Now, I think you all know that Big Green is bad at predictions. We’re not prognosticators or weather forecasters, and we have no magic stone that allows us to see the future. I can tell you what I’ll have for breakfast tomorrow, but that’s only because I’ve been having the same breakfast for nigh unto thirty years. Anything harder than that is just too damn hard.
That’s a long way of saying that we won’t be releasing our new album this Fall, as we had predicted. After painstaking consideration and much rending of garments (which took about five minutes), we decided to push the release to Spring. Why, you may ask? I offer this simple explanation: the quality goes in before the name goes on. That’s right – making a Big Green album is like building a Zenith radio in the nineteen fifties. The only thing missing is the voice of Bill Conrad.
Now, quality is a relative thing, son
Yes, I know … Big Green isn’t known for maintaining stringent quality control standards. That’s not our jam, mothers. No sir – we try to get the feel right. And when that happens, we know it down to the soles of our cheap-ass shoes. If the overall quality has to suffer, so be it, my friend. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them, well …. we have other principles.
Still, even Big Green has minimum quality standards. The mixes from this new album were just skimming the bar, low as it may be, so we need a little more time. For we will serve no wine before its …. oh, god damnit! Not another slogan!
So, anyway … we’re giving it another six months, just for good measure. And in the interim, since you’ve been such good children, I will regale you with the story of one of our early songs. As I mentioned before, our upcoming album has a bunch of kind of serious songs, or Gumby songs, if you will. The song we’ll be dissecting today comes from a previous Big Green era, when all of our songs were strange ….. very strange.
You would have liked Lincoln
Speaking of quality, the song I’m going to explore is called Quality Lincoln, and it’s actually a medley of three smaller songs, one building on the randomness of the other. Matt and I wrote it back in 1990 or 1991, I believe, and I don’t believe we ever performed it in front of an audience or recorded it seriously. (Not sure it’s possible to record such a silly song seriously, but I digress.)
We did a cheap-ass basement recording of it for our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast back in 2016. You can find the full lyric in our lyrics section. Now you can sing along …. but what does it mean?
We don’t pretend to know the meaning of any of our songs, but here’s my take, based on years of close textual reading, tarot cards, astrological deep dives, and so on.
Shouldn’t happen to our quality nation’s president
So the song starts with:
Lincoln suffered from depression, Joe
but it wasn’t because of the war, you know
and it wasn’t because of his son who died
or the wacky behavior of his bride
Okay, picture a suburban couch potato back in the 1980s. Maybe s/he is watching something about Lincoln or reading a magazine article. This is the take-away (and I don’t mean snacks from the local noodle shop) – Lincoln had a rare disease | that turned him into a chimpanzee | They didn’t have the know-how in those days.
This is the nature of pre-internet conspiracy theory – using legacy media to fill in the blanks, connecting things that are both questionable and wholly unrelated to one another.
How do we get into outer space? It’s all about Colonel Smith, played by the character actor Henry Jones in Lost In Space. The narrator of the song sees Jones play this part (that of a cartoon-like antebellum southern colonel) but also sees Jones play a traitorous Civil War commanding officer in The Big Valley – an officer who was part of the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Same actor, same person. We make the connection like this:
I was a Reb in the guise of a Union Colonel
with all those fools
I butchered a town just to prove to them that I was a loyal
Lincoln tool
Then in order to escape my shame
I wandered into outer space
and here I am
The last section is in the voice of Colonel Smith, describing his ridiculous attempt to blow Dr. Smith sky-high with an exploding cream pie, cursing himself as “the Smith that gave all of the Smiths a bad name,” and ending on a rationalization of his conspiracy to kill Lincoln with a nod to MacBeth:
Safe until great Birnam Wood scaled high Dunsinane
He was the Lincoln who gave every king their bad name
Our promise to you
I know I promised new content in the Fall, so now my credibility is in shambles. That said, on behalf of Big Green, I solemnly promise that we will not use tortured metaphors or obscure television characters in any of the songs on our new album. Take that to the bank.
Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.
There were songs before Big Green, of course, and I’ve been digging through those as well. Matt started recording pretty much as soon as he could tell one end of a guitar from the other. Both he and I were always fascinated by tape recorders and other gear. We had a shrimpy little portable monaural reel-to-reel machine when we were kids, about the size of a steno pad, which we would use to record hastily contrived audio plays, jokes, and other bullshit. Matt recorded his first songs on an old SONY stereo reel-to-reel that kind of half worked. I remember working out a method for overdubbing, using a digital delay – you could arm one of the two channels for recording, run the playback of the other channel through the delay, and it would line up pretty closely. Then came the four-track cassette portastudio.
Well, many of those cassette collections were made up of Christmas songs – not carols, but songs Matt wrote on the theme of Christmas. (He typically recorded these collections himself to retain the element of surprise.) The one Matt put together in 1989 was entitled “PT 109” and the sleeve featured a slightly modified version of the heroic cartoon-like cover of Kennedy’s war memoir by the same name. The song PT 109 was actually a country number ripping on George H.W. Bush, who had just become president and who had a heroic WWII story about how he had rescued a future president of the United States – himself – from a plane crash in the Pacific. The lyric was written in the posthumous voice of one of Bush’s crewmates, lamenting that he hadn’t served under another commander:
This time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).
Rolled out of bed a little tardy today. Who can blame me? After a gut-full of grub, a man’s thoughts turn to hibernation. Big Green doesn’t ordinarily celebrate major holidays, but we did relent this year and enjoy a modest Thanksgiving feast, prepared by the steady hand of our confidant Anti-Lincoln, who has elected to stay at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill while he considers his next steps. (I think he’s contemplating some brand of global domination, but no details yet. Can’t rush a genius!)
