There’s that funny music again. And the really strange thing is, every time I hear it, there’s someone at the front door. What’s that? A door bell? Oh … okay. Never mind.
Well, I thought I was on to something important there; maybe a new scientific principle born of some random observation, like noticing a minor irregularity in the orbit of Mercury. No such luck, my friends – looks like the Nobel Prize for Physics will be going to someone else this year … again. (Don’t know how many of these disappointments I can stand.) I understand that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, has been nominated for the Ignobel Prize in making things blow sky high. That’s a tough one to win – it’s a little hard to guess how high sky high is.
Lord only knows, we don’t do what we do here at Big Green for the love of prizes and little metal statuettes. Neither do we do it for the money. (The simple fact is that there IS no money in what we do.) Nay, we just do it for the simple joy of music …. that omnipresent mellifluous force that lifts our spirits up on high. That unseen power that unites us with the choir invisible. That … I don’t know …. ear worm that drives you out of your skull for three days; thanks an effing bunch, Matt! YOU AND YOUR CATCHY TUNES!
Honestly, if we relied on positive feedback, like all of our coaches and half of our therapists suggested, we would have left this “business” years ago. I’ve known enterprising individuals who consider push-back a strong indication that you’re doing the right thing. That sounds good to me, but frankly … we don’t even get a lot of negative feedback. We’re like the band in the bubble. We’re music minus fun.
Hey, maybe we’re on to something, right? Matt wrote a song years ago called “Motivation X” which celebrated the sentiment: use your motivation to restrain yourself. That’s the revolution, right? Go easy on the world. Start a collective and make music because that’s what you do, not because you want to rip the world a new asshole and burn through a lot of money, a lot of trees, a lot of water, a lot of gas, etc. Make your revolutionary act the act of not succeeding.
Wait …. there’s that funny music again! Mailman, perhaps?
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:
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.
Well, as you can see, the bottom is falling out of Big Green, economically speaking. Nothing new, right? As a class, musicians tend to be monetarily challenged, let’s say. Doing music for a living is tantamount to perpetual unemployment, interrupted by occasional contract work. And when you’re a plainclothes band, the gig money sucks. Usually you get a percentage of the door. If you’re more well known, they might give you the WHOLE door. And if you draw a good crowd, they might even throw in a window as well.