Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Old Stock.

2000 Years to Christmas

You’ve forgotten it again? Damn it, man! I hope you realize what this means. No, I mean, I really hope so … because I haven’t any idea what this means. Not a rhetorical question at all.

Oh, hey, everybody. I may be the only upstate New Yorker who says “hey” when he means “hi”. Or possibly not. In any case, hope all is well with you out there, beyond the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. The colder months are coming on up here in the great north country, and we’re still looking for things to burn for warmth. We ran out of old hammer handles years ago. Then went the stair railings. Next, we pulled up the Rochester floors in the old executive offices, just above the shop, and tossed them into the fireplace. Fuel got kind of scarce after that – I personally think it was a mistake to burn the fireplace mantel in the fireplace. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Last week we were giving capitalism just one more try. Well, it didn’t work out, my friends. In a world that demands success, all we can offer is failure. But we’re offering it on splendid terms – no money down. In fact, buy now and you pay nothing for six full weeks! Oops. Forgot myself. Yeah, we don’t have a lot of new products to offer the world, just some old stock in the form of about 800 copies of our first album, 250 copies of our second album, and maybe 20 copies of our third. (It’s like we learned something as we went along.) I’m sitting on them now as I write this, and let me tell you … they make lousy furniture.

Chuck another log in there. Or something.

Hey … we’ll get through. We always do. Last year, when things got tight, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to find a day job. He didn’t have a lot of experience, but he has that kind of honest, open face that people tend to trust, and somebody offered him an entry level position at a hot dog stand. Location? Wherever he pushed it. Three steps down from a food truck – maybe four – but food service none the less. I suppose if we find ourselves in a bind again this year, I can toss a chef’s hat on his brass noggin and see if he can’t get a job as a line cook in some space-themed eatery that doesn’t exist. (This IS upstate New York, for crying out loud.)

What’s that, Marvin? No. No, we can’t burn our CDs. The reason is simple – they’re more toxic when they’re on fire than when they’re being played on your stereo. Now, where’s that chef’s hat?

Old stock.

2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Is that what it actually sounded like? Don’t remember that at all. That’s probably down to drug use, I guess. Like all those Dead concerts I never went to. (At least I don’t remember going to any.)

Hello and welcome to another chapter of Archive Summer, with your host, Joe of Big Green. (Kind of a medieval sounding name, right? I am Cleetus of Taberg!) As I mentioned in previous posts, there’s precious little for band members to do during this time of COVID-19 social isolation, unless you’re into performing online … and have a decent internet connection. We could try to do streaming performances, but it would sound like one of those old novelty greeting cards that plays a tinny little loop of “Happy Birthday” when you open it. (Except we would NEVER play Happy Birthday. Copyright, you see …. those fuckers are litigious as hell! In fact, I shouldn’t even say the name of that song, let alone play it.)

You wouldn’t think that, living in an abandoned hammer mill, we would have much of an archive, but that’s where you’re wrong. DEAD WRONG. God no, we carry every piece of flotsam and jetsam from our previous lives along with us, like traveling hoarders. None of it’s worth anything, of course (we hocked all of that years ago), just sentimental value … with the emphasis on mental. The fact is, when you’ve been a “recording” group as long as we have, you tend to have a lot of recordings lying around. Some of them go back to the 1970s, but those are pretty rough and, well … just never mind about those. They’re a bit like those tight-fitting velour shirts dudes used to wear back then – not something you want to advertise. Like most bands, we started life badly imitating people we liked, then started to piece together the ad-hoc approach to music that Big Green is now known for. (To the extent that we’re known, of course.)

Uh, Marvin ... this is a microwave. The DA-88 is downstairs.

Our back catalog includes a mountain of stuff. Super early songs recorded straight to stereo on cassette machines and beat-up living room reel-to-reels. Faux “multi-track” recordings pieced together by bouncing tracks from one cheap recorder to another. A lot of Matt songs recorded on his first four-track cassette deck and subsequent similar machines – there are literally more than a hundred of these. Then we got an 8-track Tascam DA-88 deck in 1995, and we recorded 2000 Years To Christmas on that, among other things. (I’ve got some cassette submixes of unfinished songs from that system). In 2001 we moved to a Roland VS-2416 deck, which we used to make International House and most of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. For the last few years, we’ve been using Cubase Artist to record the Ned Trek songs, most of which you can hear on our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast (now on hiatus) or our Ned Trek podcast. Needless to say, there’s a ton of unreleased material, and I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant), trawling through all of it, looking for, I don’t know, caramels hidden in piles of shit. (Sounds delicious!)

Hey, it’s summer, right? We’ll start posting stuff again soon … but for now, another mint julep. (That’s a drink, Jim.)

Archive fever.

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, I’ve got the entire album up on YouTube. Now what do we do? Are we famous yet? Famous as Amos (without the cookies, of course)? No? Thought not. Nothing on the applause-o-meter. Dung!

Well, friends, life is full of disappointments. Like the other day, I had dis appointment with my doctor, see? And I had to go and break it, see? (Not the appointment … the doctor’s bowling trophy. It was offensive to me.) Perhaps you yourself are disappointed to see me once again revert to my cheap imitation of a forties guy, like the voices we inserted into some of our Ned Trek songs. If so, you know what it’s like not to have things your own way. Hey, man … I’ve been there. And it looks like we’re going there again. Our new 2000 Years To Christmas playlist has been up for days, and we’ve seen very few plays. What the hell, man … it’s free! Play the damn record!

Ouch, okay … that was a little harsh. Sorry. I imagine you’re disappointed in me again. (Second time in as many paragraphs.) Perhaps I should try more gentle persuasion. Come on, people now … smile on your brother! Everybody get together, and play the goddamn record right now! Whoops, that went south. Well, how bout if I embed the album right in this here blog post – like so:

There we go. Just press the nice, candy-like “play” button, right smack in the middle of the screen. Do it now!

Hoo-man. Marketing is hard work. I think I’ll take the rest of this blog post off. The fact is, I’ve been taking a lot of time off this summer. As most musicians know, this kind of time off is not taken by choice. There’s no bloody place to play practically anywhere, thanks to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and most musicians have been forced to do their performing on line. Me, I’ve been doing what I usually do in the middle of the summer – sorting through the archives, looking for little bits of hidden treasure (or trash, as the case may be). With the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I’ve turned up a few interesting fragments of our past lives. Some old notebooks filled with hastily scribbled lyrics and song lists. A cache of Big Green logo buttons, designed by friend of the band, author/photographer Leif Zurmuhlen. And of course, some old recordings rescued from cassette tapes.

Cuts from our first bootleg cassette compilation, ca. 1983

We played a lot of covers, man! Back in the pre-Big Green days (nominally, at least), before the internet was invented, our set list was a raft of kind of tired covers, some weird stuff, and a sprinkling of original numbers, mostly Matt’s songs but a few of mine as well, and a handful of Tim Walsh numbers (Tim was our first guitarist who, sadly, passed away a few years ago.) Phil Ross was our drummer at the time. The recordings are rough – a couple of mics plugged into a stereo audio cassette machine, that was about it. It’s the kind of thing only a mother could love, so I don’t typically share them. (If you’re dying to hear some examples of us murdering a Jimi Hendrix song, let me know and I’ll get something to you.)

There, see? Now I’m completely relaxed. Just thinking about archive diving puts me in a good mood.