mix (basically faders up) of a recording we started a few months ago as part of a long project focused on resurrecting some of our older songs that were never properly recorded or released. Paradise is a song ripped from Matt’s back pages. Not sure what it’s about – you’d have to ask him – but it’s got elements of archeology in it, which is something that has shown up in some of his other songs, like Primitive, Christmas with the Australopithecus, and others. Probably watched too many Dr. Leakey T.V. specials back in the ’70s, that’s my guess.

Song: Kublai Khan. Another Matt song from about the same period. Actually, this one is  loosely themed on the live and exploits of Sun Myung Moon, late founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times.  Given that our podcast is typically focused on this sort (i.e. dead people), I can hardly believe that we neglected to mention the salient fact that Dr. Moon passed away. Next episode!

That’s about all for this month. Give it a listen, and then send your complaints to:

Mitt Romney
Governor of Sucktopia
Richy Richland, New Hamphire.