Tag Archives: Sri Lanka

Usual Rubbish

Hey, dis guy ain’t got all his buttons, mack

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Get Music Here

What’s in that box? I’ll tell you what’s in that box. There’s nothing in the damn box, man. But that box over there, the one with the torn flaps, that’s got some gig posters in it. From 1987. A little late on those.

Hey, there, Big Green fans! Just catching us in the middle of Spring cleaning. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “Joe”, you’ll say, “this isn’t Spring, it’s late summer, nigh unto fall, you idiot.” And then you’ll flip me off and storm out of the room in search of cleverer bands. But before you’re out of earshot, I’ll just remind you that we’re late with everything we do. We don’t eat breakfast til lunch time, no lunch til dinner time, and so on. The more you know!

Damaged collateral

Back to cleaning. Man, you wouldn’t believe how many recondite corners there are in this stupid barn of a hammer mill. Somehow that moving company we hired to carry our stuff from our lean-to in Sri Lanka to here managed to squirrel something away in every alcove. It’s almost like they DIDN’T want us to find anything. But here we are, after only about twenty years, digging it all up and sifting through it like panhandlers. Who says we’re slow on the draw?

Anyhow, you wouldn’t believe the shit we’re finding! Old gig calendars. Stacks of flyers for college bulletin boards and the like. Every guitar string Matt ever broke and then some. Various decorative items and abandoned set lists. (No, we’re not hoarders … we just, you know … keep stuff.) In other words, a bunch of useless junk. Would you believe it? Perhaps you would. In which case, my earlier declaration would be inaccurate. It’s hard to know who you can trust nowadays.

Pin it on, the jam

In many ways, our junk production outstripped our music production from the very beginning. Those were the days before the internets, my friends. Televisions were mostly analog. Phones were something attached to the wall or plugged into an outlet. People read odd, inky things called “newspapers”. Personal robot assistants were made of pots and pans and leftover appliance parts. (Okay, THAT part hasn’t changed so much.) When you had to get the word out on something in those days, you had to do it old school.

Get ... yours ... squx

Oddly enough, even during a time when we couldn’t hang on to a drummer for more than a few weeks, we had a machine that made campaign buttons. Sure, there was no way we could hold down a gig, but we were always able to distribute pin-on buttons with our logo on them. Talk about the cart before the horse! No surprise, then, that in the midst of our Fall cleaning, we came across a cache of Big Green buttons. I’m guessing we spent a couple of days stamping those suckers out on that button press back in ’87. (No wonder our drummers all walked.)

Get yours today

Hey, there’s a limited supply of these items in the known universe. But if you so, so love Big Green, and you wish you could shake the claw of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), then you deserve one of the few remaining Big Green buttons. Just email us or send a comment via social media and we will fix you up, gratis, while supplies last. Because that’s the kind of band we are …. the kind that’s cleaning the junk out of its squat house.

Usual Rubbish

House hunting.

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No, man – that’s just not acceptable. We have a budget, remember? A very tight budget. We just can’t afford something that ostentatious. Perhaps a step or two down from that, like … like maybe a pole barn. Or a shed.

Oh, hi. Yeah, you’ve caught us in the midst of the sort of dilemma all bands face at some point in their careers – finding another place to live because the squat-house you’ve been occupying for twenty years has been taken over by ne’er-do-wells. Don’t you just HATE when that happens? It’s kind of what we went through back in the late nineties, when we were evicted from our beloved lean-to in Sri Lanka. Oh, the memories. Sad was the day when that thing collapsed. (As a famous cartoonist once put it, it leaned fro. Or perhaps closer to the mark, it leaned-too much.)

So, once again, we are in search of lodgings. Our upstairs neighbors are simply insufferable. And honestly – we’re not super picky people. We didn’t get our hair in knots over the odd explosion here and there, or the noisy parties, or the constant arrivals and departures at all hours. Then there were the inhuman things they did to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), dressing him up like a farm hand and dropping him out in the courtyard with a pitchfork in his claw. But the final straw was the music, oh the music! They have some kind of song service, and they dialed in the eighties this past week. Seriously, eighties pop radio wafting down from the third floor. I feel like I’m back in my Albany apartment circa 1982, listening to my neighbors cranking out Loverboy crap at two in the morning.

Nah. Waaay too tony for us.

Have we confronted them? Of course. And as you know, I have extensive training in conflict de-escalation, so I was among the first to ascend the stairs to the third floor and politely request a conference with the new occupants. A little later on, as the urgent care nurse was wrapping gauze around my battered forehead, it occurred to me that our approach to this problem may be a little off.  Maybe we’ve been here too long, I thought, rubbing my chin and wincing in pain. Hence the house-hunting project.

We’ve gone through the local squathouse listings, worked our way through mills and barns, and now we’re down to shacks, sheds, huts, and … well … brickyards. Yeah, I know – pretty meager, but ANYTHING’s better than listening to “Turn Me Loose” one more freaking time.