Yeah, I checked that drawer. And the one below it. Jesus, I checked all of them, okay? It’s simply not there. And no, the lizard people didn’t steal it during the night. We would have heard them, Abe, and incidentally …. THERE ARE NO LIZARD PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET.
Hoo, man. You have to talk until you’re green in the face before people get the idea around here. Especially with someone like anti-matter Lincoln, who believes every conspiracy theory he hears on YouTube or Instagram or whatever the fuck. I mean, the guy’s positronic doppelganger was assassinated, so he sees plots everywhere. I suppose it’s hard to trust in times like these … especially when you’re Lincoln.
As anniversaries go …
Well, it should surprise no one that Big Green has reached its coral anniversary. That’s right – the traditional gift on your thirty-fifth is not the Electric Light Orchestra box set, it’s some ossified sea exoskeletons. Hope you enjoy! No question but that 35 years is a long effing time to be together, whatever the hell you’re doing or even trying to do. No wonder people are throwing sea-floor rocks at each other.
So, what does the coral anniversary mean? That your marriage is hung up on the reef? Could explain a lot about Big Green, am I right? We haven’t put out an album since 2013’s Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Not that anyone is counting (aside from me), but that’s the second longest time we’ve gone between albums. Of course, the irony is that we’ve actually already recorded several albums worth of material yet to be released.
The reason for the ceasin’
So, what is our excuse for this behavior? I’m going to go with laziness. We’re a bunch of useless layabouts, no good to anyone. Ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – he does most of the heavy lifting around here. The only break he gets from heavy lifting is when he’s doing all of the light lifting. Some might think this arrangement leaves us with more time to create content, but we seldom take the opportunity to do so.
I suppose it’s fair to point out that this isn’t the first fallow period we’ve gone through as a group. Even at our inception, when most bands are hopping around like jackrabbits, looking for the next venue, we were kind of … um …. meh. We did rehearsals. We recorded. We wrote. But gigs? Not so many that first year. In fact, I was playing in other bands just to keep the lights on.
Up from the archives
Speaking of other bands, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I found an old tape of a gig Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and I played back in 1987, when we were just getting the band started. The video is grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but I digitized it anyway and started throwing it up on YouTube. The gig was in support of the release of our friend Dale Haskell’s album Factory Village, and it was captured on video by another friend, crack photographer Leif Zurmuhlen.
Check out the playlist if you want to see Ned and me framming away on stage at Albany’s famed QE2 club. And while you’re there on YouTube, try to avoid those rabbit holes anti-Lincoln is always falling into.
This won’t surprise you, but this group has very little imagination. How little? Well … glad you asked. Basically, their ideas for a Big Green logo consist of different colored circles with a picture of each of them in the center. So tubey has one with tubey’s picture, Anti-Lincoln with his, and so on. Never mind what these items say about their concept of this band … this band that NONE OF THEM RECORDS WITH … these logos are an atrocity. And now they’re talking to me about slogans. What a freaking waste of time!