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?
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Who the hell are we? It’s all a blur to us now.

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Remember those blurry shots of us romping around Forest Hill Cemetery back in our old home town? Sure you do – we’ve used them a million times. There we were, just posing with the marble angels, when the photographer decided to take shots of us running as he ran backwards in front of us. That’s when the world went all wiggly.

Well, that was back in the early nineties. As I said, we’ve been using those as publicity shots for decades, mostly because they’re some of the few decent images of us from when we were youngish. In those days, people didn’t have hi-def video cameras in their pockets. Phones were something wired to the wall (pretty much) and cameras were a thing. (Ask your mother.)

Unlike a lot of nobody bands at that time, we were fortunate enough to know some first-rate photographers, like friend of Big Green Leif Zurmuhlen. (He’s still shooting up a storm for pubs like Nippertown in Albany, NY.) The blurry images were taken by somebody else competent. But the point is that our best shots are from those days when skilled people with cameras happened to be our friends.

Case of mistaken identity

Given that we spent a fair amount of time in a blur, it’s not surprising that we might get confused with other people. I mean, look at the photo – that could be anybody. And frankly, with a name like Big Green, one might expect to encounter doppelgangers. It has two common words, and one of them is a color, for crying out loud.

Well … it happened. Not sure exactly how, but our catalog of poor-selling music got mixed up with that of another act named Big Green. (I believe there’s more than one, actually.) It’s a hip hop artist, and a number of their works were attributed to our account, just as a few or ours have (and continue to be) attributed to their account. As we’re working on a new album, we thought this might be a good time to kind of untangle that mess.

We’ve had some success in this, but it’s not finished. We haven’t heard from the other Big Green, but I imagine they’re grateful for our efforts, as I believe their music is a hell of a lot more popular than ours. I’m expecting a fruit basket from them any day now.

Pump up the jam

Speaking of streaming services, now might be a good time for you to add Big Green (um … THIS Big Green) to your playlists. In fact, while you’re doing that, maybe let our songs run for a few hours and rack up some plays – We’re wearing cardboard belts!

Here’s where to go to find our sorry asses:

This is us on Amazon music. Don’t buy anything – just use your account to play your favorites from our various releases.

We’re also on Spotify. And no, we don’t know Joe Rogan. We’re just on the same streaming service, that’s all. Again, put us on continuous loop – Daddy needs new shoes.

We also have an artist site on Apple Music. This one is a little confused, as they haven’t included our album Cowboy Scat. (That one is still attributed to the hip-hop Big Green, poor sods.)

Big Green is probably on other services that are downstream of the majors, as we’re distributed by The Orchard and by CD Baby. (2000 Years to Christmas and International House are through the Orchard; Cowboy Scat is through CD Baby.)

Free stuff

If you don’t have a hay-penny, god bless you. But if you don’t have access to streaming services, you can listen to our music for free – just let us know that you want to and we’ll make it happen. Be nice to us and we’ll send you a genuine first-edition Big Green button, designed by photographer Leif Zurmuhlen, hand-pressed by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison back in the eighties, and stuffed into a box for 35 years. Just ask!

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New year is here: Back to work, lazy mothers!

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Well, that was a nice little holiday break, and we all had a bit of a laugh. But now it’s 2024, dudes – time to get back down to it. No more messing around, no more late rising. You had your vacation, damn it! Nose to the grindstone, my fine little friends.

That’s my version of a pep talk. I’ve never been much in the way of a motivational speaker, especially when the audience is me and my brother. Neither one of us wants to take any of THAT guy’s bullshit. And as you know from long experience, Big Green is a leaderless collective. We don’t subscribe to self-imposed hierarchies. Nor do we subscribe to the daily paper, or even a monthly newsletter. But I digress.

A far safer Forbin Project

I’m not sure, but I think we’re in year two of producing this particular album. And if you include the year or so we spent working out which album we were going to make (new songs or retreads), call it three. Why does it take Big Green so damn long to make a record? Well, there are three reasons:

  1. We’re slow as a mother. Always have been, always will be. That’s just the speed we’re built for, man – can’t help it. What the hell, it took us five years to finish International House, and it takes less than an hour to listen to the s.o.b.
  2. We’re oldsters. That’s part of the reason for #1. Not much we can do about that shit. Stick around long enough and you’ll be old, too.
  3. We’re busy-ass mo-fo’s. Matt in particular has a raft of responsibilities. I myself don’t have a raft, but I have responsibilities. Hence, we record maybe once a week, whether we need to or not.

Thing is, we tend to approach each album like it’s the Forbin Project. Whether you’re building Colossus or Guardian, it’s a heavy lift. Though thankfully, unlike the Forbin project, the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance … and Patty Duke’s father plays no role whatsoever in our production process.

Leftovers and tailings

Some of you (and you know who you are) have asked if there won’t be a sample or two of the current project available at some point. No man can say! We like to toss random recordings out there from time to time – some are leftovers, some are tailings or abandoned experiments. (As you know, Dark Christmas was one of those from our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas.)

The truth is, we haven’t even done any rough mixes yet, which is kind of nuts. We’re also in the process of upgrading from Cubase 9 to Cubase 12 (yes, I know – they just released 13, the motherfuckers) and changing platforms. And hell, we’ve got at least 25 songs under serious construction, with another 15 to 20 started. And another thing …. OUCH.

We’ll get this sucker done, trust me. Or my name isn’t … uh … whatever it is.

Random Lyric

Here’s an old one by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison:

Now the picture in my mind is hazy
Just like the number’s washed off my hand
I’m just another nameless no one
She’s just another faceless one night stand

From the song “A Name and a Face”. Listen to the demo we recorded in 1986:

BIG GREEN 1986 DEMO

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year (or not)

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Well, here we go again – it’s the holiday season, and Christmas is upon us once more. What will Santa bring this year? A steaming pile of wombat droppings? More bricks of surplus cheese? He’s full of surprises, that old man. Kind of amazing that he’s made it this far in life without changing jobs. (Actually … we haven’t changed jobs either, so who am I to criticize?)

What someone is saying somewhere

It’s often been said (and still remains said-able) that no band keeps Christmas in quite the same way as Big Green. I don’t know who exactly is saying that, but no matter – we are extremely possessive when it comes to the Yuletide, and we’re not giving it up under any circumstances. It’s MINE, you hear … MINE!! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!

Ahem …. uh … so, what would Christmas be without Big Green? Pretty much the same. And that fact that we latched on to it early on makes no difference to just about anyone. Though I will say that this is an ideal time of the year to listen to our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, which you can tap on Spotify, on The Orchard, on YouTube even … pretty much any freaking where. A bit of easy listening to get you through those difficult moments around the dinner table with relatives you’re fortunate to see only once a year. (If they start talking about the perils of critical race theory, crank up the volume!)

A little stocking stuffer

Which leads me to the point of this whole dumb-ass post. As I explained last month, we’re still tracking our next album, and it’s slow-going. And while I don’t have any genuine new content for you this year, I do have some hot holiday leftovers to share.

Back when we recorded 2000 Years To Christmas in the late 1990s, we started with a list of about 18 songs. We started 17 on the DTRS system we were using in those days, 16 of which were completed. The final disc had 13 tracks, so we left three of them off for quality control reasons (that’s the corporate-speak way of saying we weren’t super happy with how they came out). One of those tracks was kind of a borderline case. It’s called Dark Christmas, and we thought it was high time it got tossed out there for folks to hear. So we remastered it and threw it up on our YouTube channel – here it is:

Dark Christmas, by Big Green

So there you have it – a little stocking stuffer, just in time for the holidays. And no, this is not some kind of AI-driven confabulation – I think one listen will tell you that it couldn’t be anything other than us, back in the day. So enjoy, share, add it to your playlists, etc. And cheer up … or not, depending on your preference.

See you in the new year!

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In the studio with America’s most obscure band

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Dad always told us, be the best in the world at something. Actually, I don’t think it was dad who said that – probably some random stranger passing us on the street. Doesn’t matter. Find something to be best at, he said, and we went and did it. Someone had to be the most obscure band in America, we thought. Why not us?

Well, the nearly forty-year-old unknown quantity known as Big Green is back in its makeshift studio again. Another project, another album … call it what you like. We’ve got a heap of songs to record, once again, and we’re doing it the only way we know how – under the radar.

By The Numbers

So how’s the new project going? It’s going, as the old saying goes. It’s hard to qualify our progress, so I will try to quantify it for you. Here are the numbers we’re working with. And bear in mind, none of us are even amateur mathematicians.

80-plus – That’s the rough number of songs we started out with as potentially being part of this album. The vast, vast majority were written by Matt, and a handful by me (a.k.a. Joe).

40-plus – Another imprecise number, this one representing the number of recordings we’ve started since we began this project last year. This doesn’t include a couple of early demos we did prior to 2022.

24 – Finally, a solid number! This is the number of recordings we’ve concentrated on – songs that include substantially more than a reference guitar track.

20 – This is how many recordings have keyboard parts, mostly piano. Some are midi parts, some d.i. from my Korg SV-1. Coincidentally, this is also the number with main vocal tracks, 8 with backup vocals.

18 – The current number of songs with a bass track. (We’ve been furiously adding them in recent weeks.)

17 – That’s the number of tracks that have fully programmed drum parts. This is typically something that happens in pre-production, but we don’t do that. That would be preposterous.

Name That Album

When does this whole thing come to a conclusion? No man can say. We don’t even have a working title for the album. Call it Splunge or something, just for the time being. If we had a different name, the album title might suggest itself. For instance, if the name of our band was “Choosy Mothers”, the album title would almost have to be “Jif”. The name Big Green doesn’t suggest anything to me at all.

Mistaken Identity

Then there are those times when we get confused with artists that actually have a following. It’s usually the result of a coincidence in song titles. Here’s one right now:

Volcano Man, by Big Green
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In the shop for a little tune-up.

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Mother ship, this is Central New York calling – we need repairs … like, right now. Oh, and one more thing … HAAAAALP!

It will surprise exactly none of you that Big Green doesn’t have tech support in-house. That’s largely because, well, we don’t even have the “in-house” part. But hey, there’s a lesson embedded in every misfortune. And so when I tried to upgrade our recording platform – in the middle of an album project – I discovered that our corporate overlords had made this impossible. The lesson? “Right to Repair” is a thing, it turns out. And the manufacturer of our computer at some point decided that I was wrong to repair. Very wrong, indeed.

Tech for the technically challenged

Now, I’m not great with tools. I get screwdrivers mixed up with other drinks. Nevertheless, I started clawing away at my laptop computer and soon discovered that the likes of me could not open the effer. That’s when I put the tools away and called the repair shop. What we really need is something like bicycle repair man, from that old Monty Python script. In a perfect world, we could resort to such things. But alas.

How’s the project going, aside from our various technical foibles? So good of you to ask. It’s like chipping away at a mountain, actually. You just keep lopping off every piece of it that doesn’t look like your next album. We started about 40 or 45 songs, and we seem to be concentrating on maybe half of them. Matt’s adding bass parts; I’m randomly adding keyboards, voice, etc. It could use some yeast, certainly, and maybe a pinch of nutmeg. None of my bunt pans are big enough to accommodate …. oh, wait; that’s the Madison county bake-off, not the album. Apologies. Always get those mixed up in my tiny brain.

Bitter legacy

We’re working off an old legacy platform that can’t be updated, and we’re at least three versions behind on our multi-track workstation software (Cubase 9). This is a good time, it seems, to upgrade. So we bought the computer, we bought the software, we put the two things together, and … bupkis. That’s when I started working away on the computer with various screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, and the like.

Now, I suppose we could just hike up the street a few blocks and record at Big Blue North, but hey … that would take money. It may surprise you that we haven’t been given an advance on royalties by our corporate label. (If so, you must be one of the legions who have never heard of Big Green. And to you I say, welcome!)

Oh, well … we’ll manage. You’ll see. And if you want to pre-order a copy of Big Green’s next album, I would strongly advise you to wait. We’ve still got some managing to do, you see.

luv u,

jp

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Which album comes next? we Would love to know.

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This just in from Big Green Central: nothing new to report. Check again next month. Hah! Just kidding … about the “next month” thing. Yes, we have nothing new to report, but that just means that havoc and mayhem are nothing new to us. And who doesn’t want to hear about havoc and mayhem, right? Nobody – that’s who.

What’s the controversy this month? So glad you asked. The thing is, we’re working on an album of new material, and it’s taking the usual forever for us. Of course, avid Big Green followers will know that we also have a packet of older songs that haven’t been gathered into an album. Those are the songs from Ned Trek, a feature on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN, which has been on an extended hiatus for … what … three years? Jesus Christmas.

Tale of Two Records

We’ve been talking about releasing a Ned Trek album for probably as long as Ned Trek has been a thing. It would essentially be our second podcast album, the first being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick from back in 2013 – in other words, another collection of songs written mostly for laughs, recorded in kind of a hurry under pressure of a deadline. We did, however, put a little more work into the Ned Trek songs, and our recording technology improved marginally through the course of the series … which is why we’re still thinking about doing a release.

But here’s the rub: which album comes first? The Ned Trek songs are mostly done, they just need some polishing … but there’s also about 80 of them! There’s probably less of the new material, maybe 50 songs, but the recordings are still under construction. If we’re spending time recording the latter, we have no time to polish and curate the former. See what I mean?

Kicking the Can

We could settle this the way we settle other important questions – kick the can down the road. Not the metaphor … I mean, write “Ned Trek” on one end of the can, “new songs” on the other side, then kick it down the road a set number of times and see which side it lands on. Isn’t that how everyone makes important decisions?

Hey, look … when we decide which comes first, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, you can listen to all three of our released albums for free on YouTube – just visit https://www.youtube.com/@biggreenband and hit play. AND subscribe! (While you’re there, check out the live tracks and some of the other junk we’ve posted.)

Luv u,

jp

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Cracking the most ridiculous case of I.D. theft ever.

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Ready for some good news? So the fuck are we! Give us yours and we’ll give you ours – deal? Right, well … maybe not.

Our “good” news is that BIG GREEN IS NOW ON SPOTIFY! And now, as Paul Harvey used to say (ask your grandmother), here’s the rest of the story. Big Green has actually been on Spotify for years, only our releases got all tangled up with the work of another artist named Big Green. Frankly, that should have been good news for us, because we are (wait for it) THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL BAND IN THE HISTORY OF POP MUSIC, so any association with any other artist could only lift us higher. (Though in the case of the other Big Green, not very much higher.)

After some wrangling with the Spotify peoples, they managed to separate our catalogs, so the other Big Green need no longer be burdened by listing the 21 songs on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, or have to explain the disturbing images in our video for One Small Step. But hey … that doesn’t mean you can’t be burdened by them!

While we’re working on the next album (and yes, we are STILL working on it), by all means open your Spotify app, find our artist page, follow us, play our songs, rate us, etc. Throw us a bone! We’ll find some way of thanking you with swag, free files, etc. Whatever we’ve got lying about. That’s just the kind of band we are.

Now, we’re NOT suggesting that you open our Spotify page on every computer in your home, workplace, etc., and start streaming our songs on a loop. Nor are we suggesting that you buy a bunch of burner phones and do the same thing. That would be highly unethical and an offense against the laws of god and man. Just listen on Spotify. Over and over …

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A Summer Place (No, Not the Damn Song!)

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Shit boy howdy, it’s hot. Hot as blue blazes. Let’s see – what other cliches can I use to describe the searing effects of a dying planet? HOT ENOUGH FOR YA?

Yes, friends, your Big Green friends are in a summer place. No, we’re not on vacation, sailing a yacht around the boiling Caribbean. Far from it! It’s fair to say that we are on a kind of summer hiatus, though for me that has meant working on our new album DAY and NIGHT. (Not EVERY day and EVERY night, you understand, and of course, not ALL day or ALL night.) Just chipping away at the monument, here and there.

When will it be finished? Whoa, man …. not so fast. We’ve got about 40 tracks started. That’s a lot of squeaking and whistling, to say nothing of the tap dancing. I’m not whining, you understand. And as Orson Welles once said, “we will serve no whine … before its time.” In other words … I don’t know, sometime in the Fall, maybe?

As for summer activities, I’m sure you know that it’s not the same as it used to be back when we were just young critters, walking around a random barnyard, making stupid faces, and lampooning more famous musicians (which is a category that includes basically every other musician ever). Matt’s refinishing floors, I think, in addition to watching falcons and feeding beavers. Me? I’m negotiating with squirrels. And I’m getting my ass handed to me.

Anyway, stay tuned … we’ll be posting again soon. Enjoy your summer!

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Crashing the party

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Hey, campers …. In case you hadn’t noticed, our WordPress site was down for a few days due to unknown technical issues (our Web hosting service was probably vacuuming the server farm and tripped over a power cord or something). If it happens again, well god damn it … you won’t see this! Nevertheless, the party continues unabated, crashes notwithstanding. We’re still recording, posting stuff on YouTube and Instagram, and annoying the neighbors with our noisy activities. If we keep you up at night, let us know!

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International House without the pancakes

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What’s up, Big Green visitors? As previously reported, we’re still at work on our splendid new project (as of yet unnamed), tracking, listening back, swearing, deleting, tracking again … rinse and repeat. You know our process: no process! It’s working as well as ever.

Busy as we are, we are finding some spare time to sort through some old file boxes, clean out the attic, etc. We thought this might be a good time to post our second album, International House, on YouTube. We’ve got a couple of tracks posted to a playlist so far (Welcome To It and For Your Majesty’s Amusement), and we invite you to check it out, subscribe, etc., particularly if you haven’t heard the album before. Give it a spin and tell us what you think!

Okay … back to the slog. Cue up the next song, folks! Roll tape!