Tag Archives: Matt Perry

Usual Rubbish

All present and accounted for.

Okay, everybody – band meeting. Let’s do roll call. Matt Perry? Present. Myself? Present. Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Present, but lacking in agency. Mansized tuber? Absent. (He planted himself in the courtyard again, and frankly, it’s just too cold today to have the meeting out there.)

Yeah, it’s been a while since our last meeting. A few weeks, anyway. Like August 1987. We are a self-governing collective, but not a very well organized one, truth be told. When you live in an abandoned hammer mill (or an abandoned refrigerator, for that matter), there’s little else to do besides wander around and try to keep yourself occupied between tours. We might go crazy for a spell and even (dare I say it?) rehearse a few numbers. Such madness has taken hold of us on more than one occasion.

I suppose you’re wondering how it is that we manage to support ourselves. Well, I don’t think I have to tell you that we are lousy salespeople … perhaps the worst ever. In a capitalist society such as ours, you have to charge for your music, no matter by what means it may be delivered. Of course, the availability of the post-industrial hulk known as the Cheney Hammer Mill makes it possible for us to basically give away our music and still have a roof over our heads, albeit a leaky one.

Present.We have, in the past, posted our albums for purchase on digital distribution sites – the Orchard, CDBaby, etc. My feeling – and I should raise this at the meeting, already in progress – is that we should just post songs for free download and give people an opportunity to contribute towards the good of the Big Green cause through a Patreon site or something like that. It’s basically a digital passing of the hat, which we’ve done as well (the Luddite version, in any case).

Our songs keep getting sillier. I think it may be something in the water. That’s another topic we should raise if this meeting ever gets underway. How do we turn up the serious? Doesn’t that have to happen before you’re born? All these searing questions, and there’s more where those came from. (Mind you, it’s a little dark up there.)

Okay, well … meeting adjourned until, I don’t know, 2047. Make it a Sunday in October. I’ll dial in.

Usual Rubbish

Rubbish in.

Anybody seen my tuning fork? No, damn it, THAT’S not it. That’s my tuning spoon. I said fork, you moron. This …. place!

Oh, yeah … hi out there. I’m just attempting to replace a string on a second hand guitar that’s been lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill since before we started squatting inside this big old drafty barn of a place. In as much as Big Green is a collectivist institution by nature, we make use of what resources avail themselves, utilizing only what we need to accomplish a mutually agreed-upon task, then replacing the surplus in such a way as to benefit all. Yes, we’re all equal here. Except, of course, anti-Lincoln. Fuck that guy!

Why am I restringing an old, abandoned guitar? Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m doing it with used strings. We’re scraping the bottom of the stewpot here, folks – I won’t make any bones about it. (Typically, what you find at the bottom of the pot is not so much bones as sinew and fat, but I’ll leave that right there.) That’s what you have to do when you’re Big Green, you know. We thrive on privation. We bask in the glow of our obscurity. When gravity says come down here, we go up there. When we look in the mirror, we know that we’re the opposite of Dude, what did you DO to this thing?what we see looking back at us.

What does all this mean? Well, I’m gonna’ tell ya’. We still haven’t finished our podcast, that’s what. The machinery is moving pretty slowly these days, folks. Matt’s got his hands full with his various nature-focused responsibilities, tracking peregrine falcons, tending the beavers, and writing up stats for The Kingbird. And me, well … I saw a bunny in the yard. And there was some other junk. And I listened to a video clip on my phone. Uh … I got nothing. Rubbish in, rubbish out, right?

Sure, I know, it’s been four months since our last show; it’s in the works, and we’re mixing the songs right now. One …. more .. hurdle. Keep your eyes open and your mouths agape. Expect a delivery … soonish.

Usual Rubbish

Post not.

Ask not what Big Green has been doing for you this week. Ask what you can do for Big Green. And yes, I am cribbing from John F. Kennedy – that’s how we roll around here. It’s all JFK, all the time.

Interestingly, president Kennedy did have a role in Big Green’s history, albeit a minor one. Back in the day when we were fighting the cat for the scraps that she had just wrestled away from some mice, we would record in our childhood bedrooms, our mother’s living room, some spare room – wherever we could fit a cassette machine and some battered instruments. (Those instruments!) Matt and I would bang around the way we still do now, hammer together a song, then release it on cassette. And when I say “release”, I mean something like tossing it out into the middle of the road and hoping someone chances upon it. (You know – essentially like posting it on the Internet … without the Internet part.)

Hey, Abe ... Does this song remind you of the war?Well, many of those cassette collections were made up of Christmas songs – not carols, but songs Matt wrote on the theme of Christmas. (He typically recorded these collections himself to retain the element of surprise.) The one Matt put together in 1989 was entitled “PT 109” and the sleeve featured a slightly modified version of the heroic cartoon-like cover of Kennedy’s war memoir by the same name. The song PT 109 was actually a country number ripping on George H.W. Bush, who had just become president and who had a heroic WWII story about how he had rescued a future president of the United States – himself – from a plane crash in the Pacific. The lyric was written in the posthumous voice of one of Bush’s crewmates, lamenting that he hadn’t served under another commander:

Had I served on PT 109
I would have had the good fortune to be
on patrol with lieutenant JFK
and I might just have survived to this day
‘Cause sometimes not only the hero survives to tell the tale

Anyway, that’s Kennedy’s contribution to Big Green. Not unique, of course – our songs feature many presidents, including the current one. Occasionally they show up in the titles as well. Fun fact: one of our cassette collections was entitled “Songs that remind Lincoln of the war”. Extra points if you can guess which president was on the cover of that sucker.