Tag Archives: Lost In Space

News

New Home (Old Band).

It’s moving day, Major West!

Okay, starting with a quote from Lost In Space is probably a little too obscure for most of you young’uns, I admit. But the message is clear: Big Green is moving to a new URL. That’s right – we’re boxing up all of our baubles, winding up all of our furniture in bubble-wrap, and backing the U-Haul up to the front stoop of big-green.net. Time to load it in and pack it off to our new digs at … well, right where you’re at right now.

Yep, Matt and I have been hashing this out for a while (see the photo – this decision has clearly been decades in the making). But sometimes you just have to pull the damn trigger, am I right? Lord knows, we have plenty of reasons for doing this, but here are the top ones:

Reason #1: Leaky roof, squeaky floorboards

Leave us face it, the old blog flat at www.big-green.net/bg is a dump. The landlord is not cool. Every time something goes wrong, he sends in his brother-in-law with a Swiss army knife or some third-rate contractor who owes him a favor. Our blog was down for well over a month, and it didn’t come back up until we paid for service on top of our rent. Not cool! Time to hit the road, Jack.

Reason #2: No pets

You wouldn’t think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would count as a pet, but he most certainly did – at least when they came in to do the census. (We had the mansized tuber just stand still for a while so they would think he was a potted plant.) Fuck all, let’s face it – if that place ain’t good enough for Marvin, it ain’t good enough for yours truly. That’s our position and we’re sticking to it.

Reason #3: Long grace period

Okay, so when you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it, it’s nice to have a span of time when you’re maintaining both the new joint and the old dump at the same time. That’s kind of what we’re doing. The blog is moving, but we will maintain the blog for a while at the old locale, at least while we settle in at biggreenband.com. Mind you, the landing page at big-green.net isn’t going anywhere; we’ll just repoint the links to the new blog when it’s ready.

Those are the best reasons. Want the rest? Of course you don’t! Trick question.

What’s next

Coming up this Spring, we’ll be releasing a single, name yet to be announced, so stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Stepping into eden, yeah, brother.

2000 Years to Christmas

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind.

The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else.

The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine.

In a distant dive, long, long ago

Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when we were still playing clubs. Back then, the indie rock club scene was not yet much of a thing here in upstate New York, so it was hard to find places that would cater to original songs. And yea, your friends in Big Green had no abandoned mill in which to shelter, and they were sore afraid. So it is written.

Our group was my illustrious brother Matt and I, plus John White on drums and Ace guitarist Tony Butera. We started running out of Big Green work, so we decided to go back to some of the same clubs under an assumed identity. Not the first time we tried this, of course, but this time around, we actually got a few gigs. (Sometimes it makes sense to go under cover.)

Who's Herbert?

Laughed out of Utica

Anyway, we decided to call ourselves “The Space Hippies.” This was after a group of ne’er-do-well intergalactic hipsters that appeared on a Star Trek episode named The Way To Eden. (Not to be confused with the motorcycle freaks that threatened to blow up the nameless planet that the Space Family Robinson had crashed on in the 3rd and final season of Lost In Space – an episode nonsensically named Collision of the Planets.) They played twangy space guitars and, well … that seemed like a good thing to us.

Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing. In fact, one of the first club owners Tony called to ask for a booking told him, “I can’t hire a band called The Space Hippies. It I did that, I’d be laughed out of Utica.” That was when I got the strong feeling that we should change the cover band’s name to Laughed Out of Utica. (I got voted down on that one, damn it!)

Tunes with psychological issues

Fact is, we did work a bit with the Space Hippies, though I think we kept changing the name so we could double dip, Jethro Tull-style. One club we got booked into was a place called Looney Tunes on NY Route 5. I’ve got a cassette tape of one of the nights we played there. The quality is pretty bad, but you can basically hear us framming away at those rock covers. I included one track from this tape on the July 2019 episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. The song was a Matt Perry number titled “How ‘Bout The War”. (Tony plays a screaming solo on this and, basically, every track on the tape. What a madman.)

What else do I remember about the Space Hippies’ premiere gig? Let’s see. There was dogshit on the stage when we were loading in. I think it was a welcome gift from the club owner. Ah, those were the days.

Usual Rubbish

Thumbs sideways.

Hello, this is central control. Central control to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Do you copy, Marvin? Of course not. Who on Earth would copy Marvin?

Well, I seem to have the mill to myself today. The place is as quiet as a grave, albeit a very drafty one. Dank, too … or maybe the word is acrid. Musty … that’s what I’m looking for. Anyway, everyone seems to have taken the week off. I hear it’s spring break week for the kiddies at all the local schools, so maybe my various associates all have secret lives involving school age children and tickets to Disney World. Can’t say for certain – Anti Lincoln has been looking a little extra suburban just lately.

For my own part, I have filled my time with something very unproductive – watching TV. I binge watched all ten episodes of the new Lost In Space reboot, and I think I’m ready for some kind of high tech media purge. Since I have no self-control and even less in the way of formal responsibilities, I will take this opportunity to render a brief review for your edification. Ahem … it doesn’t entirely blow, but there are aspects of it that do. Fun to watch, but it has some issues that are not unlike the original, super-campy TV show. Let me ‘splain. First I’ll put my T.V. critic hat on. You know, the one that makes you mean and nasty.

Was it THAT bad, really?First off, the basic premise of the Lost In Space reboot is, if anything, weaker than the original. They land on the planet Colorado, it appears. Mind you, they have reconfigured some of the plot devices used in the original, so the alien world has an eccentric elliptical orbit that brings it waaaaay too close to a black hole (in the original, it was the planet’s sun) causing everything to burn to a crisp. They aren’t clear on what the annual cycle is, but I assume it’s short since they seem to be heading for the hot spot of the orbit. So … they’re saying that everything on the planet dies and is reborn, but we’re seeing massive, mature stands of forest, complex animal life, including apex predators … what the hell? A random scientist on the show tells us the trees have only one ring. They’re eighty feet tall! Ridiculous.

Then there’s that robot. For chrissake, they could have just rented Marvin from me for a few weeks. We could have used the revenue, frankly. And instead of re-orchestrating the original third-season heavy-on-the-french-horns theme song, we would have been glad to provide them with suitable space music. Not a problem, producers … all you got to do is call.

Bottom line: it’s kind of meh, but watchable. Well, is that the time? Thanks for taking that detour with me. Tune in next week – I’ll be reviewing Father Ted.