Looks like rain again. And forty, maybe fifty degrees. You call this winter? I call it bullshit, man. Fifty years after the blizzard of ’66, and it’s like freaking April out there in the middle of February. Freak. Ish.

Right, I know. Don’t start a blog post by talking about the weather. Very well. But I should add that, even though the weather’s been less than frightful, we’ve been sticking pretty close to home this winter. Old habits die hard, I guess. And while the sun shone over these past few days, we’ve occupied ourselves with digging through the vast Big Green archive, looking for rare nuggets of a glorious past that never was. The odd gig poster. A broken guitar string. A broken guitar. A broken guitar case. (Interestingly, I found those all together.)

Some will remember that my first instrument was the bass guitar. (And when I say “some”, I don’t mean anyone reading this.) When Matt and I started playing out in the late 70s, that was my axe, for the most part, though I started banging on my brother Mark’s Fender Rhodes piano fairly early on. Matt and I spent more than a few years in the wilderness, putting together bands and watching them fall apart. First we couldn’t hold on to a guitar player. Then it was drummers – before John White picked it up, we hopped from one player to another. After that, it was guitar players … I think we had three in the space of two years in the early nineties. Big Green was invented in 1986. It kind of came up in our alphabet soup while we were hanging out in Ballston Spa, NY, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Okay, so … if you look around my basement, you’ll find my P-Bass, still virtually unplayable (just like it was thirty years ago). If you look hard, you’ll find Mark’s Fender Rhodes. We’ve got some recording from those early days, but they’re spotty at best. I may post one at some point just for laughs. We popped into a studio in Utica back in 1981 and recorded some live tracks, including a couple of originals. It’s a pretty good snapshot of where we were musically back then – rushed, tired-sounding, no sense of parts or arrangement. We were a mess! Kids those days!

God damn, I wish it would snow so that I wouldn’t feel as thought I’m just wasting my time down here. (That’s right, friends … it’s all about me.)