Tag Archives: Phil Ross

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Hey, hey … we weren’t The Monkees after all.

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Bloody awful weather, isn’t it? Nobody knows better than my brother band-mate Matt, out every day in the great outdoors, slogging from bird’s nests to beaver ponds, feeding everything in sight. Damn, I get the chills just thinking about it. But then, I am a basement dweller by day … and by night, often times, twiddling dials on the seemingly never-ending album project Big Green is stumbling through.

Got to give him a lot of credit – he works like a dog, and yet still somehow finds the time and energy to write songs by the dozen. I mean, it’s not like we’re living in some communal band-house like The Monkees, every day full of hijinx and lip-syncing singalongs. Though, to be honest, that’s kind of how we started out.

Brokerton-On-Hudson

Picture this, people: a time long before nearly everyone had a high-def global network-connected video camera in their pocket. Can you see it? And do you hate it as much as we did? My guess is yes. Well, that’s when we started the scrum of washed-out musicians that eventually became Big Green.

Yes, we did have a Monkees-like communal band house. It was in a town called Castleton-on-Hudson, maybe ten miles south of Albany. We didn’t have a funky Monkees-like car, just a beat-up old Maverick, a 1968 Nova, and a capped C-10 pickup so ramshackle we called it “Ruck” (i.e. one letter short of a truck). Do three junks add up to a Monkees mobile? Ask your mother. Better yet, ask your grandmother.

Anyway, it was our practice space, songwriting retreat, whatever. We played a handful of gigs, made rough recordings, and did stupid shit, like stuffing pillows under our shirts and pretending we had gained 50 pounds overnight, just to freak the neighbors out. (Our guitarist, the late great Tim Walsh, was particularly good at this prank. So was our drummer back at that time, Mr. Phil Ross, seen on the inside cover of the collection – this post’s header image – hitting Tim over the head with a guitar, El Kabong style.)

What can I say? We were broke and easily amused.

Self-made bootlegs

Now, because this was indeed a time before digital photography (early 1980s), there’s little record of this time in our arrested development. A year or so after we left Castleton, though, Matt pulled together a compilation he called “The Todd Family Chronicles” which is a cassette collection of the songs – covers and originals – we played during that time and shortly thereafter.

Why “The Todd Family”? Experts disagree. Back in the day, Matt invented this joke character called “Toddy Ham” – an irritating little welp of the type we knew back in our suburban white-boy school days. (Toddy Ham is the kid with the whistle on the cobbled-together cassette cover shown above.)

The archeological record

What happened to the recordings? They’re still extant, if very fuzzy. I think the earliest thing we’ve posted is probably Silent As A Stone, which I talked about in a post back in 2022. But in reality, “The Todd Family Chronicles” wasn’t really a bootleg in a distributive sense – there were only a couple of copies. Not like the Christmas tapes, which Matt replicated in slightly larger quantities, or our EP tapes like “Songs That Remind Lincoln of the War”.

Photos? Very few, and most are just cheap photocopies of photos. We’re talking 43 years ago. Total miracle that we’re still producing something you can loosely describe as music, but there you have it.

Usual Rubbish

Stages in the ascent (or descent) of Big Green

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Get Music Here

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.

Phases of Big Green
Phases two, three, and three and a half of Big Green

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?

Usual Rubbish

Old home week arrives at the hammer mill.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell!

Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill.

Reaching back dimly

Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The sky was darkened by flocks of pterodactyls. And I was groping around the ancient city of Albany, looking for a steady gig so that I could keep the light bulb burning (the one dangling from the hairy cord just below the ceiling).

There were a bunch of clubs around Albany back in the 80s, and when I got there in January of 1981, they were all hurting. New York had just raised the drinking age to 21 that very month, which meant most of the college students who crowded into bars on the weekend were now prohibited from doing so. In other words, the perfect time to start gigging in the Capital District.

It's old home week!

Friend of a friend of a friend

The only band I played with in Albany back in 1980-81 was the pre-Big Green group I started with my brother Matt, my SUNY New Paltz drummer friend Phil, and our guitarist friend Tim Walsh, who died some years back. After failing miserably, I went back to Albany in 1984 to play with a commercial club band. Let’s call that group PROMISE MARGARINE, or PROMISE for short.

A couple of years later, the drummer from PROMISE got his bandleader to hire me for another commercial gig in a band I’ll call CANDYASS. The keyboard player in that band was Big Green co-founder Ned Danison (I was playing bass). We started working on songs, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening, Big Green emerged from the pastel colored ether of the eighties club scene around Albany, NY.

Love-in spoonful

As it happens, I heard from Ned this past week, and he shared a relatively recent song of his that sounds more than a bit like Big Green. It’s called Houston, We Have A Love-In. Give it a listen and shake your fist at us for being so damn awesome.

You can also hear our four-song Big Green demo, featuring Ned, on this very web site here.

Usual Rubbish

Rewind.

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It’s the dog days, or at least we think it is. So where are the freaking dogs, then? Somewhere a dog is barking.

Well, dogs or no, it’s hot as hell out there, so it’s probably a good day to lurk in the shadows of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and rifle through the archives of the last 30 years of Big Green history. Fortunately, I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on hand to help me with the heavy lifting. Yes, he can lift very heavy things. (It’s the putting them down part that he’s not so good at.) There’s a safe in the attic, but I think we’ll stick to the file cabinets and banker boxes in the main hammer assembly room.

Got a few old tapes, obviously … more than a few. When we started out as a band, we recorded on wire … I mean, tape. (We couldn’t afford wire.) Our first reel-to-reel was a broken down SONY machine that my dad bought used at some point. We recorded a few songs on old, thrice recorded tapes, though I couldn’t tell you even the names of any of them. Matt had some long instrumental pieces that still survive in that form, a few of which he wrote lyrics for. Then the revelation of cassette tapes arrived, and we bowed in humility before its sheer awesomeness. (That was about the time people started saying “awesome” when they meant something other than “awesome.”)

Look what I dug up.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.

That’s as deep as I can go into the history sack. We’ll see what’s a little closer to the top, maybe next week.