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.
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.
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 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).
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.
Ever watch Dr. Who? Sure you have. And no doubt you’ve seen how he regenerates himself every once in a while. It’s like restarting an old computer, except that when it’s done booting, it’s a new computer. That almost NEVER happens in real life, you know. Almost never … unless you’re Big Green. (Or, frankly, any other band I’ve ever known.)
We got to talking the other day. Our mouth parts moved and sounds emerged from our throats, then floated through the air and vibrated our ear drums. Those little thingies translated the vibrations into electrical signals that were then piped up to our brains. At that point, the impulses – call them voltsters – circulate around in the brain like ants in an ant farm, until they and their confederates make their way down to the mouth and vocal cords, making the whole process begin again. It’s amazing!
Anyway, we were talking about how many versions of Big Green there had been down through the ages. We started chalking up the white board and this is what we came away with.
As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, Big Green started under other names. Matt and I started learning our various instruments in the mid-1970s, and of course it occurred to us that we should play our newfound instruments in the same room at the same time, occasionally playing the same song at a similar tempo. In 1979 we decided to do that thing with some other people with instruments, and the result was a band variously named Slapstick, Mearth, Withers Backtrack, and five other things.
Did we work? Not much! A few bar gigs here and there. We spent a year in the Albany area playing one-night stands, a few outdoor events, nothing special. It was practically all covers back then. Matt was writing stuff and I was writing some as well, but mostly not the kind of material that worked well with a rock group. We have a bunch of scratchy recordings from this period, plus some studio recordings, such as Silent as a Stone, which we featured on our February 2018 episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That incarnation trailed off into the eighties.
Yes, this was the first year we called ourselves Big Green. I met Big Green co-founder Ned Danison when we were both playing in a cheesy bar band, and together with Matt we pulled this mess together. Did we practice? One hundred percent. Did we perform? Eh … not so much. I think we played in front of an audience exactly once, at a street fair in Ballston Spa, NY. (I’ve posted photos of that heinous incident in the history of rock.)
Of course, Ned and I played a bunch of other gigs that weren’t with Big Green and had nothing to do with the cheesy bar band. One was Dale Haskell’s Factory Village, videos of which I have posted on our YouTube channel. We also did a couple of songs at the wedding of our friends, Leif and Jill Zurmuhlen (Leif is the amazing photographer who took so many pictures of us before we shriveled into our current superannuated state of disrepair.) And, well, we recorded a demo. That was the year that was.
Our first year we had a problem holding on to drummers. From 1988 on, after Ned went down the road, we had trouble securing a permanent guitar player. Over the next six years, we played with Tony, Steve Bennett, and Jeremy Shaw. We also disguised ourselves as a cover band under the names I-19 and The Space Hippies. (Tony and I were going to do a duo named Seven Vertical Inches of Purgatory or SVIP, but we never got round to it.)
This last period needs a little more exploration, so I’ll save it for another post. Suffice to say, we played a fair number of gigs under the various monikers and did some recording as well.
Then came the reboot. CHIME!
Oh, damn, I did it again. Can’t stop writing 2021 when I mean 2022. It’s like I’m trying to go back in time. And why the hell would ANYONE want to go back to 2021? I mean, aside from Mitch Macaphee?
Yeah, Mitch had a pretty good year last year. He made some stuff blow up real good. The rest of us, however … not so much. We made things blow up, but not intentionally. And I have to say, this drafty old abandoned hammer mill is no place to spend January. If we were as rich as … well, as pretty much any other band, we could just pick this place up, put it on a flatbed, and move it someplace warm. But no how, my friends, no freaking how.
Okay, so when the heat is not so hot, how do you keep from turning into a band-cicle? Well, there are ways. One is to play your damn instruments. That’s what we do typically when the iceman calleth. I start banging on my acoustic guitar, beating the living shit out of it with my pick-less paw, raising callouses and annoying the neighbors with my hollering. (If you want to know what THAT sounds like, give my recent nano concerts a listen. )
Sometimes when it gets particularly frosty, I’ll play covers, like old Neil Young songs or numbers by Elvis Costello, Stones, Jethro Tull, etc. Some of it’s a little hard to render on a solo acoustic guitar, but I don’t let THAT stop me. What I can’t do is a credible version of Matt’s song Why Not Call It George, which we used to do with the full band. Our guitar player Jeremy Shaw used to do a volcanic solo on that song – holy cats! If that doesn’t warm you up, I don’t know what will.
Now, as everybody knows, January is a very quiet time for bands here in upstate New York. That’s always been the way, since grand-daddy was knee-high to a grasshopper’s grandaddy. Of course, now it’s even worse with COVID, though that doesn’t stop some people from going out and making it rain in a club somewhere. That’s fine, guys … just don’t breathe while you’re there and you’ll be fine.
We of Big Green tend to prefer our solitude. And who the hell needs the money, right? I mean, besides us? We can always ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to manufacture some cash for us. He’s got one of those inkjet printers built into his ass. (Not literally his ass, you understand – just a figure of speech.) And if he just refrains from putting Art Linkletter in the president hole of the bills, someone might actually accept them as legal tender. (Hope so – it’s a long slog to Spring.)
Now, one of the benefits of having a mad science advisor is that, when you can’t afford to run the central heat, he or she can come up with some technical solution that will keep you from freezing to death. Yesterday Mitch Macaphee somehow managed to build a fire in the forge room of the mill. Only it wasn’t something impressive, like a flame generated by a concentrated tachyon beam. He literally just pulled beams out of the mill roof and threw them in the fire.
What a freaking luddite! I expect some kind of miracle cure to our hypothermia, not burning the house down one plank at a time!
That thing shouldn’t be allowed in a residential neighborhood. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Mitch. I don’t want the mayor to send us nasty letters again. Five letters in one week is enough for any abandoned mill-squatter.
Oh, hi. I’m pretending to have just noticed you, looking at the blog post I wrote days ago. (What a giveaway!) We’re having personnel issues again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, high in the hill country of Central New York, far from the beaten path. It’s my own fault for taking on a mad science advisor. Sure, he helps us get to Neptune and other distant worlds. Sure, he bends time like Superman bends steel bars (i.e. with his bare hands). But the utility ends where the madness begins, and let me tell you something, friends – Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is as crazy as Jeremy Shaw’s proverbial shithouse rat.
What’s the source of the current eviction order? Well, Mitch heard an internet rumor that a certain Chinese Space Station – the Tiangong 1 – has been sputtering in a decaying orbit for the past few years, neglected by its owners, causing a threat to navigation high above the Earth’s surface. He is now taking it upon himself to defend planet Earth by shooting the sucker out of the sky. Bet you can’t guess how. No, not with a rocket. Nope, not a deadly Edward Teller-style laser. No, not an electron lasso (is that even a thing?). Give up? Me too. I don’t freaking know.
All I can tell you, honestly, is that this project has consumed Mitch and our courtyard at the same time. He’s spent the last week building a big howitzer-like monstrosity with a barrel that’s got to be 80 feet long and a control panel with gauges, levers, flashing lights, electrical arcs, and steam whistles. (I think those are just for laughs, frankly.) Mitch refers to the device as his Positron Howitzer, though what that means I cannot tell you. But from what I’ve seen he can zero in on that sputtering space station and plant some kind of projectile in its side in a way that has the potential to ruin its whole day.
Matt wants me to dispatch Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to City Hall with some kind of peace offering – donuts or potato soup, something like that. I don’t know. Those official threats are the only personal letters I receive anymore … I’m a little reluctant to let them go.
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.
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.
