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 2014

Audio May 25, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Big Green hops awkwardly around the maypole with a brand new episode of Ned Trek, two unreleased Big Green tracks, impromptu performances, and other accidents. Avast!

This is Big Green – May 2014. Features: 1) Ned Trek XVIII: Captain Frickasee; 2) Put the Phone Down: A lame song to greet the May; 3) Joe Percy’s convocation report; 4) Matt’s falcon tales; 5) Talk of Planet of the Dinosaurs and other trivia; 6) Song: Brotherly Love, performed live by Big Green; 7) Pondering the plot of the Big Valley; 8) Song: Going to Andromeda, by Big Green; 9) Matt plays with bungees; 10) Song: Good Old Boys Roundup, by Big Green (demo version); 11) Time for us to go.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Usual Rubbish

Loserville.

May 23, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

It’s the last train to Loserville and I’ll meet you at the station. Wasn’t that a Monkees song? No? Okay … that earworm crawled away decades ago.

Well, here we are, kicking around the mill, just me and my shadow … and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Brother and bandmate Matt Perry has taken up residence in some other abandoned structure. We get together for recordings, podcast sessions, etc., then he goes home to his shack and I to mine. The mansized tuber has planted himself firmly in the courtyard; I bring a bucket of swill out to him every couple of days. Livin’ the life, as they say.

As you can imagine, the utility costs here are fantastic. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is, as I have said many times, a drafty old barn of a place, and most of the heat goes straight out the window (the same window, incidentally, that the rain and snow comes in through). Whoever is paying the fuel bills must be ripping his/her hair out by now. And then there’s the occasional rap on the door by, I don’t know, the bailiff, perhaps? U.S. Marshalls? If I looked more like Cliven Bundy’s militia crew, I wouldn’t worry about it much. But I yam what I yam, as the sailor said.

well-maybe In all honesty, I’m considering moving back to a lean-to type housing arrangement, like what we had back at the beginning of this current chapter in the history of the Big Green musical collective. That’s probably more appropriate accommodation for the collective as it currently stands, which is to say … big enough for me, Marvin, and anti-Lincoln. A little tight for my taste, perhaps. And then there’s the question of plugging Marvin in for the night. (We need at least one outlet for his AC power supply and a second for my electric piano. Oh, right … and one for my amp. Shit … my Mr. Coffee! Make that four.)

See what happens when you try to simplify? That’s when things start to get really complicated. Now pardon me … I have a podcast to finish, for chrissake.

Political Rants

Mission unaccomplished.

May 23, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

If there is one enduring truth about America, it is this: we are extremely good at making a mess and abysmally inept at cleaning it up.

The Veterans Administration controversy has been over a decade in the making, and is nothing unprecedented or even particularly unusual. Recall that the Afghan and Iraq wars were supposed to be conducted, in essence, free of charge with minimal casualties. The Iraq war, in particular, was low-balled by Bush administration officials, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, who opined to Congress that it might cost us a billion or two. They were convinced that the war would be short and sweet. They did not plan for the occupation of Iraq, nor did they plan for decades of health care services for returning veterans. It was going to be a cake walk.

wolfo-wits Yeah, not so much. But it did sound good at the time, didn’t it? And now, many deaths, dismemberments, and billions of dollars later, we are faced with an enormous backlog of wounded and battle-stressed soldiers, attempting to access a VA system that does not have the physical infrastructure to serve them in a timely fashion. That’s a large part of what’s behind the deceptive practices we are hearing about now – people trying to feign success when the system is failing miserably, at least on the intake end.

It is worse than that, though. We also never provided adequately for veterans of either the Vietnam War or the Gulf War. Vietnam vets faced similar problems with the VA upon their return, and now as they age they are coping with the same types of difficulties as Iraq vets: not enough primary care doctors, not enough admission capacity at VA hospitals … simply put, not enough resources to serve them.

I used to bring my dad to the VA hospital in Syracuse so that he could get discounted medications for his glaucoma. That was long before the post-9/11 wars, and outpatient services seemed adequate, if a little stretched. What we need to do, more than anything, is roll the costs of veteran recovery and long-term healthcare planning into any proposed deployment before we undertake it. Just like the oil industry should be expected to invest in proven safety and recovery technologies before they drill, we should plan on these expenses instead of minimizing the impact of war on the lives of our military families and the wealth of the nation.

How can we act surprised when the predictable consequences of more than a decade of war come to pass?

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Exodus.

May 17, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn’t run into any dental problems while he’s back there. Whiskey and pliers, that’s what he’ll have to look forward to in that grisly century.

Well, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud.

Let’s see … what else is in the news? Oh, yeah … the mansized tuber has decided at long last to take root in the courtyard. He’s pushing twenty now, and feels it’s high time for him to settle down and start a garden. Hard to argue with a root vegetable. We’ll see how long THAT lasts. Christ on a bike, about the only ones around here I can count on are my brother Matt and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though I caught the latter thumbing through the want ads the other day. It seems there are more opportunities out there for personal robot assistants than there were just a few years ago. I may have to start PAYING him, for chrissake.

The bottom line is that, with all of these departures and major life decisions going on, it’s getting pretty quiet around this big old barn of a place. We’ve talked about finding someplace smaller to squat, maybe opt for another three-room lean-to of the kind we occupied back in our Sri Lanka days. So long as it’s big enough to produce a podcast in, we’re good.

Political Rants

Hot air.

May 17, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is just the latest Republican politician with presidential ambitions to cast doubt on the validity of climate change, a necessary prerequisite for claiming the G.O.P. nomination in 2016. Indeed, anyone who is going to have a ghost of a chance with the tea-party fueled right-wing electorate in that party needs to be a climate change denialist to the core (though Rubio has since backpedaled slightly, perhaps in embarrassment). Sadly, then, the senator is not alone.

Now, I don’t usually comment on opinion columns, but I will make an exception on this occasion, only because columnist Tom Morgan is spectacularly deserving of the “tin ear” award for his column “Remember that report? Well, forget it.” I know Morgan is trying to be, well … sort of funny, I guess, but when he spouts something like this, the humor escapes me:

That is part of the problem the president and the Greens face. They want us to be alarmed by climate whatever. But the reason they changed the term from global warming is that the globe did not warm — not the way they predicted. And so many more of their predictions have not come about.

Morgan goes on to say that many of the predicted “calamities” related to climate change have failed to occur. All of this, mind you, on the week when it was reported that the West Antarctic glacier is, well, melting away … in fact, it’s in the midst of what’s described by researchers as an unstoppable retreat which will result in a precipitous rise in sea level over the long term. That’s long term.

Short term, the evidence of climate change is simply undeniable. Glaciers are retreating in Greenland, the arctic is melting, California and Texas are experiencing unprecedented drought, and extreme weather is becoming more and more extreme. Maybe Morgan doesn’t live in Tornado alley, but frankly, if he doesn’t now he may soon. Here in upstate New York, we’ve had more tornadoes in the last couple of years than in the previous 30. The next big storm may be headed your way.

Perhaps when Super Storm Sandys start happening twice or three times a month, people like Morgan and Rubio may start admitting the obvious. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

What’s next.

May 9, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

How about a bicycle tour around Scandinavia? They don’t have any big hills there, do they? Oh. Okay, well … how about Holland? Right. Too many stoned drivers. So I guess, by your logic, Colorado is the worst of all possible worlds for bike tours.

Yeah, well … Lincoln didn’t think that last comment was too funny, and apparently now he’s determined to jump back into the past, where (arguably) he belongs … even though in much of the past, he’s dead. So I guess he’s saying he’d rather be dead than spend another summer with Big Green. That’s just plain sad, you know? I’m sure plenty of less revered ex presidents would be more than glad to spend the summer with us, rather than in some poorly defined version of America’s past. But Lincoln does not count himself among that number.

So, it looks like pretty soon we’ll be going down to the cobweb-choked basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and dusting off Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device – the only piece of technological instrumentation capable of putting Lincoln back where he belongs. I’m a little nervous about doing this in Mitch Macaphee’s absence. He is, after all, our mad science advisor, and I hesitate to engage in the fraught discipline of mad science without his counsel. But … my president has called upon me, and I must respond.

Have you stopped laughing yet? Good. I’ll continue.

Part of the issue here is that we’re just not sure what to do with ourselves, man. What the hell is next for Big Green? The bike tour idea was suggested by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), so that means we arrived at it almost entirely at random. I’m not sure who told us this (perhaps our first manager, way back in the day), but I’m pretty sure we’ve established that it’s not a good idea to make major life decisions through any process that resembles random selection. We need to put on our thinking caps.

Caps on? Great. Think, Big Green, think. Get me your ideas by midnight Thursday. Or not. I’m easy.

Political Rants

Week that was (redux).

May 9, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Okay, I’ve been out of commission for a few days, taking comprehensive exams for a master’s degree in lethargy. (Hard to study for, actually … I keep falling asleep.) And though I’ve been quiet, very quiet for the last couple of weeks, I have been paying attention to what’s going on out in that wacky world of ours, and I have a thing or two to say about it. Just bet you can’t wait to hear it! Harumph!

Benghazi. Really? I mean, really? The republicans are on this Benghazi thing again? Why? Because the Affordable Care Act may not be as good a campaign issue as they thought? I keep hearing this trope about how awful it is that four people were killed. Yes, it’s awful. But Libya is a war zone. And these people make more noise about those four lives than they ever did about the more than 4,000 Americans that died in their Iraq war. How about we hold someone (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) accountable for that first, then maybe look at Benghazi (right after Afghanistan)? If magnitude counts for anything, Benghazi shouldn’t even be on the list in the first place.

Let us pray. It’s official – public meetings can be opened with some kind of Jesus prayer. Thank you, Supreme Court and, yes, George W. Bush, who replaced the then-dying William Rehnquist with another reliable young conservative, thereby locking us into reactionary decisions from the Court for another generation. I love the way proponents of prayer in the public square frame this as a freedom of religion issue. For crying out loud, YOU CAN PRAY ALL DAY LONG IF YOU WANT TO. When you do it in a public meeting, representing an institution of government that should have no association with a particular religion whatsoever, you are just cramming it into people’s faces and undermining their trust in the impartiality of government.

Nigerian abduction. Well, it took long enough for the press to talk about this, but they are finally giving it the coverage it deserves, thanks to a groundswell of anger from the grassroots. For a couple of weeks after this abduction, I kept thinking, where is this story? Our press tends to keep its distance from stories in Africa, unless they are real blockbusters. It’s just as well that there is some people power behind this … maybe that will bring about some meaningful change in Nigeria.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

On leave.

May 5, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Got my hands full this week, so no posts, I’m afraid. I’m taking comprehensive exams for my master’s in linguistic studies. No, seriously … a couple more days of this and I can go back to being the rudderless idiot I’ve always been, only with a master’s degree.

Back to the books. Stay tuned. Give the April podcast another listen. And if you’re any good at theoretical linguistics, give me a call for crying out loud. I may have some questions that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t answer.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Thin broth.

April 25, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Hey, Lincoln. No, not you, Anti-Lincoln – I mean your positively-charged doppelganger. Lincoln … close that window, will you? It’s freaking freezing in this barn. I don’t care if you’re practicing your big speech to an imaginary multitude in the courtyard. Do it in front of an imaginary open window!

Yes, here we are … Big Green is once more ensconced in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, where the Buffalo never roamed and where peregrine falcons coexist with Web cams (no lie!). We have re-occupied our decrepit squat house, wresting it back from the yahoos that took possession of it while we were out on our multi-planet tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A triumphant return … not. We’ve had better tours, to be sure. (And better interstellar tour buses. That recycled rocket was a real rattle trap from start to finish.)

How did we convince the Cliven Bundy wanna-be’s to lay down their weapons and let us back into our abandoned mill? The same method we always use: soup to nuts, my friends, soup to nuts. We had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) cook up a crock of Servin' it up at the mill. his signature turnip and spare-tire consumme – a staple on our interstellar extended tours – and we offered it to the nuts occupying our adopted home. They couldn’t resist, flocking out to the courtyard to partake of that rare delicacy. While those hayseeds were choking it down, we slipped passed them and locked the front door behind us.

Sure, there was some complaining, a little KA-POW, KA-BLAM! mostly for show, but they eventually mounted their battered station wagons and rode off into the sunset. As their silhouetted figures receded from view, I meant to thank them. What for? I don’t know. Giving us a reason not to have that same soup again as our “welcome home” supper. In fact, if I NEVER taste another SPOONFUL of that BLOODY TURNIP and SPARE TIRE SOUP AGAIN, it will be MUCH … TOO … SOON!

All right, then. I feel much better now. Back to the studio.

Political Rants

White hats.

April 25, 2014 Joe Leave a comment

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits.

Well, his hat's in the right place. I use that term “conservative” in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of “conservative” who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That’s the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot.

I’m no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flabbergasted over the past couple of weeks that I would need to explain that fact to people who term themselves conservatives. Of course, it seems that they didn’t make a very close study of the man they were raising to the level of Paul Revere, as it seemed to come to them as quite a surprise when he piped up with this little gem about African Americans:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Okay, I may as well just say it. Not only is this guy a racist, he appears to be suffering some form of dementia; perhaps early stage Alzheimer’s. I think the latter condition may play a role in his lack of the ability to conceal the former. I would almost feel sorry for him, frankly, were it not for the fact that he’s bilking the federal government for a million dollars in back grazing fees and fines (note: the fees are very, very reasonable) and apparently content to start the equivalent of a modern range war to keep from parting with his cash. (It’s not hard to imagine what would happen to black people in, say, Philly if they were to try something similar.)

My advice to the Feds is this: the man has bank accounts, doesn’t he? Do to him what you are doing to the Russians and the Iranians. Freeze his assets until he complies. No guns needed for that.

luv u,

Official site of the band Big Green