Here’s a quick update on what’s happening with Big Green: Not Much. At least not yet. Yes, the rumors are true, we are working on a new project – our first album since the release of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick ten years ago (to almost universal condemnation). You’ll be glad to know that we are committed to meeting and even exceeding the high standards we set with that album. You heard it here first.
While you’re waiting for the new album to surface, we will continue posting random bits from the archives, including some previously unreleased holiday recordings. So keep one eye on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@biggreenband) and one eye on the road. If you have a third eye, reserve that one for gazing into the eternal void.
Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!
Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.
Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.
One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!
Looks pretty moribund to me. Did you kick the tires? Here – take the ignition key and give it a few cranks. Nothing? Right. This will be harder than I thought.
Hey, hello. Welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in central New York state, an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way place if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Still in the midst of an archive summer – not that much of a novelty around this place. Seems like every summer I find myself diving through boxes and bins of old tapes, moth-eaten notebooks, forgotten scraps of paper, and old biscuit tins filled with souvenirs of a bygone age. You know what they say about idle hands. Don’t you? Hell, I don’t know what they say. I was hoping you’d tell me. Something like, idle hands build false … idols. Who knows?
Actually, it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who reminded me that we haven’t posted an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, in over seven months. Something of an oversight, I’d say. Like most musicians in these pandemic times, I chalk it up to COVID-19, but that’s not really the reason. You know the story, right? Just too much other shit to do. Anyway, Marvin has talked me into reviving the podcast, and not a moment too soon. The RSS feed was getting too rusty to send anything over. If we’d waited another month, it would have seized up entirely. We have blown the whole impulse stack trying to start it up again. Sure, we could have mixed the matter and antimatter cold, but it’s never been done. How’s that for a reason?
As some of you know, I have, in fact, started yet another podcast – it’s called Strange Sound, and it’s a long-running political rant … something like the audio version of my, well … political rants. Anyway, that soaked up some of my time and energy. Of course, there’s ongoing maintenance of the hammer mill. Not that I actually do any of it, but it is something that’s happening, and it does take time. (Just not mine.) Then there are local relationships to keep up. You can’t overstate the importance of this – If we don’t work our butts off to mollify our neighbors, they’re likely to come after us with pruning hooks. Have you ever been pruned by an angry neighbor? One time is enough, believe me. Finally, the hammer mill’s roof is in terrible shape, and I have to spend practically every rainy day changing the buckets under the leaks. It feels like bailing out the titanic sometimes, only with less cheesy music.
Well, we’ll see if anything comes charging down that RSS feed. (Keep your ears open.)
