Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

Marvin’s Picks.

2000 Years to Christmas

Any sales this week? Huh. Didn’t think so. That album is a goddamn drug on the market. Which is a strange saying, as drugs sell pretty well, generally speaking …. much better than our albums. Damned capitalism!

Well, here we are, my friends. Your friends and comrades in Big Green, frittering away our time in this abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, dreaming of the days when we had things to eat other than fritters. (Actually, fritters are pretty economical, if you know how to make them. Two words: saw dust.) We were having our weekly planning meeting, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was delivering the quarterly sales report. How did it go? Well, the good news first – there were, indeed, sales. And yes, there was revenue. Though the amounts were so infinitesimal that they can neither be accurately calculated in natural numbers nor seen with the naked eye. (I tried clothing my eyes, but I still couldn’t see anything.)

Now, I know what you’re going to say: It’s not Marvin’s fault that sales of Big Green music have fallen through the crust of the earth. My response to that is simply … you’re letting him off too easy. We assigned Marvin the role of sales manager specifically so that he could take the blame for our continuing commercial failure. That may seem unfair, but he, being an automaton, does not grasp the concept of fairness. He is programmed for mirth and chagrin, but not that special feeling of annoyance and offense you get when someone is hurling insults at you and treating you unfairly. It just rolls off of him like … well … like insults off of a brass automaton. His primary contribution to the Big Green enterprise is to keep us from yelling at one another for our failings. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I find your numbers unconvincing. HarrUMPH!

Once in a while Marvin comes up with a suggestion worth more than a moment’s consideration. Recently he opined that we should set up a Patreon site and sell our songs and other junk to whomever. We hemmed and hawed over that for a while (Matt did most of the haw-ing), then decided to table it for the time being. What the hell are we going to sell, right? Baked goods, for crying out loud? Sure, we have songs. We have buttons. We have, uh … discs. Some of them even have music on them. I think we’ve got some guitar picks lying around. Though some of them have been claimed by Marvin – he uses them as shims when a contact goes wonky somewhere in his electronics bay. I suppose we could run a Patreon promotion – Marvin’s Picks: five for a buck. Or maybe not.

Damn. Capitalism is hard, man.

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

What the .... ?

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!

Usual Rubbish

Time off.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hey … did I mention we had a special going? I did? Okay. Well … I won’t mention it again. Just pretend I didn’t say anything. Right, then …. night night.

Oh, hi. Just got off the phone with our manager. Yes, that’s right. It may surprise some of you to know that Big Green has management. Sure, it doesn’t look like we do from the outside. This band has always had a certain quality of randomness to it …. or perhaps an uncertain quality of randomness. Now, I’m not suggesting that that’s some kind of clever management ploy meant to drive buzz and idle speculation about the band …. what will they do next? Nah. It’s more that we simply have the worst management in the history of the music business, hands down.

Now, I don’t mean to sound overly critical. It’s just that we haven’t had a gig in the United States – yay, on the planet Earth, even – in more than 25 years. Our records go nowhere, unless it’s by accident (like our song Volcano Man, which is benefiting from a prolonged case of mistaken identity.). No hits. Not even any misses. Our three albums have performed as what used to be called “drugs on the market”, wanting for promotional investment in addition to being, well, strange. This is the kind of management that can be really discouraging, you know? Then there was the time he told us to wear matching orange Chuck Taylor high tops. God, those things looked stupid … especially on Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t even have feet.

Big Green has always had this kind of problem with management, labels (like Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.), hangers-on, that sort of thing. Back when we were kids, we had management for a brief time that booked us around the Albany, NY area. Our equipment was trash. I had a broken down Fender Rhodes piano, our PA was from hell – mixed components patched together in a haphazard fashion; a 100-watt QSC amp powering two Cerwin Vega cabinets … and belching smoke while it did it. We also had two Shure tower speakers, which were hands down the worst PA invention since the megaphone Rudy Vallee used to sing through. One time they booked us and another band to play alternate sets, except they had an actual PA system, pumping out a wall of sound while we were soldering patch cords on stage. It was like Loverboy vs. junior high electronics shop class.

So, yeah …. in retrospect, I guess our current management isn’t that bad. I’d rather take all this forced time off than play dozens more of those really lame gigs we used to play, back in the day.