All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Maybe the best year there ever was

2000 Years to Christmas

Well, we don’ have any flour. The mice ate it. And no baking pans of any kind. I’ve got a rusty skillet and enough batter mix for one pancake. Will that do? Oh, I see … Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Hey, you can’t please everybody. (And frankly, there’s no point in trying. ) The fact is, we are ill-equipped to celebrate anything here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as we don’t have the usual set of domestic crockery, pots and pans, etc. that you expect to find in these parts. Then there’s that no-baking clause in our lease. (Yes, lease. The one some panhandler drew up for us on toilet paper.)

Here’s the rub, though – we kind of have something to celebrate. It’s our thirty-fifth anniversary as a named band. And if that isn’t worth frying up a flapjack, what the hell is?

Deep roots. Broken branches.

Of course, we didn’t spring out of the ground back in the summer of 1986. Far from it! We fell from the sky, my friends. Fortunately, there were a lot of trampolines in the 80s, so it was a soft landing. And yes, we were young. Too small even to carry our enormous guitars.

No roadies, of course. So like ants, we would carry our gear in and out of clubs, trying to conceal our tiny-ness. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t help because at that time he was about the size of a clock radio. (A clock radio is, well … a clock with a radio built into it, and you can ..,. uh … ask your mother.) Our arms were broken with all of that lugging, which made it that much harder to play. But we persisted!

There .... See how short we were back then?

Punk party in the park!

I’ve told the story many, many times about how we named the band. Gather round, kiddies …. we’ll give it to you one more time. One time in the white bread suburban town we grew up in, Matt and my sister saw a poster for a punk party in the town park. As that seemed like the most unlikely thing in the world, they went to have a look-see.

Well, when they got to the park, there was not a punk to be seen. Just a bunch of trees organized into what was known in the punk scene at that time as a “forest”. When Matt and my sister returned, he was asked, “what were those punks at the park like?” Matt replied, “Well, they had big green hair and bark suits.”

We then wanted Big Green Hair and Bark Suits as our band name, of course, but on the suggestion of Big Green co-founder Ned Danison, we shortened it to Big Green.

That was thirty-five years ago. Get a strong enough telescope and you can see it for yourself – just point the scope at where the earth was on this day in 1986 and, well ….. you will see … something.

Political Rants

Wearing out our welcome in iraq

Biden dropped bombs on Iraq and Syria again this week, this time using F-15s and F-16s. This is the president’s second large action against what the administration describes as Iranian-backed groups. They claim this action is in self-defense, invoking the U.N. Charter (presumably article 51). Nancy Pelosi piped up with her own cry of support for the attack, stating that “protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”

Now, what the fuck freedoms are these heroes defending? And how is it self-defense to hit back against local forces that are resisting our presence in their own country? A country, mind you, that didn’t ask us to invade in the first place and that has explicitly asked us to leave. Like all empires, we have an expansive sense of our own sovereignty. We feel put upon when the locals rise against us.

What’s different is lesser than what’s the same

I know, we were all happy when Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes taken away from him. And his assassination of Soleimani was an obvious and reckless provocation coming from an administration that put Iran on notice in its first week and tore up the JCPOA. That said, they still stride around the Middle East like they own the place, and that should be just as unacceptable to us as when Trump did it.

Even worse, the Biden foreign policy team is leaving bad policies in place from the previous regime. They are essentially in agreement with much of it, and because they are generally more competent than the last crew, they in some ways may pose an even greater threat to the cause of peace.

And again, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, anyway? Our troops should leave now. In fact, they should never have been there in the first place.

Death of a Salesman

Of course, there was a reason why they went there in the first place. The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq to the American people – or at least to enough of them for the tanks to start rolling. An important part of that sales effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week.

I’ve never made a habit of dancing on people’s graves, and I’m not about to start now. Suffice to say that this man did a lot of damage in his life. He helped to push two disastrous wars that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people. Simply put, he was a horrible man in many respects.

Of course, he had a lot of help in this sales job. The mainstream press was a tremendous help. At the height of Rumsfeld and Bush’s popularity, before the Iraq war went predictably down the drain, the press was even painting Rumsfeld as some kind of warped sex symbol. I remember having a hard time with that as I waited in supermarket checkout lines, looking at People magazine or Us or whoever was blowing Rumsfeld that week. Jesus, how nauseating can you get?

Anyway, one of the main architects is now gone. Time to stop this stupid ass war, once and for all.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

When all your sharps sound flat.

2000 Years to Christmas

This is not the instrument I play. Mine is over there. You know, the one in the big wooden case that has to be pushed around on dollies. No, not THAT kind of dolly … the kind that’s flat and has WHEELS, damn it. Don’t you know ANYTHING?

Oh, goodness – my apologies. I had assumed that no one was reading this. I’m afraid you’ve caught us at kind of a difficult moment. You see, an alert listener – I believe someone in rural Idaho – suggested that we sound like people who play their instruments blindfolded. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I got the guys together and we donned our cartoon-like blindfolds, then started playing the first instrument we came upon.

Needless to say, this exercise was about as unenlightening as any we’ve attempted previously in our residency at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. But we try to be responsive to the demands of our audience. That is our lot as performers, is it not? (Some would say not.)

There’s a difference, man

Nevertheless, I would have to say that I did, in fact, learn something from this experience. For one thing, not all instruments are built the same. You tend to get kind of parochial when you play the same axe over and over, right? Well, hell – put a blindfold on and play the next axe you come across. You’ll discover that there are some remarkable differences between, say, a tuba and a mandolin.

To be fair, there is one thing those instruments have in common: I can’t play either one of them. Not that I haven’t tried to play unfamiliar instruments. Long time Big Green listeners will know that I played banjo on a couple of tracks, including “Falling Behind” on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our ex-governor (cousin) Rick Perry tribute album. You can also hear me playing banjo on “Box of Crackers”, a recording we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN (see our August 2019 episode).

What the hell’s the point of music, anyway?

Now, I’m not saying, on the basis of these crude recordings, that I can actually play the banjo. Far from it! But – and this is important – I can play it about as well as I play the bassoon. Which is to say, not really at all. You see, the bassoon is among the most difficult of the wind instruments to master. I was just explaining this to Prince Leopold the other day. It has a double reed and is the size of a bedpost. In fact, it looks like what you get when a bedpost fucks a clarinet (or vice versa).

Which naturally begs the question – what is the point of music, anyway? Like I do with most esoteric questions, I fed that one into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), whose patented eludian-Q9 melotronic brainalizer can work out any puzzle. (Except Rubic’s Cube. He’s still working on that one.)

Well, his lights flashed, his antennae twirled, he made whirring sounds, and then spit out a little piece of paper which read: “It is pointless.” There you have it, people! Stop wasting your lives! Put the damn bassoons away!