Tag Archives: songs

News

A few weeks since we played THAT joint.

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Well, summer is almost over and I’m at the point of digging through old files again. I always get to doing that when the days start getting shorter. Last week I burrowed my way through some tax records from the 2000s. (Riveting stuff.) This week, it’s Big Green set lists. Those are perhaps marginally more interesting than old 1040s, but it largely depends on what you like.

For those of you not steeped in Big Green history, here’s the short version: we haven’t played a live gig in decades. Think Beatles post-1966 or XTC post-1982, except without the massive success, cult following, or obvious talent. Picture a handful of underfed guys in their twenties, humping their broken-down amps into some cheap dive. That’s us!

What the ancient tablets teach us

So what about those set lists? First glance, I can’t effing believe we played any of those songs. Of course, we’re talking about the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen-nineties – a time before ubiquitous cell phones, decades prior to the advent of “smart” phones with HD video cameras. The handful of times we put a show on tape, we had to get some freak to bring a VHS camcorder … which were not exactly thick in the ground, my friends.

Thing is, like most bands, we were working to fill out three, sometimes four sets. Fortunately for us, brother Matt has always been a songwriting machine, so we had plenty of material as long as we could convince a guitar player to learn a bunch of strange songs. We played clubs (most of which no longer exist) and colleges (Utica, SUNY PI, Middlebury, MVCC), as well as street fairs, outdoor concerts (usually with other groups), etc.

Strangely, I still have set lists from a couple of these college gigs. Looks like “I Hate Your Face” was always high on the roster. And that effing MVCC gig was an all-original set, no covers. What the ever-loving fuck.

Scoping out the song spectrum

You can tell from these yellowing sheets of poster board that we’ve been all over the map, musically speaking, since the late eighties. Our music runs the full spectrum from extremely silly to kind of serious. Here’s how I map it out in my own unscientific manner:

  • 1987 – 1993 Songs: Silly to Extra Silly
  • 2000 Years To Christmas (1999): Fairly Silly to Silly
  • International House (2008): Mostly Serious (except for Volcano Man)
  • Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013): Very, Very Silly

Now, with our upcoming album (still being mixed, by the way), we’re back to wearing the serious pants again. No big laugh riot on this sucker, folks … unless you’re laughing AT us. Then it’s funny as all hell.

Silly is just around the corner

For those of you who prefer the silly Big Green, fear not – we have an enormous trunk full of Ned Trek songs, all produced and waiting for remix. And trust me, there’s some silly-ass shit in that trunk. And that’s not to mention the older material we’ve recorded and never released.

So, good news / bad news: if you like the silly stuff, there’s more coming. If you hate it, well … lookout … there’s more coming.

TBT: That old used to be

You’ve probably heard them already, but here are a few selections from our stage set back in the goofball early nineties:

News, Recording

In the studio with America’s most obscure band

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Dad always told us, be the best in the world at something. Actually, I don’t think it was dad who said that – probably some random stranger passing us on the street. Doesn’t matter. Find something to be best at, he said, and we went and did it. Someone had to be the most obscure band in America, we thought. Why not us?

Well, the nearly forty-year-old unknown quantity known as Big Green is back in its makeshift studio again. Another project, another album … call it what you like. We’ve got a heap of songs to record, once again, and we’re doing it the only way we know how – under the radar.

By The Numbers

So how’s the new project going? It’s going, as the old saying goes. It’s hard to qualify our progress, so I will try to quantify it for you. Here are the numbers we’re working with. And bear in mind, none of us are even amateur mathematicians.

80-plus – That’s the rough number of songs we started out with as potentially being part of this album. The vast, vast majority were written by Matt, and a handful by me (a.k.a. Joe).

40-plus – Another imprecise number, this one representing the number of recordings we’ve started since we began this project last year. This doesn’t include a couple of early demos we did prior to 2022.

24 – Finally, a solid number! This is the number of recordings we’ve concentrated on – songs that include substantially more than a reference guitar track.

20 – This is how many recordings have keyboard parts, mostly piano. Some are midi parts, some d.i. from my Korg SV-1. Coincidentally, this is also the number with main vocal tracks, 8 with backup vocals.

18 – The current number of songs with a bass track. (We’ve been furiously adding them in recent weeks.)

17 – That’s the number of tracks that have fully programmed drum parts. This is typically something that happens in pre-production, but we don’t do that. That would be preposterous.

Name That Album

When does this whole thing come to a conclusion? No man can say. We don’t even have a working title for the album. Call it Splunge or something, just for the time being. If we had a different name, the album title might suggest itself. For instance, if the name of our band was “Choosy Mothers”, the album title would almost have to be “Jif”. The name Big Green doesn’t suggest anything to me at all.

Mistaken Identity

Then there are those times when we get confused with artists that actually have a following. It’s usually the result of a coincidence in song titles. Here’s one right now:

Volcano Man, by Big Green
News

Which album comes next? we Would love to know.

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This just in from Big Green Central: nothing new to report. Check again next month. Hah! Just kidding … about the “next month” thing. Yes, we have nothing new to report, but that just means that havoc and mayhem are nothing new to us. And who doesn’t want to hear about havoc and mayhem, right? Nobody – that’s who.

What’s the controversy this month? So glad you asked. The thing is, we’re working on an album of new material, and it’s taking the usual forever for us. Of course, avid Big Green followers will know that we also have a packet of older songs that haven’t been gathered into an album. Those are the songs from Ned Trek, a feature on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN, which has been on an extended hiatus for … what … three years? Jesus Christmas.

Tale of Two Records

We’ve been talking about releasing a Ned Trek album for probably as long as Ned Trek has been a thing. It would essentially be our second podcast album, the first being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick from back in 2013 – in other words, another collection of songs written mostly for laughs, recorded in kind of a hurry under pressure of a deadline. We did, however, put a little more work into the Ned Trek songs, and our recording technology improved marginally through the course of the series … which is why we’re still thinking about doing a release.

But here’s the rub: which album comes first? The Ned Trek songs are mostly done, they just need some polishing … but there’s also about 80 of them! There’s probably less of the new material, maybe 50 songs, but the recordings are still under construction. If we’re spending time recording the latter, we have no time to polish and curate the former. See what I mean?

Kicking the Can

We could settle this the way we settle other important questions – kick the can down the road. Not the metaphor … I mean, write “Ned Trek” on one end of the can, “new songs” on the other side, then kick it down the road a set number of times and see which side it lands on. Isn’t that how everyone makes important decisions?

Hey, look … when we decide which comes first, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, you can listen to all three of our released albums for free on YouTube – just visit https://www.youtube.com/@biggreenband and hit play. AND subscribe! (While you’re there, check out the live tracks and some of the other junk we’ve posted.)

Luv u,

jp

News

A Summer Place (No, Not the Damn Song!)

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Shit boy howdy, it’s hot. Hot as blue blazes. Let’s see – what other cliches can I use to describe the searing effects of a dying planet? HOT ENOUGH FOR YA?

Yes, friends, your Big Green friends are in a summer place. No, we’re not on vacation, sailing a yacht around the boiling Caribbean. Far from it! It’s fair to say that we are on a kind of summer hiatus, though for me that has meant working on our new album DAY and NIGHT. (Not EVERY day and EVERY night, you understand, and of course, not ALL day or ALL night.) Just chipping away at the monument, here and there.

When will it be finished? Whoa, man …. not so fast. We’ve got about 40 tracks started. That’s a lot of squeaking and whistling, to say nothing of the tap dancing. I’m not whining, you understand. And as Orson Welles once said, “we will serve no whine … before its time.” In other words … I don’t know, sometime in the Fall, maybe?

As for summer activities, I’m sure you know that it’s not the same as it used to be back when we were just young critters, walking around a random barnyard, making stupid faces, and lampooning more famous musicians (which is a category that includes basically every other musician ever). Matt’s refinishing floors, I think, in addition to watching falcons and feeding beavers. Me? I’m negotiating with squirrels. And I’m getting my ass handed to me.

Anyway, stay tuned … we’ll be posting again soon. Enjoy your summer!

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

Pulling the plug is never as easy as it looks

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Get Music Here

I don’t know. I’m effing sick of this. Are you effing sick of this, too? You are? Wow … okay. For how many years? Damn …. why didn’t you say so? I was just doing this to keep YOU happy!

Well, you learn something new every day. Or at least every week. Except last week – I was kind of too busy to learn anything. It gets like that sometimes. Anyway, let’s just agree to say that you learn something new every little once in a while. Maybe every time Sylvie brings you some water. Like in the Leadbelly Song. But I digress.

What the this is

The “this” we’re kvetching about is this thing called blogging. We’ve been doing it for twenty years, and somehow – seemingly unnoticed by us – the world has kind of moved on. Now everything is social media, social media, etc. A few still blog, outside of the corporate shills, but it’s not really a thing anymore, and well … that’s a shame. Still, blogging has its place. I just don’t know whether or not its place is here, exactly.

Since we started this back in 1999, it’s been kind of a chronicle, a travel log, and a journal rolled into one. There have been a lot of twists and turns, like those times we went to the chewy center of the earth, blasting our way through miles of nougat until we hit molten caramel. Or the times we’ve visited the gas giants on the outskirts of our celestial neighborhood. We always felt that people would come away from those stories with valuable life lessons. Lessons like, DON’T TALK TO THOSE SQUATTERS!

The free hand

Now some of you might say, well, so you’ve been writing a stupid blog. What are you doing with your OTHER hand? It may surprise you to know that it actually takes two hands to type this stuff in. The fact is, we need to start doing other things …. things that are more, I don’t know, useful maybe? Not the right word. How about interesting? Probably still not ideal. Nevertheless, we need at least one free hand, even if we’re going hands-free.

Us, back in the day

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Matt’s been writing songs like a house on fire. Even in our salad days he didn’t put out THIS much stuff. And we didn’t have a lot of salad days. Anyway, we’re going to start recording these songs, first as demos, then maybe pull it together in another album. We have the makings of at least one other album in the Ned Trek library – the new stuff, though, is completely different. That’s the one thing we’ve never been short on: material. Everything else, yes, but not that.

Wait for it!

Long story short, I will be posting Big Green stuff on social media, maybe pull some of that into the blog, but these regular posts will be going on hiatus. If I hear a flurry of calls for them to return, I will start posting again … but I’m not holding my breath. Til then, you know where to find us. (Right here.)

Usual Rubbish

Even the colonel gets more mail than us

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Get Music Here

Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel”, or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo.

Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing!

First tune, then play … the tune.

Part of what makes people cranky around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the lack of creature comforts. The furniture in this joint is literally either made of bricks or fashioned crudely from surplus hammer handles. Looking to get comfy? Just stuff an old burlap sack full of grass and you’ve got yourself a pillow, dude. And when it gets hot here in upstate New York, well, you just open up a window. Or wave a fan or two. (You see? You knew I would steer it back around to fans again, didn’t you?)

That said, we have our tasks at hand. One of them is keeping Marvin (my personal robot assistant) from setting the mill on fire with his greasy cooking. The other is rehearsing for our next album, which we are doing remotely through one of those Zoom-for-music apps. That’s right – Matt’s on one end of the hammer mill, I’m on the other, and we jam over the internets. (You gotta problem with that, huh? HUH?) It’s mostly a process of Matt showing me a half dozen more tunes that he wrote since the last time we talked. Me? I’m chipping away at one, maybe two.

Subject matter experts

The thing with Big Green, you see, is that we get onto these jags. This is particularly true of my illustrious brother, Matthew. I’ve written before about his tendency to deeply explore a topic through the medium of pop song. Hell, he wrote about eighty songs on the subject of Christmas, probably a hundred about Ned Trek, at least 25 about Rick Perry. Now he’s on to human interrelationships, so it’s relatively unbroken ground. I mean, who can you think of who has written songs about human emotions? Hell, no one I know.

I don't think that's the colonel Garcia Marquez was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve got a notebook full of handwritten chord charts that say we’ve got an album on the way. Though, as with the Ned Trek material, it may actually be more than one collection. You musicians know what we’re grappling with. Do you make three mediocre albums, or one really, really, really bad album? Such a hard creative choice to make. We probably need a focus group to help us untie this knot. Where the hell is Frank Luntz when you need him? Having a sandwich? Okay …. don’t bother him, then.

Right, but when the hell …

Okay, so if we actually DID get fan mail, one of the first questions would probably be something like, WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING YOU SO LONG WITH THIS STUPID ALBUM? Well, dear fake reader, I know it’s been nine years since our last release. And I know that release was really lame. But bear in mind – our technology is from the stone age, carving music from living rock. We’ll keep chipping away at it until we’ve knocked off everything that doesn’t look like a new album.

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

Eric the Half a Song. Sing it with me!

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Get Music Here

Should we do another Big Green album? I don’t know … why not? Have you got any songs? Oh, good. I’ve got some, too. How many do you have? Sixty? That’s pretty good. I’ve got half. No, not half of sixty …. half of one. Song.

Well, one of us came prepared. In the past, that was what made the difference – that one person who was ready for anything. Every great band has someone who’s ready to lead, even when the going gets tough. Even shit-bum bands like us have their point person. You know – that guy who gets you up in the morning for rehearsal on a Saturday after a three-day bender. Yeah, we got rid of that jerk-ass. Who needs him?

Holding up standards

Now, I know Big Green has what may be termed a reputation. Some say we hold ourselves to a very low standard of behavior. Others say that we’re a bunch of lazy vagabonds whose only virtue is that of anonymity and ignominious failure. To this last criticism I can only say, that is not one virtue … it is clearly two. Before you condemn, my friend, learn to count. It is not hard, and it will pay you dividends long into the future.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that we don’t do stuff right. It’s hard to maintain a standard when you even maintain your abandoned hammer mill. If our standard as a band is to put out an album every five, ten, sometimes thirteen years, we should be able to meet it. That at least gives us a little time to compose, to rehearse, to record, to take five years off for an extended nature walk, and so on. But even this is becoming too high a bar to clear.

Birdman strikes again

We have about as many strikes against us as any band ever thought of having. For one thing, we’re old. I’m pushing a thousand, I’m pretty sure. We also have broken down equipment and a total lack of recording skills beyond just the basics. (“Record” button is red. Got it!) And our personnel is constantly changing. Sometimes antimatter Lincoln has to sit in on guitar, and we occasionally rope Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into banging on those drums.

How many songs you got, Joe? Hey, back off, man.

The one strike we don’t have against us is material. Got lots of tunes, thanks to my illustrious brother Matt, a.k.a. bird man, a.k.a. the songwriting machine of the great north country. Since the last recordings we did for Ned Trek (mostly Matt’s songs) three years ago, he has written by his own count about fifty or sixty more. I think that might be enough for an album. The man is prolific. I’m pretty sure he wrote three or four songs in the time it took me to type that.

Some people think the hardest part of making an album is thinking of the name. Common misconception. The hardest part for us is deciding which of Matt’s 47 songs we should leave off the album. And THEN having to name it.

Holding up my end

But what the hell am I doing, standing here and yakking? I should be writing songs, damn it. If I start now, I might have thirty or forty in the hopper by … I don’t know … the year 2525. Hey … that’s an idea for a song! In the year 2525 …

Usual Rubbish

Getting by with a little help from some fiends

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2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, here’s the thing. I’m too big in the frame. It goes against the theme of the series, dude. If there’s one thing Big Green doesn’t like, it’s inconsistency. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles.

Oops! Didn’t know anyone was reading this. You just caught me having a little disagreement with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is serving as my video producer this month. Nothing serious – just an obscure conceptual question that has vexed us since the beginning of this blog post: how nano is nano? What means this? Allow me to explain.

A question of scale

We’re doing a little side project called the Nano Concert. Perhaps you’ve heard us nattering about it in previous posts and on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. You haven’t? DAMN IT! Marvin, did you forget to publish the blog posts again? Why have I been wasting my breath? What’s that? You DID publish them? Uh, okay. Never mind. What was I saying?

Ah, yes. The Nano Concert is really just a virtual mini solo concert by yours truly (Joe of Big Green), playing some old favorites from the beloved Big Green song book. We recorded six songs, played them on the podcast, and are in the process of posting them to our YouTube Channel. Can we truly describe this as a nano concert? Is it more than merely small? Well …. six songs doesn’t even make a set. And I’m too lazy ass to do more than that in one go. So in my book, it’s nano.

I can't play this freaking thing ...

Strings v. keys – the reckoning

The funny thing is, on five of the six songs, I’m playing six-string guitar. Now, those who know me well (and those few fiends who enjoy our music) know that I don’t play any instrument particularly well, but that if you were to rank my ability to play them in order of best to worst, it would go: (1) piano, (2) bass, (7) guitar.

That’s not a typo. I only play three instruments, and guitar is still my seventh best axe. So, why, you may ask, am I playing an instrument I can barely identify from three steps away? It’s the challenge, my friends. What fun is there in playing it safe, right? Any true musician craves a challenge. And though I’m not a TRUE musician, I do crave challenges …. as well as various foodstuffs. (You can’t eat a challenge, friend – just remember that.)

Give it a listen, damn it!

Okay, so … do you want to hear me pounding out some old Big Green tunes on a 23-year-old six-string acoustic guitar? Dive on in, my friends! I just posted the last number on Thursday. This is the first in a series of nano concerts, I like to think, though I may have to actually hire a producer rather than having Marvin twirl the knobs.

Whoops. Sorry, Marvin – didn’t know you were listening. You realize that lever you’re pulling will erase everything we did this morning , right? Step away from the console! Arrgh … never mind.

Anywho, here’s the playlist. Let me know what you think, fiends!