Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Moving to Ironia.

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If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who arbitrarily find something to complain about. Especially when it involves pointless grousing about other people. I HATE PEOPLE LIKE THAT.

Right, you guessed it. I was being ironic just then. Some people do that for a living. Me? I’m ironic in my spare time. Actually, it’s not merely a matter of personal whim. We’ve just taken on a marketing consultant recommended by our somewhat lackluster label, Loathsome Prick Records. I would tell you her name, but she told me her name must never be spoken. In any case, she – I will call her “Noname” … which rhymes with Edamame in my tiny mind – is going to help us “position” Big Green in the international indie music marketplace. That’s something our label tells us we need to do, like, RIGHT NOW.

Okay, so… part of that new positioning is that we should start being more ironic. I know what you’re going to say, and I am appalled… APPALLED that you would even think of such a thing! No, really… I know that we’ve been living, breathing, writing, playing, singing, exemplifying irony for more than two decades now. I know that our entire first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and its follow-up, International House, were both frantic fits of festering irony. Trouble is, from a marketing perspective, none of that counts. It’s more about being seen to be ironic. “Noname” is insistent that we apply at least half of each waking hour working on ostentatious displays of irony.

My response to that has been, well, typical for me. I put Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on the case. Never send a man to do what a personal robot assistant can do for him – that’s what I always say, without a hint of irony. I asked Mitch Macaphee to program some irony into his sorry ass, and Mitch obliged, punching numbers into his little hand-held remote, pointing it at Marvin and saying the magic words: Obey! Obey! Marvin wheeled out the door and into the streets of Little Falls, dodging shoppers on a mission to ironyland. Sure enough, when we went out to the grocery store for some day old bread, there was Marvin, in front of Magillicuddy’s Hardware, ringing a bell and wearing a Santa-style hat, an old paint bucket on the sidewalk in front of him. Was he raising money? God, no. He was demonstrating the absurdity of a world in which robots in Santa garb can panhandle out of season without even raising an eyebrow. In short, he was practicing… that’s right …. starts with an “i”.

Here’s something else that starts with an “i”: I’ve had it with this for the nonce. Noname be damned, I’m hitting the sack. (Or perhaps merely mocking those who do so in earnest. Who can say?)

Usual Rubbish

What’s new.

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Well, it’s finally coming down. The snow that is. And the lamp post. Yes, you heard me right – the lamp post came down … and Jim Bob is responsible.

Okay, truth is… I don’t know for certain that Jim Bob is responsible. It may well have been Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who knocked the lamp post down during the first snow storm of the year. Here it is, the week after Christmas, and people are still driving like it’s July. Spoiled by global warming, I suppose. In any case, I only have myself to blame. It was I who suggested that Marvin serve as our chauffeur until a suitable replacement might be found. What? You didn’t know we had people driving us around? Well, that’s because we haven’t up until now. We’ve just recently adopted the Bowie-esque doctrine of acting successful to become successful. It’s like priming the pump, man.

Why this sudden obsession? Well, as you know, we of Big Green weren’t exactly born with the word “success” tattooed on our butts. (Mine has something else entirely tattooed onto it. I’m giving you twelve guesses what that might be.)  We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for lo these past three decades, playing in dives, recording in the basement on superannuated technology, scratching for every inch, inching for every scratch…. you get the picture. (Actually, you get the sound file. We don’t do pictures.) What have we got to show for it? A second-hand robot chauffeur, that’s what. And one that can’t avoid major obstacles.

I know, I know – I shouldn’t complain, what with this being the season of kindness and gratitude. (Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sees it more as the season of mindlessness and attitude, but that’s how he rolls.) We’re still recording, still flailing away at the canon, committing item after item from the seemingly bottomless vat of unrecorded material to virtual tape. You can hear the results of these sessions on our podcast, This Is Big Green, where we post first drafts of songs we will eventually release as our next album(s).

So sure, we live in a drafty mill, no fuel for the fire, no food in the fridge, no miracle grow for the mansized tuber (not that he needs it).  But we’ve got something more valuable than any of that: a gift coupon to Tony’s pizza, good for another three days. To the limo… and damn the lamp posts!

Usual Rubbish

Yule be sorry.

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We don’t have a garage. This is an abandoned hammer mill, built when people didn’t have cars. There is no garage here, get me? Now DON’T CALL HERE AGAIN! (Click! buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…. )

Got to love these small town managers. It’s bad enough that they pass an ordinance against squatting in abandoned properties (something Lincoln is convinced is aimed directly at us, lawyer that he is); now they’ve got one against all night parking. Thing is, we – that is to say, the core members of the musical collective known as Big Green – don’t even have cars. We’re not parking overnight on the street because we’ve got nothing to park. No, no –  they’re complaining about the big, blimp-like space vehicle we rented for our recent interstellar tour, which is still hovering over the mill like some kind of sales promotion. (The owner has yet to pick it up.) The town would hang tickets on the thing if they could find a ladder long enough. (They’re talking to the fire department right now. This could get ugly.)

So many distractions. How the hell is a man supposed to produce a podcast? Matt and I have yet to finish our Christmas episode, and time is running short, as you all know. We may have to …. cancel … Christmas. There’s nothing I can do; it’s this weather…. Oops, sorry. I started channeling Rankin-Bass’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Retail Bonanza”. I mean Reindeer. It’s not about the weather at all. It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the….. D’oh! Damn you, 1960’s television! Get out of my head!

Okay, to be fair, it’s not like we haven’t made any progress on our Christmas episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. We have done the basic tracks for at least two previously unreleased Big Green Christmas songs. We are going to resurrect an outtake from our 1999 album 2000 Years To Christmas – another previously unreleased Big Green song – specifically for the occasion. There will be other musical oddities, including yet another performance by Cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas, presidential candidate, and… and…. something else. I can’t remember the third thing. Oops.

So listen, mo-fo’s, we’ve got some work to do. A present to wrap, if you will. I’m taking the phone off the hook.

Usual Rubbish

Homearriving.

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Yeah, there’s some in here, too. Yep, all over the floor. Jesus Christ on a bike. Where are all the freaking buckets? Why don’t squatters have landlords … with buckets?

Oh, hi… Yes, Big Green has made its triumphant return to Earth from its somewhat less-than-triumphant [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, pulling our rental spacecraft into a low, low … very low parking orbit (approximately 100 feet above the Earth’s surface) over the Cheney Hammer Mill, our abandoned mill of a home in upstate New York. And, as will happen when one leaves one’s home for a stretch of weeks, some maintenance issues have emerged to greet us, providing us with distraction even before we’ve had the chance to remove our tour galoshes. They say all roofs leak, but I doubt they all leak this badly. My converted hammer assembly room suite looks like a freaking swimming pool. I think I see fish.

Right, well… that’s the kind of problem you expect. What I didn’t expect was to have to deal with obstinate bandmates after our return as well as throughout the tour. I’m thinking specifically of … wait for it! … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You may have thought I was going to say the mansized tuber, but really… he’s no trouble, hanging out in his specially climate-controlled terrarium, working his smartphone with both roots, tweeting pictures of himself in a methane sauna on Neptune. (Very therapeutic for cruciferous beings.) No, no… Marvin gets the prize this week. He has refused to leave the circa 2001: A Space Odyssey rent-a-vessel we took on this latest tear through the solar system. He has developed what Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) calls “Hal 9000 Syndrome”. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome, except, well, a lot less congenial.

Okay, so Marvin is refusing to open the pod bay doors. This is not a tragedy. We’ve got too much on the agenda to care, frankly, so he can float up there, 100 feet above our heads, and play Captain Bligh to his brass heart’s content. Matt and I have a Christmas podcast to produce, and time is running thin… I mean, short. (Premise is running thin.) Lord knows we want to have an action packed episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN posted before the fat elf flies – an episode full of new recordings, old yuletide favorites, an outtake from our “classic” (i.e. elderly) album 2000 Years To Christmas, and just the sort of incoherent ramblings you expect from us.

No, no…. you don’t have to thank us. Just send buckets. Lots of buckets.

Usual Rubbish

Back to ground.

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Okay, then. Is that a wrap? What? It’s already the holiday season? What happened to freaking October? Okay, then… so it’s a Christmas wrap. Satisfied?

Oh, hi. Yeah, I know. After ten weeks on the road, tempers wear a little thin. What, you got a PROBLEM with that? (Sorry. I’ll start again.) Post Thanksgiving slump. This shipboard life is not for me; nor, apparently, is it for anyone else on board. Speaking of bored … this business of bobbing around the solar system is bloody tiresome. I don’t know how sFshzenKlyrn stands it, year after year, millennium after millennium. It’s just as well that he’s a transcendental etheric life form that ignores all boundaries between space, time, and whatever. (Especially the whatever. The man simply cannot take anything seriously.)

And then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s bouncing around this tin can like… like a robot in a tin can. Of course, he always gets antsy this time of year, when the big robotics convention is taking place back on Earth. He is constantly checking the Web for updates, seeing if any big strides have been made. Always has to be in the vanguard, our Marvin. Get used to it, man – one day, time leaves all of us behind. It’s freaking inevitable. In fact, it’s the great hairy screaming inevitable that is our universe. Who cares if some table-top tractor can solve equations faster than you do? You still can…. well…. lift very heavy things…

And then there’s the marigolds, the marigolds. What? Sorry… there  are no marigolds. Oxygen is running a little thin in this rattletrap we call a spacecraft. We’re somewhere between Jupiter and five miles away from Jupiter, running low on fuel, supplies, and what-not. Ever run out of what-not on an interstellar voyage? You do NOT want to know how awful that can be.

So anyway… it’s back to Earth for us, or the Earth that will be left when we return – an Earth wracked by climate change, war, illness, poverty, and rapacious corporate greed. Home sweet freaking home, just in time to do our annual Christmas Special podcast. Stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Seasoning.

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Season’s greetings to you all. And we of Big Green say hello as well, whatever the so-called “season” may have to say. (Who ever heard of a talking season?)

Just writing whilest we’re having a little Thanksgiving layover on Titan, moon of Saturn, mother of all Tofurky. (Yes, this is where it comes from.) Taking a little break from the feasting, conversing, and pontificating (Anti-Lincoln is back on his Mexican-American War soapbox again), so this is a good time to open the mail, it seems. Most of our inquiries appear to be about our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so let’s start with this:

Dear Big Green:

On your podcast, I heard you read a bogus letter asking why so many of your songs are about war. You, of course, never answered the question to anyone’s satisfaction. I now challenge you to do this thing. What is with the war kick?

Sincerely,

Gen. Douglas MacArthur (deceased)

Well, General – thanks for listening to our podcast, first of all. Why do we write about war? I don’t know. Why do we write about Christmas? Sure, we’re not soldiers, but then we’re not practicing Christians, so neither makes sense. I guess you could say we’re just ranging around for material, grabbing anything that doesn’t run away screaming. (And some things that do.) Sometimes we ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to name themes for us using his autonomic radomizer. We’re that desperate, dude.

Here’s another:

Dear Big Green:

I’ve listened to your previously unreleased songs. They sound, well, half-baked. Is that intentional, or are you just too damn lazy to finish them?

Best,

Phil Specter (deceased)

Hey, Phil – it’s a fair question. Yeah, the previously unreleased songs on the podcast are, in fact, literally half-baked. They are first drafts, if you will (or even if you won’t), of recordings for our next collection of material. We’re planning to track the better ones and release them under separate cover. These initial recordings are basically Matt and I playing the songs like we do as a two-man band, with a basic rhythm track, guitar, keys, vocals. That’s it. No wall of sound yet. We’re working on the sheet rock right now, man. Patience!

Whoa, is that the time? Back to the Tofurky fest for me. Cheers.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log: quatro livre. (Say what?)

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Here’s the fourth installment of our vaunted tour diary. Anybody got a pen? How about a knife? I can just whittle the words. A pen knife? Even better!

Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to sFshzenKlyrn. I know what you’re thinking – he probably used some kind of trans-temporal presto-digitation to conjure us up a new ion drive servo chip. No such thing. He just waited until Marvin (my personal robot) was in sleep mode and plucked the chip out of his sorry hide. (Marvin lists a bit now. Not that that’s a bad thing… I have him doing our set lists. Boom-crash.)

Here’s the lowdown on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011:

10.31.2011 – Hallowe’en on Betelgeuse. Surprisingly, this is kind of a big deal up here. Not that they do the costumes or the trick or treat. In fact, it’s kind of an interstellar anti-gravity day – the Betelgeusians (unlike humanity) have mastered the science of gravity. They’ve got this big-ass switch, the size of Texas, and every October 31st (our time) they flip it and then their iridescent pseudopods leave the ground. Talk about fun. (That’s right – just talk about it.)

11.01.2011 – We start the month on the right pseudopod. Hit the stage around 10 p.m. local, played for almost three hours. Matt tried open tunings on his kazoo during “Just Five Seconds”. (We’re way ahead up here.) I’d never seen sFshzenKlyrn play his telecaster with a violin bow before, and  during our last set Anti-Lincoln seemed to have gotten his hands on a dulcimer somewhere. Leave Earth a four-piece, return home an orchestra. That’s the magic of space travel.

11.03.2011 – We are the 99 and 44/100 percent! New slogan for Ivory soap – what do you think? No, actually… it’s the current chant down here on Neptune. We’ve joined in the “Occupy Neptune” project for the few days that we’re here. Had a few celebrity drop-ins already this week. Tomorrow’s a general strike. Of course, there are only about five people on the whole planet, but frankly…. that makes organizing a snap. Don’t even need freaking Twitter.

Well, so anyway… keep the faith down there in Oakland, New York, Boston, and everywhere else. We’ll hold down the fort up here on Neptune. In fact, we’ve got the outer planets covered – no worries.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log (third story).

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What is all the ruckus about? I told you we were bringing equipment with us. And no, we don’t need unicycles. We can get around on our own two feet, thank you very much.

That’s the problem with interstellar tours, my friends. A billion opportunities for misunderstandings. No shortage of those, particularly when you’re traveling with the two Lincolns (posi- and anti-), as we appear to be out here on Big Green’s vaunted [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011. Anyway, here’s how it went down this week:

10.25.2011 – Our first full night on Kaztropharius 137b. If anything, it’s quiet – too quiet. Keep forgetting that there’s no atmosphere here, ergo, no sound. (Or is it “air-go; no sound”? You decide.)  We strummed our way silently through about a dozen tunes. The denizens of this strange little rock appeared partial to “My Bed”, one of Matt’s dream-sequence numbers. They pick up vibrations from our instruments via the floor of the venue. (They all appear to be equipped with stethoscopes. Looks kind of odd from on stage.) sFshzenKlyrn ripped the song a third corn chute, as the Simpsons once put it. Another triumph.

10.28.2011 – Pulling away after three successful gigs on Kaztropharius. By successful, I mean survivable… but only just barely. Anti-Lincoln decided to take a stroll down by the river district, apparently. Well, he got kind of drunk and one thing led to another. I’m not precisely sure how he acquired the riding saddle, but however it happened, he seems to have won first prize. We are now band non grata on Kaztropharius 137b. Nice work, anti-Lincoln! Who’s going to eat our discs now, pray tell?

10.29.2011 – Well, now he’s done it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has trashed the hyperdrive. He has this self-preservation circuit that compels him to replace any defective parts with whatever’s available. He needed a certain kind of chip for one of his motor circuits, and… well… he found one in our rent-a-ship’s hyper drive. So now we’re chugging along at the interstellar equivalent of 25 miles an hour, garbage scows passing us like we’re standing still. Got a string of gigs waiting for us, and at this rate, we’ll get to the first of them sometime in early 3109011 A.D. My guess is that they’ll pull out on us. What’s yours?

Oh well. Do me a favor, eh? Email me a diagram for a q47 space modulator chip.  Just google it. Thanks a million.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log (part deux).

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There are no filling stations out yonder. Just ask Warren Oates. If you can’t find him, seek out another character actor and ask him or her. You may be surprised by their answer. (Or not.)

Here’s what happened on the “road” this week:

10.15.2011 – Pulled into Neptune, was feeling ’bout half-past dead. Our rent-a-ship has been sputtering, so we brought it into a Neptunian garage for service. The cost? Full proceeds from our three performances on Neptune, plus 9% excise tax. (Looks like Herman Cain is having an impact up here, as well. The craters tell the tale.) sFshzenKlyrn practically melted his Telecaster on the fourth song (Why Not Call It George?), then settled down for a succulent Neptunian roast. (Roasted crater peat. This is important: Neptunian is not … repeat, not … one of the great cuisines.)

10.17.2011 – Strange how Polaris looks like downtown Rochester. Could be worse. We set up on a suspended platform – one of those anti-gravity jobs you see all over the place on Kaztropharius 137b – and went through the better part of our song list. Looks like we’ll have to work up some more numbers. The Polaroids experience time in extreme slow motion – the equivalent of about 14 hours to each of our standard Earth minutes. Kind of a difficult gap to fill, actually. Hey dudes…. how about a slow one? 

10.19.2011 – Right through the center of the Great Onion Ring. You full-time terrestrials know it as the Ring Nebula, but out here they associate it with their favorite snack. Pity, really, that more interstellar phenomena aren’t named for appropriate junk food back on Earth. After all, we invented junk food, we perfected it, we raised it to a high cultural value, and we defend it with our lives. The Greeks had their gods, sure. But we have our Ring Dings.

10.20.2011 – Closing in on the next venue; that hideous little globe named Kaztropharius 137b … the one place in god’s great universe where our CDs sell like hot cakes. I may have explained this before – the denizens of Kaztropharius 137b eat complex plastics, so to put a fine point on it, our CDs are, in fact, hot cakes to them. And we’re okay with that. Just settling in for a few night gigs.

Hey…. we’re not idle on the road. Always thinking, you know. We posted the third episode of our increasingly strange podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Check it out at http://www.big-green.net/pod and be not ashamed.

Usual Rubbish

Long view.

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Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Vector diagrams to light board. Finger fins to the driver behind. Quarter to three in the afternoon. What am I saying?

Doesn’t matter, really. We’re getting close to the departure date on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, our hotly-anticipated romp through the musical hinterlands of outer space, with planned stops in the Jovian system (Jupiter for you space travel novices), Betelgeuse, Kaztropharius 137b, Sirius, and the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, home base of our sometime-guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn.  Yes, I know – last time we stopped there we took a few lumps, but they’ve since healed up, and hey – never let it be said that we let experience stand in the way of a good lapse in judgment. Still got it, baby.

Anyhow, we’re just running through our confusing array of pre-launch checklists. Can’t be too careful these days, particularly when your vehicle has such a spotted past as the one we’ve rented for the occasion. Some of these lists are so damn mundane, though, it hardly seems justified…. but protocol is protocol. Here’s a for instance: (1) spacecraft fuel, check! (2) spacecraft, check!  (3) passengers and crew, check! (4) desire to depart for interstellar destinations, check! Who the f**k came up with that? My guess is that it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant), due to the rote existential nature of his selections. But I digress.

Another thing that doesn’t much matter: we haven’t really worked out a set list yet. Or any of the songs that would populate a set list. That would involve rehearsal, you see, and as a very wise horn player once told me, rehearsal is just a crutch for cats who can’t blow. Normally I don’t take such vouchsafes as gospel, but THIS time…. well, I daren’t disregard such an obviously valuable insight. Anyway, Matt and I have been recording some numbers for the podcast (This Is Big Green), so we will probably remember those songs at the very least. That’s about… oh…. half a set. Then there are the songs we make up on the spot. And of course, the mansized tuber plays a little accordion. (Don’t ask how little. Just… don’t.)

Okay, so yeah…. we’ve got a lot of getting together to do before our departure next week. But no fear- Big Green is up to this challenge. In fact, we’ve got a check list for this very situation. Left it around here…. somewhere…