Start with a one, and a two, and a three, and a … ouch! Damn it, man … I can’t do this in slippers. I need my stomping shoes!
Oh, hi. Yeah, it’s us again, making music again, or dying in the attempt. One thing you can say about this crazy rock music kick, if it ever catches on, is that it’s all about the rhythm section. It’s pretty simple once you get started. And after you learn how to spell “rhythm”, you’ve taken the first step to glory. Then all you need is a sense of timing and some good stomping shoes … and a decent drummer. And of course a bass player. Yes, yes … and rhythm guitar. Oh, yeah … piano. How could I forget that one? Well … maybe it isn’t all that simple after all. But it is contagious, my friends. Mucho contagious.
Listen to me rambling like an idiot. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation, or just bad air. Maybe some of that west coast forest fire ash is making its way back east. Whatever. Our project this week is an attempt to find the rhythmic core of every song we do. First, we get someone to strum the chords on a guitar. That might be Marvin (my personal robot assistant), except that he can’t even hold a guitar unless it’s in a zero gravity environment, like the deck of the Jupiter Two. So maybe anti-Lincoln …. or my brother Matt, who can actually play a guitar. (No, that’s too easy.) Then we pull out the rhythm arranger. Now I know you’re probably picturing a computer workstation of some kind with a pad controller midi-ed into it. Well, dream on, my friends. Our rhythm arranger is a bunch of pots and pans arrayed in a circle, and the rest of us beating on them with wooden spoons. (It’s just about getting the flavor, right? Then we bring in the drummer.)
Is this a fools errand? More than likely. But what other kind of errand are we likely to run … I mean, aside from sending Mitch Macaphee, the world’s third greatest mad scientist, down to the corner store to buy some batteries? You musicians out there know how this works. You just try a bunch of different things, different combinations of instruments and patterns, until something starts to gel. You don’t know how it happens, but it always does. Of course, you have to stir the mix properly, and make certain the water is hot enough, then refrigerate three hours before serving. But enough about Mr. Wiggle. I’m sure you’re just dying to know more about our creative process. Well, I’ll tell you, my friend …. so are we. That’s why we’re sitting around our makeshift living room in an abandoned hammer mill, banging on pots and pans. It’s a conjuring trick.
Next week: how to make Jello. Again.
So, if I’m treating every songwriting project like the evolutionary ascent of man, that amounts to a lot of banjo-plucking primates. And that’s where many of my songs start out. I’ll find a chair somewhere in this big old barn of a place, throw my cheap-seat Martin D-1 across my leg and start playing the five chords I know best. If I stumble upon some progression or melody worth repeating, I can’t rely on memory alone. Fortunately, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an audio recording module, and if I can get him to stand still long enough, I can capture whatever the hell it is I’m working on and play it back later. If it happens in the middle of the night, the playback sounds like …. you guessed it …. banjo-plucking primates.
Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.
Small wonder the heads on my antiquated cassette tape machine have picked up a charge; I’ve been running hours of tape through that thing as part of my summer project to archive and restore Big Green’s early recordings (1984-96) as well as some even more primordial stuff from the early 80s. Since practically all of the songs were recorded on analog audio cassette, which doesn’t hold up all that well over the decades, it’s just as well that I’m getting to this now. By the end of the process, I hope to have remastered early mixes of 150 to 200 songs, the vast majority written by my illustrious brother, Matt. That shiny tape makes for a bewildering trail (which is, in fact, pretty close to the title of one of those 200 songs).
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.
My summer pass-times usually include deep archive stuff – you know, threading old reel-to-reel tapes onto antiquated and dysfunctional playback machines, just to get a momentary listen in to what they contain. We have a few of those, and many, many audio cassettes with both stereo and four-track content. We also have Hi-8 DAT tapes from our Tascam DA-88 days (the system we used to record our first album, 
We have, in the past, posted our albums for purchase on digital distribution sites – the Orchard, CDBaby, etc. My feeling – and I should raise this at the meeting, already in progress – is that we should just post songs for free download and give people an opportunity to contribute towards the good of the Big Green cause through a Patreon site or something like that. It’s basically a digital passing of the hat, which we’ve done as well (the Luddite version, in any case).
what we see looking back at us.
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: