Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

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.)

Usual Rubbish

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.

Usual Rubbish

Xmas again.

2000 Years to Christmas

I don’t know. Why don’t we just toss it out into the street and see if anyone happens upon it? Wait … that was our original marketing strategy? Did it work? Huh. I thought not. Oh, well … maybe twice is the charm.

Oh, hi, silent majority of Americans who read this blog on a regular basis. I didn’t recognize you at first with that mask on. You just caught us in the middle of a marketing strategy session – we’re trying to shift more physical and digital copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, a full twenty years after its release. (I’m sure you’ve noticed the banner. Yeah, that was us that put that there.) We’ve got discs stacked in the basement of the hammer mill, discs serving as ashtrays and drink coasters, discs nailed to the walls of the bathroom in a psychedelic mirror-room kind of effect – freaky! We’ve handed them out, tossed them out, used them as Frisbees, table hockey pucks, sacred amulets, etc. Everything but sold them. Yes, as capitalists, we’re abject failures. We’re the worst robber barons ever!

Well, it’s time to embrace our failure and make it our own. Now that it’s aged a solid two decades and made its way into countless music services, we’ve finally gotten around to posting 2000 Years To Christmas on YouTube. I’ve handed the task off to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and he has assured me that he will upload the songs in a timely fashion. Of course, his wifi connection is a little wonky, and we can’t afford decent internet around this joint, so we have to rely on him rolling on his gimbals past the public library so that he can tap into their free wifi long enough to send another music video skyward. That necessarily involves circling the library a few times, maybe five, maybe seven for the longer songs. Eventually, the librarian comes running out of the building, swinging a yardstick at Marvin and telling him to get the hell out. I’ve programmed Marvin to comply, so he does so … then comes back later. (I programmed that into him, too.)

He's dead, Lincoln. And he's fictional!

Is this a reasonable strategy for a band in this era of COVID lockdown? Hell, I don’t know. Are there any reasonable strategies? We’re just pushing shit out there, hoping someone hears it and gets some enjoyment out of it. Or not. Either way, putting an album on YouTube is the functional equivalent of dropping it in the middle of the street and hoping someone happens upon it. So you could say we’ve been consistent from the get-go with this album.

I know some of my colleagues disagree with this approach. “Get a manager”, they holler, “like that blonde guy on the Partridge Family!” “I think he’s dead,” I’ll respond, but they are undeterred. “Did you try to call him,” they say. “Did you send him a postcard? His name is Reuben Kincaid!” Hoo man. I guess I’ll have to write that postcard if I ever want to get anti-matter Lincoln off my back. I just wish to hell someone would tear him away from his classic TV channel.