What the hell. Was it THAT long ago? No way! Effing 1986 was … uh … oh, right. I’m leaving out a few decades. Fuck, we’re old. Where’s my porridge?
Nothing like a little trip down memory lane to lift your spirits, right? Just be sure not to take a right at the light – that road goes straight to crazy town. Spent the morning listening to recordings from our first year as a band, 1986. Actually, not the WHOLE morning, as there are only a handful of recordings. We did everything on a shoestring back then, and you don’t have to be a recording technology specialist to know that shoestrings are a very low-fidelity substitute for magnetic tape. Fact is, Big Green co-founder Ned Danison had the use of his brother’s recording studio, and we piled in there one weekend and plowed through a four-song demo that got us, well …. exactly nowhere, but it’s a nice conversation piece. (See? I’m talking about it even now, thirty three years later.)
That was a hot summer, too. Or maybe it was all of those wine coolers. Either way, we were going through what another guitar player friend of ours termed “the Brr-roke Period”, fighting the mice for scraps, sharing smokes, sleeping on people’s floors. (At one point it got so bad we were forced to sleep on somebody’s walls.) Of course, being white people, we were never REALLY REALLY poor, just poor as seen on T.V., like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck carving that bean into paper thin slices, so thin you could see through it, and squeezing the slices between similarly translucent slices of bread. I suppose in that metaphor, I played Donald, quacking madly in frustration at our made-for-television penury. Poor suburban waif! No bean for his sandwich!
Yeah, well … we didn’t have an entourage of helpers back then. No Mitch Macaphee to help with mad science solutions. No Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to tie our shoes and balance our checkbooks. No checkbooks (because, wait for it …. we were broke). We didn’t even have a drummer, for crying out loud, or at least none that would stick with us long enough to play a gig. So that summer of 1986 (or was it the fall? No matter.) when we got the use of John Danison’s 8-track garage studio, we recorded three tracks with a session drummer we knew from around Albany, NY at that time, a guy by the name of Pete Young. Two of the tracks were cover songs from our stage set at that time – “She Caught The Katy”, by Taj Mahal, which we played on THIS IS BIG GREEN back in 2012, and Little Richard’s “Slipping and Sliding”. We also did one of Ned’s songs, entitled “A Name And A Face”, which kind of amusingly chronicles a one-night stand of the drunken eighties variety – an alt-rock walk of shame, if you will.
That was our demo. It went nowhere. Pete left the group before he even joined. Ned left the group the next year. And here you have us – the remainders of a random idea for a group, 34 years ago, chronicled in that hastily produced demo …. which I will post one of these days. Stay tuned!
Postscript
One of these days came sooner than I thought. Here is that four-song cassette demo we recorded back in 1986, over in Ballston Spa, NY.
Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)