All posts by Joseph

The rest of the rest of the story

August 13, 2021 Joseph

Editor’s note: There is no editor for this blog. I’m the night janitor, emptying the trash cans and spreading the refuse thin enough on the floor that no one notices. I’m on my smoke break, but I’m taking this opportunity to say that what follows is the rest of that lame interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry.

Part one: The bad van

Marvin: Rumor has it that Big Green and its various precursors had some of the worst vehicles in the history of indie bands. That’s quite a distinction. Care to expand on that?

JP: Glad to, Marvin. Of course, back when we were just starting out, a bunch of dewy-eyed kids with a song in our hearts and a sandwich in our hip pockets, we had a 1973 C-10 pickup with a cap on the bed. It had gaping holes, rust, primer, five different shades of orange paint, etc. In fact, it had so many pieces missing, we called it “Ruck” (i.e. not quite a truck).

I’ll spare you the grisly details of driving Ruck to gigs. Suffice to say that, at least once, I had to crawl under the sucker at the traffic light on the intersection of Central Ave and Lark in Albany, NY and tighten the gearshift linkage, which kept unscrewing itself. Once was enough.

Then we had Moby, a 1970 Econoline Supervan, former ambulance, that I bought at auction. It had duct tape over the “Ambulance” decal on the hood. On a good day it got 11 miles per gallon. It …. was a bad van.

Finally, we had a brown, mid-eighties Econoline that we took on the road a few times, including a gig up at Middlebury College. It was in January and the heat didn’t work, so we were frozen solid by the time we got home. To make matters worse, it would stall at idle. It was, in short, another bad van. I sold it, nameless, to lettuce man.

Marvin: Sad end to a sad story.

JP: The hell it is. Move on!

Shifting the Marlboro stacks

Marvin: Perhaps even worse than your vehicles were your PA systems. Can you talk about that a bit.

JP: I could, but you probably wouldn’t understand what I’m saying because the PA system sucks so bad.

Marvin: What was that? I can’t hear you!

JP: Back in the seventies, when the skies were black with flocks of hooting pterodactyls, we invested in a small PA. No, not the kind you see these days, with powered speakers, etc. This was a Marlboro PA, with two boxy speakers and what looked like a cheap knock-off fender guitar head with four volume pots. Pro tip: pull the volume pot and you get reverb!

Okay, so we moved to Albany and had to get something marginally better than the twin kazoos. And we did just that. We bought two of those old Shure tower speakers, with like half-a-dozen five-inch speakers in a vertical array. And when that didn’t work, we got two Cerwin-Vega 15″ cabinets that we used for years after that. The Marlboro stacks became our monitors.

Marvin: Where are they now?

JP: I’m sitting on them. They make a jolly comfortable chesterfield.

Political Rants

Missed us by that much: nuclear brinkmanship

August 13, 2021 Joseph

This week was the 76th anniversary of our having dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? What an insane thing to do – though to be frank, at that point in the war our bombers were laying waste to Japanese cities with conventional bombs, including a 1000 plane raid on Tokyo. (The commander liked the number.)

When we pay homage to those whose lives were lost or permanently altered by this episode, we do so in the knowledge that things went from bad to worse over the years that followed. The system we set up over the arc of the Cold War was aptly described as a “Doomsday Machine”. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg reviews this system in great detail in his recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Planning for first strike/use

One thing that wasn’t particularly surprising about Ellsberg’s book was the fact that U.S. nuclear policy has always been based on the idea of first strike or first use. The reasoning is pretty simple – launch an overwhelming strike that eliminates the enemy’s ability to launch their own attack, partly by targeting their nuclear arsenal. The other component is that of blackmail, in essence – do as we say or we will blow up your cities.

What Ellsberg makes clear is that their actual plan in the 1950s and early 60s was, in the event of a general war, to bomb both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to smithereens, even if the Chinese were not a party to the conflict. Of course, we know now (and they likely knew then) that any large exchange of H-bombs would result in virtual omnicide, but our war planners tried not to dwell on that notion.

Planes, trains, and autonomous vehicles

This insane “war” plan – really, an annihilation plan – was built on the flimsiest platform back in the 1950s. Supposedly only the president could give the order to use nuclear weapons. That authority, according to Ellsberg, was delegated to regional commanders, either explicitly or implicitly (there was supposedly a letter from Eisenhower to his commanders setting out the authority, though no one seemed to be able to produce a copy).

The plan relied on bombers back then and a very unreliable global communication system that could be disrupted by the weather. Later on, it was ICBMs with MIRV’ed warheads (multiple independent H-bomb warheads in a single missile), but the game was the same – use them or lose them.

It got to such a point of madness that during the Carter administration, planners seriously considered a massive construction project out west to support the MX missile program. It was like an enormous shell game, with thousands of miles of track, mobile launchers, bunkers, pools, fake missiles, all to throw the Soviets off.

Still crazy after all these years

Suffice to say that we still live with the remnants of this madness. After a number of close calls, when the entire ramshackle enterprise almost came crashing down on us all, we are still apparently willing to extend the life of these weapons yet another generation.

The longer these weapons exist, the greater the danger that they will be used. If our leaders really wanted to keep us safe, they would take the lead in ending the nuclear standoff once and for all. Their failure to do so speaks volumes.

luv u,

*Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.*

Usual Rubbish

Stepping into eden, yeah, brother.

August 6, 2021 Joseph

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind.

The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else.

The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine.

In a distant dive, long, long ago

Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when we were still playing clubs. Back then, the indie rock club scene was not yet much of a thing here in upstate New York, so it was hard to find places that would cater to original songs. And yea, your friends in Big Green had no abandoned mill in which to shelter, and they were sore afraid. So it is written.

Our group was my illustrious brother Matt and I, plus John White on drums and Ace guitarist Tony Butera. We started running out of Big Green work, so we decided to go back to some of the same clubs under an assumed identity. Not the first time we tried this, of course, but this time around, we actually got a few gigs. (Sometimes it makes sense to go under cover.)

Laughed out of Utica

Anyway, we decided to call ourselves “The Space Hippies.” This was after a group of ne’er-do-well intergalactic hipsters that appeared on a Star Trek episode named The Way To Eden. (Not to be confused with the motorcycle freaks that threatened to blow up the nameless planet that the Space Family Robinson had crashed on in the 3rd and final season of Lost In Space – an episode nonsensically named Collision of the Planets.) They played twangy space guitars and, well … that seemed like a good thing to us.

Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing. In fact, one of the first club owners Tony called to ask for a booking told him, “I can’t hire a band called The Space Hippies. It I did that, I’d be laughed out of Utica.” That was when I got the strong feeling that we should change the cover band’s name to Laughed Out of Utica. (I got voted down on that one, damn it!)

Tunes with psychological issues

Fact is, we did work a bit with the Space Hippies, though I think we kept changing the name so we could double dip, Jethro Tull-style. One club we got booked into was a place called Looney Tunes on NY Route 5. I’ve got a cassette tape of one of the nights we played there. The quality is pretty bad, but you can basically hear us framming away at those rock covers. I included one track from this tape on the July 2019 episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. The song was a Matt Perry number titled “How ‘Bout The War”. (Tony plays a screaming solo on this and, basically, every track on the tape. What a madman.)

What else do I remember about the Space Hippies’ premiere gig? Let’s see. There was dogshit on the stage when we were loading in. I think it was a welcome gift from the club owner. Ah, those were the days.