Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

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!)

Usual Rubbish

‘Tis the season to be somewhere else entirely

2000 Years to Christmas

No, I didn’t add a sousaphone. I don’t play the freaking sousaphone. I told you, I’m the only one playing. Try listening to what I say, instead of just watching for my mouth to stop moving so you can start talking again. Geez.

Hello out there. Hope all is well with you during this festive time of year. Sometimes festivities can be downright depressing. Oh, sure – there are gaudy Christmas miracles everywhere you look these days. Inflatable snowmen, bloated Santas, flashing lights of every size and color. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) felt compelled to festoon the exterior of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Most sentient beings would say he fell short, but at least he tried.

Christmas cracker concert

Okay, so, as you know, I talked myself into doing a nano concert earlier this year, and thus far the reviews have been … well …. invisible. Audience missing, presumed entertained. Well, that was so encouraging that I decided to do a special Christmas nano concert this year – a Nano Christmas, if you will, in which I would render selections from our sizeable holiday songbook. I can hear the bots applauding already.

So, once again, I’m performing solo for a cheap tablet camera, strumming an instrument I’ve never been able to master, hollering like a crazed chimp. Doesn’t that sound like Christmas? It is our gift to you, dear reader/listener. Not a thing of great value. Not a sausage, though there are such things. An offering like those proffered in days of old. No, I’m not talking about the magi. (Not THAT old!) I mean the days of Matt making Christmas tapes and handing them out to all and sundry. This is the digital interwebs version of that.

Big Green Nano Christmas Concert

Going half way

We don’t observe a lot of traditions. No fish on Christmas eve. No boxing day. No dead carcass of an evergreen tree decaying in the living room. We are non traditional, and that’s why you love us. Of course, we did a whole album of Christmas songs – not the familiar numbers, as you know, but home-made jobs, recorded in the basement, pressed, packaged, shipped, unloaded, and … well … brought back down the basement.

And yes, I know there are twelve days of Christmas. Feels more like twelve hundred, but I digress. Thing is, we’re running on fumes here at the hammer mill. So yes, we will be posting stuff over the holidays. But we can’t afford twelve days of that shit, so we’ll do six. Or seven. No more than seven. But probably six, really.

Hey, half a loaf can still make a sandwich or two, right? We may be starting with the lords a-leaping, but that doesn’t matter, man. It’s the thought that counts.

Watch for those holiday posts on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed. And have a very happy holiday week, people.

Usual Rubbish

The worst of all possible universes

2000 Years to Christmas

Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year.

Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way.

Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer

Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the Christmas iceberg here in Big Green land. There’s plenty more where those came from. You’ll see!

Some of those songs are from Matt’s early period, when he recorded Christmas songs on his 4-track cassette deck and distributed them as low-rent, labor-intensive gifts. And then there are some songs from the Ned Trek period, which covers the second half of the 2010s and, technically, is still underway. Many songs in this latter group feature funny voices and bizarre ass lyrics. Oh, and many in the former group, as well.

All about the wormhole

I wish I could say that everyone is looking forward to the holiday season. Fact is, I squat with a bunch of sad sacks. Take Mitch Macaphee (please!). Our Mad Science advisor has spent the past three weeks laughing up his sleeve at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for that is simple – Mitch has been conjuring wormholes into alternate universes since long before Zuck was a tike. The notion of someone creating a fake universe seems hilariously redundant to him.

Okay, so here’s my question: what if Mitch finds out you can make money at that Zuck scam? Will he borrow Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine and rip open the fabric of space/time? Will he then charge punters fifty bucks a head to step through and shake hands with purple protozoa-men from the fourth dimension? And last, but perhaps most importantly, will he share the proceeds with us? THAT’s what keeps ME up at night.

So, is this your answer to the Metaverse?

The reason for the seizin’

In any case, our Christmas season is starting out like all the rest of them have: fighting off the bailiffs. As you know, we’ve been squatting in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of two decades (or, perhaps, the worst part). The local authorities, bless their hearts, have been trying to evict us for most of that time. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without an eviction notice!

Thus far, we have let our nasty upstairs neighbors answer the door when the cops come calling. Frankly, I think they’ve forgotten we still live down here. And truth be told, I am in no mood to remind them.