Tag Archives: gigs

Usual Rubbish

Putting the strings on your banjo

Leave a comment
2000 Years to Christmas

See, here’s the thing – I don’t even use a pick. I just slam the damn thing with my thumb. Yes, it’s primitive. Yes, it’s painful. But it gets the job done, sort of. So turn up the heat on that cookpot, dude. We’ve got some strings to boil!

Hiya, folks. Yeah, you guessed it – we’re boiling old strings, home style, so that we can reuse them. I snapped the top string on my Martin, framming away on some random cover song, and well … someone stole my pin money. You know … the pin money I use to buy strings. Why, you may ask, wouldn’t I just use string money? Simple – because I need that money for cooking oil. Do I have to explain EVERYTHING, for crying out loud?

The mechanical guitar tech

I would be the first person to admit that we are not a stage-ready band. It’s been a long while since we played anywhere, and we’re rusty as an old hinge. And as any working musician knows, you need to have your systems in place if you expect to sustain yourselves through a long-ish tour. I mean, it’s not like the old days, when we just packed up the broken down van and drove off … until it broke down. Then when we fixed it in the middle of the road, we got arrested, and …. well … it’s not like that now.

We always flew pretty low to the ground, frankly. Lord knows we would do things differently today. For one thing, I would press gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to be not only our roadie foreman, but my own personal guitar tech. That fucker can spin his wrists like a power drill, so it’s easy for him to do a quick string change. Mitch Macaphee even built a strobe tuner into his audio circuit. He’s like a freaking Swiss army knife (except no plastic toothpick).

Ain't you got that thing all strung up yet? Geeez ...

Line, please!

Then there’s the lyrics. It’s enough to test anyone’s memory. We could tape them to our mic stands, but that looks so damn lame. Matt could carry them around on his phone, but if he’s scrolling that infernal contraption with two hands, how’s he going to play his bass? And on top of that, he’s got about two million songs, so the lyrics would stack up to the ceiling, several times.

I guess we could get Marvin to feed us lyrics as we play, like a automatronic music stand. Too many jobs for our little brass friend? Nonsense! Why, I’ve seen him do a dozen things at the same time, though admittedly it was really just the same thing done a dozen times real fast. But sure, he could change my strings and hold up lyrics at the same time. It would hardly even begin to get in the way of his other duties.

Bootleggers and scalpers abound

I took a cursory look around the Internets this week and I ran across something I don’t see every day. It was some dude selling our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, on Ebay. Now that was strange enough, as we only pressed about three or four dozen discs at the time. What was even more astonishing was that I saw it on offer by someone else on Ebay who was selling it as a UK import! And the price point, people, the price point: $30!

Naturally, I wrote the dude and told him, hey … if he sells it for $30, we’ve got more where that came from. Place your bets, people, place your bets!

Usual Rubbish

Summer doldrums.

Leave a comment
2000 Years to Christmas

Hey …. turn the light off. It’s the middle of the freaking night, man. What? The sun? You mean the sun that the Earth orbits? What’s the sun doing out in the middle of the …. oh. Right. I need one of those twenty-four hour clocks.

Yeah, that’s right folks – I overslept again. I blame the season. Now, that comment would make even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) laugh up his brass sleeve, because I basically blame the season for everything. No work? Goddamn northern winters! No groceries? Stupid spring cleaning! I knew those cereal boxes would come in handy one day. No gravity? Dumbass autumn! That’s when Mitch Macaphee starts sharpening his antigravity skills in anticipation of the big mad science annual meeting in Berlin on October 17.

Here in upstate New York, it’s getting so that we only have two seasons anyway: coldish and hot. That means fewer scapegoats for our manifold failings. In any case, I blame my sleepiness on the doldrums of late summer, when that sun is beating down on the leaky roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, turning the third story of this heap into something like a brick oven. I always get snoozy in this weather. And the fact is, there isn’t a lot going on musically these days. COVID-19 has shut down all the clubs. Musicians are performing on Zoom and Google Hangouts, hoping for a mercy tip. It’s just a weird damn time to be alive.

Zzzz.

I was saying to Matt the other day (he couldn’t hear me, of course, because he was out passing sweet potatoes to beavers) that these days are a lot like back in the day when we first started out. There were about five places to play around where we lived, and they were all dives. He was too young to get into a bar, but we got in anyway and jammed in front of rows of punters drinking their faces off and hollering for that Dave Mason song … you know, the one that goes blah blah blah and we just disagree! Nine times out of ten we’d get stiffed at the end of the night and have to burn the effing place down …. and then there would be even fewer places to play. I’m telling you, people, violence doesn’t pay! (Unless you’re paid to do it, of course.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think it’s that, well … don’t expect us to do much until it gets colder. Then expect to hear some complaining about how freaking cold it is in here.

Usual Rubbish

Hands out.

Leave a comment
2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Still promoting the Christmas album, eh? Think that’s wise? I mean, it’s freaking May, man. What’s that? Okay. I’ll just stand over here, then, and not say anything.

Oh, hi. I was just talking to our advertising manager, a Mr. Antimatter Abraham Lincoln, esq., who spent some time as a railroad lawyer, I hear, and has since moved into marketing and PR. Perhaps a bit less mentally challenging for him, I suspect. Anyway, Anti-Lincoln has some very passionate opinions about what works and what doesn’t work. Interestingly, they don’t appear to have anything to do with standard measures of success, like sales, cash flow, etc. I’m not sure what he’s measuring, frankly. In as much as he is an anti-matter being, it’s possible that the less successful something is, the more of a success he considers it to be. If that’s the case, then Big Green is on top of the world in his book.

Yeah, trouble is … we’re on the bottom of the world in everyone else’s. I know, I know – the top and the bottom of the world are both cold, cold places, and nobody stays there long without a key to the ice station. Then there’s the radiation pouring through that ozone hole, and … um … I’ve lost the thread of this metaphor. Anyway, like every other band in America, we’re freaking dead in the water, hijacked by COVID-19, our gigs canceled, our audiences loathe to gather (and with good reason), our technicians fighting the cat for scraps. Many musicians have taken to the internets with virtual performances, either passing the virtual hat or running shows behind a pay wall. And many are discovering how little money there is in the internets. Shake it upside-down, and all you get is some gum wrappers and pocket lint.

Lincoln ... seriously. Give it up, man.

Some of you are aware that we of Big Green are old hands at the internet. Sure, we started life as an old-school, thrown-together, play-in-the-park-gazebo type of band. (That was in the Before Time, before the Awful Things.) We limped along in that mode for a number of years, then had a re-birth in the late 1990s as a virtual band, launching our first web presence in 1999, along with a page on the now-defunct mp3.com site (a domain that has been replaced by some exploitation pop culture news aggregator). This blog is just the most recent iteration of the garbage we’ve been posting since then. Trust me, no one knows better than us how little money there is to make on the internet. The thing will NEVER fly. But still … Anti-Lincoln will try. Unlike his posi-matter doppelganger, he really only cares about personal gain, not the fate of mankind … and some personal gain. He’s a gold-digger, old dishonest Abe.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby. Hobbies we got. Work? Not so much.

Usual Rubbish

Bringing it back home.

Leave a comment

What do you mean the broken-down car has broken down? How much more of a heap could it possibly be? Okay, okay … we’ll call the hook. No, not CAPTAIN Hook. Unless he’s opened a towing business in his dotage. Seems unlikely.

Our audience is a little hard to reachWell, as you can see, the bottom is falling out of Big Green, economically speaking. Nothing new, right? As a class, musicians tend to be monetarily challenged, let’s say. Doing music for a living is tantamount to perpetual unemployment, interrupted by occasional contract work. And when you’re a plainclothes band, the gig money sucks. Usually you get a percentage of the door. If you’re more well known, they might give you the WHOLE door. And if you draw a good crowd, they might even throw in a window as well.

Now, when you play mostly original music, like we do, that’s an even bigger problem. Nobody knows the songs, for one thing … when you’re not famous, that is. Even worse, the audience starts requesting songs by the Scorps, or Stairway to Heaven, or maybe Beethoven’s Ninth. (That last one is hard to pull off with a four-piece rock group. Especially the vocals!) Before you know it, you’re walking out of that dump with your tail between your legs, your pride in the toilet, and your self-respect on a slow boat to Madagascar. You’ve been there – don’t deny it!

Now, we’ve tried to adapt to this harsh reality. Playing for plants and trees. Booking jobs in outer space. (Once you’ve solved the transportation problems, it’s easier than it sounds.) Making sandwiches instead of music (it CAN be done). But there’s only so much you can do to alleviate the pain of independent music. Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. Nobody know but … I don’t know … Weezer? Cue the violins.

Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk technique here. Unlike a lot of interstellar circuit groups, we play our instruments with hands. Not pseudopods. Not antennae. Not mind waves. That makes us more of a curiosity in venues on Neptune. That helps the door take a little. So … keep playing Neptune, right?

Usual Rubbish

Tonight’s the night.

Leave a comment

That's it, over there.Well, shut my mouth. There appears to be some kind of celebration taking place up the street from the Hammer Mill. Maybe we should mosey on over there. Or maybe not. This street’s getting a little rough. (I don’t mean crime-wise. I mean the pavement’s in pieces, as in potholes the size of a Buick … some with Buicks stuck in them.)

It’s a natural fact – we need to get out more. Big Green is getting house bound, or mill-bound, if you will. Part of it is our reluctance to play gigs anywhere on planet Earth. That is, admittedly, a failing of ours. Mea culpa. I don’t know why we don’t perform on our mother world. Maybe it’s the gravity. My keyboards weigh a ton on earth, but when we play, say, Phobos, I can pick them up with one hand. Sure, there aren’t a lot of music fans there … none, in fact, but setting up is a breeze!

We’ve been asked to consider playing a club or a college here on Terra. Why, just last week, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) said we should set up in the old man bar on the corner and jam until they boot our sorry asses back into the road. Inartfully put, perhaps, but his corroded tin heart was in the right place. So the other night I dropped in at that joint, sat there and stared at the piano for a couple of hours. I didn’t make any noise, so I left. I’m going back again tonight to see if there’s a different outcome.

Old man bar on Earth, zero-gravity lounge on Neptune – it doesn’t make much difference to us where we play, so long as we know what the hell we’re playing. I’ve never been good at set lists, but I know that if someone on stage picks the songs, it’s less likely that we’ll have to play a bunch of stuff people ask us to play. Like something by the Scorpions, for instance.

Whoa, is that the time? Time to go out in the street and be sociable. Talk soon.