All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Names and faces.

2000 Years to Christmas

What the hell. Was it THAT long ago? No way! Effing 1986 was … uh … oh, right. I’m leaving out a few decades. Fuck, we’re old. Where’s my porridge?

Nothing like a little trip down memory lane to lift your spirits, right? Just be sure not to take a right at the light – that road goes straight to crazy town. Spent the morning listening to recordings from our first year as a band, 1986. Actually, not the WHOLE morning, as there are only a handful of recordings. We did everything on a shoestring back then, and you don’t have to be a recording technology specialist to know that shoestrings are a very low-fidelity substitute for magnetic tape. Fact is, Big Green co-founder Ned Danison had the use of his brother’s recording studio, and we piled in there one weekend and plowed through a four-song demo that got us, well …. exactly nowhere, but it’s a nice conversation piece. (See? I’m talking about it even now, thirty three years later.)

That was a hot summer, too. Or maybe it was all of those wine coolers. Either way, we were going through what another guitar player friend of ours termed “the Brr-roke Period”, fighting the mice for scraps, sharing smokes, sleeping on people’s floors. (At one point it got so bad we were forced to sleep on somebody’s walls.) Of course, being white people, we were never REALLY REALLY poor, just poor as seen on T.V., like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck carving that bean into paper thin slices, so thin you could see through it, and squeezing the slices between similarly translucent slices of bread. I suppose in that metaphor, I played Donald, quacking madly in frustration at our made-for-television penury. Poor suburban waif! No bean for his sandwich!

Us in the 80s

Yeah, well … we didn’t have an entourage of helpers back then. No Mitch Macaphee to help with mad science solutions. No Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to tie our shoes and balance our checkbooks. No checkbooks (because, wait for it …. we were broke). We didn’t even have a drummer, for crying out loud, or at least none that would stick with us long enough to play a gig. So that summer of 1986 (or was it the fall? No matter.) when we got the use of John Danison’s 8-track garage studio, we recorded three tracks with a session drummer we knew from around Albany, NY at that time, a guy by the name of Pete Young. Two of the tracks were cover songs from our stage set at that time – “She Caught The Katy”, by Taj Mahal, which we played on THIS IS BIG GREEN back in 2012, and Little Richard’s “Slipping and Sliding”. We also did one of Ned’s songs, entitled “A Name And A Face”, which kind of amusingly chronicles a one-night stand of the drunken eighties variety – an alt-rock walk of shame, if you will.

That was our demo. It went nowhere. Pete left the group before he even joined. Ned left the group the next year. And here you have us – the remainders of a random idea for a group, 34 years ago, chronicled in that hastily produced demo …. which I will post one of these days. Stay tuned!

Postscript

One of these days came sooner than I thought. Here is that four-song cassette demo we recorded back in 1986, over in Ballston Spa, NY.

1986 Big Green Demo
Political Rants

Why fat Donnie don’t care.

I’ve been accused more than once of being cynical and of imputing the worst motives in every action of those I dislike. I suppose that’s fair – I’m certainly no better than most people in that particular category of failing. And I’m sure that fans of Donald Trump (yes, I’m looking at YOU) will take issue with what I have to say in this post, just as they are likely to frown at the title and decry it as a cheap shot. Again, it’s a fair cop. I think after what we’ve gone through over the last three and a half years, we’re due a few cheap shots, right? Friends can disagree on that point. As it happens, I take little interest in stories of the president’s personal boorishness, such as some of what is currently being reported with respect to his niece Mary Trump’s new book. Tales of his moronic sexism are as unsurprising as they are nauseating. He said his young niece was “stacked” – shocker! More evidence that he’s a titanic douche. Moving on.

No, I’m guessing that Trump supporters, if they read this blog, would take issue with my contention that the president doesn’t care about what happens to most COVID-19 victims … perhaps more than they would with my observation that he’s fat. Here again, it’s just acknowledgement of an obvious fact. If Trump cared what happened to COVID victims, he would do something about the pandemic (other than brag incoherently about how well he’s handling it). He is not doing anything to prevent these deaths, and in fact is going out of his way to advocate for policies and practices that will result in further spread of the disease. He lies about it incessantly, has done from the beginning, and attempts to push off responsibility for fighting the pandemic on other people, politicians, countries, etc. Why? Why would a president not want to preserve more lives?

I think the answer’s pretty obvious. Trump only cares about how things affect him personally. The people being killed by this virus are overwhelmingly drawn from communities that are less likely to support his re-election. The death rate for African Americans is more than twice that of whites. Indigenous and Latinx are dying at higher rates as well. Frankly, Trump doesn’t give a shit about those people. If more of them drop dead, there will be less of them marking a ballot for his opponent. Trump’s friend Bolsonaro offers an even more crass example of this – COVID is absolutely tearing through indigenous communities, the same people Brazil’s insane clown president thought should have been wiped out even more back in the days of conquest. Trump is a hair more subtle, but it doesn’t take Kreskin to work out his campaign calculus with regard to COVID victims. Fewer old white people, yes, but many, many fewer black people. What you lose on the milk you make back on the oranges.

What can we do? Defeat Trump in November, among many other things. This crisis has cast so many societal problems in stark relief – it’s clear what we need to do, and getting rid of Fat Donnie would be a good first step.

luv u,

jp

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

Old stock.

2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Is that what it actually sounded like? Don’t remember that at all. That’s probably down to drug use, I guess. Like all those Dead concerts I never went to. (At least I don’t remember going to any.)

Hello and welcome to another chapter of Archive Summer, with your host, Joe of Big Green. (Kind of a medieval sounding name, right? I am Cleetus of Taberg!) As I mentioned in previous posts, there’s precious little for band members to do during this time of COVID-19 social isolation, unless you’re into performing online … and have a decent internet connection. We could try to do streaming performances, but it would sound like one of those old novelty greeting cards that plays a tinny little loop of “Happy Birthday” when you open it. (Except we would NEVER play Happy Birthday. Copyright, you see …. those fuckers are litigious as hell! In fact, I shouldn’t even say the name of that song, let alone play it.)

You wouldn’t think that, living in an abandoned hammer mill, we would have much of an archive, but that’s where you’re wrong. DEAD WRONG. God no, we carry every piece of flotsam and jetsam from our previous lives along with us, like traveling hoarders. None of it’s worth anything, of course (we hocked all of that years ago), just sentimental value … with the emphasis on mental. The fact is, when you’ve been a “recording” group as long as we have, you tend to have a lot of recordings lying around. Some of them go back to the 1970s, but those are pretty rough and, well … just never mind about those. They’re a bit like those tight-fitting velour shirts dudes used to wear back then – not something you want to advertise. Like most bands, we started life badly imitating people we liked, then started to piece together the ad-hoc approach to music that Big Green is now known for. (To the extent that we’re known, of course.)

Uh, Marvin ... this is a microwave. The DA-88 is downstairs.

Our back catalog includes a mountain of stuff. Super early songs recorded straight to stereo on cassette machines and beat-up living room reel-to-reels. Faux “multi-track” recordings pieced together by bouncing tracks from one cheap recorder to another. A lot of Matt songs recorded on his first four-track cassette deck and subsequent similar machines – there are literally more than a hundred of these. Then we got an 8-track Tascam DA-88 deck in 1995, and we recorded 2000 Years To Christmas on that, among other things. (I’ve got some cassette submixes of unfinished songs from that system). In 2001 we moved to a Roland VS-2416 deck, which we used to make International House and most of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. For the last few years, we’ve been using Cubase Artist to record the Ned Trek songs, most of which you can hear on our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast (now on hiatus) or our Ned Trek podcast. Needless to say, there’s a ton of unreleased material, and I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant), trawling through all of it, looking for, I don’t know, caramels hidden in piles of shit. (Sounds delicious!)

Hey, it’s summer, right? We’ll start posting stuff again soon … but for now, another mint julep. (That’s a drink, Jim.)