Tag Archives: Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Under the holiday hood.

Man goddamn, it’s come and gone again, hasn’t it? Those freaking holidays seem to take fifty years to get here and then they’re gone in five seconds. And we’ve only done one miracle ride!*

Anyway, as some of you already know, we have posted our second annual Christmas podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN: Holidaze 2012, a nearly 100-minute extravaganza that dwarfs even the titanic pointlessness of last year’s effort and renders anew the promise of fractured Christmases to come. Many of you know that I am not given to wild exaggeration, but I have to say that THIS holiday special is THE MOST AMAZING HOLIDAY SPECIAL since the BIRTH of THE JESUS. Let me emphasize that I have to say that because, well, our sponsor, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., has demanded a higher number of downloads on this episode. And when they don’t get what they want, they get something else … which is ugly. So… gun to my head, I most certainly would.

All right – no lie, there is a lot in this episode. Here’s a run-down of the hoedown, with times listed, so you can skip to the parts you like:

    • Ned Trek V (3:18 ) – Mr. Ned and Willard take another romp through the inter-dimensional void of classic television shows, with hilarious consequences. (Introduced as always by a particularly cheesy-sounding Lee Majors.)
    • Put The Phone Down (39:20) – Matt and I launch right in to a lively holiday discussion. Riveting, as usual.
    • Charlie in the Box and the first Semi-Automatic Christmas (42:45) – A whimsical tale of Charlie, Hermy, and the putsch in Santa’s workshop. (a Reeking-Ass production.)

A nice gift idea. From crazy town.

  • Song: Merry Christmas, Children (59:40) – New recording of a previously unreleased Christmas song Matt wrote back in the day. We tried to produce this song for 2000 Years To Christmas, but ended up abandoning the track. This was done over the last three weeks or so.
  • Song: Father Christmas (1:06:43) – Another from Matt’s ample stable of Christmas songs – a new, previously unreleased recording, just in time for freaking Christmas. Again, recorded over the last few weeks – lightning fast for us. Mixed it in my sleep as you can probably tell.
  • Song: Martha’s Christmas (1:12:04) – A cut off of our 1999 album 2000 Years to Christmas. A brief, ironic (because it was the ’90s) ode to the doyen of holiday decor, Martha Stewart.
  • Song: Christmas Spirit (1:17:23) – More from the Matt Perry Christmas songbook. New recording of a previously unreleased song, this one a nod to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A little more holiday mythology, hurriedly recorded and packaged with a bow.
  • Matt’s Christmas Bird Count tale (1:20:00) – Matt tells of getting impaled on an invasive species of weed while managing the annual bird survey. A chilling tale of heroism.
  • Song: Head Cheese Log (1:35:09) – Another cut from 2000 Years To Christmas, this one the album closer, a calliope waltz imagining a yule log made of head cheese. Yeah, we got some ‘splainin’ to do, but that bus left the station a long time ago, friend.

Anywho, that’s what we have in the Christmas stocking for you all. (There may be a moldy orange in the heel, as well – take a look.) If you want to hear the music without the podcast, contact us and we’ll put it together for you. Enjoy!

* “Miracle ride” involves driving around looking at cheesy Christmas displays, referred to by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison as “Christmas miracles.”

Usual Rubbish

Tall tales.

Gather ’round the fire, folks. Everybody got their hot chocolate? Not too, hot, right? Make yourselves comfortable. Got some serious yuletide bloviating to do.

As I mentioned last week, all of our little elves have been laboring under harsh working conditions in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering together the disjointed fragments of Big Green’s Christmas Podcast. A thankless job, to be sure, but somebody has to do it (at a substandard wage). Next year maybe we outsource to Sri Lanka in honor of Mitt Romney’s eventual nomination. Or not. Anyway…. Christmas…

It occurs to me, listening to our holiday audio extravaganza, that our explanations of the songs included in the podcast are, shall we say, somewhat wanting. So what the hell… I’m going to give you the low-down on all of them, just so that you can be a more informed listener. That’s how we roll over here at Big Green – full disclosure at all times. Why, you may ask? Well… I’d rather not say.

Okay, so here’s the story below the music. I’ve included the time markers so that you can work your way through our 2 and a half hours of blather:

Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2). [at 1:40] One of the numbers from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. Some reviewer on GarageBand thought it sounded like Neil Young, but that’s probably mostly the instrumentation. What’s it about? Damned if I know. It was a year-later rejoinder to Matt’s “Merry Christmas, Jane”, which also appears on 2000 Years To Christmas. (Little known fact: There is, indeed, a “Merry Christmas Jane, Part 3” that has never been properly recorded. Maybe next Christmas, children.)

Dark Christmas.  [at 1:10:30] This is an outtake from the 2000 Years To Christmas album – one of the handful of completed songs that didn’t make it onto the disc. What’s it about? I’m still trying to work that out, but it’s sung in the voice of someone who is trying to pull someone out of their holiday slump.

Christmas Sport. [at 1:24:35] Matt’s musical reflection on the warm holiday tradition of shooting everything that moves. Another new recording.

Christmas Puzzle. [at 1:33:00] Matt wrote this about a classmate of his in grade school who was a bit disappointed with his secret santa gift. (He actually explains this better on the podcast.) The original recording was made more than a decade ago and recently enhanced with new vocals, percussion, and a remix.

Jit-Jaguar. [at 1:51:47] We recently recorded this number about the political fortunes of a local officeholder who, disappointed at the results of a recent election, calls upon a Japanese sci-fi movie automatonic superhero to assist with his vengeance on the people who rejected him.

Evening Crab Nebula. [at 2:14:29] A new recording made with the help of “Cousin” Rick Perry; a tale of hope and caution. Hope for political advantage; caution about taking biblical stories too literally. Contains the only known instance of a rhyme with the word “Nebula” in a pop song lyric.

There we go, kids. Lame explanations, I admit, but… lame is better than nothing. Have a happy.

Usual Rubbish

Homearriving.

Yeah, there’s some in here, too. Yep, all over the floor. Jesus Christ on a bike. Where are all the freaking buckets? Why don’t squatters have landlords … with buckets?

Oh, hi… Yes, Big Green has made its triumphant return to Earth from its somewhat less-than-triumphant [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, pulling our rental spacecraft into a low, low … very low parking orbit (approximately 100 feet above the Earth’s surface) over the Cheney Hammer Mill, our abandoned mill of a home in upstate New York. And, as will happen when one leaves one’s home for a stretch of weeks, some maintenance issues have emerged to greet us, providing us with distraction even before we’ve had the chance to remove our tour galoshes. They say all roofs leak, but I doubt they all leak this badly. My converted hammer assembly room suite looks like a freaking swimming pool. I think I see fish.

Right, well… that’s the kind of problem you expect. What I didn’t expect was to have to deal with obstinate bandmates after our return as well as throughout the tour. I’m thinking specifically of … wait for it! … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You may have thought I was going to say the mansized tuber, but really… he’s no trouble, hanging out in his specially climate-controlled terrarium, working his smartphone with both roots, tweeting pictures of himself in a methane sauna on Neptune. (Very therapeutic for cruciferous beings.) No, no… Marvin gets the prize this week. He has refused to leave the circa 2001: A Space Odyssey rent-a-vessel we took on this latest tear through the solar system. He has developed what Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) calls “Hal 9000 Syndrome”. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome, except, well, a lot less congenial.

Okay, so Marvin is refusing to open the pod bay doors. This is not a tragedy. We’ve got too much on the agenda to care, frankly, so he can float up there, 100 feet above our heads, and play Captain Bligh to his brass heart’s content. Matt and I have a Christmas podcast to produce, and time is running thin… I mean, short. (Premise is running thin.) Lord knows we want to have an action packed episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN posted before the fat elf flies – an episode full of new recordings, old yuletide favorites, an outtake from our “classic” (i.e. elderly) album 2000 Years To Christmas, and just the sort of incoherent ramblings you expect from us.

No, no…. you don’t have to thank us. Just send buckets. Lots of buckets.