All posts by Joseph

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The (Christmas) Spirit of Ninety-Six

We dug up a Christmas tape from 1996 this week and posted parts of it on the Internets. Hey, it’s Christmas, right? What is the significance of this collection? Well, my friends – this project taps a deep vein in the corpus of Big Green material. These four songs, now on YouTube, represent some firsts, some lasts, and a whole lot of mister in-between.

First things first: I believe this was the first group of songs we recorded on our eight-track DTRS system back in the nineties – the same deck, board, etc., we used a couple of years later to do our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. We got the system in 1995 and did a few test tracks before getting started on this 1996 collection, which was originally eight songs, including two we revamped, remixed, and released under separate cover.

What about last? Well, this was Matt’s last Christmas collection, recorded as a giveaway to family, friends, pets, etc. It was a yearly tradition in Matt-ville, from about the mid-1980s to 1996, covering a body of work that included all of the songs off of 2000 Years To Christmas, plus many, many more (including numbers we featured in our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.)

There’s more where that came from. Enjoy your holidays!

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We will walk on the beautiful grid

As we work on new projects, we’re still mining the archives, and this week we tossed up a bit of musical ore (or slag) called Beautiful Grid. This is another track we recorded at AcqRock studio in Utica, NY as part of a demo project co-produced and underwritten by friend of Big Green Bob Acquaviva back in 1991.

We previously released Beautiful Grid as part of a very limited run EP back in the mid-2000s, along with three other numbers, but that’s a bit like tossing it out into the middle of the street and waiting for someone to happen upon it. So here it is again:

We shall walk on the beautiful grid
You’ll be inspired by the hymns that we pull from the sky
And on the streets
By and by
So will lend me all I need
To survive

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What’s Behind Just Five Seconds

Our latest archive pick, Just Five Seconds, was recorded back in 1991, if memory serves, at AcqRock studio in Utica, NY. The track’s co-producer and sponsor was Bob Acquaviva, friend of Big Green, founder of the band Mere Mortals, producer, and all-around awesome dude. That’s the short story on how we made it. But what’s it about? Hmmm….

Tough question. Songs are always about a bunch of things and nothing in particular. But here’s a piece of the puzzle. Matt wrote this song after the 1987 collapse of the Schoharie Bridge on the New York State Thruway. He and our niece Mona were traveling along that stretch of highway that particular day and were held up in the consequent traffic jam. That was some of the input behind that lyric:

You could have been over the side
You could have been in the water
I was just two cars back
There was nothing I could have done to save you
You could have been drowning, or
You might have been broken to bits
I was just driving by
There was nothing I could have thrown to you

I just inspected those bridge supports
I checked them off as I ate my lunch
My pen said “years and years”

Ripped straight from the headlines. (35 years ago, of course.)