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Write in the middle of it all

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Get Music Here

Okay, so, what rhymes with Klondike? No, that’s two words. I’m looking for one, man. Why am I so exacting? Well, let me tell you, fool … you don’t get to where I got without applying a little exactitude in all the right places. Take it from Mr. Nobody. You heard it here first!

Well, hello, cybernauts, and welcome to the home of Big Green. We’ve been around so long, we seem like a square. Ain’t that the way with popular music groups … particularly the ones that aren’t so popular. Why, we’ve been making noises under the name Big Green since Matt wore skinny ties and I rolled my jacket sleeves up to the elbow. Yes, we lived in the eighties. It wasn’t easy, kids, no matter what they tell you. There were no hover crafts, no jet packs – none of the things you young’uns are used to these days.

Putting the tune in cartoons

Like most bands, our biggest challenge is developing new material. Mind you, we stand on a mountain of older songs, thanks largely to the relentless songwriting machine known as the right honorable Matthew Perry, esq. He has an enormous catalog of numbers covering a range of topics, from bad t.v. shows to disease to space Nazis. (No, not THOSE space Nazis … other ones.) Why, we could spend the rest of our lives making decent recordings of songs that he demoed in a rush thirty years ago, and never run out of material.

But man was not meant for that! One must never rest upon one’s laurels, even if you’ve been ceremoniously presented with a laurel and hardy handshake. No, sir – music is about the new, the now, the WOW. Ask any cartoon character on Saturday morning television. Did the Archies play old songs? Did Josey and the Pussycats hash out retreads of other people’s material? Of course they didn’t. If they had, they would have been laughed out of the cartooniverse. I think we can all take a lesson from that.

Scraping around for subject matter

Right, so as you probably know, we resort to some unorthodox methods of songwriting, particularly when under time pressure. Sometimes I go for plucking random words out of a dictionary. Matt prefers old cookbooks, but hell, they’re all the same words, just in different orders. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Joe! Why don’t you wait until you hear from a major record label before you start writing? Just sit with your pen at the ready, until the phone rings with that eight figure offer.” That was it, wasn’t it? Just call me Kreskin. Or Criswell. Even though I’m not.

See? I'm not Criswell. How much more proof do you need?

Hey man – we don’t sit around the hammer mill waiting for someone to make us work. Hell, we’ve been sitting around this place for years, and nothing remotely like that has ever happened. Not sure where I was going with that, but anyway … we have always been self starters. I like to think that we work circles around other bands when it comes to living in a hammer mill. Top that, Captured by Robots!

Anything we can do

You know how the song goes, right? Anything we can do, you can do better … or something like that. Well, fuck that song. I’m getting out my scratch pad and freestyling some song lyrics. It’s that or do the dishes. Decisions, decisions.

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Making perfect stock for kindling wood

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2000 Years to Christmas

Cold as hell in here. Haven’t you got that fire going yet? Put some of that kindling around the bottom and let’s see if that catches. Okay, okay – nice. Hey … why does that kindling have an F-hole. MARVIN!!

Hello, friends. Well, winter is upon us again. This is the time of year when Big Green most deeply regrets squatting in an abandoned hammer mill. (Sounds like a good album name: Big Green most deeply regrets …. or not.) Squatters don’t get energy hookups. They just flat out ignore us, man. It’s like we’re not even here …. which is good if they’re the cops, but not so much if they’re delivering pizzas. (If cops start carrying pizzas, we’re all in trouble.)

The ghost of El Kabong

Okay, so we rely on Marvin (my personal robot) for many things. This week, it’s tending the fire. So I told him to go get some kindling wood so he could get the damn fireplace started. He came back with an odd but acceptable assortment of maple, rosewood, and birch fragments. I thought, “Hey, what the hell – maybe he’s not such a fuck up.”

Well, now I have to eat my epithets. I had pictured Marvin rooting through the neighborhood, picking up discarded pieces of wood. Turns out, he just made his way into our rehearsal space, smashed up some of our instruments like El Kabong, and brought the remains in to be incinerated. Okay, so … let me say that again. My robot assistant smashed an old guitar and a violin so he could have kindling for a fire.

You get the kindling. I'll just go over here for a while.

For the greater good

Hell, you know, this reminds me of a song. It’s called Greater Good, one of them there Big Green songs from the 1980s. I played a live version of it on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN a couple of years ago. Anyhow, there’s part of the lyric that goes something like this:

There’s something lurking there behind your eyes
It sees in me perfect stock for kindling wood
It’s sentimental for those bad old days
when sinners were murdered for the greater good
It wants to burn me for the greater good

Ironically, I think the guitar Marvin smashed up may have been the one I wrote that song on. Somehow he was trying to make the metaphor come true. That’s not something I strongly recommend when it comes to rock songs. Such a practice could make life even more confusing than it is now, and damn it, life is confusing enough!

What is the plan, man?

While we’re trying to keep warm over here in upstate New York, I imagine you are making plans for your holiday revelries. We are doing the same, in our own fashion, bit by bit. I’m still planning a holiday nano concert – just you wait and see. Marvin is looking forward to his annual gift of light machine oil. Mansized tuber is hoping for some more plant food. Lincoln, well …. reinstatement, perhaps, in true Trumpian fashion.

Got interesting yuletide plans? Share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Get them to me early enough, and I’ll write a lame song about one of them, chosen randomly. Because that’s the way we roll.

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Trying to overcome the rule of thumb

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2000 Years to Christmas

Step back a little bit further – you’re out of frame. Okay, now take a step to the right. That’s it. That’s … no, that’s too far. Go back to the left. LEFT! You know, the side your left hand is on. Oh, Jesus!

Oh, hi. Well, once again I’m called upon to do something that I have zero aptitude for. Namely, that’s taking pictures of our band. We do not have an official photographer, which is a shame … because we had a professional photographer before we even had a drummer. (In fact, he sat in on one of our photo sessions as our drummer.) Then we had a drummer, but no guitar player. But I digress.

Bad self portaits

That said, I’m not averse to learning new skills. Neither am I skilled at learning a new verse. The thing is, I am singularly bad at photography. Ask anybody I’ve taken a picture of. I’m always giving them portrait orientation when they want landscape, and vice versa. (Turns out a lot of people prefer portrait – it’s more slimming.)

There’s another thing, too. I think it’s because of these damn camera phones. Back in MY day (get off my lawn!), camera’s were big, bulky things with a massive lens and hard metal shutter buttons. Now, you hold your dumb-ass phone out in front of you, accidentally pressing three or four soft-touch buttons, and next thing you know you’ve essentially butt-dialed Madagascar.

Thumbs up, baby

Then there’s my honking thumb. The sucker keeps getting in the way of the lens. I spend half an hour setting up a shot, getting all the folks together, polishing Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to a high gloss, trimming the root-mesh off of the mansized tuber’s strange protuberances, and so on. Then I take the shot …. and my MF thumb is taking up a third of the frame.

Me and my thumb

See, this is why I’m not filthy rich. If I was a shameless capitalist opportunist, I would promote this as my distinctive style, an aesthetic flourish, a unique take on the world. A little hot air can go a long way, my friends. Soon my thumb-obscured photos would hang in galleries and museums all over Europe, and I would have many imitators. But alas, like my clumsy thumb, the money-making gene skipped my generation of Perry. Them’s the breaks.

Xmas greetings ahead

Now, I know we’ve been doing nothing but repeats these past few Christmases. This year will be different …. I hope. Stay tuned. I’m thinking another nano concert is in order. Think of it as our Christmas Pageant. I’ll be the third reindeer on the left.

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There’s another way of saying this

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2000 Years to Christmas

I could have sworn I left it right here. Sometimes I think I’m losing my nut. And sometimes I think I’m losing my soup. So I’ve got it covered, soup to nuts. What was I saying again?

Hoo, man. Those squatters upstairs must be smoking the devil’s weed once again. I’ve got second-hand smoke brain. Of course, after having spent a third of my life with first-hand smoke brain, this almost rises to the level of clarity. No, there are many possible reasons why I’m thick as a brick today. Here’s one …

Sleep is our friend

Let’s face it. When you don’t sleep enough, you start getting stupid. Ask anyone who’s been up for five days. Rest assured, they will tell you that they cannot rest assured. And if you ask anyone who’s been up for a hundred days, they won’t answer because they’re busy being dead. In short, sleep is obligatory.

Now, many of you know I’m a part time geezer. In fact, pretty much everyone in Big Green is exactly that. My illustrious brother Matt, for instance, seems to expend endless amounts of energy looking after all of nature’s creatures. Does he sleep any more than I do? Probably not. But – and this is important! – he makes more sense than I do. Good thing, too. Anyhow … they say that you need less sleep when you get older. The truth is, you just GET less sleep. How they mix those two things up is beyond me.

This isn't helping.

Go to the window

Some people lose sleep because they walk in their sleep. The name for this syndrome is somnambulism, or “whooping cough.” (Okay, maybe not, but never mind.) To be clear, this illness not only makes you tired, it can beat the hell out of you. I don’t think that’s my problem, though to be sure I roped Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into testing my slumbering ass.

Here’s how the test worked. Marvin would wait until I was sleeping, then start playing the recording of Leo McKern in the movie Help saying “Go to the window”. The theory was that, if I were a sleepwalker, the power of suggestion would be enough for me to defenestrate myself. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. (It wasn’t for want of trying, however. Marvin ran that thing on a loop for about five hours.)

The power of Z

Leave us face it: the only cure for not getting enough sleep is getting enough sleep. Trouble is, when I try to sleep, I think about trying, then I think about thinking, then I think about thinking about thinking …. oh, damn it. It’s the brain, man! How do you stop a brain? (No one can restore a brain!)

Fortunately, I can put myself to sleep simply by playing my favorite songs. Three or four bars in, and the big Z sneaks up and takes hold. It’s a real crowd pleaser, people.

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A really, really bad week for a camping holiday

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2000 Years to Christmas

Did you pack the sleeping bags? Good, good. How about the hurricane lamps? Excellent. Now there was something else we were planning to bring along. What the hell was it? Oh, right. Marshmallows.

Well, it is August, and as you know, most of the world goes on vacation during the course of this high summer month. (I mean most of the northern hemisphere, of course. Below the equator it’s freaking winter.) Big Green is no exception. While the French bug out on August 1, we typically wait until August 21st just to give them a head start. Not that they have anything to worry about – we seldom get beyond the stage of packing our stuff before the wheels come off.

Faulty transport technologies

Okay, so, that wasn’t a metaphor. The wheels actually came off of our rented vehicle. Not surprising, given the liberal terms they offered us. Faced with the prospect of embarking on a walking vacation, we obviously started looking into other options. Now, not everyone has access to a mad scientist, and while it’s tempting to just ask the dude to whip together some kind of land rover hover craft, we don’t want to take the easy way out. (Besides, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is in Madagascar for a conference.)

My first thought was to press-gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into hitching himself up to a donkey cart and pulling us along. He has solar batteries and motorized feet, so it’s not as far-fetched as it seems. Well, when he refused, we were left with few good options. The only ones worth considering were, hitch anti-Lincoln up to a donkey cart, or settle for a stay-cation in the Cheney Hammer Mill courtyard.

Face it, man. It's too tough to toast 'em.

Free water from the sky-gods

I hate to say that the wheels came off of our stay-cation plans, but they kind of did, even though technically speaking, wheels were not required. As soon as we pitched our tent in the courtyard, it started coming down … in buckets. Again – not a metaphor. It was literally raining buckets! Now I know that rain is a blessing in many parts of the world. But too much of a good thing is, well … not a good thing.

You couldn’t describe what happened next as anything like a vacation. I’m basing that on firm metrics. For instance, there was no recurring campfire. No s’mores were made. (Marvin tried to make the s’mores work, but water and graham crackers don’t mix.) No one carved a birch bark canoe. I know these aren’t universally recognized benchmarks, but they give you a rough picture. Bloody weather!

You can’t go home again

The fact is, when you’re home, you can’t go home again. Though, interestingly, when you open a door, you can close it … again. In any case, slinking back home from a failed stay-cation took about two minutes. Hardly a walk of shame. (I think the minimum length for a walk of shame is five minutes, but don’t quote me.)

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Unmasked at the CHENEY Hammer Mill (again).

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hey, I heard the regulations have changed. So you can take the damn thing off, now. That’s right, it came down just a few days ago. Some dude in a tie said so. So this is from the suits, man. What do you mean that’s weak sauce? I’m hip, dude, I’m hip!

Oh, man … why does everything have to end up in an argument around this place? Something to do with the atmosphere here inside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. It gets a little stuffy, especially in the warmer months, and that contributes to a kind of contagious psychosis. I’m not a doctor, of course, but I play one on the internet, and where I come from, this is a bad thing!

Old news is good news

Anyway, we get our news a little bit late here in this forgotten corner of the world. We’re only now hearing that the COVID regulations in New York have been relaxed, and we can start dropping the mask when we’ve gotten our vaccinations worked out. (And we did, by the way – the shots were free, so our attitude is basically gimme some of that.) How liberating, right? What a welcome relief … right?

Wrong, apparently. At least according to some of my squat mates. Several are refusing to drop the mask, for a variety of reasons. Now, I tend to discount the claims of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber, as neither one of them needed to wear a mask in the first place. (Not that disputes with them are anything new – see, for example, this post from 2007.) But when it comes to the mammalian members of our entourage, it’s a different story entirely.

You see, the thing is … all of the human members of Big Green, as well as our various hangers-on – I mean, assistants – feel that the masks generally improve our looks. I don’t disagree. We’re getting a little crusty around the edges, and unlike artisan bread, not in a particularly appetizing way. I for one have taken to drawing more attractive facial features on my masks, like a full rack of normal teeth or a mustache that isn’t dominated by gray hair.

The anti-Lincoln project

Take anti-Lincoln (please!). He needs an oversized mask to cover his festering gob. Frankly, it makes him look like an old-time bank robber. Or a railroad industry lawyer, which … well …. the actual Lincoln in fact was. Frankly, I think he and the others just don’t like the smell of the Hammer Mill in Spring. Why they don’t just say so, I don’t know. This place reeks! Say it loud!

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Ascent of Band.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmmm, that’s weird. Is that really us? Are you sure? Sounds a bit more like Captured By Robots. Of course, we might have recorded during that period when we were captured by robots. Could explain a lot.

Yeah, here we are, folks. Big Green has survived yet another national election here in the United States. You’d hardly know it was happening up here in the sheltering hollow of the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York. Just pull down the shades, pull up the drawbridge, stick a cork in the chimney, and poke your fingers in your ears. That’s how we deal with lots of stuff here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – bill collectors, building inspectors, the people who actually own this property, the local constabulary … just pretend you’re not here. Couldn’t be simpler. (Though more than once, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has given away the game by detonating one of his experimental substances just as the coppers are walking away.)

Holing up in the mill gives us a little extra time to roll back through some old tape. (We’ve got wire recordings as well, but nothing to play them on … so we leave them in the wire-house.) Listening to all of this shit is like looking at a chart representing the “ascent” of man. There’s some folk sounding music that could be the chimp at the start of the line. Our primitive rock combos are like Australopithecus, the earliest “certain hominid” in our long line of musical train wrecks. (Though the first band we tried to do was more like Oreopithecus, largely because we subsisted mainly on a diet of Oreos that whole time.) Our Big Green demos from the 1980s are something like Peking Man, in that we include a raft of covers as well as originals, some of which begin to border on Neanderthal territory.

Hmmm ... Explains a lot.

Where this tortured analogy breaks down is my contention that our current state of development is certainly no farther along than Cro Magnon. That’s not a musical comment exactly – it’s just that the traditional depiction of Cro Magnon in ascent of man illustrations looks just like a modern white dude, except with long locks, more facial hair and a spear over his shoulder. (It might just as easily have been a guitar.) Now I don’t know about you, but that dude looks a hell of a lot more like us than the Modern Man guy at the front of the line, who looks like somebody’s 1950s dad, stepping into the shower. (Though I will say that he looks like the only one of those primates that might have his own personal robot assistant.) When I listen to Ned Trek songs, I can totally picture Cro Magnon belting them out, particularly the Nixon numbers.

One day we will do an anthology like collection, I suspect. We’ll need another step or two in evolution to manage it, but be patient.

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Hidden victims.

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FYI , I’m currently home and recovering after minor surgery in this time of COVID-19 lockdown. The highlight of yesterday was a call from the hospital telling me that I had been exposed to someone who tested positive with the virus – presumably a staffer who interacted with me the previous week. I had been interacting cautiously with people since my release last Saturday, including a visit to another health care provider, so they needed to be notified. When I was in hospital, I had asked about getting tested, and they put me off. This is not working. They should be testing everybody, and they’re not even testing the most likely carriers.

What’s most concerning, though, is the toll this is very likely taking among the most vulnerable, particularly residents of nursing homes. I don’t know about how these homes are run in other communities. What I can say, based on personal experience, is that in my neck of the woods, people in nursing homes die all the time of respiratory illness. When my mom was in an institution, it seemed clear that the expectation was that she would just get ill and die one day, and that there wasn’t much they were going to do about it. The times my mom got seriously ill, we pulled her out and put her in the hospital for proper care, which she got. But other folks with less attentive families who would catch the viruses that regularly rip through those places like the angel of death would just expire in their rooms without fanfare. From what I could see, neither the required skills, nor technologies, nor effort would be put into saving them. One day, they would just be gone.

In the context of that reality, I just can’t imagine how many of these folks are being lost to COVID. Would we even know? Do they differentiate between the Coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, once an elderly resident is dead? When this started showing up in residential facilities it struck me that there might be a great many silent victims of this pandemic, and thus far I haven’t seen convincing evidence that something like this isn’t happening. We are hearing about documented losses in various communities across the country, but this could be a dramatic under count. As of April 18, 3,400 nursing home residents in New York had died of COVID-19. They are perhaps making an extra effort to track these in certain communities, but I doubt that’s happening everywhere. When I picture my mother’s mean accommodations – a dorm-room size compartment, curtain down the middle to separate two beds, shared bathroom and closet space, very little social distance. That at the cost of $90,000 a year and up.

The cost of this pandemic is enormous. We could have prevented it if we had taken the threat seriously. We didn’t, thanks in large measure to the reality television star in the White House, but also thanks to flaccid protections prior to his tenure that were easily undone by legislators and administration hacks bent on deconstructing the administrative state. Accountability? We shall see.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
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Hoarding.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Ten thousand dollars? Dude, no one in this hammer mill has got that kind of money. At least … not that I’m aware of. Maybe Mitch is holding out on us. (He could be a counterfeiter, actually.)

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little negotiation. I’m trying to work out the terms on a major purchase. What kind of purchase? Well, I’ll give you three guesses. No, not a PA system. No, not a hippie van with 3-D painted plaster sunflowers sticking out all over the place. Give up? I’m trying to buy a can of soup. Yes, one can of soup. Not the greatest soup in the universe, you understand … just your basic, run-of-the-mill lentil soup, the kind mother used to make … when she made cheap-ass canned soup.

Now, I know your next question is going to be something like, “But, Joe … why in the world would a can of soup cost ten thousand dollars?” Well, friends, I’m glad you asked. You see, it turns out to be true that it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good. The current pandemic crisis may have idled millions of workers, put bands out of business, and driven legions to the brink of poverty, but for some it is proving to be some kind of libertarian capitalist paradise. Scarcity, my friends, scarcity …. just drop by the local grocery store and you’ll see what I mean. You get there early, and the hoarding geezers have already ransacked the place. (Hey, anybody who wants to use “Hoarding Geezers” as a band name can have it, my treat.)

Hazmat mill.

How will we afford $10K-per -can soup? Well, as you know, we are an idea incubator here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We put our heads together (mind you, not too close together … no more so than six healthy feet) and came up with absolutely nothing. Then Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, announced that he had secured a deal with the regional hospitals as an overflow site. I was scratching my head over this – how could anyone think they move keep people here without making them sicker? Look what this place is doing to us! Well, it turns out they didn’t want extra space for people … they wanted extra space for medical waste disposal. Mitch is going to cash in … and we’ll have dump trucks loaded down with spent hypodermic needles backing up to the courtyard entrance.

A bunch of spent needles in the courtyard? Who would be surprised by that sight?

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Twelve days of it.

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2000 Years to Christmas

On the first day of something my something gave to me … something, something, something, blah, blah blah blah blah, five golden … things!

Arrgh. Leave us face it. For a band that began its recording career with what was ostensibly a Christmas album, we are terrible at remembering even the most oft-repeated holiday songs. Someone – I think it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – once suggested caroling around the neighborhood on Christmas eve, hoping for some charitable cast-offs and crusts of festive breads, but when you glom over too many lyrics, you lose credibility as a caroler and instead of handing foodstuffs to you, your audiences tend to throw them at you with some force. Personally, when it comes to seasonal pastimes, I prefer the ones that don’t involve serious festive injuries and having steaming vats of hot holiday cheer poured on us from second-story windows. Call me Scrooge.

We don’t have any really strong holiday traditions. Probably the most enduring one is our annual Christmas week sequestration, imposed on us by the local DPW, which views the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as a handy place to dump tons of snow they’ve removed from more affluent and generously populated quarters. Sure, we can’t emerge from the mill for a stretch of days, but that gives us a reason to be innovative in our festive celebrations. It’s not about how many gifts you buy, or how much food you throw in the garbage disposal …. no no, Christmas is about the little things. Really little things, like nano particles. You see, when we’re snowed in over the holidays, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee takes it upon himself to show us slide presentations of particles he has utilized in his more depraved experiments. A four-hour powerpoint on sub atomic particles – now that’s the kind of Christmas I’m talking about.

Dull.

Speaking of Christmas, as I mentioned before, we are marking the 20th anniversary of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, this season. And when I say we’re “marking” it, I don’t mean urinating on it …. far from it! While 2000 Years To Christmas is not generally available in stores, there are umpteen different ways to hear it, download it, and even get your hands on the disc. If you want to know more, just visit our special Anniversary Page for details.

Otherwise, we’ll be posting a few things over the holidays, as always. Maybe not all twelve days … just the ones we know the lyrics to.