Tag Archives: music

Next stumbles.

Process that track. Delete that wave. Get a little drunk and then dig your grave. I don’t know, what is the work song equivalent of my current occupation? Most professions have been reduced to someone sitting in front of a computer terminal, tapping away and grimacing. Here at Big Green, we are no exception. As I am now demonstrating, by sitting in front of a computer and typing. And grimacing.

Well ... maybe not.Sure, I know, we should perform. I think that’s a marvelous idea. Right now, our performances are our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which appears nearly every month right here on this channel (check local listings). We could haul our sorry, superannuated asses down to the local gin mill and slog through some of our hundreds (yes, literally hundreds) of songs, most of which have never been heard outside a small circle of friends, and I wouldn’t rule that out. Maybe we’ll do some Stage-It performances, or something like that. Who the hell knows?

The main thing is (and this is important!) we are still making ridiculous music … still bizarre and asinine after all these years. Right now, the place to hear it is here. And as I look around at the clammy walls of the empty, abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adoptive home, I am reminded of why we got into this in the first place… that spark of an idea that started Big Green decades ago, in a place far (well, not so far) away. That voice that came to me, early one morning, seeping into my cloudy, half slumbering consciousness, to whisper those inspiring words: “You need to make money somehow, you dope-ass loser … get a band going!”

Actually, it was louder than a whisper. And it wasn’t a disembodied voice; it was my roommate at the time, asking for my half of the rent. He was one of those guys who put labels on stuff in the refrigerator, each one sporting his name. To me, though, those labels always read “eat me”.

But enough about ME. What have you been up to, eh?

Tossed together.

Not much I can add to that, brother. How about another piano? No, no … not a different individual piano instrument, I mean another piano PART! Holy Jebus!

You are genetically weird.Oh, hi. Sorry about my outburst there. No, I wasn’t having an argument with my illustrious brother Matt, I was just rehearsing for our conversation later on today. I know it may seem strange, but I have to rehearse for just about everything that occurs in my life. Which is even stranger, in fact, because I almost never rehearse for gigs. In fact, you might describe me as downright hostile to the idea. (As a friend once famously said, “Rehearsal is just a crutch for cats who can’t blow.”)

Now I should say here, no one has ever accused Big Green of not blowing. That just never has been part of our DNA. Granted, we have some errant strands in there; some stray genes that make us more susceptible to, say, living in abandoned hammer mills (which, on a rainy day like today, is kind of like living in a water treatment plant) or keeping personal robot assistants … like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yeah, we have a lot of personal and genetic history to live down, but we soldier on. Damn the torpedoes! (No, I mean, really, damn them. Those suckers smart.)

Speaking of abandoned hammer mills, we’re hammering out some new songs for the next episode of the podcast. They started out to be “first-draft” essays of the kind we did in 2012 – those rough little numbers that ended up on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick in slightly less rough shape. But as we go, they keep getting more and more complicated. Recording is more like painting than sculpting, I have to say – you can keep slopping new paint over the old, sometimes until the canvas is inches thick with the stuff. When sculpting, you can only knock so many chunks off that rock before you’re left with … I don’t know … a smaller rock?

Hey, Matt … where’s my spatula? I’m going with the post impressionist look on this one. (Just practicing again. Love to hear the sound of my own echo in this old barn of a place.)

Rigelian casaba fever.

Which star is this again? I get them mixed up sometimes. We did Betelgeuse. We did Aldebaran. One big red, the other little yellow. Now it’s time for a blue star … Rigel. Perfect place to play the blues.

Big GreenBig Green playing the blues … on our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? Well … sure, why not. That’s some of what we started out by playing many, many moons (and many suns) ago, before we started writing a lot of our own music. We played Taj Mahal numbers, real standards like Statesboro Blues, and similar stuff, along with songs by The Beatles, The Band, Neil Young, etc. In our early days as Big Green, we had an alter ego cover band that performed under a series of ridiculous names, including “The Space Hippies”, “I-19”, and others. (One club owner, I recall, refused to hire The Space Hippies, claiming that, if he did, he would be “laughed out of Utica.” That’s when we founded the band, “Laughed out of Utica”.)

Right, so … our first night on Rigel, we started out with our old club date rendition of Corrina, Corrina. The non-corporeal beings of Rigel 3 went wild, as far as we can tell. The only way we can register any type of response is through highly sophisticated scanning equipment we borrowed from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (they use it to track labor organizers in their mines and on their plantations). According to thRigel looks invitinge sensodyne magenetometer, the charged particles that make up most of the mass of Rigelian “bodies” were vibrating at a particularly high frequency during Corrina, Corrina. I call that success.

Of course, we are having some mechanical problems with our spacecraft. Nothing new there. Just a matter of thrust, or lack of same. Too many Rigelian casabas in the fuel mix, I suspect. We’re likely to stay on Rigel 3 for a couple more days, since we can’t seem to escape its orbit.  sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, has gone on to the next engagement ahead of us, since he does not require a space craft to travel between worlds. Handy, that. One day, perhaps he’ll show me how it’s done. Then I’ll make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do it.

Next stop: Capella.