Category Archives: News

News (and some olds) about Big Green

News

Hey, hey … we weren’t The Monkees after all.

Bloody awful weather, isn’t it? Nobody knows better than my brother band-mate Matt, out every day in the great outdoors, slogging from bird’s nests to beaver ponds, feeding everything in sight. Damn, I get the chills just thinking about it. But then, I am a basement dweller by day … and by night, often times, twiddling dials on the seemingly never-ending album project Big Green is stumbling through.

Got to give him a lot of credit – he works like a dog, and yet still somehow finds the time and energy to write songs by the dozen. I mean, it’s not like we’re living in some communal band-house like The Monkees, every day full of hijinx and lip-syncing singalongs. Though, to be honest, that’s kind of how we started out.

Brokerton-On-Hudson

Picture this, people: a time long before nearly everyone had a high-def global network-connected video camera in their pocket. Can you see it? And do you hate it as much as we did? My guess is yes. Well, that’s when we started the scrum of washed-out musicians that eventually became Big Green.

Yes, we did have a Monkees-like communal band house. It was in a town called Castleton-on-Hudson, maybe ten miles south of Albany. We didn’t have a funky Monkees-like car, just a beat-up old Maverick, a 1968 Nova, and a capped C-10 pickup so ramshackle we called it “Ruck” (i.e. one letter short of a truck). Do three junks add up to a Monkees mobile? Ask your mother. Better yet, ask your grandmother.

Anyway, it was our practice space, songwriting retreat, whatever. We played a handful of gigs, made rough recordings, and did stupid shit, like stuffing pillows under our shirts and pretending we had gained 50 pounds overnight, just to freak the neighbors out. (Our guitarist, the late great Tim Walsh, was particularly good at this prank. So was our drummer back at that time, Mr. Phil Ross, seen on the inside cover of the collection – this post’s header image – hitting Tim over the head with a guitar, El Kabong style.)

What can I say? We were broke and easily amused.

Self-made bootlegs

Now, because this was indeed a time before digital photography (early 1980s), there’s little record of this time in our arrested development. A year or so after we left Castleton, though, Matt pulled together a compilation he called “The Todd Family Chronicles” which is a cassette collection of the songs – covers and originals – we played during that time and shortly thereafter.

Why “The Todd Family”? Experts disagree. Back in the day, Matt invented this joke character called “Toddy Ham” – an irritating little welp of the type we knew back in our suburban white-boy school days. (Toddy Ham is the kid with the whistle on the cobbled-together cassette cover shown above.)

The archeological record

What happened to the recordings? They’re still extant, if very fuzzy. I think the earliest thing we’ve posted is probably Silent As A Stone, which I talked about in a post back in 2022. But in reality, “The Todd Family Chronicles” wasn’t really a bootleg in a distributive sense – there were only a couple of copies. Not like the Christmas tapes, which Matt replicated in slightly larger quantities, or our EP tapes like “Songs That Remind Lincoln of the War”.

Photos? Very few, and most are just cheap photocopies of photos. We’re talking 43 years ago. Total miracle that we’re still producing something you can loosely describe as music, but there you have it.

News

The Lincoln trilogy: a slight digression

Now, I think you all know that Big Green is bad at predictions. We’re not prognosticators or weather forecasters, and we have no magic stone that allows us to see the future. I can tell you what I’ll have for breakfast tomorrow, but that’s only because I’ve been having the same breakfast for nigh unto thirty years. Anything harder than that is just too damn hard.

That’s a long way of saying that we won’t be releasing our new album this Fall, as we had predicted. After painstaking consideration and much rending of garments (which took about five minutes), we decided to push the release to Spring. Why, you may ask? I offer this simple explanation: the quality goes in before the name goes on. That’s right – making a Big Green album is like building a Zenith radio in the nineteen fifties. The only thing missing is the voice of Bill Conrad.

Now, quality is a relative thing, son

Yes, I know … Big Green isn’t known for maintaining stringent quality control standards. That’s not our jam, mothers. No sir – we try to get the feel right. And when that happens, we know it down to the soles of our cheap-ass shoes. If the overall quality has to suffer, so be it, my friend. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them, well …. we have other principles.

Still, even Big Green has minimum quality standards. The mixes from this new album were just skimming the bar, low as it may be, so we need a little more time. For we will serve no wine before its …. oh, god damnit! Not another slogan!

So, anyway … we’re giving it another six months, just for good measure. And in the interim, since you’ve been such good children, I will regale you with the story of one of our early songs. As I mentioned before, our upcoming album has a bunch of kind of serious songs, or Gumby songs, if you will. The song we’ll be dissecting today comes from a previous Big Green era, when all of our songs were strange ….. very strange.

You would have liked Lincoln

Speaking of quality, the song I’m going to explore is called Quality Lincoln, and it’s actually a medley of three smaller songs, one building on the randomness of the other. Matt and I wrote it back in 1990 or 1991, I believe, and I don’t believe we ever performed it in front of an audience or recorded it seriously. (Not sure it’s possible to record such a silly song seriously, but I digress.)

We did a cheap-ass basement recording of it for our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast back in 2016. You can find the full lyric in our lyrics section. Now you can sing along …. but what does it mean?

We don’t pretend to know the meaning of any of our songs, but here’s my take, based on years of close textual reading, tarot cards, astrological deep dives, and so on.

Shouldn’t happen to our quality nation’s president

So the song starts with:

Lincoln suffered from depression, Joe
but it wasn’t because of the war, you know
and it wasn’t because of his son who died
or the wacky behavior of his bride

Okay, picture a suburban couch potato back in the 1980s. Maybe s/he is watching something about Lincoln or reading a magazine article. This is the take-away (and I don’t mean snacks from the local noodle shop) – Lincoln had a rare disease | that turned him into a chimpanzee | They didn’t have the know-how in those days.

This is the nature of pre-internet conspiracy theory – using legacy media to fill in the blanks, connecting things that are both questionable and wholly unrelated to one another.

How do we get into outer space? It’s all about Colonel Smith, played by the character actor Henry Jones in Lost In Space. The narrator of the song sees Jones play this part (that of a cartoon-like antebellum southern colonel) but also sees Jones play a traitorous Civil War commanding officer in The Big Valley – an officer who was part of the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Same actor, same person. We make the connection like this:

I was a Reb in the guise of a Union Colonel
with all those fools
I butchered a town just to prove to them that I was a loyal
Lincoln tool
Then in order to escape my shame
I wandered into outer space
and here I am

The last section is in the voice of Colonel Smith, describing his ridiculous attempt to blow Dr. Smith sky-high with an exploding cream pie, cursing himself as “the Smith that gave all of the Smiths a bad name,” and ending on a rationalization of his conspiracy to kill Lincoln with a nod to MacBeth:

Safe until great Birnam Wood scaled high Dunsinane
He was the Lincoln who gave every king their bad name

Our promise to you

I know I promised new content in the Fall, so now my credibility is in shambles. That said, on behalf of Big Green, I solemnly promise that we will not use tortured metaphors or obscure television characters in any of the songs on our new album. Take that to the bank.

News

A few weeks since we played THAT joint.

Well, summer is almost over and I’m at the point of digging through old files again. I always get to doing that when the days start getting shorter. Last week I burrowed my way through some tax records from the 2000s. (Riveting stuff.) This week, it’s Big Green set lists. Those are perhaps marginally more interesting than old 1040s, but it largely depends on what you like.

For those of you not steeped in Big Green history, here’s the short version: we haven’t played a live gig in decades. Think Beatles post-1966 or XTC post-1982, except without the massive success, cult following, or obvious talent. Picture a handful of underfed guys in their twenties, humping their broken-down amps into some cheap dive. That’s us!

What the ancient tablets teach us

So what about those set lists? First glance, I can’t effing believe we played any of those songs. Of course, we’re talking about the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen-nineties – a time before ubiquitous cell phones, decades prior to the advent of “smart” phones with HD video cameras. The handful of times we put a show on tape, we had to get some freak to bring a VHS camcorder … which were not exactly thick in the ground, my friends.

Thing is, like most bands, we were working to fill out three, sometimes four sets. Fortunately for us, brother Matt has always been a songwriting machine, so we had plenty of material as long as we could convince a guitar player to learn a bunch of strange songs. We played clubs (most of which no longer exist) and colleges (Utica, SUNY PI, Middlebury, MVCC), as well as street fairs, outdoor concerts (usually with other groups), etc.

Strangely, I still have set lists from a couple of these college gigs. Looks like “I Hate Your Face” was always high on the roster. And that effing MVCC gig was an all-original set, no covers. What the ever-loving fuck.

Scoping out the song spectrum

You can tell from these yellowing sheets of poster board that we’ve been all over the map, musically speaking, since the late eighties. Our music runs the full spectrum from extremely silly to kind of serious. Here’s how I map it out in my own unscientific manner:

  • 1987 – 1993 Songs: Silly to Extra Silly
  • 2000 Years To Christmas (1999): Fairly Silly to Silly
  • International House (2008): Mostly Serious (except for Volcano Man)
  • Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013): Very, Very Silly

Now, with our upcoming album (still being mixed, by the way), we’re back to wearing the serious pants again. No big laugh riot on this sucker, folks … unless you’re laughing AT us. Then it’s funny as all hell.

Silly is just around the corner

For those of you who prefer the silly Big Green, fear not – we have an enormous trunk full of Ned Trek songs, all produced and waiting for remix. And trust me, there’s some silly-ass shit in that trunk. And that’s not to mention the older material we’ve recorded and never released.

So, good news / bad news: if you like the silly stuff, there’s more coming. If you hate it, well … lookout … there’s more coming.

TBT: That old used to be

You’ve probably heard them already, but here are a few selections from our stage set back in the goofball early nineties: