I don’t know. Do you really think it’s that insulting? Not sure why anyone would take it personally, frankly. Unless, of course … they have a particularly hate-able face. A hate-friendly face, if you will. Oh, well.
Yeah, here we are, in the midst of one of our summertime projects. Always something to do here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, even if that something is virtually nothing. You could say this entire blog – all 17 years of it – amount to virtual nothingness, am I right? In any case … we’re just hashing out what the rest of the season is going to look like. We’ve got some archival material yet to go through; the kind of stuff that accumulates over three decades of playing and writing and recording together. A mountain of … something. Give it a listen, then you pick the descriptor.
This week’s “Wayback Wednesday” release was another selection off of our 1993 video demo – just us playing our set list live in front of a madman’s camera. We posted Matt’s song “I Hate Your Face“, the first verses of which goes like this:
God, I hate your convulsive face
Four, sixteen, a million, your annoying face
has got me sick and I’ve got to go
God, I made a big mistake
Eight sixty-four, a million, a huge mistake
when I parked it here
Did I stay too long? You know I stayed here far too long
Teenage angst? No sir. He wasn’t a teenager when he wrote it, for one thing. I won’t speak for Matt, but it always felt to me like a parody-punk song, complete with faux-teenage angst. By the way … this isn’t about YOUR face. Just putting that out there. It’s another face entirely, folks.
What’s left? Well, from the video, there’s a bunch of cover songs, a couple of which we may be able to get away with posting. (Expect pop-up ads.) We also have a lot of audio content – a bunch of live songs, some even listenable. We also have a handful of studio numbers that we can put out.
I know, I know … stop talking, start posting. Right, right.
As I think I mentioned before, we don’t have a lot of video footage of us playing live, and even less of us playing our own songs. This demo included a lot of covers – all stuff we liked playing. So it’s kind of a freeze-dried sample of our set list from the 80s and 90s. We’ve got three takes of “Sensory Man”, as well as a rehearsal sequence on that song, a couple of takes of “I Hate Your Face”, and one of “Why Not Call It George?” – that’s it for our songs. That is, unless someone out there has video of us playing at Middlebury College or SUNYIT, when we opened for Bloodline. Anybody? Thought not.
Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)