Tag Archives: 1993 video

Usual Rubbish

About your face.

I don’t know. Do you really think it’s that insulting? Not sure why anyone would take it personally, frankly. Unless, of course … they have a particularly hate-able face. A hate-friendly face, if you will. Oh, well.

Yeah, here we are, in the midst of one of our summertime projects. Always something to do here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, even if that something is virtually nothing. You could say this entire blog – all 17 years of it – amount to virtual nothingness, am I right? In any case … we’re just hashing out what the rest of the season is going to look like. We’ve got some archival material yet to go through; the kind of stuff that accumulates over three decades of playing and writing and recording together. A mountain of … something. Give it a listen, then you pick the descriptor.

This week’s “Wayback Wednesday” release was another selection off of our 1993 video demo – just us playing our set list live in front of a madman’s camera. We posted Matt’s song “I Hate Your Face“, the first verses of which goes like this:

God, I hate your convulsive face
Four, sixteen, a million, your annoying face
has got me sick and I’ve got to go

God, I made a big mistake
Eight sixty-four, a million, a huge mistake
when I parked it here
Did I stay too long? You know I stayed here far too long
Back in the day

Teenage angst? No sir. He wasn’t a teenager when he wrote it, for one thing. I won’t speak for Matt, but it always felt to me like a parody-punk song, complete with faux-teenage angst. By the way … this isn’t about YOUR face. Just putting that out there. It’s another face entirely, folks.

What’s left? Well, from the video, there’s a bunch of cover songs, a couple of which we may be able to get away with posting. (Expect pop-up ads.) We also have a lot of audio content – a bunch of live songs, some even listenable. We also have a handful of studio numbers that we can put out.

I know, I know … stop talking, start posting. Right, right.

Usual Rubbish

Sensory man.

Did you feel that? No? Okay, check. How about that? Really. Right, then. Check again. Now let’s try the pointed stick. You don’t want to do it? Well, aren’t you the sensitive one.

Yes, we’re back. I’m just interrogating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to get some idea of the degree to which his primitive analog circuitry has the capability to emulate human emotions and mock the various senses we take for granted. So far, it’s not going very well. His brass exterior seems impervious to brillo pads, water, even fire. Not sure about pointed sticks – that may be his Achilles’ heal. (I guess I could wait until he’s feigning sleep, then try it on his heel.)

Why am I wasting my time in such a manner? Well, while I’m waiting for Matt to get here and start recording the next episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, I am consuming myself with summer projects, some of which I’ve blogged about over the past few weeks. Annoying Marvin is one, though it’s hardly just a summer project. Still, this is kind of a pointed annoyance, and not just because it involves pointed sticks. You see, as part of one of my OTHER summer projects, I just posted on our YouTube Channel another live performance video from Big Green’s 1993 demo. This song, “Sensory Man”, is another Matt number – his exploration of the robot experience via Lost In Space. We’re talking Robot B-9 here, people. You know, that does not compute. Danger, Will Robinson. Etc.

Aren't you the seismic man?As I think I mentioned before, we don’t have a lot of video footage of us playing live, and even less of us playing our own songs. This demo included a lot of covers – all stuff we liked playing. So it’s kind of a freeze-dried sample of our set list from the 80s and 90s. We’ve got three takes of “Sensory Man”, as well as a rehearsal sequence on that song, a couple of takes of “I Hate Your Face”, and one of “Why Not Call It George?” – that’s it for our songs. That is, unless someone out there has video of us playing at Middlebury College or SUNYIT, when we opened for Bloodline. Anybody? Thought not.

Leave us face it – Big Green’s earthly performance faze was relatively brief. Most of our archival material is from a time before Big Green …. a time when, dare I say it, beasts of every size and description roamed the Earth. The scarier ones were club owners. But then you knew that. (If you own a club, you’re probably a cave man. Am I right?)

Usual Rubbish

Old continent, new name.

A little higher. Little more. That’s it. Right, now … slowly lower the winch. That’s got it. Okay, a little too fast. Too fast. I said TOO FAST! Oh, Jesus. Right … order another banner. No wonder I never get anything done.

Oh, hello. Forgive me if I always seem surprised when you come along. I’m inclined to forget about the blogging version of the “fourth wall” and the fact that others can see what the hell I’m doing (or not doing). Today you’ve caught me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in the midst of constructing Big Green’s new YouTube Channel, hot off the presses. You see, for the longest time we’ve been pointing our listeners/readers/browsers, whatever, to my personal YouTube channel, which has over the last few years become choked with political content, obscure linguistics and philosophy of mind lectures, comedic bullshit, and so on. It finally dawned on my dim little brain that the band needed its own space for video content, and hey presto – a summer project was born.

Why not, indeed?

The timing of our YouTube launch is not entirely an accident. As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been trawling through old tapes, discs, etc., listening to and watching recordings of performances from our terrestrial live performance days back in the 1990s. Over the past few weeks, I cut up a video demo we recorded back in March of 1993 with the guitarist we worked with at that time, the amazing Jeremy Shaw. The video is standard def, 4:3, and a little strange. We taped these performances in a practice room somewhere in Utica – as I recall it was a loft-like space within a couple of blocks of the Police Department headquarters. (Could explain why we look so polite.)

There are some cheesy visual effects inserted at the time of the recording – basically presets in the camera our videographer was using. (The videographer was a dude named Angel whom we met through a mutual friend.) They add a certain trippyness to the whole business, but no matter. Hilariously, the rehearsal space was a typical rock band man-cave environment circa 1993, with cheesecake posters on the walls and overstuffed ashtrays. (Just behind my illustrious brother you’ll notice the incongruous sight of some babe posing for the camera.)