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A few weeks since we played THAT joint.

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Well, summer is almost over and I’m at the point of digging through old files again. I always get to doing that when the days start getting shorter. Last week I burrowed my way through some tax records from the 2000s. (Riveting stuff.) This week, it’s Big Green set lists. Those are perhaps marginally more interesting than old 1040s, but it largely depends on what you like.

For those of you not steeped in Big Green history, here’s the short version: we haven’t played a live gig in decades. Think Beatles post-1966 or XTC post-1982, except without the massive success, cult following, or obvious talent. Picture a handful of underfed guys in their twenties, humping their broken-down amps into some cheap dive. That’s us!

What the ancient tablets teach us

So what about those set lists? First glance, I can’t effing believe we played any of those songs. Of course, we’re talking about the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen-nineties – a time before ubiquitous cell phones, decades prior to the advent of “smart” phones with HD video cameras. The handful of times we put a show on tape, we had to get some freak to bring a VHS camcorder … which were not exactly thick in the ground, my friends.

Thing is, like most bands, we were working to fill out three, sometimes four sets. Fortunately for us, brother Matt has always been a songwriting machine, so we had plenty of material as long as we could convince a guitar player to learn a bunch of strange songs. We played clubs (most of which no longer exist) and colleges (Utica, SUNY PI, Middlebury, MVCC), as well as street fairs, outdoor concerts (usually with other groups), etc.

Strangely, I still have set lists from a couple of these college gigs. Looks like “I Hate Your Face” was always high on the roster. And that effing MVCC gig was an all-original set, no covers. What the ever-loving fuck.

Scoping out the song spectrum

You can tell from these yellowing sheets of poster board that we’ve been all over the map, musically speaking, since the late eighties. Our music runs the full spectrum from extremely silly to kind of serious. Here’s how I map it out in my own unscientific manner:

  • 1987 – 1993 Songs: Silly to Extra Silly
  • 2000 Years To Christmas (1999): Fairly Silly to Silly
  • International House (2008): Mostly Serious (except for Volcano Man)
  • Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013): Very, Very Silly

Now, with our upcoming album (still being mixed, by the way), we’re back to wearing the serious pants again. No big laugh riot on this sucker, folks … unless you’re laughing AT us. Then it’s funny as all hell.

Silly is just around the corner

For those of you who prefer the silly Big Green, fear not – we have an enormous trunk full of Ned Trek songs, all produced and waiting for remix. And trust me, there’s some silly-ass shit in that trunk. And that’s not to mention the older material we’ve recorded and never released.

So, good news / bad news: if you like the silly stuff, there’s more coming. If you hate it, well … lookout … there’s more coming.

TBT: That old used to be

You’ve probably heard them already, but here are a few selections from our stage set back in the goofball early nineties:

Usual Rubbish

The many incarnations of one Big Green

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Get Music Here

Ever watch Dr. Who? Sure you have. And no doubt you’ve seen how he regenerates himself every once in a while. It’s like restarting an old computer, except that when it’s done booting, it’s a new computer. That almost NEVER happens in real life, you know. Almost never … unless you’re Big Green. (Or, frankly, any other band I’ve ever known.)

We got to talking the other day. Our mouth parts moved and sounds emerged from our throats, then floated through the air and vibrated our ear drums. Those little thingies translated the vibrations into electrical signals that were then piped up to our brains. At that point, the impulses – call them voltsters – circulate around in the brain like ants in an ant farm, until they and their confederates make their way down to the mouth and vocal cords, making the whole process begin again. It’s amazing!

Anyway, we were talking about how many versions of Big Green there had been down through the ages. We started chalking up the white board and this is what we came away with.

1979 – 1986: The Proto Period

As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, Big Green started under other names. Matt and I started learning our various instruments in the mid-1970s, and of course it occurred to us that we should play our newfound instruments in the same room at the same time, occasionally playing the same song at a similar tempo. In 1979 we decided to do that thing with some other people with instruments, and the result was a band variously named Slapstick, Mearth, Withers Backtrack, and five other things.

Did we work? Not much! A few bar gigs here and there. We spent a year in the Albany area playing one-night stands, a few outdoor events, nothing special. It was practically all covers back then. Matt was writing stuff and I was writing some as well, but mostly not the kind of material that worked well with a rock group. We have a bunch of scratchy recordings from this period, plus some studio recordings, such as Silent as a Stone, which we featured on our February 2018 episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That incarnation trailed off into the eighties.

1986 – 1987: The Ned Year

Yes, this was the first year we called ourselves Big Green. I met Big Green co-founder Ned Danison when we were both playing in a cheesy bar band, and together with Matt we pulled this mess together. Did we practice? One hundred percent. Did we perform? Eh … not so much. I think we played in front of an audience exactly once, at a street fair in Ballston Spa, NY. (I’ve posted photos of that heinous incident in the history of rock.)

Of course, Ned and I played a bunch of other gigs that weren’t with Big Green and had nothing to do with the cheesy bar band. One was Dale Haskell’s Factory Village, videos of which I have posted on our YouTube channel. We also did a couple of songs at the wedding of our friends, Leif and Jill Zurmuhlen (Leif is the amazing photographer who took so many pictures of us before we shriveled into our current superannuated state of disrepair.) And, well, we recorded a demo. That was the year that was.

Is this part three or two?

1988 – 1994: Musical Guitar Players

Our first year we had a problem holding on to drummers. From 1988 on, after Ned went down the road, we had trouble securing a permanent guitar player. Over the next six years, we played with Tony, Steve Bennett, and Jeremy Shaw. We also disguised ourselves as a cover band under the names I-19 and The Space Hippies. (Tony and I were going to do a duo named Seven Vertical Inches of Purgatory or SVIP, but we never got round to it.)

This last period needs a little more exploration, so I’ll save it for another post. Suffice to say, we played a fair number of gigs under the various monikers and did some recording as well.

Then came the reboot. CHIME!

Usual Rubbish

Stages in the ascent (or descent) of Big Green

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Get Music Here

You know, when I was a boy, my pappy said to me …. what’s that? How the hell did you know that? Oh, right. He’s your pappy, too. Easy to forget little details like that when you get to be MY age. Get off my lawn!

Yikes, well … welcome to geezerville … I mean, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat house. It is, after all, just a rest stop in the long journey that is our story. Not exactly the best appointed rest stop on the Thruway, mind you – there’s no Cinnabon, no Chick Fillet. There’s no 1960s style automat where you can grab a soggy hours-old tuna sandwich if you’re in a hurry. But I digress.

Phase one: the first phase

Sure, we go way back. Big Green’s founding was a scattershot affair, spread over several decades. We count our age in geologic time, as our official story will attest, but as far as start dates are concerned, we’re probably talking 1979. That’s the first year Matt and I played in a band together. Sure, we sucked, but give us a chance! We had only just grown our guitar hands, our pump organ feet, our harmonica teeth. (Ever seen harmonica teeth? Trick question – most harp players don’t have teeth.)

I mean, if you want a more compelling genesis story, look elsewhere. (Genesis, perhaps.) The fact is, we picked up our cheap guitars, went to some cheap venues, and started playing our cheap repertoire. Matt and I did some duo gigs, but we mostly played as a four-piece, with our first drummer Mark K (no last name – YOU know who you are!) and our first lead guitarist, Tim Walsh. So there was pounding and there was twanging, but no screeching quite yet. Big Green was still in the protozoan stage.

Phase two: the one that came after one

As was my habit, I took a year off, this time in New Paltz, NY, living in the worst dorm on campus at the SUNY college there. Across the hall from me lived our soon-to-be second drummer, Phil Ross, who’s still playing gigs, last I heard. Phil and I used to sit in his room and listen to his truly impressive LP collection – lots of old Dylan sides, Phil Ochs, etc., and some new stuff by this Elvis Costello dude. Phil and I shared an apartment for a semester, then a house outside of Albany, NY, along with my other bandmates, Matt and Tim, and my partner at the time, Ellen.

Phases of Big Green
Phases two, three, and three and a half of Big Green

So, the nameless band that one might call proto-Big Green went under a variety of monikers, from Slapstick to Mearth to Duck and Cover. We played some gigs around Albany, did some recording, then kind of ran out of gas as a band. That’s when Matt dug into writing in a big way. (Fun fact: his song Sweet Treason is partly about our year in Castleton-On-Hudson. See if you can guess which part!)

Phase three: a name and a phase

What came after that? Well, Tim and Phil went off to do other stuff, and Matt and I teamed up with Ned Danison (author of A Name and A Face) and a bunch of random drummers – and eventually John White, our forever drummer – to put together the band that would be called Big Green. So it was musical drummers for a while, then musical guitarists for a longer while, but ultimately we landed in an abandoned hammer mill and started telling you this long, shaggy-dog story of failure and hardship.

You know the rest. Five or six more phases, and we’re here. Any questions?

Usual Rubbish

Two score and two.

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Feeling a bit reflective this week. And no, it’s not because I’m standing in front of a mirror. That’s just narcissism – whole different category of crazy. Besides, all of my mirrors cracked years ago.

Let me start from the beginning. This week I was trying to program Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to make guacamole, which is a challenge in as much as his programming consists of setting a combination of three-position switches in a certain configuration for a given task. Of course, Marvin was built by a mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee), so there’s no guide for what configuration will deliver what outcome, which leaves only trial and error. I was getting close to guacamole (I had found the right combination for gazpacho), but strangely I ended up programming him to replay demo recordings from our earliest days. (Who would’ve thunk those two things would be one toggle-click away from one another?)

Well, that got me thinking back to the days of yore (or days of Yor, Hunter of the Future), when we started this whole music thingy. Two score and two (or was it three?) years ago, Matt and I first picked up our guitars. Then we dropped them because they were too heavy for our little hands, in that we were young and all. Before long, we picked them up again, started plucking, strumming, dairning, nairn-ting (those are technical terms), and we started a little rhythm combo – Matt playing guitar, our friend Tim Walsh playing another guitar, me playing electric bass, and somebody, anybody, playing drums. (We finally settled on our friend Phil Ross, who was better than we deserved.)

I can't play this freaking thing.

Then one day (I think it was in 1979) Matt noticed that my guitar had fewer strings than his. He grabbed it out of my hands, leaving me no option but to start banging on the nearest piano. We did a few songs like that, then more, then more, more, more, and .. well … it became the new normal. Within a few years, we started to learn how to play our instruments, which really got in the way of the kind of music we were into, so we worked hard to forget all we knew. Thus Big Green was born.

Well, that’s the unofficial history of the band. For the official history, full of asinine exaggerations, see our Pre-History page. Now … back to that mirror.