You know, any other band would be talking about a summer tour right about now. But that’s what “normal” bands do. They play in front of actual people and stuff. Big Green? Not so much.
Here’s the thing about Big Green. We are not a “normal” band. We are a musical collective, a band of brothers, a loose association of critters, a gaggle of organisms, a … I don’t know, something else that implies more than one of us. And weird. The very suggestion of a “summer tour” brings to mind something quite different from what most people picture. We’re not rolling into Akron or Missoula, playing in a urine-soaked noise cave, and sleeping on someone’s floor. No, sir – typically, we’re sleeping in the urine-soaked cave. That cave? It’s called the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home.
Okay, so we never, ever do normal tours. I’m not saying we never will, but everyone ELSE is saying it, so who am I to argue? No, sir … when we go on tour, it’s not the usual plainclothes, indie circuit – it’s in outer space, on other planets, in other solar systems, and so on. Actually, one time, we did an inner space tour, deep beneath the Earth’s crust, but that was the one exception. So if you heard us, and it was after 1993, you would have had to either (a.) tunneled to the planet’s chewy center or (b.) traveled to Neptune, Jupiter, or the Crab Nebula. Unlikely, I admit.
Anyway, when we want to do a summer tour, we start by looking up. Way up. Hey, think of it this way. The Hubble Space Telescope, now 25 years in flight, has demonstrated that the visible universe is far busier a place than we had ever previously imagined, with fields of literally millions of galaxies within view. In short, there are a lot of punters out there – a lot more than you’ll find down here on old Terra Firma. So what use is it trying to hit it big in America or England or India? We want to be big in M24 and environs. Fuck the Milky Way – it’s podunk, according to sFshzenKlyrn, and he should know … he was DISCOVERED by the Hubble.
So, yeah … there may be a voyage this summer. Grass is always greener in the next galaxy cluster over.
Well, you caught Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and I on a little automotive tour of the greater Little Falls, NY area. All it takes is some kind of vehicle – in this case, Mitch Macaphee’s 1968 Chevy Nova – and a little curiosity. Sure, the muffler just fell off (again) and I can see the road going by under my feet, but these are minor inconveniences. Spring is here, people – it’s time to start living the life. Let’s get our sorry asses out of that drafty old hammer mill and fill our nostrils with the scent of new life. Or … not. Up to you.
Okay, so … this will come as no surprise to any long time followers of Big Green, but we make recordings using technology roughly equivalent to stone knives and bear skins, as the late Leonard Nimoy once put it. (My guess is that he had 1000 times the resources when he cut “Mr. Spock’s Songs from Outer Space,” but I digress.) We are plagued by technical glitches and the spotty performance of superannuated recording equipment, including a first generation digital workstation with no practical means of exporting song data or sound files (namely a Roland VS-2480 from the year 2001). It is choked with projects and ready to keel over.