Tag Archives: Marvin

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

Hey, dis guy ain’t got all his buttons, mack

Get Music Here

What’s in that box? I’ll tell you what’s in that box. There’s nothing in the damn box, man. But that box over there, the one with the torn flaps, that’s got some gig posters in it. From 1987. A little late on those.

Hey, there, Big Green fans! Just catching us in the middle of Spring cleaning. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “Joe”, you’ll say, “this isn’t Spring, it’s late summer, nigh unto fall, you idiot.” And then you’ll flip me off and storm out of the room in search of cleverer bands. But before you’re out of earshot, I’ll just remind you that we’re late with everything we do. We don’t eat breakfast til lunch time, no lunch til dinner time, and so on. The more you know!

Damaged collateral

Back to cleaning. Man, you wouldn’t believe how many recondite corners there are in this stupid barn of a hammer mill. Somehow that moving company we hired to carry our stuff from our lean-to in Sri Lanka to here managed to squirrel something away in every alcove. It’s almost like they DIDN’T want us to find anything. But here we are, after only about twenty years, digging it all up and sifting through it like panhandlers. Who says we’re slow on the draw?

Anyhow, you wouldn’t believe the shit we’re finding! Old gig calendars. Stacks of flyers for college bulletin boards and the like. Every guitar string Matt ever broke and then some. Various decorative items and abandoned set lists. (No, we’re not hoarders … we just, you know … keep stuff.) In other words, a bunch of useless junk. Would you believe it? Perhaps you would. In which case, my earlier declaration would be inaccurate. It’s hard to know who you can trust nowadays.

Pin it on, the jam

In many ways, our junk production outstripped our music production from the very beginning. Those were the days before the internets, my friends. Televisions were mostly analog. Phones were something attached to the wall or plugged into an outlet. People read odd, inky things called “newspapers”. Personal robot assistants were made of pots and pans and leftover appliance parts. (Okay, THAT part hasn’t changed so much.) When you had to get the word out on something in those days, you had to do it old school.

Get ... yours ... squx

Oddly enough, even during a time when we couldn’t hang on to a drummer for more than a few weeks, we had a machine that made campaign buttons. Sure, there was no way we could hold down a gig, but we were always able to distribute pin-on buttons with our logo on them. Talk about the cart before the horse! No surprise, then, that in the midst of our Fall cleaning, we came across a cache of Big Green buttons. I’m guessing we spent a couple of days stamping those suckers out on that button press back in ’87. (No wonder our drummers all walked.)

Get yours today

Hey, there’s a limited supply of these items in the known universe. But if you so, so love Big Green, and you wish you could shake the claw of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), then you deserve one of the few remaining Big Green buttons. Just email us or send a comment via social media and we will fix you up, gratis, while supplies last. Because that’s the kind of band we are …. the kind that’s cleaning the junk out of its squat house.

Usual Rubbish

All the king’s robots and all the King’s pens

Get Music Here

We got another one of those notes, man. One of those neighbor notes about the uncut lawn. Let’s say they’re a little disappointed in us. I have to admit, I’m disappointed in us, too. We really SHOULD have mowed that lawn, but we were too damn LAZY and SHIFTLESS. (Please share this post with our neighbors so that they will feel validated.)

Anyway, here we are in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, no validation in sight … not even for our parking. You know, I think we might be the subject of yet another community effort to rid the neighborhood of ne’er do wells. Frankly, I object to being termed in such a way. I may not always do well, but I certainly sometimes do well. I can’t speak for any of the other members of our entourage, but I for one try to remain on the straight and narrow. (It’s been a bit too narrow lately, though.)

Call in the lawn robots

Now SOME people I know, and I won’t say who, hire robots to mow their lawn. I’m not super comfortable with that idea. The part I’m not comfortable with, I should add, is the “hire” part. Why buy the milk when you own the cow, right? We have our own damn robot, thank you very much. His name is Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and if you Google his full name, you’ll come up with about twenty years of posts on this very blog. Or some nonsensical artificial intelligence story. Same damn thing.

Thing is, the lawn robots descend onto your property in a swarm and cut the grass in about ten minutes – just a big flurry of activity, then they’re gone. Marvin could NEVER do that. If he tried to get a job with the lawn robots, he would never get past the first interview. They would laugh him out of Utica, for chrissake. Think of that: Laughed out of Utica. Good name for a band, I think. But I digress. I can’t ask Marvin to do our lawn. It’s a matter of principle. Marvin was created for greater purposes, like vacuuming the hall. I can’t allow him to lower himself in that way.

Sign ’em if you got ’em

What Marvin really needs is a contract. We used to have one of those, with that crazy corporate label Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., of Indonesia. It was signed in red ink, actually, though it may have been blood, now that I think of it. Those guys were kind of rough. They weren’t getting us to do shit by using Jedi mind tricks. It was more the truncheon and tire iron method. But hey, you don’t want to hear about our contract signing ceremony under duress. This is supposed to be a HAPPY occasion.

Mow the damn lawn. Stuff it!

It’s actually a good thing we’re no longer under contract to Hegemonic. We can release our new songs into the wild like birds and let them fly on their own volition. Labels always make you do dumb shit you don’t want to do, then cut up your albums to make two or three. You call that value? Jesus Christmas. What an industry! Even our mad science advisor, exploiter of the intergalactic time warp, Mitch Macaphee thinks that’s unjust, and he’s crazy as a loon. Maybe crazier.

From green to red

Yeah, so there are drawbacks. And the first is no money to pay the damn bills. A smarter band would just let them do what they want with their music, but nobody ever accused us of being smart. At least not to our faces.