Tag Archives: original music

Usual Rubbish

Passing the hat on the internets

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, let me play a few more notes. Yes, I will choose them carefully. Here we go. All right, that’s got it. Did the donation meter move up at all? No? Mother of pearl.

Hey, out there. Another week in the life of Big Green, possibly the most obscure rock band in the history of the genre. I’m always looking for superlatives when I write about this group, and frankly that’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe, just maybe the Chefs of the Future (friends of ours) approach our level of obscurity, but I doubt it. (After all, if I’ve heard of them, how obscure could they be?)

I don’t need to remind you about how hard it is to keep the lights on around here. Important historical context: the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house, was originally a gaslit factory, later wired for electric lights. Those lights feed on electricity from our local utility, which we … ahem …. borrow from the corner telephone poll (for crying out loud, don’t tell anybody!). Of course, they keep cutting our line, so yeah, it’s hard to keep the damn lights on. And, uh …. what was I talking about?

Return to cyber busking

Oh, yeah. Generating income. Well, as I began to describe in last week’s column, we have been turning dustbins upside-down in this place looking for material to build a show out of. Not that we’re likely to venture into local clubs or auditoriums any time soon, but the virtual space is another question. Lord knows plenty of musicians are out there framming away – why the hell not us, right?

Hence we have opened the door on cyber busking once again. I know, I know, we had a lot of problems last time, not least of which Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his shaky camera hand. Then there were the copyright strikes – damned intellectual property! YOU CALL YOURSELF AN INTELLECTUAL? HOW … DARE … YOU?

Another Big Green original

Well, fortunately, we have a lot of original material. I mean, a boatload of the stuff. Sure, it’s a boat from some unknown country where music is completely weird and unfamiliar to American ears, but that’s okay. We can fill whole nights with our own tunes, honest. I’m sitting on a stack of original songs right now. The sharps are kind of pointy, frankly. (When it comes to converting music to furniture, I prefer the flat keys.)

Okay, so you may ask (and well you may), why haven’t you done so? Why haven’t we pulled out our western guitars (or space guitars, for that matter) and started twanging on Facebook, like all of our singer-songwriter pals? Good question. I think the main reason is that it takes us nine years to do the simplest thing. We have whole albums worth of material recorded, for instance, and we can’t seem to knit those recordings into actual albums. I’ve got a stack of magazines chin high in the kitchen, and …. well …. they’ve needed to be thrown out for about five years. (Four more to go.)

Well, damn it, this time we’re determined. And we’ll flag you when we’re ready to go live. Make some tea and sit tight – we’ll be right with you.

Usual Rubbish

Joe to band: More album, less concept

2000 Years to Christmas

No, that’s a terrible idea. What the hell! Sometimes I wonder about your synaptic circuits, dude. I’m starting to think your think-o-lator needs urgent service. What else have you got? I got nothing.

Oh, hey, out there in cyber land. Just another day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home in upstate New York. And by “another day,” I mean another contentious debate over the best way forward for your friends in Big Green. As you know, rock bands spend a lot of their time working out their artistic direction over the course of ten, sometimes twenty years. Hell, if you don’t do THAT, you might end up drifting … or playing the same stuff over and over again …. which is, uh, kind of what …. we …. do ….

An extraordinary meeting

Well, we’re trying to get away from that sort of thing. That’s why we’ve convened a special meeting of the Big Green creative steering committee, which is comprised of the band members, of course, plus Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber. We used to include Anti-Lincoln in these meetings, but he kept talking about the war and, well, that gets old pretty fast.

Still, even without “A-Link”, as we call him, in attendance, we some time end up treading the same territory. For instance, we were on the topic of concept albums. I asked the group to suggest some possible concepts for upcoming Big Green collections. Most of the man-sized tuber’s suggestions were plant-based, but then Marvin piped up with the suggestion that we do an album themed around the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. I’m telling you, it’s A-Link all over again!

Can we leave Prince Leopold out of this, Marvin?

Why all Marvin’s ideas are bad ones

Okay, putting Lincoln aside for a moment, there are about a hundred reasons why doing a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War is a bad idea. First of all, I’m convinced that a not-insignificant portion of our fan-base is still sensitive about the accession of Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen to the Spanish throne. And while I don’t want to seem like a panderer, in these hard economic times, we shouldn’t go out of our way to alienate anyone unnecessarily.

This tends to be the problem with many if not all of Marvin’s ideas. There’s always a poison pill hidden in there somewhere. Honestly, a concept album about the Franco-Prussian War would inevitably dredge up unpleasant memories of the birth of France’s Third Republic, and THEN where would we be? That’s why all of Marvin’s ideas are bad!

The totally excellent solution

How about this? No more concept albums. From now on, Big Green albums will just be a collection of randomly generated songs with no relationship to one another or to some unifying idea. Thoughts? Any hands? (Or branches, tubey?)

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

What the .... ?

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!