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Hey, hey … we weren’t The Monkees after all.

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Bloody awful weather, isn’t it? Nobody knows better than my brother band-mate Matt, out every day in the great outdoors, slogging from bird’s nests to beaver ponds, feeding everything in sight. Damn, I get the chills just thinking about it. But then, I am a basement dweller by day … and by night, often times, twiddling dials on the seemingly never-ending album project Big Green is stumbling through.

Got to give him a lot of credit – he works like a dog, and yet still somehow finds the time and energy to write songs by the dozen. I mean, it’s not like we’re living in some communal band-house like The Monkees, every day full of hijinx and lip-syncing singalongs. Though, to be honest, that’s kind of how we started out.

Brokerton-On-Hudson

Picture this, people: a time long before nearly everyone had a high-def global network-connected video camera in their pocket. Can you see it? And do you hate it as much as we did? My guess is yes. Well, that’s when we started the scrum of washed-out musicians that eventually became Big Green.

Yes, we did have a Monkees-like communal band house. It was in a town called Castleton-on-Hudson, maybe ten miles south of Albany. We didn’t have a funky Monkees-like car, just a beat-up old Maverick, a 1968 Nova, and a capped C-10 pickup so ramshackle we called it “Ruck” (i.e. one letter short of a truck). Do three junks add up to a Monkees mobile? Ask your mother. Better yet, ask your grandmother.

Anyway, it was our practice space, songwriting retreat, whatever. We played a handful of gigs, made rough recordings, and did stupid shit, like stuffing pillows under our shirts and pretending we had gained 50 pounds overnight, just to freak the neighbors out. (Our guitarist, the late great Tim Walsh, was particularly good at this prank. So was our drummer back at that time, Mr. Phil Ross, seen on the inside cover of the collection – this post’s header image – hitting Tim over the head with a guitar, El Kabong style.)

What can I say? We were broke and easily amused.

Self-made bootlegs

Now, because this was indeed a time before digital photography (early 1980s), there’s little record of this time in our arrested development. A year or so after we left Castleton, though, Matt pulled together a compilation he called “The Todd Family Chronicles” which is a cassette collection of the songs – covers and originals – we played during that time and shortly thereafter.

Why “The Todd Family”? Experts disagree. Back in the day, Matt invented this joke character called “Toddy Ham” – an irritating little welp of the type we knew back in our suburban white-boy school days. (Toddy Ham is the kid with the whistle on the cobbled-together cassette cover shown above.)

The archeological record

What happened to the recordings? They’re still extant, if very fuzzy. I think the earliest thing we’ve posted is probably Silent As A Stone, which I talked about in a post back in 2022. But in reality, “The Todd Family Chronicles” wasn’t really a bootleg in a distributive sense – there were only a couple of copies. Not like the Christmas tapes, which Matt replicated in slightly larger quantities, or our EP tapes like “Songs That Remind Lincoln of the War”.

Photos? Very few, and most are just cheap photocopies of photos. We’re talking 43 years ago. Total miracle that we’re still producing something you can loosely describe as music, but there you have it.

Usual Rubbish

More than a few blocks from factory village

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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.

Usual Rubbish

Old home week arrives at the hammer mill.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell!

Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill.

Reaching back dimly

Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The sky was darkened by flocks of pterodactyls. And I was groping around the ancient city of Albany, looking for a steady gig so that I could keep the light bulb burning (the one dangling from the hairy cord just below the ceiling).

There were a bunch of clubs around Albany back in the 80s, and when I got there in January of 1981, they were all hurting. New York had just raised the drinking age to 21 that very month, which meant most of the college students who crowded into bars on the weekend were now prohibited from doing so. In other words, the perfect time to start gigging in the Capital District.

It's old home week!

Friend of a friend of a friend

The only band I played with in Albany back in 1980-81 was the pre-Big Green group I started with my brother Matt, my SUNY New Paltz drummer friend Phil, and our guitarist friend Tim Walsh, who died some years back. After failing miserably, I went back to Albany in 1984 to play with a commercial club band. Let’s call that group PROMISE MARGARINE, or PROMISE for short.

A couple of years later, the drummer from PROMISE got his bandleader to hire me for another commercial gig in a band I’ll call CANDYASS. The keyboard player in that band was Big Green co-founder Ned Danison (I was playing bass). We started working on songs, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening, Big Green emerged from the pastel colored ether of the eighties club scene around Albany, NY.

Love-in spoonful

As it happens, I heard from Ned this past week, and he shared a relatively recent song of his that sounds more than a bit like Big Green. It’s called Houston, We Have A Love-In. Give it a listen and shake your fist at us for being so damn awesome.

You can also hear our four-song Big Green demo, featuring Ned, on this very web site here.

Usual Rubbish

Just holler.

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Delays, delays, delays. Frankly, production is a pain in the ass. That said, what do I do for a living? I’m a producer, damn it. I should have been a janitor. (Though on Sundays, I’m that, too.)

Yes, friends … the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast wagon has hit a few bumps in the road. Is it because our Ned Trek productions have become too elaborate and costly? God, no. It’s STILL the most cheap-ass podcast on the planet. (We still have that trophy somewhere. I think Anti-Lincoln is using it for an ashtray.) No, it’s not complication, it’s … well … the OTHER kind of complication. Frankly, I need six hands. I could also use a third leg. One ass is enough, of course. The point being, we are spread kind of thin here in Big Green land.

Sure, if we were any other band-focused podcast, we would be content with just hollering randomly into the mic every week and dropping that onto iTunes. But if you’re Big Green (and we are), the quality goes in before the name goes on. (Note to lawyers: we make no claim of ownership over the preceding slogan, and it does not in any way reflect the character of our organization.) Of course, the term “quality” is, in fact, value-neutral: things can be of good quality, bad quality, etc. But that’s not the point. Every episode has some kind of “quality”, and until we insert that value-neutral substance into the file, it ain’t going nowhere. Short answer: we’re running behind … again. But THIS IS BIG GREEN is still a thing, and it will return.

Are the 80s over yet?Okay, I’m not going to dip into one of those “things were simpler in the old days” reveries, but what I’m describing are both first-world problems and 21st Century foibles of a type that would have baffled us back when we started this moth-eaten music collective known as Big Green. When we first started using that moniker in 1986-7, we were working with people out around Albany, NY. Matt was writing songs like a mad man, just as he does today. Only there was no internet, no smartphones, no simple way of getting your music out there other than standing on a stage or hawking home-made cassette tapes at the local record shop. Kids these days!