Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Putting the pieces back together

March 4, 2022 Joseph

Yeah, I checked that drawer. And the one below it. Jesus, I checked all of them, okay? It’s simply not there. And no, the lizard people didn’t steal it during the night. We would have heard them, Abe, and incidentally …. THERE ARE NO LIZARD PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET.

Hoo, man. You have to talk until you’re green in the face before people get the idea around here. Especially with someone like anti-matter Lincoln, who believes every conspiracy theory he hears on YouTube or Instagram or whatever the fuck. I mean, the guy’s positronic doppelganger was assassinated, so he sees plots everywhere. I suppose it’s hard to trust in times like these … especially when you’re Lincoln.

As anniversaries go …

Well, it should surprise no one that Big Green has reached its coral anniversary. That’s right – the traditional gift on your thirty-fifth is not the Electric Light Orchestra box set, it’s some ossified sea exoskeletons. Hope you enjoy! No question but that 35 years is a long effing time to be together, whatever the hell you’re doing or even trying to do. No wonder people are throwing sea-floor rocks at each other.

So, what does the coral anniversary mean? That your marriage is hung up on the reef? Could explain a lot about Big Green, am I right? We haven’t put out an album since 2013’s Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Not that anyone is counting (aside from me), but that’s the second longest time we’ve gone between albums. Of course, the irony is that we’ve actually already recorded several albums worth of material yet to be released.

The reason for the ceasin’

So, what is our excuse for this behavior? I’m going to go with laziness. We’re a bunch of useless layabouts, no good to anyone. Ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – he does most of the heavy lifting around here. The only break he gets from heavy lifting is when he’s doing all of the light lifting. Some might think this arrangement leaves us with more time to create content, but we seldom take the opportunity to do so.

Turns out you're right. We're just a bunch of lazy mothers.

I suppose it’s fair to point out that this isn’t the first fallow period we’ve gone through as a group. Even at our inception, when most bands are hopping around like jackrabbits, looking for the next venue, we were kind of … um …. meh. We did rehearsals. We recorded. We wrote. But gigs? Not so many that first year. In fact, I was playing in other bands just to keep the lights on.

Up from the archives

Speaking of other bands, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I found an old tape of a gig Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and I played back in 1987, when we were just getting the band started. The video is grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but I digitized it anyway and started throwing it up on YouTube. The gig was in support of the release of our friend Dale Haskell’s album Factory Village, and it was captured on video by another friend, crack photographer Leif Zurmuhlen.

Check out the playlist if you want to see Ned and me framming away on stage at Albany’s famed QE2 club. And while you’re there on YouTube, try to avoid those rabbit holes anti-Lincoln is always falling into.

Usual Rubbish

Putting the strings on your banjo

February 25, 2022 Joseph

See, here’s the thing – I don’t even use a pick. I just slam the damn thing with my thumb. Yes, it’s primitive. Yes, it’s painful. But it gets the job done, sort of. So turn up the heat on that cookpot, dude. We’ve got some strings to boil!

Hiya, folks. Yeah, you guessed it – we’re boiling old strings, home style, so that we can reuse them. I snapped the top string on my Martin, framming away on some random cover song, and well … someone stole my pin money. You know … the pin money I use to buy strings. Why, you may ask, wouldn’t I just use string money? Simple – because I need that money for cooking oil. Do I have to explain EVERYTHING, for crying out loud?

The mechanical guitar tech

I would be the first person to admit that we are not a stage-ready band. It’s been a long while since we played anywhere, and we’re rusty as an old hinge. And as any working musician knows, you need to have your systems in place if you expect to sustain yourselves through a long-ish tour. I mean, it’s not like the old days, when we just packed up the broken down van and drove off … until it broke down. Then when we fixed it in the middle of the road, we got arrested, and …. well … it’s not like that now.

We always flew pretty low to the ground, frankly. Lord knows we would do things differently today. For one thing, I would press gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to be not only our roadie foreman, but my own personal guitar tech. That fucker can spin his wrists like a power drill, so it’s easy for him to do a quick string change. Mitch Macaphee even built a strobe tuner into his audio circuit. He’s like a freaking Swiss army knife (except no plastic toothpick).

Ain't you got that thing all strung up yet? Geeez ...

Line, please!

Then there’s the lyrics. It’s enough to test anyone’s memory. We could tape them to our mic stands, but that looks so damn lame. Matt could carry them around on his phone, but if he’s scrolling that infernal contraption with two hands, how’s he going to play his bass? And on top of that, he’s got about two million songs, so the lyrics would stack up to the ceiling, several times.

I guess we could get Marvin to feed us lyrics as we play, like a automatronic music stand. Too many jobs for our little brass friend? Nonsense! Why, I’ve seen him do a dozen things at the same time, though admittedly it was really just the same thing done a dozen times real fast. But sure, he could change my strings and hold up lyrics at the same time. It would hardly even begin to get in the way of his other duties.

Bootleggers and scalpers abound

I took a cursory look around the Internets this week and I ran across something I don’t see every day. It was some dude selling our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, on Ebay. Now that was strange enough, as we only pressed about three or four dozen discs at the time. What was even more astonishing was that I saw it on offer by someone else on Ebay who was selling it as a UK import! And the price point, people, the price point: $30!

Naturally, I wrote the dude and told him, hey … if he sells it for $30, we’ve got more where that came from. Place your bets, people, place your bets!

Usual Rubbish

Can Christmas be that far behind?

November 19, 2021 Joseph

I don’t think that’s the right box, man. I keep the glass bulbs in the box marked “winter gloves” and the tinsel in the box marked “soup can collection”. That box is marked “Christmas decorations”, and that’s where I keep my soup can collection. And my winter gloves.

Oh, hey. I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in. No, I’m not being anti social. I just don’t want to spoil the surprise. We’re working on our Christmas pageant, and we’re hoping that no one will guess this year’s theme before we finish our parade floats. I’ve had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) run out for some more plaster of Paris. What’s that, Anti-Lincoln? Are you sure? Damn. Marvin went to Paris.

What’s in a theme?

I can tell you what the theme won’t be this year. Anti Lincoln wanted to do a reconstruction-themed Christmas. I told him that we simply couldn’t do it justice. Also, our crazy neighbors upstairs would come at us with torches for advancing what they’ve been calling Critical Race Theory. Much as I like the idea of pissing them off, I think we’ll let that one rest.

Then there was the mansized tuber’s idea. Do you really want to hear it? It’s kind of predictable. He had some goofy notion that you could find a fir tree, chop it down, haul it through the snow and back to the Mill, then poke the trunk into a base so that it stands upright. What then? According to tubey, you hang little baubles and lights from the carcass, and when you wake up Christmas morning, they’ll be a surprise under the dead tree. Crazy shit.

Living in Christmas past

Hey, in all honesty, we’re getting older. And when you get on in years, there’s a tendency to look back a bit. We’ve got a kind of storied Christmas past, which is to say that we’ve got a lot of stories about it. Of course, there’s 2000 Years To Christmas, our first album. Then there’s all those Xmas episodes we did on THIS IS BIG GREEN. And don’t forget the fractured carols we sing when we’re drunk, in any season.

Suffice to say, we’ve got a lot of material. If we actually opt for a pageant this year, there will be singing. No dancing, though – unless you count what Marvin does when he updates his operating system. Will there be a full band performance? Well …. not likely. But you may see me sitting in front of a cheap camera, strumming hesitantly on a guitar.

Our pledge to you, dear listener

One promise: I won’t play any Cowboy Scat songs. That’s final. That wouldn’t be Christmas-y. (If you want more promises, I’m taking requests – just use the comment form, below.)