Tag Archives: YouTube

Usual Rubbish

Getting by with a little help from some fiends

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, here’s the thing. I’m too big in the frame. It goes against the theme of the series, dude. If there’s one thing Big Green doesn’t like, it’s inconsistency. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles.

Oops! Didn’t know anyone was reading this. You just caught me having a little disagreement with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is serving as my video producer this month. Nothing serious – just an obscure conceptual question that has vexed us since the beginning of this blog post: how nano is nano? What means this? Allow me to explain.

A question of scale

We’re doing a little side project called the Nano Concert. Perhaps you’ve heard us nattering about it in previous posts and on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. You haven’t? DAMN IT! Marvin, did you forget to publish the blog posts again? Why have I been wasting my breath? What’s that? You DID publish them? Uh, okay. Never mind. What was I saying?

Ah, yes. The Nano Concert is really just a virtual mini solo concert by yours truly (Joe of Big Green), playing some old favorites from the beloved Big Green song book. We recorded six songs, played them on the podcast, and are in the process of posting them to our YouTube Channel. Can we truly describe this as a nano concert? Is it more than merely small? Well …. six songs doesn’t even make a set. And I’m too lazy ass to do more than that in one go. So in my book, it’s nano.

I can't play this freaking thing ...

Strings v. keys – the reckoning

The funny thing is, on five of the six songs, I’m playing six-string guitar. Now, those who know me well (and those few fiends who enjoy our music) know that I don’t play any instrument particularly well, but that if you were to rank my ability to play them in order of best to worst, it would go: (1) piano, (2) bass, (7) guitar.

That’s not a typo. I only play three instruments, and guitar is still my seventh best axe. So, why, you may ask, am I playing an instrument I can barely identify from three steps away? It’s the challenge, my friends. What fun is there in playing it safe, right? Any true musician craves a challenge. And though I’m not a TRUE musician, I do crave challenges …. as well as various foodstuffs. (You can’t eat a challenge, friend – just remember that.)

Give it a listen, damn it!

Okay, so … do you want to hear me pounding out some old Big Green tunes on a 23-year-old six-string acoustic guitar? Dive on in, my friends! I just posted the last number on Thursday. This is the first in a series of nano concerts, I like to think, though I may have to actually hire a producer rather than having Marvin twirl the knobs.

Whoops. Sorry, Marvin – didn’t know you were listening. You realize that lever you’re pulling will erase everything we did this morning , right? Step away from the console! Arrgh … never mind.

Anywho, here’s the playlist. Let me know what you think, fiends!

Usual Rubbish

Rough sledding.

2000 Years to Christmas

Take a look out the window and let me know what you see. What? What do you mean you don’t see anything? Did you open your eyes first? Okay. It’s just that you’ve made that mistake before, but …. let it pass.

Hey, greetings from the great north country! As you may have noticed, particularly if you live in the northeastern United States, we’ve gotten a little bit of snow this week. In fact, it appears to be up to the second story of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house. That would be fine, of course, except that … well … we have to come and go occasionally, to get provisions, to frequent the local tavern (I’m talking Anti-Lincoln here), to mail parcels, etc. All of that vital, life-giving activity has been brought to a halt in the wake of a fearsome nor’easter that isn’t fit for Christmas, New Years, nor Easter. (That’s why they call it a nor … uh … never mind.) Yes, winter is here with a vengeance. I think it’s pissed at us for the previous couple of mild winters, likely fueled by runaway climate change.

Okay, so, if you were snowed into an abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, what would YOU do to pass the time? I can think of one thing right off the bat: Christmas carols. Sure, we can gather ’round the old spinet, old uncle George will plunk out the tunes from the sheet music, and Frankie and the girls and I will sing five-part harmony on the classic yuletide favorites, like Pagan Christmas and Merry Christmas, Tarzan and other seasonal hits. We’ll have to get Tiny to sing the lead on Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2), of course, and then we can all sip some mulled cider as we gather around the TV yulelog broadcast and sing along with Head Cheese Log.

Fa-la-la-la whaaa?

What’s that? You’re not familiar with those carols? Why, those are selections from Big Green’s 1999 debut album, 2000 Years To Christmas, now celebrating the first anniversary of its 20th anniversary. It’s been 20 for a whole year now! This past year we put the entire album on YouTube so that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) could listen to it without cranking up the phonograph like a Model T. No need to roll out the spinet, my friends – just call up YouTube, load the playlist, and hit play. We’ve even posted the lyrics so that you can sing along. So if you’re snowed into your abandoned hammer mill, no way to get out, tired of watching static on your rabbit-ear TV set, this is an easy way to pass the time. Send us a video of you signing along with the album on YouTube, and we’ll send you a free copy of the disc. (I think we’ve got one or two of them kicking around the place.) If you prefer the mp3 version, just get the disc and rip mp3s from it. Simple!

Anyway, happy sledding, my friends. Time to dig a tunnel to the bar … I mean, the bank.

Usual Rubbish

Old Man Fall.

2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I know, I know – heat costs money. Unless we start burning shit, right? I mean, we’ve got a lot of fuel in this joint, don’t we? And when that runs out, we’ve got a mad science advisor on hand. He can either invent some way to keep us warm, or we can burn those many notebooks he has, all stuffed with theorems to destroy whole planets. We’d be doing humanity a favor!

Howdy, everyone. Sure, we want to do humanity a favor. But we also want to do ourselves the favor of keeping from freezing to death. If the coming winter turns out to be anywhere near as chaotic as this past summer, people will be porting us out of this dump with a pair of ice tongs. Oh, the humanity! And yes, I am being a bit paranoid over the question of how we are going to heat this place, particularly as the nights are get colder and damper. And spookier. But let’s face it – as squatters here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we have no means of acquiring energy from mega-corporations and using it to keep ourselves toasty. Besides, the idea is loathsome to us. Give in to big corporations? Bah! We’d sooner, well …. burn something other than what they’re selling.

There are a lot of drawbacks to living in an abandoned hammer mill. Lack of heat is one of them, sure, but the real problem with our Big Green lifestyle is that we tend to sleep through the worst weather, no matter how bad it gets. That is not a good thing. It’s not that we’re particularly comfortable here. It’s just that we’ve been musicians so long that our diurnal clock has ceased to function properly. You’re supposed to be up all night, in bed half the day, then it’s supper for breakfast and you’re off. (Supper used to be my very favorite breakfast!) Of course, we used to drink like fish … or like fishes. Maybe just Phish. (I think they drink Saranac, actually.) If we still did that, well …. we’d jam more.

See? There is a resemblance.

Which makes me think, hey …. in this weird ass COVID world we now inhabit, why don’t we join all of the other out-of-work musicians and start jamming on YouTube or Zoom or some other web platform? Well, I can think of one reason – our internet access is dotty, to say the least. I’d like to say we have a legitimate node or ingress to the Web here at the mill, but I don’t want to be accused of lying. Let’s just say that it’s sub-optimal, so if we ever do start cranking out virtual performances, live or pre-recorded, we’ll probably have to tap into somebody’s broadband wifi. I’m looking at you, Ken’s Barber Shoppe!

No doubt about it – Fall is the season that hangs us up the most. Always has been. But here at Big Green, we make the best of things, even if things are …. well … just things. Maybe we can convert Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of space heater. (He was partially constructed from an old hot water tank, as legend has it.)