Tag Archives: songs

Usual Rubbish

Hammer day.

What, raining again? Huh. Very well. Looks like it’s rainy day schedule, kids. Coloring books and tunafish sandwiches. Except that we don’t have tunafish. So … I’ll have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) make crayon sandwiches. Gotta make do as best we can, boys.

Hey, what would you do if you were stuck in an abandoned hammer mill and the weather went all pear-shaped? Probably something similar. They say that musicians do their best work behind closed doors, removed from all distractions. They also say that more songs are written on rainy days than on sunny ones – the theory being that crappy weather makes songwriters want to stay home more, and home with nothing to do means picking up the guitar or banging on the piano. Wanna know what else “they” say? What the fuck, I don’t know. Ask them.

This might be a good time to write some songs. As I’ve pointed out in these pages before, Matt and I have different approaches to songwriting, so the time may be right for one of us; likely not both of us. Matt writes songs on the hoof, tromping about the hills, streams, and woods, singing verses into his smart phone while he’s feeding the beavers, then harmonizing the song later when he gets within grabbing distance of a guitar.

Big Green in 1988My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.

Turns out, we were, as I mentioned last week. I reviewed some more of those old recordings with Jeremy Shaw, who played guitar with us for a while, and some of his parts were amazing. Then I started cutting up the video program, and as an experiment I exported a soundcheck we did using fragments of Sensory Man. I’ll post that when I’ve got the song to post as well. (The audio needs a little help. The video looks like us in somebody’s garage, which is pretty close to the truth.)

This may turn out to be a total YouTube summer … if it keeps raining.

Usual Rubbish

Inside the May podcast.

Jesus, that was slow. You know what we need? One of those vacuum tube systems with a branch that runs straight up to the freaking internet. You just stuff the podcast into a plastic capsule, cram that sucker in the tube, and up it goes to the “cloud”. Then when it rains, everybody gets your podcast. Modern technology – what a freaking miracle.

Now that the long-awaited May episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN has finally been posted, this seems like a good time to offer a quick rundown of its questionable contents:

Ned Trek 28 – Disheveled in the Dark. This longish, musical episode of our Star Trek parody is based on the classic Star Trek episode entitled “Devil in the Dark”, a standard morality play (of course – it was the 1960s) about a mining planet being terrorized by a mysterious cave dwelling creature. Look it up … got it? Okay. The creature, called the “Horta”, is represented in our version as the “Hairta”, literally the animated hair of Donald Trump, rampaging its way through Republican candidates on a hyper-polluted, free market, toxic waste dump and fracking planet run by Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus. There’s a lot of running, coughing, and (of course) a performance of the palamino mind meld.

There are also eight new Big Green songs, which include:

Say Can You Fear (timecode: 16:14). A Nixon song. Basically another plea from the Nixon android for consulting work and a path back to respectability. Dude’s got issues.

Romney and You Know It (timecode: 22:04). Captain Willard Romney muses on the now dim possibility of a brokered GOP convention. Arrangement offers a minor nod to the late great George Martin. (You can also hear the song on Soundcloud.)

Down in the Polls (timecode: 39:12). Mr. Welsh wields his folk guitar into action and renders an Irish-tinged ballad of the killer Hairta. References to some of your favorite GOP contenders in 2016.

post-itHerr Mr. Hair (timecode: 49:14). Perle’s song. Predictably, he’s trying to curry favor with the Hairta. Always another ego to be stroked (or combed in this case).

You Made That Bed (timecode: 1:05:25). Sulu, the moral center of the Ned Trek universe (aside from Ned himself), characterizes the episode as one of chickens seriously coming home to roost. Cowbell played by Marvin (my personal robot assistant).

Demigod (timecode: 1:15:16). Ned’s song. A moody Melvin slow rocker about the phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism. Listen closely for ironic callback to the Youngbloods’ “Everybody Get Together”.

Hey GOP (timecode: 1:21:49). Shuffle swing number about the predicament of the Republican party, faced with the rampaging Hairta.

Cry for the Children (timecode: 1:26:36). Another over-the-top Doc Coburn number, filled with religious imagery and agonized wailing.

Put the Phone Down. Matt and I talk about how freaking exhausted we are having just completed eight songs for a freaking podcast. We also discuss the Utica Peregrine Falcon project, as well as some archival audio and video from Big Green’s live performance period back in the early 1990s.

Usual Rubbish

Shipkeeping.

That one? Sure, why not? It’s been a few weeks. And I guess you could say that 25 years is a few weeks … because, well … it is.

For whatever reason this week, I am reminded of one of Matt’s songs from yesteryear, a number called “Don’t Give Up The Ship”. It’s probably because the Cheney Hammer Mill is leaking like a sieve, but that’s nothing new. Or maybe it’s because we’ve finished mixing the podcast songs (all eight of them!) and I’m starting to trawl through our old tapes for lack of anything better to do. Just call me Riley. The guy with the life.

As I’ve said here before, we’ve got a million of ’em (songs, that is), but unlike the late Prince, they are not all exquisitely recorded and salted away in a vault. No, friends … they are poorly recorded on 4-track cassette, mostly, and chucked into the cramped, musty vault called my skull. “Don’t Give Up The Ship” is a Quixotic riff centered on Perry’s flag, and it’s always had a lot of resonance with me, frankly. Here’s a sample of the lyric:

Well it grieves me when I see you
On some moldy homemade raft
You’ve no life jacket, there’s not precautions
You’re spinning downstream and you’re laughing

Well I’m not about to stop you
I’ve not the will and I’ve not the means
Still I stand here like I’m waiting
A world without you I’ve never seen
You say, “Read it off the flag …”

Don’t give up the ship, says the flag that
flies above the turbulent waves
Don’t give up the ship, be a fool and
hold the course away from the shore

Ahoy.We’ve got a lot of back pages, and a lot of archival recordings from our various periods. I’m not talking about the Precambrian here – well, not exactly. More like the 1980s, 1990s. Our earliest incarnation of the band that became Big Green was probably 1979, about a year after I took up bass as an instrument. We’ve got studio recordings from 1981, ’82, and ’91 or so. I’ve got live recordings from 1993, mostly (Matt may have some earlier material squirreled away somewhere), most of which are pretty rough.

I also stumbled upon a video that was shot by the friend of a friend. It’s essentially a demo, kind of a videotaped rehearsal. I digitized it this past week and will set about cutting it up and posting some excerpts. It’s a pretty good representation of where we were musically around the time we were playing with the very fine guitarist Jeremy Shaw, who now works his butt off all over the country.

BTW – We dropped an advance mix of one of our podcast songs, “Romney and You Know It“, last week on Soundcloud. Check it out. (Look for the podcast episode this coming week.)