Did you upload the episode on time? Marvin? Can you hear me? Oh, Jesus. Not again. Right … Hey, anti-Lincoln! Plug Marvin in for a couple of hours. Make yourself useful!
Hi, good people. I’m pretty sure Marvin (my personal robot assistant) uploaded the August episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN – our fifth anniversary broadcast! – over the last couple of days, but until he has a decent charge on him I can’t be sure. If you listened to it, you know a lot of what I planned to tell you today. But because I am a pedantic motherfucker, I fully intend to tell you about it anyway. Here’s what we got under the hood.
Ned Trek 29: Error of Mercy – This latest episode of our Star Trek political parody audio melodrama is based on the classic Star Trek episode titled “Errand of Mercy”. (For you non-aficionados, here’s the IMDB listing.) The crew of the Free Enterprise arrives at the planet Origami just ahead of the Confederation’s arch rivals, the Cleenton Empire. The episode features a bad, bad imitation of Bill Clinton, a perhaps worse imitation of James Carville, and a lot of cheap shots. Perle ends up wearing another barrel, so it’s probably worth a listen.
Put The Phone Down – We start with some strained renditions of a song by The Troggs, as sung by Peter Lorre, the Daleks from Dr. Who, and others, then rip right into a discussion of current affairs. That more or less follows the theme of my political rant this week – the assholes vs. the fuckers, in essence, though we also spend some time on “Bernie or Bust” and the Green Party. (Don’t get me started!)
Live Songs – These are audio tracks from the excerpts of our live video demo we posted over the past few weeks on our YouTube Channel. These include Sensory Man, I Hate Your Face, and Why Not Call It George? Fairly raucous, more or less in line with cuts from our Live From Neptune EP. The recordings were made pretty proximate to one another, probably within a year or so (1993-4). This was at the end of the period when we performed with guitarist and friend of Big Green, Jeremy Shaw.
Anyway, a lot of good-ish listening here, so enjoy. Or at least try to enjoy. I just want to spread a little sunshine as I move through the world, that’s all. Just call me “little joey sunshine”. (Sure beats “fucker”.)
I suppose you’re wondering where your podcast is. Well, I was getting to that. THIS IS BIG GREEN has been coming together slowly. We did the voices for the next episode of Ned Trek last week, then we’ll need to do some editing and dubbing, etc. We’re probably looking at another couple of weeks, during which time I will frantically try to dig up some not-too-uninteresting material from our archives. There will likely be a few more Wayback Wednesdays on tap, so stay tuned.
As I think I mentioned before, we don’t have a lot of video footage of us playing live, and even less of us playing our own songs. This demo included a lot of covers – all stuff we liked playing. So it’s kind of a freeze-dried sample of our set list from the 80s and 90s. We’ve got three takes of “Sensory Man”, as well as a rehearsal sequence on that song, a couple of takes of “I Hate Your Face”, and one of “Why Not Call It George?” – that’s it for our songs. That is, unless someone out there has video of us playing at Middlebury College or SUNYIT, when we opened for Bloodline. Anybody? Thought not.
Anyway, I’ve been taking this opportunity to relearn the keyboard and vocal parts to some of our older songs. There are literally hundreds of them, so I suppose if I wanted to, I could play a different one every day for the next nine months, then start again. (I only have time to play one song a day, and usually it ends up being “Summertime” or something like that.) Yesterday’s song was Matt’s “Promised Land”, which is one of those Dylanesque songs Dylan never wrote. We’ll record these at some point, though we have scratchy demos of all of them, recorded on cassette portastudios back in the stone age. (We’ve played some of these on our podcast, 
My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.
Trouble is, we spend so much time on 
As I mentioned in previous posts, we’re finishing eight songs for the next episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek parody that’s the baloney in the cheap-ass sandwich known as the 
Speaking of the Carpenters, Matt and I have been tracking some backing vocals for the next crop of songs – about eight of them, to appear in the next installment of 
Okay, so let’s assume the weather has nothing to do with Mitch’s cloud bazooka. This is effed up, man! Remember now – we are squatters in this here hammer mill, see? And, well … the heat in this place is a little unreliable. Most of the winter we depend on an old wood stove in what used to be the shipping office. It’s the mansized tuber’s job to stoke the thing, and sometimes he falls down on the job a little. But most days we manage to keep the ice off the dishwater … though I don’t suppose you’re aware of how effective ice can be as a dishwashing medium. It scrapes, it emulsifies, it …. okay, I’m exaggerating. You have to look on the bright side when you’re freezing your ass off.