Tag Archives: Volcano Man

In the studio with America’s most obscure band

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

Taking the words WAY too literally.

2000 Years to Christmas

Jesus, man … another song about geoscience? Just wait until Mitch gets his hands on that. What’s the topic this time – gravitation? I guess he’s already fucked with that sufficiently. Still, I worry.

Yeah, that’s right. No one wants to see your friends in Big Green just moping around the abandoned hammer mill like a bunch of sad sacks, bickering with one another. So we make an extra effort to smile when we get visitors. And if we’re not in the mood, we get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do it for us. No, he doesn’t have anything like what you might call a mouth, but he’s got some grill work to show, and that will do in a pinch.

What’s the beef? Nothing serious. Just interrogating my illustrious brother Matt about the subject matter of his recent songwriting. Some of you may recall that his lyrics have spawned some trouble in the past. No, they’re not controversial or obscene in any way, but they do give Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, some bad ideas. And he tends to take our song lyrics very literally.

The Question of George

A couple of years ago it was Matt’s song “Why Not Call It George?”, the lyric for which has always sounded to me, in part, like a bulleted list of mad-man items:

Gravity can: (a) make your mind flow out from your tongue; (b) take your eyes downtown to see the nuns all bunched up on the tiles; (c) pull your lips back from your smile

(Hear it yourself: Check out our live version of the song on our YouTube channel.)

Parts of that song made Mitch think he could (dare I say it?) rule … the world! Or at least reverse continental drift and reclaim Pangaea. I got nervous when he started spending months at a time in the lab … and the ground started shaking. Not. good.

This doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Eruption Imminent!

Then there was “Volcano Man”, a track from our 2nd album, International House. Mitch started obsessing over that one as well. You know how grade school kids sometimes build those baking soda volcanoes for school projects? Well, that’s a miniature version of what we had to deal with around this dump. Of course, Mitch had to open a vent straight down to the Earth’s molten caramel center, just so that the ‘cano was authentic. He was doing it with an upside-down rocket, Crack In The World style. What a mess!

Anyhow, I’ve tried to encourage Matt to write songs about less volatile things. You know, like …. butterflies, or cobblestones, or vegetable stew. Maybe you’ve got some suggestions that don’t suck (like these do).

String theory.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm, yeah. We’re getting close to the expiration date on THAT little scam. Hard to sustain that 20th anniversary narrative for more than a year, right? And hell, we missed the International House tenth anniversary. And people are beginning to figure out that our Volcano Man recording is not the famous one from the comedy movie. What’s the next grift, Lincoln? And how do we keep it secret? Thank god almighty Marvin isn’t typing this conversation into the blog … right …. Marvin …. ?

Oh, damn! Uh …. we were just working on the … um … lines for a play we’re writing about corrupt musicians. Fictional corrupt musicians. Pretty convincing, huh? Sure, like most writers, we draw on life experience. I mean, your first play is bound to be a veiled autobiography, right? It’s hard to imagine a band getting by on grift alone. It’s simply not remunerative enough, for one thing. Then before you know it you’re squatting in abandoned buildings, like maybe an old mill somewhere in upstate New York. Fighting the cockroaches for crumbs. One of these days we’re going to win one of those fights, after which we will all dine sumptuously. Or at least anti-Lincoln will – his favorite snack is stray crumbs, which, if you think about it, is the antimatter equivalent of chicken fricassee, the posi-matter Lincoln’s favorite snack. It all adds up, doesn’t it?

Okay, well … you’ve got us dead to rights. Whatever we may be as musicians and songwriters, we are utter failures at making money in any legitimate way. The closest thing we’ve come to steady day-labor was probably that two or three weeks when we rented the man-sized tuber out as an ornamental plant for a local bank lobby. (We convinced them he was a ficus. They may know all about money over there, but they’re no ornamental plant experts.) Then there was that brief period when we lent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to the Police Department as a traffic direction automaton, though that was only useful when the town had blackouts. (Marvin’s inventor Mitch Macaphee went so far as to contrive a couple of power failures just to increase demand on his robot creation.)

Nice work, tubey ... I mean, ficus!

These revenue streams have dried up, unfortunately. Man-sized tuber and Marvin are practically in open revolt. Who can blame them, right? It’s not like we take it upon ourselves to rent our aging bodies out as manikins, substandard as they might be. We can scrape just about enough money together each month to buy guitar strings. God help us if we ever need bass or piano strings! Once in a while we get a residuals check from interstellar MP3 sales, but it’s not enough to keep the lights on. What’s the solution? Another …. interstellar …. tour? No, that would be madness! After that last disaster a couple of years ago? Forget it! I’m not piling into another one of those slapped together space barges so that I can be piloted by a madman to some remote asteroid venue where there’s nothing to breathe but radioactive methane. That’s final.

Okay, Marvin – stop typing. Now …. when do we ship out for Aldebaran?

Time off.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hey … did I mention we had a special going? I did? Okay. Well … I won’t mention it again. Just pretend I didn’t say anything. Right, then …. night night.

Oh, hi. Just got off the phone with our manager. Yes, that’s right. It may surprise some of you to know that Big Green has management. Sure, it doesn’t look like we do from the outside. This band has always had a certain quality of randomness to it …. or perhaps an uncertain quality of randomness. Now, I’m not suggesting that that’s some kind of clever management ploy meant to drive buzz and idle speculation about the band …. what will they do next? Nah. It’s more that we simply have the worst management in the history of the music business, hands down.

Now, I don’t mean to sound overly critical. It’s just that we haven’t had a gig in the United States – yay, on the planet Earth, even – in more than 25 years. Our records go nowhere, unless it’s by accident (like our song Volcano Man, which is benefiting from a prolonged case of mistaken identity.). No hits. Not even any misses. Our three albums have performed as what used to be called “drugs on the market”, wanting for promotional investment in addition to being, well, strange. This is the kind of management that can be really discouraging, you know? Then there was the time he told us to wear matching orange Chuck Taylor high tops. God, those things looked stupid … especially on Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t even have feet.

Big Green has always had this kind of problem with management, labels (like Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.), hangers-on, that sort of thing. Back when we were kids, we had management for a brief time that booked us around the Albany, NY area. Our equipment was trash. I had a broken down Fender Rhodes piano, our PA was from hell – mixed components patched together in a haphazard fashion; a 100-watt QSC amp powering two Cerwin Vega cabinets … and belching smoke while it did it. We also had two Shure tower speakers, which were hands down the worst PA invention since the megaphone Rudy Vallee used to sing through. One time they booked us and another band to play alternate sets, except they had an actual PA system, pumping out a wall of sound while we were soldering patch cords on stage. It was like Loverboy vs. junior high electronics shop class.

So, yeah …. in retrospect, I guess our current management isn’t that bad. I’d rather take all this forced time off than play dozens more of those really lame gigs we used to play, back in the day.

About the ‘cano.

2000 Years to Christmas

There’s always the chance it could be legitimate. Why not? Must we always be so damn cynical? What happened to those happy-headed funsters we used to be back in 1978? Wait … we were never happy-headed funsters? Well … at least that explains what happened to them.

Once again, you catch us in the midst of a philosophical debate, an exquisitely complex conundrum that has confronted us in our COVIDian solitude. Well, perhaps I’m being too generous. Let’s just say we’re having a little difference of opinion. Nothing too weighty, you understand – after all, these are austere times, and we’re trying to be economical with our emotions (as we have little else to be economical with). Why don’t I describe the debate we’re having here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and you can decide whether it rises to the level of a philosophical discussion? That I shall do.

As you know, when it comes to the matter of commercial success, Big Green is a smoking failure. We are so obscure, you’d think we spent the last thirty years trying to be unsuccessful (which, I suppose you could argue, we did). Nevertheless, we have resorted to various forms of representation. The first was Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, the Indonesian corporate label that nearly clapped us in irons and threw us in a dungeon somewhere in Jakarta. Then we mutinied and set up our own label, Hammermade … but of course, that’s just a name, so we’ve had to work with actual distribution companies to get our albums out where people can find them (or not find them, as the case may be). That means we use the same digital distribution networks that most acts use, though i suspect those with decent representation and name recognition realize a better return on their streaming plays, downloads, etc., than we do. Fuckers!

In any case, every week or so we get stats from our distributor, and our numbers are usually somewhere halfway down the toilet (except for around the holidays, when Pagan Christmas takes off like a rocket, thanks to our pagan listeners). Then last week, we saw higher than usual numbers on the track Volcano Man, from our second album, International House. My initial reaction was the same as my reaction to everything else: “What the hell?” Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was immediately of the opinion that the song had finally found its mythical audience – that elusive unicorn of a loyal listener cohort that has been the stuff of speculation since we first donned our Big Green hair-hats and bark suits. (Marvin’s little video screen flashed the word “eureka”.)

That's what we're talking about.

Hey … you expect robot assistants to be a little over-enthusiastic, right? But then Anti-Lincoln and Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, jumped in on Marvin’s side, so Matt and I had to disabuse them of their delusional optimism. Turns out there’s a rational explanation for everything – there’s a new song/video called Volcano Man that’s from an upcoming Will Ferrell movie entitled Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. People were obviously looking for that Volcano Man and not our Volcano Man, which is quite different, though similarly ridiculous. Marvin’s not convinced – he thinks it’s all a coincidence. Anti-Lincoln is leaning more towards a conspiracy theory, which is totally like him. Not sure about Mitch – he’s moved on to another project.

Where was I going with this? No place special. Always wanted to go there.

THIS IS BIG GREEN: November 2013

Big Green declares open season on reason with the November episode of their podcast, featuring Ned Trek 14, The Wrath of Carl, and several Big Green songs. Boy howdy.

This is Big Green – November 2013. Features: 1) Ned Trek XIV: The Wrath of Carl; 2) Song: Volcano Man, by Big Green; 3) Put the Phone Down: Matt and Joe talk about the start of hunting season and its random killing; 4) Electon 2013: The Gleason effect; 5) Big Green’s live days: Matt on horse, Joe on cow; 6) Song: Little Pig Flies, by Big Green; 7) A visit with Anita Bryant; 8) Random Extra Song: Good Old Boys Roundup; 9) End time