Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Pulling the plug is never as easy as it looks

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I don’t know. I’m effing sick of this. Are you effing sick of this, too? You are? Wow … okay. For how many years? Damn …. why didn’t you say so? I was just doing this to keep YOU happy!

Well, you learn something new every day. Or at least every week. Except last week – I was kind of too busy to learn anything. It gets like that sometimes. Anyway, let’s just agree to say that you learn something new every little once in a while. Maybe every time Sylvie brings you some water. Like in the Leadbelly Song. But I digress.

What the this is

The “this” we’re kvetching about is this thing called blogging. We’ve been doing it for twenty years, and somehow – seemingly unnoticed by us – the world has kind of moved on. Now everything is social media, social media, etc. A few still blog, outside of the corporate shills, but it’s not really a thing anymore, and well … that’s a shame. Still, blogging has its place. I just don’t know whether or not its place is here, exactly.

Since we started this back in 1999, it’s been kind of a chronicle, a travel log, and a journal rolled into one. There have been a lot of twists and turns, like those times we went to the chewy center of the earth, blasting our way through miles of nougat until we hit molten caramel. Or the times we’ve visited the gas giants on the outskirts of our celestial neighborhood. We always felt that people would come away from those stories with valuable life lessons. Lessons like, DON’T TALK TO THOSE SQUATTERS!

The free hand

Now some of you might say, well, so you’ve been writing a stupid blog. What are you doing with your OTHER hand? It may surprise you to know that it actually takes two hands to type this stuff in. The fact is, we need to start doing other things …. things that are more, I don’t know, useful maybe? Not the right word. How about interesting? Probably still not ideal. Nevertheless, we need at least one free hand, even if we’re going hands-free.

Us, back in the day

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Matt’s been writing songs like a house on fire. Even in our salad days he didn’t put out THIS much stuff. And we didn’t have a lot of salad days. Anyway, we’re going to start recording these songs, first as demos, then maybe pull it together in another album. We have the makings of at least one other album in the Ned Trek library – the new stuff, though, is completely different. That’s the one thing we’ve never been short on: material. Everything else, yes, but not that.

Wait for it!

Long story short, I will be posting Big Green stuff on social media, maybe pull some of that into the blog, but these regular posts will be going on hiatus. If I hear a flurry of calls for them to return, I will start posting again … but I’m not holding my breath. Til then, you know where to find us. (Right here.)

Hey, dis guy ain’t got all his buttons, mack

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What’s in that box? I’ll tell you what’s in that box. There’s nothing in the damn box, man. But that box over there, the one with the torn flaps, that’s got some gig posters in it. From 1987. A little late on those.

Hey, there, Big Green fans! Just catching us in the middle of Spring cleaning. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “Joe”, you’ll say, “this isn’t Spring, it’s late summer, nigh unto fall, you idiot.” And then you’ll flip me off and storm out of the room in search of cleverer bands. But before you’re out of earshot, I’ll just remind you that we’re late with everything we do. We don’t eat breakfast til lunch time, no lunch til dinner time, and so on. The more you know!

Damaged collateral

Back to cleaning. Man, you wouldn’t believe how many recondite corners there are in this stupid barn of a hammer mill. Somehow that moving company we hired to carry our stuff from our lean-to in Sri Lanka to here managed to squirrel something away in every alcove. It’s almost like they DIDN’T want us to find anything. But here we are, after only about twenty years, digging it all up and sifting through it like panhandlers. Who says we’re slow on the draw?

Anyhow, you wouldn’t believe the shit we’re finding! Old gig calendars. Stacks of flyers for college bulletin boards and the like. Every guitar string Matt ever broke and then some. Various decorative items and abandoned set lists. (No, we’re not hoarders … we just, you know … keep stuff.) In other words, a bunch of useless junk. Would you believe it? Perhaps you would. In which case, my earlier declaration would be inaccurate. It’s hard to know who you can trust nowadays.

Pin it on, the jam

In many ways, our junk production outstripped our music production from the very beginning. Those were the days before the internets, my friends. Televisions were mostly analog. Phones were something attached to the wall or plugged into an outlet. People read odd, inky things called “newspapers”. Personal robot assistants were made of pots and pans and leftover appliance parts. (Okay, THAT part hasn’t changed so much.) When you had to get the word out on something in those days, you had to do it old school.

Get ... yours ... squx

Oddly enough, even during a time when we couldn’t hang on to a drummer for more than a few weeks, we had a machine that made campaign buttons. Sure, there was no way we could hold down a gig, but we were always able to distribute pin-on buttons with our logo on them. Talk about the cart before the horse! No surprise, then, that in the midst of our Fall cleaning, we came across a cache of Big Green buttons. I’m guessing we spent a couple of days stamping those suckers out on that button press back in ’87. (No wonder our drummers all walked.)

Get yours today

Hey, there’s a limited supply of these items in the known universe. But if you so, so love Big Green, and you wish you could shake the claw of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), then you deserve one of the few remaining Big Green buttons. Just email us or send a comment via social media and we will fix you up, gratis, while supplies last. Because that’s the kind of band we are …. the kind that’s cleaning the junk out of its squat house.

All the king’s robots and all the King’s pens

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We got another one of those notes, man. One of those neighbor notes about the uncut lawn. Let’s say they’re a little disappointed in us. I have to admit, I’m disappointed in us, too. We really SHOULD have mowed that lawn, but we were too damn LAZY and SHIFTLESS. (Please share this post with our neighbors so that they will feel validated.)

Anyway, here we are in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, no validation in sight … not even for our parking. You know, I think we might be the subject of yet another community effort to rid the neighborhood of ne’er do wells. Frankly, I object to being termed in such a way. I may not always do well, but I certainly sometimes do well. I can’t speak for any of the other members of our entourage, but I for one try to remain on the straight and narrow. (It’s been a bit too narrow lately, though.)

Call in the lawn robots

Now SOME people I know, and I won’t say who, hire robots to mow their lawn. I’m not super comfortable with that idea. The part I’m not comfortable with, I should add, is the “hire” part. Why buy the milk when you own the cow, right? We have our own damn robot, thank you very much. His name is Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and if you Google his full name, you’ll come up with about twenty years of posts on this very blog. Or some nonsensical artificial intelligence story. Same damn thing.

Thing is, the lawn robots descend onto your property in a swarm and cut the grass in about ten minutes – just a big flurry of activity, then they’re gone. Marvin could NEVER do that. If he tried to get a job with the lawn robots, he would never get past the first interview. They would laugh him out of Utica, for chrissake. Think of that: Laughed out of Utica. Good name for a band, I think. But I digress. I can’t ask Marvin to do our lawn. It’s a matter of principle. Marvin was created for greater purposes, like vacuuming the hall. I can’t allow him to lower himself in that way.

Sign ’em if you got ’em

What Marvin really needs is a contract. We used to have one of those, with that crazy corporate label Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., of Indonesia. It was signed in red ink, actually, though it may have been blood, now that I think of it. Those guys were kind of rough. They weren’t getting us to do shit by using Jedi mind tricks. It was more the truncheon and tire iron method. But hey, you don’t want to hear about our contract signing ceremony under duress. This is supposed to be a HAPPY occasion.

Mow the damn lawn.

Stuff it!

It’s actually a good thing we’re no longer under contract to Hegemonic. We can release our new songs into the wild like birds and let them fly on their own volition. Labels always make you do dumb shit you don’t want to do, then cut up your albums to make two or three. You call that value? Jesus Christmas. What an industry! Even our mad science advisor, exploiter of the intergalactic time warp, Mitch Macaphee thinks that’s unjust, and he’s crazy as a loon. Maybe crazier.

From green to red

Yeah, so there are drawbacks. And the first is no money to pay the damn bills. A smarter band would just let them do what they want with their music, but nobody ever accused us of being smart. At least not to our faces.

If you’re built upside-down, walk on the ceiling

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Hmmm. That’s kind of catchy. How about this one? Right …. nothing on the applause meter. Okay, your turn. That’s just goddamned awesome. Now let me try one. Sucks. WHY WAS I BORN?

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re working. As one of those performing rock/pop groups that composes its own material, we, of course, need an editorial process. You just walked in on one of our markup meetings. Here’s how it works: we write out a lyric on a big sheet of white paper, then hang it up on the wall. Everyone gets a chance to cross words out and add words in. We decide with a roll of the dice who goes first. If the winner of the dice roll is Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I have to put a bucket on my head. Then Matt is invited to draw a face on the bucket with magic marker. Got all that?

Sausage making 101

I’ve written about our creative process many times on this blog. Think of my posts as helpful tips for songwriting, especially for those who aspire to be as commercially unsuccessful as we’ve been. Now, let me just say right here and now that not everyone is cut out to reach that lofty goal. It takes a certain special something to be this big of a flop. You either got it or you don’t, as the saying goes. And baby, we got it.

How do you write a massively non-commercial song that almost no one will be able to relate to, except perhaps your neighbor’s dog? Well, it’s not as hard as it sounds. You start with subject matter – something real niche-y, like the history of cardboard. We, for example, chose Rick Perry for one of our albums. Now that may seem like a crass attempt at capitalizing on someone else’s fame, drafting behind them as they sail along. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, it’s so far from the truth, it circled the globe and bumped into the truth from the other side.

The ballad of Cousin Rick

Look – if you’re going to be as unpopular as Big Green, you need to pick something to write about that’s even more unpopular. Rick Perry was low hanging fruit in that regard (see Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick). So Matt wrote a boatload of songs about him, and I wrote a handful. That’s our usual ratio. You could say I’m more careful when I write, but that would be a lie. I rely on found words, forced rhymes, and a bottle of tempera paint so that I can squeeze it all over my lyric sheet when I decide it’s garbage. It’s cathartic, trust me – just give it a try.

Does this look convincing enough?

Thing is, as a band we’re kind of built upside-down. I mean, Big Green started out with the weird songs. You know what I’m talking about – Sweet Treason, The Milkman Lives, Going To Andromeda, all that stuff, then those umpteen million Christmas songs. After that, it was International House weirdness, then Cowboy Scat, and finally, Ned Trek. Now we’ve got a boatload of songs about … wait for it …. interpersonal relationships. You know – the stuff that most bands start with before they go all weird and shit. We’re like freaking Benjamin Button, except that I hate that stupid movie.

Where next?

I don’t know, man …. we’ve got some recording to do. Lots of songs, damn it. There’s certainly at least one album’s worth of unreleased material, and maybe even a box set. That’s right – we could record all the songs, put them in a cardboard box, set the box out into the middle of the road, and hope our fans chance upon it. That’s called “marketing”, kids. Ask your mother.

Welcome to the song recycling center, Campers

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You want to use that one? Really? Which version? Hmmm … okay. That one’s not in the best condition. I think Mitch was using it to prop his closet door open. And then there’s the rising damp. Lots of factors go into this, dude. It’s not so simple.

Like most bands, Big Green has a back catalog. The question is, what to do with all that material, sitting idle, not carrying its own weight. I’ve told our old songs to go out and get a job, but some of them are reaching retirement age, and that’s not an optimal time to start the search. The thing is, we’ve got a boatload of new material coming this way, thanks to the transitive property of Matt Perry, in particular. Yes, I (Joe) have written a handful, but Matt’s output far outstrips mine, and good thing too. ‘Cause I’m a lazy-ass mother. Putting it all on the table here.

Reviving the nineties

So, some who have known Big Green since its inception recall that we had a flurry of activity in the early nineties. We were playing clubs, schools, etc., with a bewildering variety of guitar players. The decade before, we couldn’t hold on to a drummer for love or money. John White took up with us in the late eighties, so problem solved …. except then we didn’t have a guitarist. Then we got one, then lost one, got another, lost another, etc. Let me know when you’ve heard enough. (I know I have.)

Most of the recording we did in the nineties was with Jeremy Shaw, friend of the band, who played a bunch of gigs with us, did some video, and a few audio demos. One of the demos we did was a group of songs we recorded live and later released under the moniker LIVE FROM NEPTUNE. These were performances straight to DAT tape, no overdubs – we did a bunch of takes on maybe five or six songs. You can hear Jeremy really shredding that thing on Special Kind of Blood, Merry Christmas, Jane, and one or two others.

Look over there: something shiny

Okay, so our new material is nowhere near ready for release in any form. Frankly, we’re still in the composing and rehearsing stage. Then comes the de-composing. After that, Marvin (my personal assistant) fashions an album cover out of used ball bearings, and that’s how the sausage is made. But as of now, we’ve got a long way to go. I mean, we’ve got personnel issues to straighten out, we’ve got hinky tech problems, we’ve got rising damp. Our objective – a new album – is either very, very small, or very, very far away. Don’t ask me to solve THAT rubic’s cube.

Did you post those oldies yet?

What do you do when you don’t have anything new to share? Recycle the old stuff, that’s what. We’re chucking some older numbers onto our YouTube channel, so that fans of that platform can listen to our classic selections free of charge, any time that suits their fancy … even if they don’t have a fancy suit to their name. We uploaded 2000 Years To Christmas some time ago, of course. Now we’re working on our EP from the mid 2000s, the afore-mentioned LIVE FROM NEPTUNE. The first two songs are posted on YouTube, with more to come. What do you know about that? Something shiny.

Seasonal effectiveness disorder

Summer’s almost over, and I know I’m not alone in thinking that it’s about damn time. Still, we haven’t accomplished much this season. Not that this summer should be any different from previous ones. Hey, we’ll keep chucking old songs in the air until we get our arms around the new ones. (They ain’t chuckable quite yet.)

I said keep the bastards away from me!

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I told you, I didn’t want to be disturbed. And just because I have a gaping hole in my wall doesn’t mean you can just jump right through it. Get out, and take those nasty things with you. Jesus! This mill is a prison!

Okay, I admit that I was overreacting a tad just then. My deepest apologies, and the same for Marvin (my personal assistant), who was once again in the process of invading my personal space for no good reason. Still, that doesn’t justify bad feelings or harsh words. We try not to fly off the handle around here – that’s part of our credo as a band, and it’s something we’re particularly, uh … shit ….. WILL YOU TURN THAT DAMN THING DOWN!!

Quadropedal unmanned vehicles

What did Marvin want from me? Well, he made a new friend today and he wanted to show the bugger off. It’s one of those automated robot dogs – you know, the kind that chase people to death in your nightmares (or just in Black Mirror). He thinks he found the robot dog out in the street, but I happen to know that little iron fido is one of Mitch Macaphee’s latest experiment. It’s kind of his Eighth Man, if you know what I mean, though he’s clearly no Professor Genius.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust autonomous vehicles of any sort. They have a mind of their own, you know. And they’re just as liable to take your leg off as any real dog, maybe more. I mean, I could possibly get behind Mitch’s experiment if it were about supporting our next interstellar tour. But damn it, man, it’s got nothing to do with that. That’s right – Mitch is going rogue, once again!

A real Florida story

Now, I’m not a big fan of all these other states. But apparently there’s one state called Florida, and apparently there’s a place down there called Cape Canaveral. And at this Cape Canaveral is a special installation of the Space Force. And that force needs protection … the kind you get from autonomous robot dogs.

Yeah, I'm not crazy about that idea.

Okay, friends. Like I said earlier, I don’t much cotton to autonomous robot animals. And I’ve made my opinion quite well known within the domain of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Which is why it puzzles me so that Mitch Macaphee – whose hearing is excellent, I understand – would put in a bid for building those robot dogs for Cape Canaveral. Seriously, do you know what this means? It means all of his beta testing will be happening right here, in the hammer mill. That’s no fair, man. Tell Florida to get their own beta-tested robot dogs. (Not even sure you need to tell them something like that.)

My little redoubt

Like with most of Mitch’s contracts, it’s really best to just ride them out and keep your head down. I might consider investing in some knee guards – something that will protect my vulnerable shins from those vicious robots. No, they haven’t done anything mean yet. But they might decide to at any moment. What part of autonomous do you not understand?

Even the colonel gets more mail than us

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Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel”, or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo.

Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing!

First tune, then play … the tune.

Part of what makes people cranky around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the lack of creature comforts. The furniture in this joint is literally either made of bricks or fashioned crudely from surplus hammer handles. Looking to get comfy? Just stuff an old burlap sack full of grass and you’ve got yourself a pillow, dude. And when it gets hot here in upstate New York, well, you just open up a window. Or wave a fan or two. (You see? You knew I would steer it back around to fans again, didn’t you?)

That said, we have our tasks at hand. One of them is keeping Marvin (my personal robot assistant) from setting the mill on fire with his greasy cooking. The other is rehearsing for our next album, which we are doing remotely through one of those Zoom-for-music apps. That’s right – Matt’s on one end of the hammer mill, I’m on the other, and we jam over the internets. (You gotta problem with that, huh? HUH?) It’s mostly a process of Matt showing me a half dozen more tunes that he wrote since the last time we talked. Me? I’m chipping away at one, maybe two.

Subject matter experts

The thing with Big Green, you see, is that we get onto these jags. This is particularly true of my illustrious brother, Matthew. I’ve written before about his tendency to deeply explore a topic through the medium of pop song. Hell, he wrote about eighty songs on the subject of Christmas, probably a hundred about Ned Trek, at least 25 about Rick Perry. Now he’s on to human interrelationships, so it’s relatively unbroken ground. I mean, who can you think of who has written songs about human emotions? Hell, no one I know.

I don't think that's the colonel Garcia Marquez was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve got a notebook full of handwritten chord charts that say we’ve got an album on the way. Though, as with the Ned Trek material, it may actually be more than one collection. You musicians know what we’re grappling with. Do you make three mediocre albums, or one really, really, really bad album? Such a hard creative choice to make. We probably need a focus group to help us untie this knot. Where the hell is Frank Luntz when you need him? Having a sandwich? Okay …. don’t bother him, then.

Right, but when the hell …

Okay, so if we actually DID get fan mail, one of the first questions would probably be something like, WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING YOU SO LONG WITH THIS STUPID ALBUM? Well, dear fake reader, I know it’s been nine years since our last release. And I know that release was really lame. But bear in mind – our technology is from the stone age, carving music from living rock. We’ll keep chipping away at it until we’ve knocked off everything that doesn’t look like a new album.

Now, where did I leave those Cardboard tubes?

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Man, it’s hot today. Maybe we should make some tea. Like a whole pot of tea. Perfect day for it. Just fill the pot with water, put it on the counter and watch it come to a boil. No problem – lovely pot of tea.

Well, it’s August, and it’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in here, as the sages of Monty Python once said (with a cartoonish Aussie accent). It will come as a surprise to no one that there is no air conditioning here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, the closest thing we have to air conditioning is some holes in the roof – holes that let the air in. Sometimes the air is cool, sometimes not. It’s conditional, on account of the changing weather …. air conditional.

Things my comic books taught me

Summers like this remind me of my misspent youth. I say “me”, because no one else here remembers my misspent youth. Even Matt, who misspent much of it right alongside me, doesn’t care to remember, and who can blame him? If you remember the 1970s, you probably weren’t there. That said, I remember quite a bit of it, particularly around the middle. Like an Oreo or Hydrox cookie, the ’70s had a creamy center, with crunchy wafers on either side. Ask your mother.

We had a roof over our heads and three squares a day, but not a lot of spending money. So we took to entertaining ourselves the cheap way. You know what kids are like – they’ll whittle a canoe out of an old birch tree. I was like that. Hell, I fashioned a bong out of old cardboard paper towel tubes and tape. Got the plans out of the back of a Zap comic book. It might have been Dr. Atomic or something like that. And yes, it was made of combustibles, but it didn’t catch fire …. right away.

Red sales in the sunset

Another summer tradition: we’re in the red. There’s a lot of reasons for this. One is that we’ve never really been a beach band. I think you could count on one hand the times that we’ve collectively been to the beach for something other than bird watching (Matt) or metal detecting (Anti-Lincoln). In other words, our music is not synonymous with summer fun. We’re never likely to write the big hit of the season, despite all the trying. That’s okay. I’m not sure what we would do with riches at this stage. (Tell me more about those riches …)

Yeah, not really our thing.

You know, it’s a pity comic books aren’t as universal as they used to be. If they were, we could move a lot of music through those suckers. I can see a Big Green ad tucked into the back pages, between the Charles Atlas fitness course and the patented Onion Gum. Just clip out the coupon and mail it in with a nickel taped to the little circle. We’ll send you Big Green’s latest album, plus a publicity photo signed by yours truly. The thing practically writes itself.

Get yours someplace else

Hey, while we’re sweating to the oldies, this is probably a good time to mention that we’re now on BandCamp. We’ve uploaded our first two albums there, will add more in the near future. Check it out, friend us, share our page, throw us a bone, hey will you?

Time to kick out the jams, mother fuckers.

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Jesus, how the hell did they make that image? Did they use chisels and clay tablets? I can’t even read the fricking thing. You know you’ve been around too long as a band when your earliest promo packages were written in cuneiform.

Well, it’s the doldrums of summer once again, which means we’re digging into the archives and mining our inglorious past for the occasional nugget of … whatever. I’m starting to think that Big Green was founded before the invention of the camera. Actually, it’s simpler than that – we started playing before everyone had broadcast-quality video production studios riding in their pockets.

As a result, there aren’t a lot of shots of us playing, hanging out, cavorting, etc. It’s almost like we didn’t exist before the late nineties, and we most assuredly did. But back in the day, you had to wait for the photographer to show up …. and when you’re broke, it’s a long wait.

Live from someplace

Big Green has some old recordings, of course. And yes, we’re working on new recordings (or at least rehearsing new songs) now, but we’re always digging out the oldies, cause that’s just how we roll. Just this week, I posted the first installment of our E.P. LIVE FROM NEPTUNE on our YouTube Channel – a song called Merry Christmas, Jane, a version of which also appeared on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. Because it’s YouTube, I covered the video screen with stills from our video demo and other random shots. Again, not a lot to choose from.

Why “Live From Neptune”? It made sense at the time. Mind you, we recorded the songs live to tape in Jeremy Shaw’s basement. This was a year after we played an outdoor concert at his house along with a couple of other bands. (I’ve posted a couple of tracks from that gig on THIS IS BIG GREEN.) We were working up a demo of some original songs, playing a bunch of takes straight into a DAT machine. (This was 1994, mind you.) Merry Christmas, Jane was one of them.

I feel pixilated, damn it!

Stop action headbangers

Then there were the gigs we played at bars around where we lived in upstate New York. Most of those were kind of unmemorable. And again, no photographs … or very few. I have a handful of shots from one night we played at a club named Fat City in West Utica, NY. We played there a bunch of times over the years, sometimes under assumed names, like I-19. (There’s some video of one of those nights on YouTube, courtesy of friend of the band and former I-19 guitarist/vocalist Steve Bennett.)

I suppose it’s just bad luck that back when we were younger and less crispy looking, nobody had a camera. Now that we’re old geezers, there are cameras everywhere. It reminds me how, at one of my day gigs, the standard retirement gift was a company-branded wall mirror. What’s the last thing you want when you’re hanging up your skates? But I digress. Eyes forward, Perry – that’s the stuff. Never mind what’s behind, watch what’s ahead in stead. Harrrrumph!

Advanced boxology

Hey look what I found – an old poster or five. You never know what’s in the next box. Actually, the last five boxes had other boxes in them. One of them has the key to time in it, or so the legend goes.

There’s no business like no business (I know)

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I spy with my little eye …. a table! No, that’s a chair. No, that’s Mitch Macaphee’s experimental water bong. Yes, yes, finally …. that’s a table. It’s only the last object in the room, for crying out loud. Jesus. Do you know any OTHER games?

Here’s the problem with personal robot assistants: they don’t have deep cultural knowledge about what it’s like to be a human being. I mean, Marvin isn’t even programmed to play I Spy. What the hell was Mitch Macaphee thinking when he left that tidbit out of the poor bastard’s memory bank? Beats me how he can be expected to make his way through the world without knowing classic parlor games or learning how to square dance. (And no, Marvin doesn’t know how to doe – see – doe.)

Time on our hands

Now, the more industrious amongst you will no doubt surmise that, if we are playing parlor games, we have little better to do. As nasty and condescending as that claim obviously is, it’s also just as obviously true. Yes, damn it, aside from the odd game of chance, we’re just sitting on our hands here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, hoping for salvation to pour down us like milk onto cornflakes. And man, what I wouldn’t give for a nice bowl of cornflakes just about now! (Focus, damn it, focus!)

The trouble is, there just isn’t a lot of work out there for aging indie bands that have zero reputation, zero following, and zero sales potential. Employment opportunities abound in just about every industry save local-circuit live music, and what work exists is dominated by kids (as it should be – it’s their turn, after all). I hired anti-Lincoln to sit by the phone and wait for the offers to come rolling in, and thus far, no potato. In fact, he’s grown a beard waiting for that phone to ring. (It’s the beard he already had, of course, but …. the point is, he’s been sitting there a long time.)

Making lemons out of lemonade

What is there for a bunch of wash-outs to do? Make an album, of course. Hey, look – if we waited around for people to like us before we did anything useful, we would do nothing but wait around for people to… like … us …. Okay, that’s kind of circular. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve made albums before in the midst of unpopularity. Why not do it again?

We have the material. And I’m not talking about Big Green’s lost generation of Ned Trek songs – more than 80 recordings just begging to be finished and committed to some kind of collection. Sure, that album will happen one of these days, years, etc. I’m talking about a whole raft of new songs by Matt and a handful by yours truly. Brand new material, just plucked from the Big Green tree. We’re in preliminary rehearsals right now, via JamKazam, but I expect we’ll start tracking these pretty soon. I mean, what ELSE is there to do around this dump?

See what fun they're having?

Yeah, but how do you … you know …?

There’s very likely someone out there saying, but wait a minute – Big Green no longer has a corporate label. How are you going to distribute said project, eh? WHERE YA GONNA GET THE MONEY?

Right, well … first off, don’t yell! Second, we’ve opened up a Big Green site on Band Camp. It’s got our first two albums posted on it, more on the way. Third, I don’t know … see number one. I’ve got some parlor games to finish.