Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

Celebrating a little early this time.

2000 Years to Christmas

Man, it has been a long time. But not THAT long. Still, I forgot how the hell that last song ended. And track number seven I don’t remember doing at all! My head is like a cotton swab. Mother of pearl.

Hi, everybody. Now, I don’t want to create the impression that Big Green is one of those old man groups that just reflects back on their own sorry history. That said, I was archiving some old recordings this week. As it happens, that’s what bands sometimes do when they … I don’t know … reach a certain age. I DON’T WANT TO DISCUSS IT.

Whoops – sorry. Anyway, got the chance to listen back to some stuff and it occurred to me that our second album, International House, is nearing a kind of significant anniversary. Quite a coincidence, that.

What’s the coincidence, Joe?

Well, I’m gonna tell you. As you will see in my Political Rant this week, this is also the twentieth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Who can forget those heady days back in the early 2000s, when the ground was still smoking from 9/11 and W. Bush was heating up the pork and beans, getting ready to watch some good bomb-dropping? I know I can’t (though fuck knows I’ve tried).

The coincidence is this: it is also the 14th anniversary of International House, which included a number of songs that bear on the early war on terror. The one I kept thinking of today was Enter the Mind, a song Matt wrote about the CIA black sites. Now, some might say that 14 is not a significant anniversary. I beg to differ! I’ll have you know that 14 is the ivory anniversary … or is it the one when you give your spouse the box set of Electric Light Orchestra’s greatest hits? Always get those mixed up. (They’re both the same color, you see.)

A fitting observance. Or not.

There are a lot of ways we could observe this ivory anniversary of International House. We might, for instance, move into a house and out of this drafty abandoned mill. We might throw stones into the middle of the street and hope that passing baptist ministers happen upon them. Or we could, I don’t know, put the whole damn album on YouTube. Either way, we could do something other than talk about it.

Frankly, I’m not a big fan of promoting old product. International House was our album-length retrospective on the W. Bush years. Some of the shit we were complaining about back then is still in effect today. But it’s still a period piece, if you will. We wanted an exclamation point on that sucker, not a period, but there you go.

There’s a place in time

Hey, look – we all have history. We all came from somewhere and are headed somewhere else. Maybe those two somewheres are the same-wheres – who knows? The way I see it, if we concentrate on the present long enough, it will be the past. And if we turn our eyes to the future, that future will soon be the present. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

And so, I’ll listen to more old recordings this week. You gotta know where you’ve been before you work out where you’re going. Had enough of cliches? There’s more where that came from!

Usual Rubbish

Getting a little love on the internets

2000 Years to Christmas

I think you ought to run those numbers again, man. Seriously. I thought you were a statistician. You’re not? I thought every robot was a statistician! Learn something new every day, even in statistics.

Hey howdy, folks! Happy new year from your favorite band in the universe. And while we’re at it, happy new year from us, Big Green, the band you’ve likely never heard of. Chances are good you’ve never seen us perform or listened to our songs or picked up one of our CDs. Nothing wrong with that, of course – you’re just moving with the majority. (Go against the herd, man!)

Running with the numbers

I’ve called upon the small coterie of experts in our midst, namely, Mitch Macaphee and his greatest invention (or not), Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to help increase our internet plays a bit. My assumption is that they know all about the internets. One way or the other, they can hardly do worse than we have ourselves.

Take our recent nano concerts (please). The highest number of plays we’ve gotten was 25 on one of the songs; most are in the teens or single digits. Piss poor by any standard. Now, the pretentious artist in me says that we make music for its own sake, not for the approval of the audience. But that artist in me still likes to eat. And frankly he’s not paying rent on the space he’s occupying. I think anyone can see that that’s not fair.

Hit factory, shit factory

Leave us face it, Big Green is not a titan among indie bands. The Big Green video with the highest number of plays is our live version of I Hate Your Face, which comes in at a whopping 688 views. Not exactly setting any land speed records there, my friends. Our single from 2012, One Small Step, has been viewed 219 times on YouTube as of this writing. Again … not earth shaking.

Hey, look .... there's a blip over there in December.

In particular, our song Pagan Christmas, off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, gets a bunch of plays around the holidays via streaming services, etc. By “a bunch,” I mean hundreds. Of course, via the music streaming services we get maybe 700 song plays a year. Somebody in Romania listened to our asses. How they found them with both hands I couldn’t tell you.

Happen upon us sometime

Hey, you know what they say about marketing on the internet. You don’t? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not some kind of marketing expert or something. What I do know is that, in this capitalist paradise known as digital sales, putting something on the web without paid promotion is like tossing something into the street and hoping someone happens upon it.

You know, that sounds like a good job for Marvin. HEY MARVIN – TAKE THIS BOX OF DISCS AND START TOSSING THEM AROUND RANDOMLY. THERE’S A GOOD FELLOW.

Usual Rubbish

Have a little nano with your Christmas Concert

2000 Years to Christmas

Have we reached a thousand plays yet? Hmmmm. How about a hundred? No? Right. Hit refresh again. There must be something wrong with that goddamn thing. Stupid YouTube!

Hello, friends. Hope you had a wonderful holiday week. Bet you’re wondering what we’ve been up to. No? Well, I’ll just tell you anyway. Nothing you didn’t already know – that’s the short answer. The long answer is I split a gut getting that nano-Christmas concert done and posted, and it looks like YOU haven’t even seen it yet!

Okay, so a lot of people (a.k.a. Anti-Lincoln) have asked me why we call this a nano-concert. Simple, my dear friend: it’s just my sorry ass on the view screen. That’s it – no bass player, no backup singers, no drums, only me and my distressed-looking Martin, which (I hasten to add) is not an instrument I ordinarily play on gigs. Until now.

A measured response to sloth

I know what you’re thinking. Who in their right mind would spend their entire holiday season break recording and posting a bogus solo concert? This dude over here, man. Sure, I could have done the same as everyone else – drink to excess, swerve my way back home and drop onto the mattress, dead until morning. But that’s not my way. I prefer a much more measured approach to unconsciousness.

Still, the simple fact is that we as a band need to put out more output. (We also need to take in more intake, but that’s another matter.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was an early advocate of the nano-Concert, and so I proceeded with it. Frankly, my expectations were pretty low regarding audience. And I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

Six of one and a quarter-dozen of the other

Now, I think the hardest part of the nano-concert was deciding which songs to do. It was a Christmas concert, so that narrowed it down a little. Then I had to restrict my list to songs I could reasonably play on guitar, which is fewer still. When it came to actually choosing the numbers, I was all worn out from the first two exercises. (See sloth, above.)

They always said I lack focus, and now I know what they meant.

In the end, I picked two songs from Matt’s 1990 Christmas tape, two songs from his 1991 tape, two songs from 1994, and two from Ned Trek. Some of these songs also appeared on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. You can also hear one of them on our live EP, Big Green Live from Neptune – namely Merry Christmas, Jane, which I played as a last-minute encore.

Take five

The fact is, Matt wrote so many damn Christmas songs, it would take me five years to play them back to back. And five years is a long time where I come from. Not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but I try not to be overly ambitious in my endeavors. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed our Nano Christmas Concert 2021, and that your holiday season has not been a total dumpster fire. (It it has, tell me all about it!)