Hey, campers – we just posted another of our live recordings on YouTube. It’s the song “Holiday”, the version we included on our collection LIVE FROM NEPTUNE. The song was recorded in 1994 and features the usual suspects, Matt, Joe, and John, with Jeremy Shaw on guitar. This was part of a day-long session in Jeremy’s basement, a demo project, featuring five original songs played live and captured on DAT tape, no overdubs.
Check it out:
You want to use that one? Really? Which version? Hmmm … okay. That one’s not in the best condition. I think Mitch was using it to prop his closet door open. And then there’s the rising damp. Lots of factors go into this, dude. It’s not so simple.
Like most bands, Big Green has a back catalog. The question is, what to do with all that material, sitting idle, not carrying its own weight. I’ve told our old songs to go out and get a job, but some of them are reaching retirement age, and that’s not an optimal time to start the search. The thing is, we’ve got a boatload of new material coming this way, thanks to the transitive property of Matt Perry, in particular. Yes, I (Joe) have written a handful, but Matt’s output far outstrips mine, and good thing too. ‘Cause I’m a lazy-ass mother. Putting it all on the table here.
So, some who have known Big Green since its inception recall that we had a flurry of activity in the early nineties. We were playing clubs, schools, etc., with a bewildering variety of guitar players. The decade before, we couldn’t hold on to a drummer for love or money. John White took up with us in the late eighties, so problem solved …. except then we didn’t have a guitarist. Then we got one, then lost one, got another, lost another, etc. Let me know when you’ve heard enough. (I know I have.)
Most of the recording we did in the nineties was with Jeremy Shaw, friend of the band, who played a bunch of gigs with us, did some video, and a few audio demos. One of the demos we did was a group of songs we recorded live and later released under the moniker LIVE FROM NEPTUNE. These were performances straight to DAT tape, no overdubs – we did a bunch of takes on maybe five or six songs. You can hear Jeremy really shredding that thing on Special Kind of Blood, Merry Christmas, Jane, and one or two others.
Okay, so our new material is nowhere near ready for release in any form. Frankly, we’re still in the composing and rehearsing stage. Then comes the de-composing. After that, Marvin (my personal assistant) fashions an album cover out of used ball bearings, and that’s how the sausage is made. But as of now, we’ve got a long way to go. I mean, we’ve got personnel issues to straighten out, we’ve got hinky tech problems, we’ve got rising damp. Our objective – a new album – is either very, very small, or very, very far away. Don’t ask me to solve THAT rubic’s cube.
What do you do when you don’t have anything new to share? Recycle the old stuff, that’s what. We’re chucking some older numbers onto our YouTube channel, so that fans of that platform can listen to our classic selections free of charge, any time that suits their fancy … even if they don’t have a fancy suit to their name. We uploaded 2000 Years To Christmas some time ago, of course. Now we’re working on our EP from the mid 2000s, the afore-mentioned LIVE FROM NEPTUNE. The first two songs are posted on YouTube, with more to come. What do you know about that? Something shiny.
Summer’s almost over, and I know I’m not alone in thinking that it’s about damn time. Still, we haven’t accomplished much this season. Not that this summer should be any different from previous ones. Hey, we’ll keep chucking old songs in the air until we get our arms around the new ones. (They ain’t chuckable quite yet.)
Jesus, how the hell did they make that image? Did they use chisels and clay tablets? I can’t even read the fricking thing. You know you’ve been around too long as a band when your earliest promo packages were written in cuneiform.
Well, it’s the doldrums of summer once again, which means we’re digging into the archives and mining our inglorious past for the occasional nugget of … whatever. I’m starting to think that Big Green was founded before the invention of the camera. Actually, it’s simpler than that – we started playing before everyone had broadcast-quality video production studios riding in their pockets.
As a result, there aren’t a lot of shots of us playing, hanging out, cavorting, etc. It’s almost like we didn’t exist before the late nineties, and we most assuredly did. But back in the day, you had to wait for the photographer to show up …. and when you’re broke, it’s a long wait.
Big Green has some old recordings, of course. And yes, we’re working on new recordings (or at least rehearsing new songs) now, but we’re always digging out the oldies, cause that’s just how we roll. Just this week, I posted the first installment of our E.P. LIVE FROM NEPTUNE on our YouTube Channel – a song called Merry Christmas, Jane, a version of which also appeared on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. Because it’s YouTube, I covered the video screen with stills from our video demo and other random shots. Again, not a lot to choose from.
Why “Live From Neptune”? It made sense at the time. Mind you, we recorded the songs live to tape in Jeremy Shaw’s basement. This was a year after we played an outdoor concert at his house along with a couple of other bands. (I’ve posted a couple of tracks from that gig on THIS IS BIG GREEN.) We were working up a demo of some original songs, playing a bunch of takes straight into a DAT machine. (This was 1994, mind you.) Merry Christmas, Jane was one of them.
Then there were the gigs we played at bars around where we lived in upstate New York. Most of those were kind of unmemorable. And again, no photographs … or very few. I have a handful of shots from one night we played at a club named Fat City in West Utica, NY. We played there a bunch of times over the years, sometimes under assumed names, like I-19. (There’s some video of one of those nights on YouTube, courtesy of friend of the band and former I-19 guitarist/vocalist Steve Bennett.)
I suppose it’s just bad luck that back when we were younger and less crispy looking, nobody had a camera. Now that we’re old geezers, there are cameras everywhere. It reminds me how, at one of my day gigs, the standard retirement gift was a company-branded wall mirror. What’s the last thing you want when you’re hanging up your skates? But I digress. Eyes forward, Perry – that’s the stuff. Never mind what’s behind, watch what’s ahead in stead. Harrrrumph!
Hey look what I found – an old poster or five. You never know what’s in the next box. Actually, the last five boxes had other boxes in them. One of them has the key to time in it, or so the legend goes.
Have we reached a thousand plays yet? Hmmmm. How about a hundred? No? Right. Hit refresh again. There must be something wrong with that goddamn thing. Stupid YouTube!
Hello, friends. Hope you had a wonderful holiday week. Bet you’re wondering what we’ve been up to. No? Well, I’ll just tell you anyway. Nothing you didn’t already know – that’s the short answer. The long answer is I split a gut getting that nano-Christmas concert done and posted, and it looks like YOU haven’t even seen it yet!
Okay, so a lot of people (a.k.a. Anti-Lincoln) have asked me why we call this a nano-concert. Simple, my dear friend: it’s just my sorry ass on the view screen. That’s it – no bass player, no backup singers, no drums, only me and my distressed-looking Martin, which (I hasten to add) is not an instrument I ordinarily play on gigs. Until now.
I know what you’re thinking. Who in their right mind would spend their entire holiday season break recording and posting a bogus solo concert? This dude over here, man. Sure, I could have done the same as everyone else – drink to excess, swerve my way back home and drop onto the mattress, dead until morning. But that’s not my way. I prefer a much more measured approach to unconsciousness.
Still, the simple fact is that we as a band need to put out more output. (We also need to take in more intake, but that’s another matter.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was an early advocate of the nano-Concert, and so I proceeded with it. Frankly, my expectations were pretty low regarding audience. And I certainly wasn’t disappointed.
Now, I think the hardest part of the nano-concert was deciding which songs to do. It was a Christmas concert, so that narrowed it down a little. Then I had to restrict my list to songs I could reasonably play on guitar, which is fewer still. When it came to actually choosing the numbers, I was all worn out from the first two exercises. (See sloth, above.)
In the end, I picked two songs from Matt’s 1990 Christmas tape, two songs from his 1991 tape, two songs from 1994, and two from Ned Trek. Some of these songs also appeared on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. You can also hear one of them on our live EP, Big Green Live from Neptune – namely Merry Christmas, Jane, which I played as a last-minute encore.
The fact is, Matt wrote so many damn Christmas songs, it would take me five years to play them back to back. And five years is a long time where I come from. Not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but I try not to be overly ambitious in my endeavors. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed our Nano Christmas Concert 2021, and that your holiday season has not been a total dumpster fire. (It it has, tell me all about it!)
