Tag Archives: music

Usual Rubbish

Water under the bridge.

Where’s the list? Damned if I know. It’s somewhere in the forge room, I think, under a mountain of iron filings. Well, you TOLD me to file it! Jesus.

Yeah, looks like I blew it again. So what’s new? We were compiling a list of Big Green songs we’ve written and at least cursorily recorded since our last CD release – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – some six years ago. Lot of water gone under the bridge since then, and a lot of music along with it. It’s almost like there was a little boat all loaded down with songs, and the water carried it under the bridge. Along with, well, a lot more water. Or something like that.

Of course, this is a list of all of the songs we’ve written and recorded for the Ned Trek portion of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. There are about 70 or 80 of them, all tolled. So if we decide to release another album, it will either (a) have 70 or 80 songs on it, or (b) be the product of a sane mind. Or maybe it’s two or even three albums. After all, it’s been six years, and before that it had been another five years, and before that, like, nine years. Yeah, we’re slow …. slower than most bands. But hey … most bands don’t have a personal robot assistant (Marvin) or a mad science advisor (Mitch Macaphee). If they did, well, recording albums would take a hell of a lot longer.

Right, but ... which one?

Now that I think of it, we almost never mark the anniversary of CD releases. Last year was the 10 year anniversary of International House, our second album, and no celebration, no party streamers, no commemorative live performances, no fireworks, no flagrant branding exercises hoping to chew the last dollars off of its rotting carcass. We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, and my guess is that we will do TWICE as much celebrating as we did for International House. At least that. Hell, I still have signed CDs from the tenth anniversary of 2000 Years to Christmas. Want one? Post a comment to this post or email us and we’ll see what we can do.

Till then, I had better get started on that pile of filings. Or that file of pilings.

Usual Rubbish

Two score and two.

Feeling a bit reflective this week. And no, it’s not because I’m standing in front of a mirror. That’s just narcissism – whole different category of crazy. Besides, all of my mirrors cracked years ago.

Let me start from the beginning. This week I was trying to program Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to make guacamole, which is a challenge in as much as his programming consists of setting a combination of three-position switches in a certain configuration for a given task. Of course, Marvin was built by a mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee), so there’s no guide for what configuration will deliver what outcome, which leaves only trial and error. I was getting close to guacamole (I had found the right combination for gazpacho), but strangely I ended up programming him to replay demo recordings from our earliest days. (Who would’ve thunk those two things would be one toggle-click away from one another?)

Well, that got me thinking back to the days of yore (or days of Yor, Hunter of the Future), when we started this whole music thingy. Two score and two (or was it three?) years ago, Matt and I first picked up our guitars. Then we dropped them because they were too heavy for our little hands, in that we were young and all. Before long, we picked them up again, started plucking, strumming, dairning, nairn-ting (those are technical terms), and we started a little rhythm combo – Matt playing guitar, our friend Tim Walsh playing another guitar, me playing electric bass, and somebody, anybody, playing drums. (We finally settled on our friend Phil Ross, who was better than we deserved.)

I can't play this freaking thing.

Then one day (I think it was in 1979) Matt noticed that my guitar had fewer strings than his. He grabbed it out of my hands, leaving me no option but to start banging on the nearest piano. We did a few songs like that, then more, then more, more, more, and .. well … it became the new normal. Within a few years, we started to learn how to play our instruments, which really got in the way of the kind of music we were into, so we worked hard to forget all we knew. Thus Big Green was born.

Well, that’s the unofficial history of the band. For the official history, full of asinine exaggerations, see our Pre-History page. Now … back to that mirror.

Usual Rubbish

Problem child.

Okay, blow out the candles. Try harder. Nope, nothing. Try again. What the hell … you’d think at your age you would have this worked out by now. Silly kid.

Right, so before you call child protective services, let me reassure you that we, of Big Green, are all biologically childless. The line stops here! And it’s just as well. No, sir … I was just in the midst of celebrating the nineteenth birthday of our first commercial release (a.k.a. album), 2000 Years to Christmas, which was released …. I don’t know … sometime after Christmas in 1999. Nice timing, right? Typical.  Anyway, that was a few weeks ago, and I’m glad to say it’s pretty small in the rear view mirror at this point.

So, 2000 Years To Christmas was our biggest seller. That’s not saying much. Of course, it was released relatively early in the era of online retail, and over the course of the succeeding decades it has wormed its way into any number of places online. A simple Google search on the title will show you what I mean. (Take a look at the image tab on that search if you want a cheap laugh.) It kind of has a life of is own, which is strange because we gave it life almost twenty years ago. It’s in those rebellious years, when your child tries to distance her/himself from you as much as possible. 2000 Year To Christmas never goes shopping with us anymore, and when it’s out with its friends and sees us on the street, it looks away.

They grow up so fast.We’re actually planning kind of a special party for its twentieth next year. Don’t tell it we said so – we’d like it to be a surprise. I was thinking maybe a nice new CD player, or one of those disc stands that holds maybe 200 albums. Hell, we could fill four of those with unsold copies of that thing. (Psst … don’t tell 2000 Years To Christmas that we said that, either.) In fact, forget we even had this conversation. Who are you again?

Right, well … maybe I’m being a little cautious. Nineteen is such an awkward age, and 2000 Years To Christmas still doesn’t know what it wants to do with its life.  Maybe trade school will be the thing. Maybe, I don’t know … maybe next year.