Okay, that club on Route 5 … was that the Garden Cafe or Looney Tunes? It feels more like the latter than the former, frankly. Jesus, what the hell am I asking YOU for? The only thing YOU remember is random facts about some log cabin and the battle of Gettysburg. And even THAT you get backwards. (Though to you it seems forwards.)
In case you’re worried, no, we’re not writing a memoir of Big Green. Who the fuck would buy that? If nothing else, I can practically guarantee that there will never be a (1) tell-all retrospective, (2) drippy bio-pic, or (3) lost journal having to do with this, the world’s most obscure indie rock group that ever recorded more than 100 of their own songs. That said, we will milk it for a blog post or two. The first one was last week; the second, this week. The third will have to wait its turn.
Back to the Early ’90s
So anyway, in the early nineties we made the questionable decision of basing ourselves in the Utica, NY area, our home town, which at the time was not on a particular upswing culturally. We started by working with guitarist Armand Catalano, playing clubs and campuses around the region, serving up our own songs plus an assortment of covers. As I mentioned last week, the guitar seat in Big Green was governed by the rules of musical chairs, pretty much. Armand played with us, then friend of the band Steve Bennett, and later, other friend of the band Jeremy Shaw.
This was fine, except when we got confused and called guitarists by the wrong first name. There were occasional gaps as well, unsurprisingly. But the gigs we played then represented the least of what was going on in our tiny little world. None of them were in the least high-profile events. We opened for Mere Mortals at MVCC sometime in 1991 , I think. We opened once for Joe Bonamassa’s Bloodline at what is now known as SUNY Poly in Utica, probably in 1993. We played Middlebury College one New Year’s, if I recall correctly. And then there were a bunch of dead end bars.
The output was put out
The thing was, by the early nineties, Matt Perry was writing songs like a house afire. He was writing his Christmas numbers – a new album every holiday season. And he was cranking out a bunch in-between. (No, he didn’t write songs about Saint Swithin’s day – that’s just an ugly rumor about Big Green that some meteorologist started.) We were doing piles of demo recordings, and we managed to get into a studio a few times (the former AcqRok, thanks to friend of Big Green Bob Acquaviva of Mere Mortals.)
We had some live recordings as well. We’ve played a few of them on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and there are a few more we haven’t posted as of yet. Probably the best ones of these are the DAT recordings we made in Jeremy Shaw’s basement in 1993 (or ’94? I don’t freaking know.). Then there was the video demo done by some hipster dude named Angel who worked at a vegetarian restaurant and considered the VHS tape he recorded for us some kind of masterpiece (when it wasn’t).
Yesterday is not today
So, the upshot of all this is, we have a better audio record of the 1990s than we do of the 1980s, when the only technology we could afford was a bic lighter and a pack of Marlboros. Ever try to run sound through a pack of Marlboros? It ain’t pretty. Makes a kazoo sound like a brass freaking band.
