Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Water under the bridge.

Where’s the list? Damned if I know. It’s somewhere in the forge room, I think, under a mountain of iron filings. Well, you TOLD me to file it! Jesus.

Yeah, looks like I blew it again. So what’s new? We were compiling a list of Big Green songs we’ve written and at least cursorily recorded since our last CD release – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – some six years ago. Lot of water gone under the bridge since then, and a lot of music along with it. It’s almost like there was a little boat all loaded down with songs, and the water carried it under the bridge. Along with, well, a lot more water. Or something like that.

Of course, this is a list of all of the songs we’ve written and recorded for the Ned Trek portion of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. There are about 70 or 80 of them, all tolled. So if we decide to release another album, it will either (a) have 70 or 80 songs on it, or (b) be the product of a sane mind. Or maybe it’s two or even three albums. After all, it’s been six years, and before that it had been another five years, and before that, like, nine years. Yeah, we’re slow …. slower than most bands. But hey … most bands don’t have a personal robot assistant (Marvin) or a mad science advisor (Mitch Macaphee). If they did, well, recording albums would take a hell of a lot longer.

Right, but ... which one?

Now that I think of it, we almost never mark the anniversary of CD releases. Last year was the 10 year anniversary of International House, our second album, and no celebration, no party streamers, no commemorative live performances, no fireworks, no flagrant branding exercises hoping to chew the last dollars off of its rotting carcass. We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, and my guess is that we will do TWICE as much celebrating as we did for International House. At least that. Hell, I still have signed CDs from the tenth anniversary of 2000 Years to Christmas. Want one? Post a comment to this post or email us and we’ll see what we can do.

Till then, I had better get started on that pile of filings. Or that file of pilings.

Usual Rubbish

New year, old gear.

Damn it. What the hell is up with this amp, Mitch? It’s ticking like a bomb. You didn’t, um … turn my amp into a bomb, did you? Did you?

Och, the challenges we face! And this hammer mill in the Winter, full as cold as a north wind blowing across Loch Lomond.  What the … look at me! I’ve got foreign accent syndrome, the Scottish variety. How the hell did that happen? Where’s the justice, damn it? And I don’t mean the town justice. I know right where that dude is. Now … where was I … ?

Oh, right. Let me say up front – and this won’t be surprising to longtime followers of Big Green – that this band has always been technologically challenged. Back in the day (1980s and ’90s) it was because we had no money. Our PA was held together with duct tape. We used so much of the stuff that there was none left to plug the holes in our duct work. Pretty soon we had to start calling it gaffer tape so that the ducts wouldn’t feel left out. But then the gaffers started to complain. For chrissake, we didn’t even have any gaffers, and there they were, complaining about the freaking tape!

Blessed warmth.Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, now a classic of the genre (the genre being poor-selling albums). But still, our technological infrastructure was lacking. I remember us clustered around a single mic, warming our hands over a moth-eaten tube head, and fashioning CD packages out of bits of cardboard. Working our fingers to the bone!

So yes … in comparison to those difficult days, our current challenges seem light indeed. Nonetheless, it’s hard to make music in the modern era with 20th century instrumentation. Sure, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can sit in on a couple of instruments from time to time, but it’s hard to think of him as true automation. And without automation, you need many iterations of each take. That’s why our recording process is so damn slow …. we do it nice because we do it twice. Even thrice. Or fice.

Then there’s the exploding amps. That slows things down a bit, too.

Usual Rubbish

Holiday table.

It can’t be morning yet, right? It’s still freaking dark outside. What? Oh, right. My night mask. I’ll just pull it off and … OH MY GOD … IT’S MORNING!

Well, that’s my revelation for today. What have you got? Hope you’re having a great holiday season, whether or not you celebrate any of the various commemorative feast-days that fall sometime around now. Like Trump in the White House, we’ve been staked out here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York (a.k.a. that farm upstate that every alt band goes to eventually) waiting for someone to tell us it’s safe to venture outside without proper shoes. That’s right – our shoes are a disgrace, my friends. No bones about it. And when you’ve got substandard shoes, Spring can’t come soon enough.

And while we’ve been cooped up in this drafty old barn, we’ve tried to busy ourselves with some low-budget Kringle-ing, sending out some old recordings via social media to our gaggle of patient friends, attempting to make up for the fact that we have nothing new finished … our latest batch is still in the oven, barely even browning at this point. Slow going, to be sure. Fortunately, we have an archive to keep us warm – the fruit of more than 30 years’ effort in the vineyards of no-budget songwriting, gigging, and music production. We’ve got everything from 1/4 inch reel to cassette to DAT tape to hard drives packed with ramblings, false starts, and even some complete songs. You never know what we’ll toss up next.

Okay, Marvin ... What have we got?Or maybe you will. Either way, that’s what we’re dropping on the holiday table under the tree. For a sampling, check our Twitter feed or visit our Soundcloud page and click play on any random upload. It is a mixed bag, I will admit, curated by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a tin ear … actually, two tin ears and an aluminum voicebox.  Our posts thus far have been mostly Christmas themed selections, including outtakes from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and some live takes previously featured on our YouTube page or on our Live from Neptune EP.  These are all full-rez .wav files, and a couple of the live tracks have been remastered, so give it a listen and let me know how much they suck … I mean, what you think.

Whoa, is that the time? Back to bed with me!