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: SEPTEMBER 2012 NARROWCAST


This is Big Green – September 2012 Narrowcast. Features: 1) Song: One Small Step (in remembrance of Neil Armstrong); 2) Romney’s Dancing Horse, Episode 2; 3) Put the phone down: Matt’s trunk rooster incident; 4) Song: Flying Up Ricky, by Cousin Rick; 5) Random observations on random things; 7) Song: North Camp Pasture, by Cousin Rick; 8) Shotgun exit.

Podcast Home

Sing, Rick, sing!

Turn which knob again? That one? I already turned that one, for crying out loud. Turn it again? Shut the front door!

All these knobs, all these switches… Hey, that’s a good idea for a song. All of these knobs, all of these switches, keep this up and you’ll need stitches, uh-huh. Okay… not a good idea for a song. I’m getting punchy, and small wonder. Matt and I are hip deep in mixing Rick Perry’s new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick … being a collection of songs that arose from some strange sensory phenomena our dear cousin experienced over the past year. You know how when sometimes you have a little too much to drink or a bit too much …. well, whatever, and the world around you gets all fuzzy and weird, and then the next day you find yourself freighted with all these unexplainable memories of odd behavior, like something your fevered mind cooked up in a dream? Well…. Rick wrote some songs about that.

We’ve been putting rough mixes of these songs on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, for the past few months, to mixed reviews, I must say. Here’s a sampling:

What is that sound in the middle of your last podcast? It almost could have been music but not quite…  – jaypod

Tell tex to pipe down. I’m sleepin’ here.   – brooklynfan#482

[expletive deleted] the [expletive deleted] with a [censored].
– nixon’sghost45

All very promising, wouldn’t you say? It’s this kind of feedback that keeps us going, year after year. Like that guy who wrote me last month with the simple advice of “Get a life.” Isn’t that enchanting? Almost haiku-like in its simplicity. I meditate on it daily.

When will the finished album be ready? Well, that depends on how soon we can get a turn at the power tools down in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where we reside. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber have been building something down there for weeks. Maybe it’s an ark, for all I freaking know – I hear sawing and drilling through the closed door to the shop. “Are you going to be long?” I yell, “We’ve got to start whittling those CD cases!”

Useless. Oh, well… back to the faders.

Soothsaying.

The trouble with writing blog posts at the end of a week is that, more often than not, you find yourself on the wrong end of the news cycle, when every blogger and talking head has had more than his/her say. So what the hell – I’m going to comment ever so briefly on a few things and then be quiet for a stretch of days. You’re welcome.

Embassy attacks. Been watching the awful scenes from overseas. Trouble is, it’s always that way for ordinary people in many of those countries. Think of what life is like in Iraq still, with the economy and infrastructure still in a shambles and bombs going off regularly, killing people at random in large numbers. We almost don’t even give it any notice unless the death toll reaches north of fifty or so. And yet, I tune in to Talk of the Nation and get to hear Fouad Ajami, formerly known as George W. Bush’s favorite Arab and a strong advocate of the Iraq invasion, talking about what Arab peoples need to do to join the community of civilized nations.  Doctor, cure thyself. (Again… how wrong do people have to be before they stop being trotted out as “experts”?)

Forty-seven fifty-three and fight. Like practically anyone with a television, I’ve seen excerpts of the Romney fundraising video captured in Boca Raton last May. There’s been a lot of talk about the errors Romney has made, but it seems like his most egregious ones are when he tells the truth. I’m sure that’s exactly how he and his advisers see half of the American people – a bunch of layabouts who want everything handed to them. Think about the picture that paints in your mind – who are they talking about? Are they talking about your mother on Social Security, or your father in the nursing home?

I’ve got news for Mitt Romney – and obviously there’s no way he would know this without being told – but when it comes to nursing home care, practically everyone in this country is poor enough for Medicaid. Here’s some more news: old people used to suffer badly before Medicare, Medicaid, and yes, Social Security. My grandfather had a heart condition for ten years before they passed Medicare. Try that sometime, richy, rich.

If there are a lot of working age people getting government checks or food coupons, it’s because Romney’s party skull-fucked the economy over the last decade… not because they want to be there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re now trying to shift the blame for that onto those who suffer the most.

luv u,

jp

Jupiter rising.

Great red what? Jesus christmas, I don’t have time for that. I’m trying to stay focused on the Mars mission. Then there’s Voyager, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system already… whoops. Someone’s reading this. Look busy!

Hi, friend(s). You may wonder what I’m rambling about. Though probably not, if you’ve visited this blog before. We run on and on about pretty much anything that flows into our heads. Hell, I was looking at a pizza menu the other day that featured deep-fried Oreos. But does anyone want to hear about it? God no. So we’re going to talk about something more interesting today …. like Jupiter. (The planet, not the derivative Roman god.)

The other day some massive asteroid supposedly hit Jupiter. I say “supposedly” because, to be perfectly frank, I think this incident is actually the work of our mad science advisor, Mitchington V. S. Macaphee III, M.S.D., C.M.F.  (For the curious, his honorifics are short for Doctor of Mad Science, conferred by the University of Berzerkistan, and Crazy Mother Fucker … not so much a degree as a description.) Mitch got the interplanetary exploration bug this past summer with the recent Mars probe (which he almost immediately hacked into for his own nefarious purposes). But Mars wasn’t big enough for him. Eventually he turned his attention to the king Kahoona of planets …. (wait for it!) … Jupiter.

Okay, so here’s how our household works. Those of us who are not involved in the hard sciences share the upper levels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (I myself occupy a suite just outside the old forge room, basically a storage bay where they kept the hammer handles. I sleep on hammer handles, is what I’m saying.) Down in the basement, next to our makeshift production studio, Mitch Macaphee maintains a mad science lab where he builds, I don’t know, little projects like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), time travel devices, and … crucially… interstellar space vehicles.

You have to understand the fevered mind of the mad scientist. Jupiter has a red spot, right? Mitch sees that as a challenge. Can he make a blue spot? How hard would it be? Would they call it the Great Macaphee Spot if he succeeded?

What happened next should be kind of obvious. I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask me, but sometime last week there was a loud, rocket-like sound in the early morning hours, and the next thing I know, Jupiter has two spots instead of one. Or so Mitch tells me, anyway. Sheesh. I’ve got an album to produce. And a podcast to finish. Don’t bother me with such trifles!

Never forget.

Anniversaries of 9/11 come and go, it seems, and like most days of remembrance they are not all that memorable in themselves. This past Tuesday (I believe the event actually occurred on a Tuesday, if memory serves) I was up at Syracuse University, walking past a sidewalk medium that held a field of  mini-flags, one for each of the victims of the terrorist attacks. A large sign at one end admonished us to “Never Forget.” Not a very unusual experience on such an anniversary. I’m sure there are fields of flags all across the country at this time of year. Walking past it, though, it seemed like there were so few of them. They were arranged in a big rectangle, with a large space in the middle, and it looked kind of sparse. Is this what more than 3,000 flags looks like?

I think the reason it looked so empty was that there were no flags to represent the hundreds of thousands that have died since that day, and in large part because of that day. The cautionary “Never Forget” is more of a challenge to Americans than its author likely supposed. I can tell you, I will never forget September 11, 2001 – probably the most deeply horrifying day of my life. Remembering that has never been a challenge. What I think we as Americans need to work on remembering is the fact that our political leaders used that atrocity to commit other atrocities in our names. If there is any slippage of memory, it is on that particular slope.

Just remember – by the time September 11, 2001 arrived, the Bush administration was already resolved to invade Iraq and complete the project of regime change that its top foreign policy advisers had signed onto years before. There was plenty of buzz about it in the months leading up to 9/11, and when Al Qaeda struck, the Bush team didn’t miss a beat in commandeering Americans’ shock and outrage towards support of their disastrous invasion and destruction of Iraq. Seeing how easy it was to get people behind the invasion of Afghanistan, they engaged in a full-court press that we would all do well to remember.

There is a complementary notion to “Never Forget;” that is “Never Again.” In complying with the former, we must also embrace the latter.

luv u,

jp

Process, process.

Smallest town in the biggest state. Father Joseph, what would be my fate? So starts this month’s anthem of the Hammer Mill. Can’t get that tune out of my head, man!

This writing finds us chin deep in production for our next album. Imagine Matt and me in a roomful of 1-inch Ampex tape, all spooled out and tangled like Don Knotts had it in his space capsule in The Reluctant Astronaut. Yes, we always aspire to such heights. “Why not the best?” we ask ourselves, and the answer, of course, is obvious. (Go right to the source and ask the horse.)

Why do we do this thing over and over again? This “making an album” thing? We’re past the age of consent (well past) and not famous on our home planet. Our best-selling album is welded to the hull of Voyager as it makes its way out of our solar system. (We sold one copy to NASA. They bought it because it features a lead vocal by the late Kurt Waldheim.) The fact is, we are driven. When Big Green first rose out of the primordial soup of the mid 1980s, we had several choices. They were:

1) Go back into the soup! It was quite good, actually. Always like a little ginger in with the carrots. Mmmmm-boy.

2) Start a band, but instead of an indie rock group that has to make its own albums, something less demanding. Call it “Various Artists”. That way, on our first day of existence we would have dozens, perhaps hundreds of albums to our credit, many containing hit songs from every era. Instant popularity! Just add crack!

3) Start an indie rock group that has to make its own albums. With help, of course, from our mad science adviser, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the indefatigable mansized tuber, a couple of Lincolns, and others. (Don’t want to suggest for a moment that we do all this work alone!)

So here we are, patching the rough road that is Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, preparing for final mixes and looking for obvious holes. Hey, there’s a good name for a band: The Obvious Holes. Beats the Recognizable Hicks any day.

Keep your eyes open for more fadeout grooves. Think of them as shards left over in the manufacture of the next album. Or something.

After party.

Just some random thoughts on the major party conventions, now that they’re over. Don’t have a lot of time to write this, so it’s going to be… well, random.

Tale of Two Crackers. Bill Clinton’s big speech on Wednesday night capped what seems to me like a political rehabilitation of monumental proportions. At some point, everybody started loving Bill Clinton, and he has become a major statesman … or as close to that as you can come in this age. It wasn’t terribly surprising to see this process happen with Ronald Reagan, who – despite having a spotty popularity rating during his presidency – the media always portrayed as wildly popular, and around whom an image-enhancement industry of sorts has been at work since his departure. But Clinton? Does anyone remember how denigrated he was throughout his presidency? I suppose people have gradually come to the realization that things weren’t so bad in the 1990s … since everything since then has pretty generally sucked.

That brings me to the second cracker – W. Bush. During Clinton’s long speech, while people were hanging on every word, it was hard not to think of W’s total absence from his own party’s convention, both in person and in rhetoric. If this election is truly about a competition between two distinct approaches to government, this contrast speaks volumes about the degree to which each vision (1) has a record of success and (2) is something its proponents can advance with confidence.

Turnaround. Is America ready for a turnaround, Romney-style? I think we’ve already gotten a piece of that. Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital illustrates a bit of what we can expect from a Romney administration. The short story is this: Like the corporate raiders of the 1980s, Bain would do leveraged buy-outs of companies – basically buy them on credit with relatively little money down. The resulting debt would then be held by the company. Then they would compel the company to monetize its assets for dividend payments to its new shareholders – the people at Bain and its partners. What is left is the husk of a company that had already been under stress before Bain’s arrival and is now buried under a crushing debt burden, its assets sold off to enrich others.

That’s the Romney plan for America, in a nutshell. The G.O.P., if elected, will do what it always does – borrow massively (i.e. leverage), cut taxes for the rich (i.e. dividend payment to investors), privatize (i.e. monetize assets), and deregulate. You don’t need an MBA to figure out where that’s headed.

luv u,

jp

Mis takes.

All I’ve got is a three and a deuce. You’ve got queens? Christ almighty, Mitch. What do you have, a printing press over there? Isn’t that the third hand like that you’ve…. Oh, wait a minute, I have to get to work here…

Hi, everyone. It is I, Joe Perry of Big Green. No, not Joe Perry of Aerosmith. The other Joe Perry. And on behalf of the other members of Big Green, as well as assorted denizens of their entourage, I have been asked to make the following statement. This is NOT a test. This is an ACTUAL OFFICIAL STATEMENT from the band Big Green. Ahem.

The founding members of Big Green, Joseph M. Perry and Matthew J. Perry, hereby disavow and deny any connection, either familial or professional, with the group known as The Band Perry. Any claims made by any person or persons suggesting such a connection are patently false and possibly malicious. Big Green shall henceforth neither confirm nor deny any such claims, as the members feel that this statement is sufficient response. 

There. Now that that’s dispensed with…. Why did we feel the need to do this? Well…. with our new album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick now in the final phase of production – an album that features more than one country western-themed composition – we felt it necessary to draw a sharp line between ourselves and a country group that has appropriated OUR family name, one that has performed in central New York TWICE this year already. Given the confusion over my name and that of the guitarist from Aerosmith, it seemed silly to risk confusing the public even more on the eve of the launch of our new album. Yeah, I know… they’re young, have good hair, and are well rehearsed, and we…. well, we have none of those things. There’s something to be said for due diligence, my friends.

That said, Big Green has, with the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), been carrying out a project that demonstrates a profound lack of due diligence. It’s a collection of sound files called Fade-Out Grooves that we’ve been releasing into the wild via Twitter ( @BigGreenJoe ).  These are the drawn-out hairy endings of songs we’ve recorded and mixed – basically, all of the junk that happens after the fade out. Don’t know about you, but I always wondered how songs that fade-out actually end. Well … now you can know the answer to that conundrum.

So… think of these as appetizers, just to keep you busy until the main course arrives.

Crying thief.

My guess is that Marco Rubio is speaking now as I write these lines, serving up a fitting introduction for the nominee – or Rominee – of last resort for the Republican party. A speech filled with platitudes about freedom from, I don’t know, the tyranny of a pension or reliable health insurance in your old age, spoken by the son of escapees from communist Cuba. As Ryan put it on Wednesday night, the present-day G.O.P. sees everything to the left of Ayn Rand as sclerotic socialism, including legislative initiatives – like the individual mandate and cap and trade – that they themselves invented only a handful of years ago. (Ryan himself couldn’t even stick to his Randian creed for three minutes, decrying a nanny state where “everything is free except you” then paying tribute to the Medicare his mother purportedly depends on.)

I don’t know about these guys, but that “everything free” part probably sounds pretty attractive to a lot of Americans right now. While they equate Obama with Castro, Barry is much, much closer to them than he is to the bearded one in Havana. Would that he had put his shoulder behind expanding Medicare instead of this republican inspired, Heritage Foundation formulated health insurance scheme they call “Obamacare”. Would that he had committed himself to full employment along the lines of what Robert Pollin is recommending, among others. Those are positions worth defending. The problem Obama has right now is not the Republicans … it is his own flaccid liberalism, hopelessly compromised from the first stage of negotiation.

In truth, the Republicans, led by millionaire Romney, should be easy as hell to beat. They have zero credibility on the economy, no track record to speak of. Obama at least had the Clinton years – what does Romney have? The Republicans crashed the economy; now they want the driver’s seat back. They nearly destroyed the empire it took decades of rapacious interventionism to build. They have an ex-president, a mere four years out of office, that played no role in their convention. Did anyone mention him even once? They appear to think that by disowning the historically incompetent Bush/Cheney and pretending not to remember their tenure that they can induce amnesia amongst the rest of the body politic. They believe that by pointing elsewhere and crying “thief”, they can rob again.

Now that the balloons have fallen on Romney/Ryan (and we have been treated to the spectacle of evident dementia-sufferer Clint Eastwood rambling aimlessly on national television), it’s fair to respond to that question they always ask four years into an opponent’s presidency – namely, are you better off than you were four years ago. Four years ago, we were in free fall, the credit system of the world’s largest economy was shutting down, and hundreds of thousands were being thrown out of work. Four years ago, Bush’s war of choice in Iraq was still killing young soldiers by the dozen. Unless you’re as demented as Clint Eastwood, you probably remember all that.

Yes, we’re better off than we were in 2008. Still not good, but it takes a lot of work to get out of a hole as deep as the one Romney’s party dug us into.

luv u,

jp

Back pages.

The jury is in on Curiosity. The bad news: there is no water on Mars. The good news? There’s club soda. And tonic water with lime. There’s a lot you can say about the Martians, but you can’t say they’re not civilized.

Got some time on our hands, obviously, so we have the luxury of pondering the findings of the latest Mars probe, made available by our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee (who somehow hacked into Curiosity and has compelled it to act on our behalf as a robotic booking agent on the red planet). Roll, Curiosity, roll, and soon we will be idle no longer. Or something to that effect. Hell – bring back a pizza and the Lincolns will be happy. That would certainly outdo Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and he only has to cross the street to get the great emancipators a third-rate pie. (I’m looking at you, Marvin. You’re not good!)

Well, I hope you all enjoyed our anniversary edition of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our official podcast. A little something for everyone in there, I’m proud to say. Aside from all the pointless yak by Matt and myself, you can enjoy:

  • a little visit with Mr. Ned, Mitt Romney’s dancing horse, and the candidate himself.
  • not one but TWO new songs by cousin Rick Perry: a country number titled “Fed Up” and a Susan Boyle-inspired ballad called “Lone Star”. Think of them as bookends on the empty bookshelf that is Rick’s Texas brain.
  • brief comments by Jack Ossont of the Coalition to Protect New York at an anti-fracking rally in Utica, NY.
  • a blues number culled from the first-ever demo recorded by a group called Big Green.

The last item, a Taj Mahal number named “She Caught The Katy”, which was part of our live show, was recorded back in 1986 in a garage studio (analog Tascam 8-track deck) owned by John Danison – brother of Big Green co-founder Ned Danison – who worked for the band Blotto back in the day. We threw together a four-song demo to promote the band; this was one of those tracks. I’m doing the vocal and plunking on Ned’s electric piano. Matt’s playing bass. Ned is doing the electric guitar and organ parts. The drummer was an Albany guy named Pete Young – he was with us for this recording and that was about it. (We had some drummer issues in those days.)

So hey, what the hell … enjoy. And if you go to Mars this week (or next), bring some ice.