You know, when I was a boy, my pappy said to me …. what’s that? How the hell did you know that? Oh, right. He’s your pappy, too. Easy to forget little details like that when you get to be MY age. Get off my lawn!
Yikes, well … welcome to geezerville … I mean, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat house. It is, after all, just a rest stop in the long journey that is our story. Not exactly the best appointed rest stop on the Thruway, mind you – there’s no Cinnabon, no Chick Fillet. There’s no 1960s style automat where you can grab a soggy hours-old tuna sandwich if you’re in a hurry. But I digress.
Phase one: the first phase
Sure, we go way back. Big Green’s founding was a scattershot affair, spread over several decades. We count our age in geologic time, as our official story will attest, but as far as start dates are concerned, we’re probably talking 1979. That’s the first year Matt and I played in a band together. Sure, we sucked, but give us a chance! We had only just grown our guitar hands, our pump organ feet, our harmonica teeth. (Ever seen harmonica teeth? Trick question – most harp players don’t have teeth.)
I mean, if you want a more compelling genesis story, look elsewhere. (Genesis, perhaps.) The fact is, we picked up our cheap guitars, went to some cheap venues, and started playing our cheap repertoire. Matt and I did some duo gigs, but we mostly played as a four-piece, with our first drummer Mark K (no last name – YOU know who you are!) and our first lead guitarist, Tim Walsh. So there was pounding and there was twanging, but no screeching quite yet. Big Green was still in the protozoan stage.
Phase two: the one that came after one
As was my habit, I took a year off, this time in New Paltz, NY, living in the worst dorm on campus at the SUNY college there. Across the hall from me lived our soon-to-be second drummer, Phil Ross, who’s still playing gigs, last I heard. Phil and I used to sit in his room and listen to his truly impressive LP collection – lots of old Dylan sides, Phil Ochs, etc., and some new stuff by this Elvis Costello dude. Phil and I shared an apartment for a semester, then a house outside of Albany, NY, along with my other bandmates, Matt and Tim, and my partner at the time, Ellen.
So, the nameless band that one might call proto-Big Green went under a variety of monikers, from Slapstick to Mearth to Duck and Cover. We played some gigs around Albany, did some recording, then kind of ran out of gas as a band. That’s when Matt dug into writing in a big way. (Fun fact: his song Sweet Treason is partly about our year in Castleton-On-Hudson. See if you can guess which part!)
Phase three: a name and a phase
What came after that? Well, Tim and Phil went off to do other stuff, and Matt and I teamed up with Ned Danison (author of A Name and A Face) and a bunch of random drummers – and eventually John White, our forever drummer – to put together the band that would be called Big Green. So it was musical drummers for a while, then musical guitarists for a longer while, but ultimately we landed in an abandoned hammer mill and started telling you this long, shaggy-dog story of failure and hardship.
You know the rest. Five or six more phases, and we’re here. Any questions?
I listen to some of our earliest recordings, from back before we had even the name Big Green, and they sound like something from another planet. Most are very poorly recorded, scratched onto a cassette tape using a cheap mic or two. We did a demo at a local studio in 1981 that is a bit clearer – that basically captures what we sounded like at that moment. (It wasn’t overdubbed; we just DID IT LIVE, as Bill O’Reilly would say.) That tape was just me, Matt on bass, our guitarist at the time, the late Tim Walsh, and drummer Phil Ross, who still plays downstate. Maybe if I have too much port one of these nights I’ll post a song somewhere you can hear it.