Tag Archives: rehearsal

Usual Rubbish

Planning a tour on the ground floor

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Get Music Here

Okay, I really think you have the order of operations wrong. One thing has to come before the other thing, and you’ve got the wrong thing first. Dude, it’s not that hard – why are you blinking those lights so frantically? This isn’t differential calculus … whatever the hell THAT is.

Oh, hey, out there in normal people land. Just having a little conversation here, nothing to get excited about. Just a handful of friends getting together for a quick jawbone. That’s a big motherfucker, man. I’ve seen smaller jawbones on a donkey. Whoa, is that the time? Okay, well … gotta go, guys! Great chewing the fat with you.

Right … now that I’m out of earshot, JEEEsus, what a bunch of asshats. That’s what I get for raising the issue of touring again. Let me ‘splain.

Cart before the horse

You know the old saying: don’t put the cart before the horse. For one thing, the horse might decide to drive away in the cart. And if you’re applying a different meaning to the expression “put X before Y”, you should always prioritize animals over inanimate objects. That’s a no brainer. (Or perhaps a YES brainer. But I digress.)

I guess the point is, I seem to me among a stark minority of members of Big Green’s broader entourage who believe that we should RECORD and RELEASE an album before we go on tour promoting it, not after. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t get his little brass head around that idea. I mean, I can understand why antimatter Lincoln would be in favor of the before plan – he’s from that backwards universe where everyone eats corn on the cob vertically rather than horizontally.

I don't know, Abe. That doesn't look right to me.

What’s that you say?

Now, some of you out there may be asking, what album? And yes, I know lately we’ve been doing little more than posting old archival video of us playing random songs. But just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t snow in the living room as well. (I’ve got to stop using so many cliches, particularly the ones that don’t make any sense.) The simple fact is, we’ve got some songs … a whole lot of them.

What are we doing with said songs? We’re incubating the fuckers. We’re tossing parts back and forth, writing chord charts, barking into microphones, squinting at pages of poorly recorded verse. We’re pulling things apart and patching them back together with bailing wire and scotch tape. We’re …. killing time, frankly. It’s just fun to play new stuff, even when you’re doing it over the internets.

Why the internets? Matt is sequestered in his naturalist redoubt, watching birds, feeding beavers, and somehow writing scores of new songs. So we use sophisticated web-based technology to do our dirty work. Because that’s how we roll.

Where to begin. So many choices.

Now, if we were to go on tour … AFTER finishing the new album, we could start on that pulsar I talked about last week. Nobody’s played there yet, so we could finally be the first to market with something. (Damn, we suck at capitalism!)

Usual Rubbish

Weather or knot.

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Hmmmm. That looks like light coming in. Not necessarily a bad thing, except that’s a wall, not a window. So, I don’t know… somewhat problematic.

Okay, it turns out that a potting shed is not the best place to hide during a hurricane or other extreme weather event. Who knew? Seemed sturdy enough when we moved in. I know you’re used to hearing us complain about nearly everything, but we had very few complaints about the shed, aside from the fact that there was no screen for the fireplace. Our landlord’s response? “Run for your lives! The potting shed doesn’t HAVE a fireplace!”

Yesterday the wind started kicking up and water came pouring down from the heavens like one of those super soaker shower heads. (Actually the shower head is like the rain, but never mind.) Then the entire structure started to sway lazily in the wind. Far from keeping the weather out, the shed was practically inviting it in, and frankly, this shed isn’t big enough for me and some screaming ‘nado. Well, there was some noise, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) sounded the alarm klaxon (really just a digital recording he plays back on such occasions). The shed lifted up and came down like a tossed coin, rolling around on its edges as it came to a clumsy stop.

Cheese and crackers!

Naturally, we broke out our foul weather gear, which looks pretty much like our fair weather gear, except that we keep it in a different cardboard box. I do have one Gorton’s Fisherman style hat that allows me to cross the courtyard on occasion and pound on the hammer mill door in hopes that our nasty neighbors will grow a compassion bone and decide to let us back in.  No luck yet, but what the hell. I’ll tell you, this puts a real damper on rehearsals. There aren’t a lot of genuinely waterproof instruments in the kind of music we play, so our songs start to sound a bit waterlogged by the end of the first half-hour.

I don’t know … how long does it take a sousaphone to rust? Depends on the brand, I’m guessing. Got an umbrella …. anyone?

Usual Rubbish

Practice makes more practice.

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All right, then. Ready? One, two, three, four ….  wait, whaaat? That’s not how that song starts. The bagpipes come in on the third verse, not right at the beginning. Where’s that screaming guitar, Mitch? You promised me a screaming guitar!

Oh, man. It’s really been too long since we got out on the star-dusty trail and played a few remote venues. Pulling together a live show is hard when you’re this rusty. In fact, it’s starting to make interstellar space travel seem trivial by comparison. But what the hell, we’re doing it – Big Green is going on another galactic tour, assuming we can find a spaceship worthy of such a journey. No matter what the difficulties may be, the daunting challenges … we will not be daunted. Forward! Forward into the breech, me lads!

So much for the motivational speech. Actually, I think the toughest problem we have on this project is, well, personnel. We’re a little thin on the ground here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, Matt and I are the only humans in this band. The rest of it is made up of robots and possibly space aliens. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be sitting in on drums this time out. I say “sitting”, but it’s really more like standing. He doesn’t actually play the drums – he just emits the sounds of drums in a vaguely rhythmic fashion. I’m starting to think he may have been fashioned out of some old machine parts recycled from the Caribbean.  Or maybe he was a Victor Borge imitator in a previous life – I don’t know.

One, two, three, GO!

What about the guitar? The lead guitar? No worries – Mitch Macaphee isn’t sitting in with us. But he DID promise to build us a self-playing guitar programmed with all of our recent Ned Trek era songs. That would be a tremendous time-saver, but as always, Mitch overpromises and underdelivers. He did go so far as set up a guitar on a stand with a transistor radio taped to it, tuned to the local classic rock station. I suspect he thought we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and a REAL automaton guitar player, since we typically ask guitarists to just play like some guy on the radio. (He’s got us all figured out.)

Okay, so we’ve gotten through two songs. A few more to go, right? Right.

Usual Rubbish

Jamming.

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Let’s try that again, once more from the top. What’s that? You want to take it from the bottom? How ’bout we compromise. One more time, boys, from the middle. That’s the ticket.

Whoa, man, I’m totally out of practice with this band rehearsal business. It’s like I need rehearsal rehearsals. You forget, sometimes, how much you need to know in order to know what you need to know. And once you know that you know what you need to know, you know that you’re going to forget it. Why? That may be unknowable. Am I making myself clear? Good.

Okay, so what got us on this band practice kick again? I think it was all that watching and listening to archival tapes over the past few weeks, when I found myself with some time on my hands. There was a brief period when we were playing with the very amazing guitarist Jeremy Shaw that we seemed to record everything we did, from rehearsals to gigs to auditions. Just running through that stuff, I realized that I had forgotten our repertoire, aside from a handful of numbers. At that point (1992-3), we were playing mostly original music, some covers. We didn’t play a lot of gigs; mostly colleges and clubs. We played Middlebury College, opened for Bloodline at SUNY-IT in Utica, NY, and so on.

Start Where?One complete gig I have a rough audio recording of was an outdoor concert we did at Jeremy Shaw’s house a few miles from here. There are about 25 songs, and I’d say maybe a little more than half are originals. We also played numbers from Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and god knows what else. The gig includes the only live recordings of some of my songs from that period, like “Sunday Drive” and “Greater Good”. We also did Matt’s “Why not call it George?”, “Sensory Man,” and “I Hate Your Face”, as well as some Christmas numbers. There are also some of Jeremy’s songs: “Water Over Stone,” “Shithouse Rat”, and “Requiem”.

What the hell … we must have rehearsed some of these crazy songs, right? I have no memory of that whatsoever, and yet the evidence is fairly clear. If you want to hear some of this shit, stay tuned … this may turn out to be a throwback summer after all.

Usual Rubbish

Practice makes … practice.

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One…. two…. One-two-three-four! *SMASH* Wait, hold it. Tubey, you okay? Was that your last planter? Christmas. We’ve got to go to the garden store, damn it.

Oh, hiya. Geezus, you’d think being idle and ensconced in an abandoned hammer mill would offer endless opportunities to rehearse, jam, arrange, etc. Seems like every time we try to do it, something comes up. For instance, this week I’ve got custody of the mansized tuber. (Matt had him last week. Hey – that’s the terms of the adoption agreement, what do you want from me?) I guess I never realized what a handful he can be. He’s at a difficult age for tubers; you know, that time when they either become a full-fledged plant or get mashed up into some kind of traditional dish. I have to think that, for tubey, it’s going to be the former outcome, but he doesn’t seem convinced. Now he jumps at every noise. And as you might expect, rehearsal generates a lot of noises.

Okay, so when he jerks to one side at the sound of a crash cymbal, falls off his pedestal, and cracks his planter into a thousand pieces, is that my bad? Do I bear responsibility not only for the damages but for the psychological trauma, the pain and suffering, the fibrous bruising Tubey endures as a result of his own nervousness? I think not. And yet, having custody of him does imply a level of accountability. Man god damn, this will be the THIRD king-size pottery planter I’ve had to buy on my meager income in the last five days. How much is enough? I’d just like the president and some of those congressional leaders to walk a mile in my shoes – they think THEY have it tough….

Granted, we don’t have any jobs booked for Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start working up some numbers. Matt’s polishing up his tiny guitar (it’s about the size of a badminton racket, perhaps smaller), John’s pounding away on some soup kettles. I’ve replaced a few broken tines in the Fender Rhodes 73. The plan is to play whatever we know as many times as we can stand it. That’s called rehearsal. If no one interrupts us, life is good. Only now…

Well, now I’m going to the plant store. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will tag along to do the carrying. Then it’s back to work… I hope.