When you got your hands full, you run the risk of dropping something. That’s something my grand-pappy never told me, and I never forgot it. Now you know why I always have one hand free. The more you know.
Speaking of free hands, we haven’t done any recording in a while. As I mentioned in our last post, Big Green has kind of been on hiatus lately, tending the gardens, doing odd jobs … REALLY odd jobs, like bending pretzels and hanging acorns on oak trees. You know how it is with creatives – you have to lay fallow for a time, once in a while. With us, that can be – I don’t know – ten years, maybe thirty. We measure our lives by geological time, as the story goes.
Tapes and more tapes
Of course, I’m still digitizing reel-to-reel tapes of my eldest brother Mark (1951 – 1980), setting the old grand piano on fire back in ’69, when he was taking private instruction under George Mulfinger at Syracuse University and prepping for a national classical piano competition. It’s another odd job, so to speak, because even though I am not a classical music expert, I remember all of these pieces, having heard Mark practice them since probably the day I was born (and perhaps earlier).
I have to say, listening to all of these classical pieces makes for much more survivable ear-worms than I’m used to. Don’t know about you, but ear-worms are the bane of my existence and can be prompted by advertising, ambient music in grocery stores, or dumb-ass dreams. So, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m grateful for the relief. I mean, getting parts of a Chopin sonata stuck in your head is a hell of a lot better than having some portion of “The Night Chicago Died” on infinite repeat. The very thought gives me nausea – JESUS!
Far down the Liszt
Unlike my own ass, Mark was something of a child prodigy and a highly trained classical pianist who spent a couple of summers studying music at the Chautauqua Institute and would ride out to the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse for private lessons with Mulfinger. (Fun fact: Mulfinger was a student of the German composer Emil Von Sauer, who had studied composition and orchestration under Franz Liszt. So, for those of you who still play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Mark was three degrees from Liszt.)
Me? I’m much farther down the Liszt. I took a few lessons from Mark, a few from one of his early teachers (someone you CAN’T find on the internets), dropped piano and played bassoon for a few years, dropped bassoon and broke my toe because bassoons are HEAVY, then took up bass as a late teenager, taking lessons from the renowned jazz guitarist Carmen Caramanica, who played with Lou Rawls, performed on the Tonight Show, etc., etc. I picked up piano along the way (not LITERALLY, of course. Little known fact: pianos are, in actuality, much, much heavier than bassoons).
The other brother (who’s a mother)
Then there’s Matt, the youngest brother (and the biggest mother). He did guitar lessons with Carmen as a teenager, started writing songs about five minutes later, played in proto-bands of various names with me for years before we put a stake in the ground with Big Green. Matt is a far better guitar player than he would ever cop to (always has been). He picked up the bass in one of our early bands, after Mark had died and left me his Fender Rhodes 73; Matt would play bass when I played piano and I would play bass when he played guitar.
When we started Big Green, Matt played bass when we played live and I stayed on keys. He got to be a better rock bass player than I was (I tended to be a little busy and thud-pucky, frankly – check it out here.) Frankly, Mark was the only virtuoso – Matt and I are mostly self-taught gutter musicians ad-libbing our way into a creative ditch with varying levels of success. But hey … you love us anyway, right? AM I RIGHT??
Oh, well. Needy fuckers, aren’t we? Fact is, Matt has another boatload of new songs and I expect we’ll start working on them any week now, when the beavers give him a break. (No, that’s NOT a euphemism – he really works with those furry little creatures.) We’ll keep you posted, friends … mark my words.
