Tag Archives: cover songs

Usual Rubbish

Stepping into eden, yeah, brother.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind.

The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else.

The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine.

In a distant dive, long, long ago

Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when we were still playing clubs. Back then, the indie rock club scene was not yet much of a thing here in upstate New York, so it was hard to find places that would cater to original songs. And yea, your friends in Big Green had no abandoned mill in which to shelter, and they were sore afraid. So it is written.

Our group was my illustrious brother Matt and I, plus John White on drums and Ace guitarist Tony Butera. We started running out of Big Green work, so we decided to go back to some of the same clubs under an assumed identity. Not the first time we tried this, of course, but this time around, we actually got a few gigs. (Sometimes it makes sense to go under cover.)

Who's Herbert?

Laughed out of Utica

Anyway, we decided to call ourselves “The Space Hippies.” This was after a group of ne’er-do-well intergalactic hipsters that appeared on a Star Trek episode named The Way To Eden. (Not to be confused with the motorcycle freaks that threatened to blow up the nameless planet that the Space Family Robinson had crashed on in the 3rd and final season of Lost In Space – an episode nonsensically named Collision of the Planets.) They played twangy space guitars and, well … that seemed like a good thing to us.

Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing. In fact, one of the first club owners Tony called to ask for a booking told him, “I can’t hire a band called The Space Hippies. It I did that, I’d be laughed out of Utica.” That was when I got the strong feeling that we should change the cover band’s name to Laughed Out of Utica. (I got voted down on that one, damn it!)

Tunes with psychological issues

Fact is, we did work a bit with the Space Hippies, though I think we kept changing the name so we could double dip, Jethro Tull-style. One club we got booked into was a place called Looney Tunes on NY Route 5. I’ve got a cassette tape of one of the nights we played there. The quality is pretty bad, but you can basically hear us framming away at those rock covers. I included one track from this tape on the July 2019 episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. The song was a Matt Perry number titled “How ‘Bout The War”. (Tony plays a screaming solo on this and, basically, every track on the tape. What a madman.)

What else do I remember about the Space Hippies’ premiere gig? Let’s see. There was dogshit on the stage when we were loading in. I think it was a welcome gift from the club owner. Ah, those were the days.

Usual Rubbish

Coverland.

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Where’s my great American songbook? I know I left it around here somewhere. What’s that you say, Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? There’s no such thing? That’s just a metaphor for everything written before nineteen sixty? Okay, gotcha.

Look at me, for chrissake. I’m turning the Hammer Mill upside down looking for something that doesn’t even exist outside of our tiny little minds. No, there is no Great American Songbook per se, though I have had “fake” books over the years – the Boston book, the Real book, the Real book with lyrics, etc., all illegal as hell. Strange thing to be declared contraband, but you had to have them …. even if you just played in a contraband. (A band that plays everything backwards, that is.) Seriously, fake books were an essential survival tool in the world of itinerant musicians.

You may well ask why I would need a compendium of old songs. And well you may. Keep asking – eventually I’ll find an answer. Yes, well … as you know, times being what they are, we need to, as the corporatists are fond of saying, diversify our revenue stream. That means selling nuts on the street corner (Marvin’s job), bilking the local vicar (Anti-Lincoln’s job), blackmailing the neighbors with anti-gravity rays (Mitch Macaphee’s job), and plunking out cover songs in the local coffeehouse / bar (ulp … my job). And like filling in for the local retail clerk, none of us are any good at our new jobs. (Particularly Marvin … he keeps over-roasting the filberts in his toaster oven.)

You guys know anything from the Real Book? No?

Not that I’m entirely new to the work. Long-time listeners of Big Green will be surprised to learn that we have, in fact, played covers in front of yawning audiences. I even have video demo tape of covers we did back in the early 1990s which I may even be imprudent enough to post someday (with some encouragement). We used to cover all sorts – Talking Heads, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, The Band, Neil Young, Taj Mahal, fuck all, you name it. What I’m doing now is more like what I did when I was 19 or 20 – folk-pop music from the 60s and 70s, which was, frankly, contemporary music when I was 19 or 20. Hard for me to believe that anyone wants to hear those songs again, but I don’t know …. maybe it’s been long enough. And I need some freaking coin in my hat, dude.

So start busking, right? Where’s my “Real Book”? I mean … someone else‘s Real Book.

Usual Rubbish

Jamming.

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Let’s try that again, once more from the top. What’s that? You want to take it from the bottom? How ’bout we compromise. One more time, boys, from the middle. That’s the ticket.

Whoa, man, I’m totally out of practice with this band rehearsal business. It’s like I need rehearsal rehearsals. You forget, sometimes, how much you need to know in order to know what you need to know. And once you know that you know what you need to know, you know that you’re going to forget it. Why? That may be unknowable. Am I making myself clear? Good.

Okay, so what got us on this band practice kick again? I think it was all that watching and listening to archival tapes over the past few weeks, when I found myself with some time on my hands. There was a brief period when we were playing with the very amazing guitarist Jeremy Shaw that we seemed to record everything we did, from rehearsals to gigs to auditions. Just running through that stuff, I realized that I had forgotten our repertoire, aside from a handful of numbers. At that point (1992-3), we were playing mostly original music, some covers. We didn’t play a lot of gigs; mostly colleges and clubs. We played Middlebury College, opened for Bloodline at SUNY-IT in Utica, NY, and so on.

Start Where?One complete gig I have a rough audio recording of was an outdoor concert we did at Jeremy Shaw’s house a few miles from here. There are about 25 songs, and I’d say maybe a little more than half are originals. We also played numbers from Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and god knows what else. The gig includes the only live recordings of some of my songs from that period, like “Sunday Drive” and “Greater Good”. We also did Matt’s “Why not call it George?”, “Sensory Man,” and “I Hate Your Face”, as well as some Christmas numbers. There are also some of Jeremy’s songs: “Water Over Stone,” “Shithouse Rat”, and “Requiem”.

What the hell … we must have rehearsed some of these crazy songs, right? I have no memory of that whatsoever, and yet the evidence is fairly clear. If you want to hear some of this shit, stay tuned … this may turn out to be a throwback summer after all.