Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Social media killed the radio star.

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2000 Years to Christmas

I spy with my little eye … a chair! Right, that’s the one. Now your turn. Well now … you can’t say chair, because I just did and there’s only one in the room. Pick something else, damn it!

Sheesh – that’s the trouble with playing parlor games here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. For one thing, there’s no parlor. Even worse, it seems no one in our entourage has ever played a game before. Not even Parcheesi! We are creatures of the road, my friends, driven by eternal wanderlust. Except, of course, for most of the last twenty-five years, during which we’ve been nailed in one spot.

Sure, I know – if we’ve got all this time on our hands, why the hell aren’t we recording? Why aren’t we putting out new episodes of THIS IS BIG GREEN or NED TREK? Well, that’s a good question. I would add that to our list of Freakishly Unanswerable Questions, but then that dude would call me a “dink” again, and then I couldn’t show my face in my fifth grade classroom should 1970 ever return.

Turn it down, the radio

They say video killed the radio star. Well, we never were radio stars, but we got killed none the less – not by video, though. No, sir – social media killed us. It wore us down to a nub. Just look at what it did to Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! His hands are mere claws. And the mansized tuber – he is now a helpless Facebook addict, scrolling and scrolling his life away. Pathetic!

Not like that, you idiot! Use the hockey stick.

As official spokesperson for Big Green, I do spend a little time on Facebook, Twitter, and … uh …. some other stuff. But I’m not living on that shit. And frankly, it’s the podcasts that took it out of us. At its peak, THIS IS BIG GREEN was posting 12 shows a year, half of them musicals, which meant five, six, sometimes eight new songs recorded and finished in time to post, along with an hour-long episode of Ned Trek. Holy mother – I get tired just THINKING about it.

Hammock time, geezers

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we’re retiring. For one thing, we can’t afford to. For another thing, we’ve barely even started. We’re like the Elias Sandoval of indie music. “We could have made this planet into a garden!” (It’s from classic Star Trek. Ask your mother. Or better yet, you’re moron father.)

Will we do more episodes of TIBG? Probably, but we are definitely on hiatus. Those buzzards circling over the mill, they’re just waiting on a friend. Then it’s off to the rookery. As for us, we should probably switch to backgammon. I think even Marvin could figure THAT out.

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)

Usual Rubbish

Cold Files.

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2000 Years to Christmas

How long do we have to stay down here, man? It’s five below zero. Next time we’re bringing a can of sterno or something. Maybe one of those highway flares. Ah yes – blessed warmth.

Hey, out there in internet-land. Yes, here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, doing what we usually do – nothing much, interrupted occasionally by nothing whatsoever. We lead a sedentary life out here among the ruins of a former mill-driven regional economy, brought low by the greed of post-industrial corporate financiers. So I suppose it is they we have to thank for our adopted abode, right? I mean, if they hadn’t massively dis-invested in this community and moved all their operations to the Philippines ages ago, there wouldn’t be any abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for us to squat in. So it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere. Somehow.

What’s the nothing that we’re doing today? Ah, nothing much. Just digging through our piles of junk in boxes, looking for old recordings and unfinished projects begging to be reborn. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to serve as a kind of metal detector/divining rod, using his advanced sensor technology to scan for magnetic tapes or abandoned discs. When he comes close to either one of those types of objects, lights start flashing and his antennae start twirling around counterclockwise. Then a little mechanical bird pops out of a little door in his forehead and crows the hour. That’s when we all break for lunch. (Even if it happens at 10:00 at night. Lunch is whenever the birdy sings, that’s it.)

Joe: Hey, man .. You picking up any signals? Marvin: squx.

You may ask if we’ve found anything interesting, to which I would reply, “Funny you should ask!” Actually, our time rooting through the basement was pretty much wasted. Hell, I could have looked on our old hard drives for music projects of every description, unfinished, abandoned, neglected, and so on. We started recording Rick Perry songs (later collected in our ridiculous third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) in probably 2011, then went right into the Ned Trek songs, which number in the scores – probably 120 songs over the course of six years. In between all that, we started to resurrect some older material from the 1980s and 90s – songs we had done demos of but never full-on recordings. I’m not sure how many of those there are. We’ve played a few rough mixes on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, but some have never seen the light of day. Or the dark of night.

So now, when we’re bored, we rack up one of those old numbers, hit play and twiddle the dials until it sounds like something that’s not junk. If we do that long enough, we’ll send some of it your way. That’s just how we roll.

Usual Rubbish

Inside Christmas.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Wait, what? It’s over? That was fast. How about Michaelmas? Is that over too? Okay, well … I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Was it fun? Did everybody have a good time? No? Ah … okay.

Yeah, I know – 2020 sucked, all the way to the end, right? That appears to be the consensus. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green has been known to keep Christmas in an unusual – perhaps singular – way. Like last year, when we built a big plaster volcano and set it off at midnight. Or three years ago, when we all got really, really high, then ended up trampling all over our neighbor’s chocolate pterodactyl farm (though the next day they denied ever even having one in the first place – strange). This year, on the other hand, was a low-key affair, given the COVID restrictions that even we observe … with the exception of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who eschews masks in favor of an ultraviolet force field device he wears around his neck. (It glows when it’s running – very impressive, particularly after lights out … which in the Hammer mill, comes around sunset.)

Well, at least ONE of us is safe from COVID.

Anywho, you may have noticed that we dropped an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, lately on a kind of hiatus, but still just about kicking. Yes, like everything else about this year, it’s kind of lame, but at least it hearkens back to a simpler time …. such as the year 2017. In any case, here’s what’s in the show:

Ned Trek 35: The Romney Christmas Special / Ned Trek Reunion Special. Originally broadcast on Christmas 2017, this non-episode of Ned Trek is patterned after cast reunion specials they used to run for, I don’t know, the Brady Bunch, or …. some other tripe. Pearl is played by a different annoying actor. The Nixon Android is present, but only the guy inside the Nixon Android suit, not the voice actor who read his lines. (Note: Ned Trek is an audio podcast.) The show includes a bunch of Big Green Christmas songs, including an early mix of Bobby Sweet, remakes of Plastic Head, Christmas To End, and He Does It For Spite, and others thrown together to round out the farce. (Don’t miss the cheesy T.V. pop version of Away in a Manger at the start.)

Older Ned Trek Songs. We included a few numbers from Ned Trek 15: Santorum’s Christmas Planet, as we haven’t spun these in a good long time. They include Christmas Green (a Romney song), Horrible People (a Ned song), Neocon Christmas (a Pearl song), and Make That Christmas Shine (another Romney song, a version of which is posted on our YouTube channel).

Song: Pagan Christmas. Once again this year, we included this track from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. For a variety of reasons, this track gets a lot of play around Christmas. Our main streaming platform has us down for more than 300 plays this month, which for us is a lot. Kind of a minor hit with the pagan / wiccan crowd, particularly over the last ten years. Glad to have them as listeners.

Yep, it was a clip show. I know, man. Like everyone else, we’ll try to do better in 2021. Happy new year, campers!

Usual Rubbish

Inside July (2020).

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2000 Years to Christmas

I told you to drop it on Sunday. Did you drop it? No, no …. the PODCAST, not the quart of milk. I KNOW you dropped the milk, for crying out loud. Jesus Christmas.

Hah … speaking of Christmas, we had a little present for you this week in the form of a new installment of our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Call it Christmas in July, or call it swiss cheese … whatever you like. The audience is always right, am I right? (Only when I’m in the audience.) Sure, it wasn’t as … um … generously proportioned as many of our previous installments. There was no Ned Trek episode, true. And there was no Matt, but we will do something about that soon, my friends. I just have to pry him away from the falcons and beavers long enough to talk into a mic for half an hour. Should be child’s play. (NOT).

Anyway, so what was in this episode, eh? Here’s some of what we inserted, minus the leavening – a veritable audio flatbread of goodness:

Put the phone down. I talk a whole bunch of trash about Big Green’s origin story, its origins, and its origins’ origins. We did, as it turns out, embellish the truth a little bit, but not so much as to cause discomfort. Then I tell the tale of our first demo, which we’ve posted on this very blog. Knowing that most who listen to the podcast never visit our site, I then elected to PLAY the four-song demo on the podcast.

Song: A Name And A Face. Written by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison, this song is actually a pretty apt description of hook-up culture in the 1980s. Ned and I do the singing, Ned plays guitar and some key parts, I play piano, Matt’s on bass, and club drummer Pete Young is on drums. Somewhat sloppy recording, but it sounds clear enough after 30-odd years in the closet.

Song: She Caught The Katy. This is a Taj Mahal song we used to do as part of our club show. I do the singing and the piano part, Ned does guitar and keys, Matt plays his Rick bass, and Pete Young joins us on drums.

I'm ready, Mitch. Press "record"!

Song: Bad Boy. Lennon and McCartney song that Ned loved. He sings, and the rest of us play our various instruments. The only switch here is that the drums are played by singer/songwriter Dale Haskell, friend of the band and school chum of Ned.

Song: Slippin’ and Slidin’. Our attempt at a Little Richard number. It’s a little beyond me, frankly, but I give the vocal a try while Ned, Matt, and Pete Young back me up.

Song: Just Five Seconds. This is a recording from the early nineties, after Ned left the band. Matt wrote this one and does the main vocal. Recorded in Bob Acquaviva’s studio in Utica, NY. Pete Young or Dale on drums? Trick question – it’s a freaking drum machine.

Song: Grandfather’s War. I stumble through an impromptu rendition of this old number from the eighties. Frankly, it sounds better with the beer hall banter in the background.

Song: Nutcracker. One of the many Christmas songs by Matt that didn’t get on to 2000 Years To Christmas. This is a kind of hard-driving number, cheaply recorded on a cassette portastudio back in the late eighties, I think. 1989? Probably.

Song: Honest Man. A song of mine from the nineties, recorded with Matt on my old eight-track DTRS system. Another scratch demo, fit for nought but our tattered old podcast.

That was about it. Enjoy the show. And if you don’t, well … there’s more where that came from.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: July 2020

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Big Green emerges from COVID isolation with the cheap-ass monologue that is our July show, featuring some old music, some slightly less old music, some audio hand-waving, and more. Bring it on.

This is Big Green – July 2020. Features: 1) Put the phone down: Joe laments the continuing absence of Matt and debunks Big Green’s founding mythology; 2) Song: A Name And A Face, performed by Big Green; 3) Song: She Caught The Katy, performed by Big Green; 4) Song: Bad Boy, performed by Big Green; 5) Song: Slippin’ and Slidin’, performed by Big Green; 6) More disposable back story about the band; 7) Song: Just Five Seconds, by Big Green; 8) Impromptu romp through grandfather’s war; 9) Song: Nutcracker, by Big Green; 10) All about Christmas; 11) Song: Honest Man, by Big Green; 12) Time for us (me) to go.

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Usual Rubbish

Revival.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Looks pretty moribund to me. Did you kick the tires? Here – take the ignition key and give it a few cranks. Nothing? Right. This will be harder than I thought.

Hey, hello. Welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in central New York state, an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way place if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Still in the midst of an archive summer – not that much of a novelty around this place. Seems like every summer I find myself diving through boxes and bins of old tapes, moth-eaten notebooks, forgotten scraps of paper, and old biscuit tins filled with souvenirs of a bygone age. You know what they say about idle hands. Don’t you? Hell, I don’t know what they say. I was hoping you’d tell me. Something like, idle hands build false … idols. Who knows?

Actually, it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who reminded me that we haven’t posted an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, in over seven months. Something of an oversight, I’d say. Like most musicians in these pandemic times, I chalk it up to COVID-19, but that’s not really the reason. You know the story, right? Just too much other shit to do. Anyway, Marvin has talked me into reviving the podcast, and not a moment too soon. The RSS feed was getting too rusty to send anything over. If we’d waited another month, it would have seized up entirely. We have blown the whole impulse stack trying to start it up again. Sure, we could have mixed the matter and antimatter cold, but it’s never been done. How’s that for a reason?

You search the biscuit tins. I'll revive the podcast.

As some of you know, I have, in fact, started yet another podcast – it’s called Strange Sound, and it’s a long-running political rant … something like the audio version of my, well … political rants. Anyway, that soaked up some of my time and energy. Of course, there’s ongoing maintenance of the hammer mill. Not that I actually do any of it, but it is something that’s happening, and it does take time. (Just not mine.) Then there are local relationships to keep up. You can’t overstate the importance of this – If we don’t work our butts off to mollify our neighbors, they’re likely to come after us with pruning hooks. Have you ever been pruned by an angry neighbor? One time is enough, believe me. Finally, the hammer mill’s roof is in terrible shape, and I have to spend practically every rainy day changing the buckets under the leaks. It feels like bailing out the titanic sometimes, only with less cheesy music.

Well, we’ll see if anything comes charging down that RSS feed. (Keep your ears open.)

Usual Rubbish

Old stock.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Is that what it actually sounded like? Don’t remember that at all. That’s probably down to drug use, I guess. Like all those Dead concerts I never went to. (At least I don’t remember going to any.)

Hello and welcome to another chapter of Archive Summer, with your host, Joe of Big Green. (Kind of a medieval sounding name, right? I am Cleetus of Taberg!) As I mentioned in previous posts, there’s precious little for band members to do during this time of COVID-19 social isolation, unless you’re into performing online … and have a decent internet connection. We could try to do streaming performances, but it would sound like one of those old novelty greeting cards that plays a tinny little loop of “Happy Birthday” when you open it. (Except we would NEVER play Happy Birthday. Copyright, you see …. those fuckers are litigious as hell! In fact, I shouldn’t even say the name of that song, let alone play it.)

You wouldn’t think that, living in an abandoned hammer mill, we would have much of an archive, but that’s where you’re wrong. DEAD WRONG. God no, we carry every piece of flotsam and jetsam from our previous lives along with us, like traveling hoarders. None of it’s worth anything, of course (we hocked all of that years ago), just sentimental value … with the emphasis on mental. The fact is, when you’ve been a “recording” group as long as we have, you tend to have a lot of recordings lying around. Some of them go back to the 1970s, but those are pretty rough and, well … just never mind about those. They’re a bit like those tight-fitting velour shirts dudes used to wear back then – not something you want to advertise. Like most bands, we started life badly imitating people we liked, then started to piece together the ad-hoc approach to music that Big Green is now known for. (To the extent that we’re known, of course.)

Uh, Marvin ... this is a microwave. The DA-88 is downstairs.

Our back catalog includes a mountain of stuff. Super early songs recorded straight to stereo on cassette machines and beat-up living room reel-to-reels. Faux “multi-track” recordings pieced together by bouncing tracks from one cheap recorder to another. A lot of Matt songs recorded on his first four-track cassette deck and subsequent similar machines – there are literally more than a hundred of these. Then we got an 8-track Tascam DA-88 deck in 1995, and we recorded 2000 Years To Christmas on that, among other things. (I’ve got some cassette submixes of unfinished songs from that system). In 2001 we moved to a Roland VS-2416 deck, which we used to make International House and most of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. For the last few years, we’ve been using Cubase Artist to record the Ned Trek songs, most of which you can hear on our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast (now on hiatus) or our Ned Trek podcast. Needless to say, there’s a ton of unreleased material, and I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant), trawling through all of it, looking for, I don’t know, caramels hidden in piles of shit. (Sounds delicious!)

Hey, it’s summer, right? We’ll start posting stuff again soon … but for now, another mint julep. (That’s a drink, Jim.)

Usual Rubbish

Retread.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Ever had the feeling that you’ve lived a particular moment before? Or been someplace you’ve never been to before? No? Okay, well …. I’m having it right now!

Okay, now I don’t know how many of you out there have ever had the pleasure of producing an album that’s made up of songs you’ve already recorded. Show of hands? Let’s see …. five …. six …. ten …. and a few more way in the back. So maybe just fifteen of you. That’s fifteen out of five billion, okay? I think the point’s been made. And if I sound testy, well, it’s been a long goddamn day and I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW.

Um ….. sorry. Anyway, my point is that making an album out of existing songs is like building a staircase from the pieces of your previous staircase. Which is what one of my landlords did once. Then my next landlord fixed a hole in the porch roof by tearing down the entire porch roof and throwing it into the gully behind the house. Don’t even get me started on what he did to the plumbing. But I digress …. again.

Okay, so you know how when you’re shopping at Costco or Hannaford or whatever, once in a while they throw a little something extra in your shopping bag, like a coupon or a hard candy or some discarded fruit? That NEVER happens? Okay … bad example. You know how sometimes you get something cheap and something even cheaper comes along with it? Well, in case you haven’t been paying attention, that’s how we’ve been handling our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, for a number of years now. So with each free installment you get an episode of Ned Trek, and that thing often contains additional giveaways, like a brace of original songs, roughly recorded in our makeshift basement studio.

Hey, I think I've played this part before. You just blew my mind.

You with me? Good. What we’re doing is taking some of those giveaway songs and hammering them into shape. After we do that, we’ll line them up in random order and call it an album. It’s kind of like what we did with our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, only our Ned Trek songs were a bit more considered (if no less ridiculous). We don’t have a title or a theme, just 80 or 90 songs to sort through and winnow down to maybe 15 or 16, maybe less. Some we’ll polish, others maybe re-record. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks it’s deja vu all over again, but he’s just channeling Yogi Berra.

Hey, we all have hobbies, right? Not right? Okay. Not my day for being right.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: December 2019

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Big Green mails in its last show of 2019 with an encore musical episode of Ned Trek, some seasonal songs, and a wan attempt at celebration. Bring on the new decade, people … this one sucked!

This is Big Green – December 2019. Features: 1) Put the phone down: A brief intro from that mother Joe; 2) Ned Trek 33: The Nimrod Seven (an encore presentation); 3) Song: If You’re Listening To This, by Big Green; 4) Song: Commander I’m Dead, by Big Green; 5) Song: Doctor In The House, by Big Green; 6) Song: Wait For You, by Big Green; 7) Song: Nimrod, by Big Green; 8) Song: Neocon Captain, by Big Green; 9) Song: Nixon Is Saving Us All, by Big Green; 10) Put the phone down … again; 11) Song: Pagan Christmas, by Big Green; 12) Song: Bobby Sweet, by Big Green; 13) Song: Christmas Spirit, by Big Green; 14) Song: Vital Signs, by Big Green; 15) Exit, all.

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