Tag Archives: music

Usual Rubbish

Jingle hell.

What are you going to be for this year’s Christmas pageant? A reindeer? A slice of gooseberry pie? As small pile of pine cones? So many possibilities.

I don’t imagine that anyone reading this blog is unaware of the fact that the holidays hold a special resonance for Big Green. God knows, when they start blowing those freaking carols through every available loudspeaker, my head starts resonating like a church bell at Noon. That’s what I call old time religion. And sure, we did do a whole album of Christmas songs, entitled (not surprisingly) 2000 Years To Christmas (2KY2C) – our first formal album.

When I say “formal”, I don’t mean that we appear in tuxedos with massive red cummerbunds and top hats. I mean that we released a number of collections on cassette tape prior to 2KY2C that were anything BUT formal. More than a few of those were Christmas themed albums, from which we drew the 13 songs that appeared on 2KY2C. Okay, so … as we have in previous years, we’re planning on putting together a holiday episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and in an effort to lard it out with some extra music we are ladling out compositions from those earlier “informal” releases. Last year it was “Merry Christmas from Henry K;” the year before we did “Father Christmas,”  “Christmas Spirit” and a couple of others. Plenty more where that came from.

Gooseberry pie?I’ve often said (and you’ve often heard me) that the difference between Big Green and a successful group is that all-consuming lust for fortune, fame, and higher achievements. Yeah … we ain’t got that. We’ve got the songs – scores and scores of them. We’ve got our modest musical abilities. We’ve got a sense of how to put an album together. We even half know how to record ourselves, with some struggle. But that other stuff – that “I’m the greatest” shit … that particular human chromosome was left out of our genetic inheritance.

So what the hell. Bereft of an Earthly audience, we please ourselves. If that involves putting antlers on for a few hours, so be it.

Usual Rubbish

Inside August (or September).

Hey, presto. Pulled a fast one on you last week, didn’t we? Just when you least expect to see a new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, there it freaking is, plain as paper and twice as thick. As has been our practice, this featured another “musical” episode of our warped space opera Ned Trek, the only Star Trek parody that features an all-neocon crew, a Mormon captain, and a talking dressage horse as its first officer and moral compass.

What’s inside the podcast? Well, the best way to find out is to suffer through it. You can do it! Short of that drastic step, here’s a brief guide to August’s TIBG:

Ned Trek 24: Whom Gods Deploy – This episode of Ned Trek is loosely based on the third season classic Star Trek episode, Whom Gods Destroy, the one with Captain (a.k.a. Lord) Garth, the inmate who takes over the space insane asylum and plans on conquering the universe. In our version, the inmate is George W. Bush, former imperial president, who spends his days on an asylum planet painting abstract portraits …. works that appear to presage actual events, as if (dare I say it?) he possessed some kind of supernatural power, like the guy in The Lathe of Heaven, except more on the hayseed side. (Side note: W has a serious fear of horses, my brother tells me.)

Frankly, hard to parody.Song: Up On The Bridge – Another Sulu number, one that chronicles his career fall and rise with the ebb and flow of the Star Trek phenomenon.

Song: I Paint What I See – Ex-president George W. Bush explains the genesis of his muse and its relationship to his overall worldview.

Song: Naturally – Pearl’s song to his former boss and chief advisee; a lament about W’s sorry condition as a painter, not a war-starter. Country-fied.

Song: Stephanie’s Song – Mr. Stephanie croons about W’s fear of horses and all hooved creatures in this quirky waltz.

Song: Baby Bush – A Romney number, encouraging W. to reclaim his pedestal as The Decider. Shuffle swing number.

Song: Jesus Has a Known Mind – Doc delivers an awesome message from the lord in this rock-out number. Mean!

Song: Real Talking Horse – Ned’s song, with a strange early-sixties ending reminiscent of the Four Seasons, somehow.

Pointless Banter – This you have to hear. I can’t describe it other than to say that I probably said things I regret, but …. post!

Usual Rubbish

Bringing it back home.

What do you mean the broken-down car has broken down? How much more of a heap could it possibly be? Okay, okay … we’ll call the hook. No, not CAPTAIN Hook. Unless he’s opened a towing business in his dotage. Seems unlikely.

Our audience is a little hard to reachWell, as you can see, the bottom is falling out of Big Green, economically speaking. Nothing new, right? As a class, musicians tend to be monetarily challenged, let’s say. Doing music for a living is tantamount to perpetual unemployment, interrupted by occasional contract work. And when you’re a plainclothes band, the gig money sucks. Usually you get a percentage of the door. If you’re more well known, they might give you the WHOLE door. And if you draw a good crowd, they might even throw in a window as well.

Now, when you play mostly original music, like we do, that’s an even bigger problem. Nobody knows the songs, for one thing … when you’re not famous, that is. Even worse, the audience starts requesting songs by the Scorps, or Stairway to Heaven, or maybe Beethoven’s Ninth. (That last one is hard to pull off with a four-piece rock group. Especially the vocals!) Before you know it, you’re walking out of that dump with your tail between your legs, your pride in the toilet, and your self-respect on a slow boat to Madagascar. You’ve been there – don’t deny it!

Now, we’ve tried to adapt to this harsh reality. Playing for plants and trees. Booking jobs in outer space. (Once you’ve solved the transportation problems, it’s easier than it sounds.) Making sandwiches instead of music (it CAN be done). But there’s only so much you can do to alleviate the pain of independent music. Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. Nobody know but … I don’t know … Weezer? Cue the violins.

Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk technique here. Unlike a lot of interstellar circuit groups, we play our instruments with hands. Not pseudopods. Not antennae. Not mind waves. That makes us more of a curiosity in venues on Neptune. That helps the door take a little. So … keep playing Neptune, right?