Tag Archives: original music

News

In the shop for a little tune-up.

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Mother ship, this is Central New York calling – we need repairs … like, right now. Oh, and one more thing … HAAAAALP!

It will surprise exactly none of you that Big Green doesn’t have tech support in-house. That’s largely because, well, we don’t even have the “in-house” part. But hey, there’s a lesson embedded in every misfortune. And so when I tried to upgrade our recording platform – in the middle of an album project – I discovered that our corporate overlords had made this impossible. The lesson? “Right to Repair” is a thing, it turns out. And the manufacturer of our computer at some point decided that I was wrong to repair. Very wrong, indeed.

Tech for the technically challenged

Now, I’m not great with tools. I get screwdrivers mixed up with other drinks. Nevertheless, I started clawing away at my laptop computer and soon discovered that the likes of me could not open the effer. That’s when I put the tools away and called the repair shop. What we really need is something like bicycle repair man, from that old Monty Python script. In a perfect world, we could resort to such things. But alas.

How’s the project going, aside from our various technical foibles? So good of you to ask. It’s like chipping away at a mountain, actually. You just keep lopping off every piece of it that doesn’t look like your next album. We started about 40 or 45 songs, and we seem to be concentrating on maybe half of them. Matt’s adding bass parts; I’m randomly adding keyboards, voice, etc. It could use some yeast, certainly, and maybe a pinch of nutmeg. None of my bunt pans are big enough to accommodate …. oh, wait; that’s the Madison county bake-off, not the album. Apologies. Always get those mixed up in my tiny brain.

Bitter legacy

We’re working off an old legacy platform that can’t be updated, and we’re at least three versions behind on our multi-track workstation software (Cubase 9). This is a good time, it seems, to upgrade. So we bought the computer, we bought the software, we put the two things together, and … bupkis. That’s when I started working away on the computer with various screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, and the like.

Now, I suppose we could just hike up the street a few blocks and record at Big Blue North, but hey … that would take money. It may surprise you that we haven’t been given an advance on royalties by our corporate label. (If so, you must be one of the legions who have never heard of Big Green. And to you I say, welcome!)

Oh, well … we’ll manage. You’ll see. And if you want to pre-order a copy of Big Green’s next album, I would strongly advise you to wait. We’ve still got some managing to do, you see.

luv u,

jp

News

Notes from the underground: The Basement tapes

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Well, Big Green may appear to be having a quiet start to the year, but trust me, we’re hard at work on the next project. No, I’m not talking about the Cutty Sark model I’ve been working on in the dark for the last eight years. I mean our next collection of original songs, straight from the hand of your flophouse favorites. Just the thing for a year like this!

What’s the title? Well, I wanted to go with “Working Title”, but I thought I’d save that for the first album by a band I’ve been contemplating called Various Artists. All I can tell you is, it will have new material. And lots of it.

Let me put it this way: I don’t know how tall the building will be when it’s finished, but as of now the foundation covers ten square blocks. It’s gonna be a big one, folks, so stay tuned. And while you’re waiting, check out our latest posts on YouTube:

Usual Rubbish

And having writ, the hand moves to Jersey

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Get Music Here

Yes, that’s a whole different approach. I never thought of doing it that way. Yes, very innovative – thank you for the suggestion. Of course I’ll give you credit. I’ll write it in the sky if you insist. You insist? Hoo boy.

Lesson number one for you young songwriters out there: never take advice on your craft from a robot. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been putting his two cents in a lot lately, and frankly, it’s worth every penny. We’ve been trying to pull together some new songs for our next project (another word for “album”), and he’s suggesting to me that I should start every song on kazoo.

It’s all about process. Sometimes.

Now, everyone has his/her process. We’ve discussed ours on this very blog. Some songwriters have a favorite instrument, some a favorite room. Some like to start with the music, then the lyric, others the opposite, and some a random mix. Marvin obviously prefers the kazoo. I think it’s fair to say that my brother Matt did at one point in his career. The thing is, Marvin doesn’t need a kazoo to make a kazoo-like sound. He’s got a sound generator that can imitate everything from a Blue Whale to a mosquito. (You should hear his 1993 Buick Regal. It’s spot on!)

My process? Well, mostly it’s not doing anything. But when I do write songs, I typically start with a blank piece of paper. The paper stays blank for a few weeks, until I awake from a nightmare at 2 a.m. and start scribbling randomly. The next morning, I will puzzle over the illegible nonsense I scrawled out the night before, then ball up the paper and chuck it in the trash. That’s usually when I pick up a guitar. Don’t try this at home!

Those instruments!

Some of you might think that it’s better to write songs on an instrument you know. I am living proof that that’s not necessary. The fact is, I don’t know any instruments all that well. Sure, I’m on a first-name basis with a guitar or two, and my piano is a childhood friend, but that doesn’t count for much. Like many songwriters, I reach for the closest instrument in the room and start noodling. (Pro tip: If I stumble on something good, it usually means it’s been used before.)

Worried about plagiarism? Remember what Woody Guthrie said:

“I never waste my high priced time by asking or even wondering in the least whether I’ve heard my tune in whole or in part before. There are ten million ways of changing any tune around to make it sound like my own.“

Yeah, I’ll take some of that. You might also want to remember what Tom Lehrer said:

Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize

I can't play this bloody thing!

A case of projection

Is this a roundabout way of saying that we have an album project in the works? Well, dear reader, that would be telling! After all, we have about a hundred Ned Trek songs in the can, waiting to be released in some form, including about seven or eight that have never seen the light of day. And then there’s all that new material from Matt (a.k.a. the songwriting machine of Central New York).

Damn it, man … we have so many irons in the fire, there’s nothing left to do the ironing with. Now we have to throw all those wrinkled clothes in the fire with ’em.

Usual Rubbish

Passing the hat on the internets

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2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, let me play a few more notes. Yes, I will choose them carefully. Here we go. All right, that’s got it. Did the donation meter move up at all? No? Mother of pearl.

Hey, out there. Another week in the life of Big Green, possibly the most obscure rock band in the history of the genre. I’m always looking for superlatives when I write about this group, and frankly that’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe, just maybe the Chefs of the Future (friends of ours) approach our level of obscurity, but I doubt it. (After all, if I’ve heard of them, how obscure could they be?)

I don’t need to remind you about how hard it is to keep the lights on around here. Important historical context: the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house, was originally a gaslit factory, later wired for electric lights. Those lights feed on electricity from our local utility, which we … ahem …. borrow from the corner telephone poll (for crying out loud, don’t tell anybody!). Of course, they keep cutting our line, so yeah, it’s hard to keep the damn lights on. And, uh …. what was I talking about?

Return to cyber busking

Oh, yeah. Generating income. Well, as I began to describe in last week’s column, we have been turning dustbins upside-down in this place looking for material to build a show out of. Not that we’re likely to venture into local clubs or auditoriums any time soon, but the virtual space is another question. Lord knows plenty of musicians are out there framming away – why the hell not us, right?

Hence we have opened the door on cyber busking once again. I know, I know, we had a lot of problems last time, not least of which Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his shaky camera hand. Then there were the copyright strikes – damned intellectual property! YOU CALL YOURSELF AN INTELLECTUAL? HOW … DARE … YOU?

Another Big Green original

Well, fortunately, we have a lot of original material. I mean, a boatload of the stuff. Sure, it’s a boat from some unknown country where music is completely weird and unfamiliar to American ears, but that’s okay. We can fill whole nights with our own tunes, honest. I’m sitting on a stack of original songs right now. The sharps are kind of pointy, frankly. (When it comes to converting music to furniture, I prefer the flat keys.)

Okay, so you may ask (and well you may), why haven’t you done so? Why haven’t we pulled out our western guitars (or space guitars, for that matter) and started twanging on Facebook, like all of our singer-songwriter pals? Good question. I think the main reason is that it takes us nine years to do the simplest thing. We have whole albums worth of material recorded, for instance, and we can’t seem to knit those recordings into actual albums. I’ve got a stack of magazines chin high in the kitchen, and …. well …. they’ve needed to be thrown out for about five years. (Four more to go.)

Well, damn it, this time we’re determined. And we’ll flag you when we’re ready to go live. Make some tea and sit tight – we’ll be right with you.

Usual Rubbish

Joe to band: More album, less concept

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2000 Years to Christmas

No, that’s a terrible idea. What the hell! Sometimes I wonder about your synaptic circuits, dude. I’m starting to think your think-o-lator needs urgent service. What else have you got? I got nothing.

Oh, hey, out there in cyber land. Just another day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home in upstate New York. And by “another day,” I mean another contentious debate over the best way forward for your friends in Big Green. As you know, rock bands spend a lot of their time working out their artistic direction over the course of ten, sometimes twenty years. Hell, if you don’t do THAT, you might end up drifting … or playing the same stuff over and over again …. which is, uh, kind of what …. we …. do ….

An extraordinary meeting

Well, we’re trying to get away from that sort of thing. That’s why we’ve convened a special meeting of the Big Green creative steering committee, which is comprised of the band members, of course, plus Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber. We used to include Anti-Lincoln in these meetings, but he kept talking about the war and, well, that gets old pretty fast.

Still, even without “A-Link”, as we call him, in attendance, we some time end up treading the same territory. For instance, we were on the topic of concept albums. I asked the group to suggest some possible concepts for upcoming Big Green collections. Most of the man-sized tuber’s suggestions were plant-based, but then Marvin piped up with the suggestion that we do an album themed around the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. I’m telling you, it’s A-Link all over again!

Can we leave Prince Leopold out of this, Marvin?

Why all Marvin’s ideas are bad ones

Okay, putting Lincoln aside for a moment, there are about a hundred reasons why doing a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War is a bad idea. First of all, I’m convinced that a not-insignificant portion of our fan-base is still sensitive about the accession of Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to the Spanish throne. And while I don’t want to seem like a panderer, in these hard economic times, we shouldn’t go out of our way to alienate anyone unnecessarily.

This tends to be the problem with many if not all of Marvin’s ideas. There’s always a poison pill hidden in there somewhere. Honestly, a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War would inevitably dredge up unpleasant memories of the birth of France’s Third Republic, and THEN where would we be? That’s why all of Marvin’s ideas are bad!

The totally excellent solution

How about this? No more concept albums. From now on, Big Green albums will just be a collection of randomly generated songs with no relationship to one another or to some unifying idea. Thoughts? Any hands? (Or branches, tubey?)

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

What the .... ?

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!

Usual Rubbish

My back pages.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm, let’s see …. here’s a fragment. I think I wrote this in 1987. Or maybe a couple of years before that. Yeah, more like ’85. It’s got tahini stains on it, and I swore off tahini in ’86.

Yes, here we are, doing what upstate New Yorkers typically do during the colder months, when we’re all frozen in place, afraid to leave our homes, waiting for the waxing sun to favor us once again – digging through the archives! Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve got lots of room for old cardboard boxes and file folders, hundreds of which have somehow found their way here from wherever we came from previously. I don’t know about you, but all of my possessions follow me around like a lost dog. I just don’t have the heart to turn them away. Poor little motherless stand mixer! You’ll always have a home with me!

Right, well … I don’t want to trouble you with some shabby inventory of my personal possessions. I’m mostly interested in old compositions from the early days of Big Green, when we were all knee-high to a locust. Ah yes, I remember those days well, piled into our spartan garret, scribbling away into repurposed notepads leftover from school, crossing out drafts of expository writing essays and replacing them with angry verse, channeling the angst of a then-young generation choking on its collective anger over … uh … having to do expository writing essays. And a couple of other things. Hey, those were the immediate post-punk years. We all started on Dylan and the Beatles as pre-teens, then moved on to the harder stuff when we were 20. Those 60s hipsters were our gateway drug.

Okay, let's have a look, then.

So, what are we finding? Old songs, pieces of songs, idea tapes, etc. I’m guessing there’s an album in this somewhere, though it’s going to look a lot like that Mousetrap board game by the time it’s finished. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to help me evaluate what to do with all of this old material. That’s a fairly simple process. I find some lyrics, I insert them into Marvin’s scanner, and the music goes round and round, whoa, whoa, whoa, and it comes out as a series of numbers. I then look up the numbers on the decoder ring Mitch Macaphee built for me (coincidentally, it looks just like the ones I used to get in my Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes) which renders a “yes” or a “no”. If it’s yes, then we consider turning it into something. If it’s no, well, into the bin it goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of nos, frankly. Either there’s something wrong with this ring, or I really sucked my way through the eighties. It’s one of the other, folks.

Usual Rubbish

One score years ago.

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Well, it’s, I don’t know, the album’s China anniversary. That makes it sound like we’re traveling to Beijing. Not that I wouldn’t, if luncheon is provided … but I must be fed, or I remain at home.

Yes, who can believe it, folks … it’s been 20 years since the release of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, or at least I think it is. Totally makes sense, in a way. After all, twenty years ago was the year two thousand, so that’s when we would have done it, pursuant to our obsession with accuracy. Hah! As if! We dropped the album at some weird ass time to accommodate the disc production schedule. They were taking their time about whittling those CDs. I know it’s painstaking work, but really …. six weeks? Outrageous.

Well, our Indonesian sweat shop finally churned out the product, weeks after Christmas. Picture rows and rows of workers, chipping away at blocks of plastic, knocking off everything that doesn’t look like a CD, then hand-painting each one with a degree of consistency no man would think possible. Work like that takes time. That’s why we don’t release a lot of albums here in Big Green land. There simply aren’t enough man-hours in the day to produce albums the old-fashioned way …  the way we did it back in 1999.

Damn. Sure doesn't look twenty.

That’s actually when this blog started, as some of you may recall. I began doing posts so that people who went to the URL on our album would find something when they got there. We also posted the album on mp3.com, which was a thing back then. There was a whole separate digital release on that platform, simultaneous with the release we did through The Orchard, which included all of the popular ecommerce sites at that time. Needless to say, it was a million seller. (I have a million in my cellar … ba-dum crash!) 2000 Years To Christmas remains the only album we ever made that actually got reviewed. We’re working hard to stay at that impressive level of obscurity. (Hey … it doesn’t happen all by itself.)

So … happy birthday, 2KY2C! You’re almost old enough to drink in New York State.

Podcast, Songs

THIS IS BIG GREEN: July 2019

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Big Green drops a bomb on independence day with a clumsily patched-together show that features an archive Ned Trek selection, some old live tracks, and a drunken narrative to serve as your guide. Cue fireworks.

This is Big Green – July 2019. Features: 1) Ned Trek 18: Captain Frickasee (encore presentation); 2) Put the phone down: Where the hell did that Matt guy go; 3) A brief history of Big Green guitarists; 4} Song: How ‘Bout The War (live), by Big Green with Tony “Ace” Butera; 5) Song: Greater Good (live), by Big Green with Jeremy Shaw; 6) Song: Sensory Man (live demo), by Big Green with Jeremy Shaw; 7) Song: I Hate Your Face (live demo), by Big Green with Jeremy Shaw; 8) Song: Merry Christmas, Jane (live demo), by Big Green with Jeremy Shaw; 9) Song: Special Kind of Blood (live demo), by Big Green with Jeremy Shaw; 10) The Middlebury College gig, circa 1993; 11) Time to go.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Usual Rubbish

New step.

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Huh. Never saw THAT one before. Do that again, Anti Lincoln. Wow. Are you sure that was developed in the 1850s? It looks a little post modern to me.

Ah, readers. Greetings. Here’s a handy tip: You know you have waaaay too much time on your hands when you spend a perfectly good afternoon listening to the antimatter 16th president explain that po-mo was invented by General McClellan. For chrissake … everybody knows it didn’t emerge until the later on in the Grant administration. I’ll tell you, in Anti Lincoln’s tiny mind, history is a total confidence game. If he were the actual Great Emancipator (or Posi-Lincoln, as it were), he would understand the importance of history. Posi-Lincoln loved history more than chicken fricassee. (And he loved chicken fricassee.)

We’re still in songwriting mode over here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York. Every day I pick up my superannuated acoustic guitar and start strumming the five chords I learned as a teenager, hoping to coax another number out of them. How many possible combinations are there? I’m going to find out! Note: if you know the answer to this eternal question, put it in the comments. I’m sure it involves some kind of advanced mathematical calculation that is considerably beyond my ken. Though why I’m always asking Ken to figure stuff out for me I don’t know.

Is that a trombone, man?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.

The rest is history, folks. You can read all about it right here. Now, back to that new dance step. And a one, and a two …