Tag Archives: 1987

Hey, dis guy ain’t got all his buttons, mack

Get Music Here

What’s in that box? I’ll tell you what’s in that box. There’s nothing in the damn box, man. But that box over there, the one with the torn flaps, that’s got some gig posters in it. From 1987. A little late on those.

Hey, there, Big Green fans! Just catching us in the middle of Spring cleaning. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “Joe”, you’ll say, “this isn’t Spring, it’s late summer, nigh unto fall, you idiot.” And then you’ll flip me off and storm out of the room in search of cleverer bands. But before you’re out of earshot, I’ll just remind you that we’re late with everything we do. We don’t eat breakfast til lunch time, no lunch til dinner time, and so on. The more you know!

Damaged collateral

Back to cleaning. Man, you wouldn’t believe how many recondite corners there are in this stupid barn of a hammer mill. Somehow that moving company we hired to carry our stuff from our lean-to in Sri Lanka to here managed to squirrel something away in every alcove. It’s almost like they DIDN’T want us to find anything. But here we are, after only about twenty years, digging it all up and sifting through it like panhandlers. Who says we’re slow on the draw?

Anyhow, you wouldn’t believe the shit we’re finding! Old gig calendars. Stacks of flyers for college bulletin boards and the like. Every guitar string Matt ever broke and then some. Various decorative items and abandoned set lists. (No, we’re not hoarders … we just, you know … keep stuff.) In other words, a bunch of useless junk. Would you believe it? Perhaps you would. In which case, my earlier declaration would be inaccurate. It’s hard to know who you can trust nowadays.

Pin it on, the jam

In many ways, our junk production outstripped our music production from the very beginning. Those were the days before the internets, my friends. Televisions were mostly analog. Phones were something attached to the wall or plugged into an outlet. People read odd, inky things called “newspapers”. Personal robot assistants were made of pots and pans and leftover appliance parts. (Okay, THAT part hasn’t changed so much.) When you had to get the word out on something in those days, you had to do it old school.

Get ... yours ... squx

Oddly enough, even during a time when we couldn’t hang on to a drummer for more than a few weeks, we had a machine that made campaign buttons. Sure, there was no way we could hold down a gig, but we were always able to distribute pin-on buttons with our logo on them. Talk about the cart before the horse! No surprise, then, that in the midst of our Fall cleaning, we came across a cache of Big Green buttons. I’m guessing we spent a couple of days stamping those suckers out on that button press back in ’87. (No wonder our drummers all walked.)

Get yours today

Hey, there’s a limited supply of these items in the known universe. But if you so, so love Big Green, and you wish you could shake the claw of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), then you deserve one of the few remaining Big Green buttons. Just email us or send a comment via social media and we will fix you up, gratis, while supplies last. Because that’s the kind of band we are …. the kind that’s cleaning the junk out of its squat house.

More than a few blocks from factory village

2000 Years to Christmas

You know what they say, man. Everyone as time went by got a little bit older and a little bit slower. Stay in the toaster long enough, and hell, you’re toast. Stick a fork in it. Insert your favorite over-the-hill cliche here.

Hey, lookit – I know I’ve been more reflective over the past year than in previous years. When your ass starts to get old, it spends more time looking back. (It can hardly do anything else, actually.) I’ve posted a few reflections on the bad old days. Spun a few yarns about scraping the bottom of the barrel of backwater live music. Hey, there’s always room for one more story, right? Maybe.

Hippy anniversary

It happens that this spring is the 35th anniversary of a little project that coincided with the birth of Big Green, back in the eighties. I’m thinking of this now not so much because of the anniversary, but because I’ve been digitizing a video of a 1987 gig I played with Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and Ned’s childhood friend, the late songwriter Dale Haskell.

Dale had recorded an album around that time, and we played a few gigs to promote it locally in the Albany, NY, area. It wasn’t a big production, of course – we were broke, and Dale didn’t have access to a proper studio, so he tracked the album on a cassette portastudio and ran the cassette copies of the album off manually. (We all did that shit back then, because … well, see the previous sentence.)

God save the queen

Ned and I were trying to find work for Big Green – unsuccessfully, of course. Dale had helped us out with some demo work, and we agreed to back him up on his project. He booked three dates at QE2 in Albany, a club that is now called the Fuse Box, I believe, housed in an ancient White Tower burger joint on Central Ave.

At one of those gigs, in April 1987, we opened for the Athens, GA art rock band Love Tractor. Our photographer friend Leif Zurmuhlen brought his VHS camcorder to the gig and taped our set. At some point over the last thirty years, Leif gave me the tape and it’s been sitting in my television cabinet for decades. Until last week, that is, when I transferred it to MP4.

Ned, me, and Dale

Achtung, baby

Sadly, Dale passed away last year after some troubled times. I had told him via Facebook that I had the tape sometime over the previous year, but didn’t have the means to transcribe it until recently, by which time he was gone. If I can get the audio to sound decent, I’ll drop it via the Big Green Youtube channel in the next few weeks. Promises, promises.

Kind of a kick seeing Ned and me playing together, frankly. Ned’s doubling on keys and lead guitar; I’m thumping on my Fender P-bass, wearing a white tee shirt with the word “ACHTUNG” in block letters across my scrawny chest. God, those days sucked. But they had their moments.