Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

Everything but the bathroom sink

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2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.

Usual Rubbish

Getting a good-ISH start on another year

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2000 Years to Christmas

Oh, damn, I did it again. Can’t stop writing 2021 when I mean 2022. It’s like I’m trying to go back in time. And why the hell would ANYONE want to go back to 2021? I mean, aside from Mitch Macaphee?

Yeah, Mitch had a pretty good year last year. He made some stuff blow up real good. The rest of us, however … not so much. We made things blow up, but not intentionally. And I have to say, this drafty old abandoned hammer mill is no place to spend January. If we were as rich as … well, as pretty much any other band, we could just pick this place up, put it on a flatbed, and move it someplace warm. But no how, my friends, no freaking how.

Random ways to stay warm

Okay, so when the heat is not so hot, how do you keep from turning into a band-cicle? Well, there are ways. One is to play your damn instruments. That’s what we do typically when the iceman calleth. I start banging on my acoustic guitar, beating the living shit out of it with my pick-less paw, raising callouses and annoying the neighbors with my hollering. (If you want to know what THAT sounds like, give my recent nano concerts a listen. )

Sometimes when it gets particularly frosty, I’ll play covers, like old Neil Young songs or numbers by Elvis Costello, Stones, Jethro Tull, etc. Some of it’s a little hard to render on a solo acoustic guitar, but I don’t let THAT stop me. What I can’t do is a credible version of Matt’s song Why Not Call It George, which we used to do with the full band. Our guitar player Jeremy Shaw used to do a volcanic solo on that song – holy cats! If that doesn’t warm you up, I don’t know what will.

I'm frozen solid

Through the trackless wastes

Now, as everybody knows, January is a very quiet time for bands here in upstate New York. That’s always been the way, since grand-daddy was knee-high to a grasshopper’s grandaddy. Of course, now it’s even worse with COVID, though that doesn’t stop some people from going out and making it rain in a club somewhere. That’s fine, guys … just don’t breathe while you’re there and you’ll be fine.

We of Big Green tend to prefer our solitude. And who the hell needs the money, right? I mean, besides us? We can always ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to manufacture some cash for us. He’s got one of those inkjet printers built into his ass. (Not literally his ass, you understand – just a figure of speech.) And if he just refrains from putting Art Linkletter in the president hole of the bills, someone might actually accept them as legal tender. (Hope so – it’s a long slog to Spring.)

Extraordinary means

Now, one of the benefits of having a mad science advisor is that, when you can’t afford to run the central heat, he or she can come up with some technical solution that will keep you from freezing to death. Yesterday Mitch Macaphee somehow managed to build a fire in the forge room of the mill. Only it wasn’t something impressive, like a flame generated by a concentrated tachyon beam. He literally just pulled beams out of the mill roof and threw them in the fire.

What a freaking luddite! I expect some kind of miracle cure to our hypothermia, not burning the house down one plank at a time!

Usual Rubbish

Getting a little love on the internets

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2000 Years to Christmas

I think you ought to run those numbers again, man. Seriously. I thought you were a statistician. You’re not? I thought every robot was a statistician! Learn something new every day, even in statistics.

Hey howdy, folks! Happy new year from your favorite band in the universe. And while we’re at it, happy new year from us, Big Green, the band you’ve likely never heard of. Chances are good you’ve never seen us perform or listened to our songs or picked up one of our CDs. Nothing wrong with that, of course – you’re just moving with the majority. (Go against the herd, man!)

Running with the numbers

I’ve called upon the small coterie of experts in our midst, namely, Mitch Macaphee and his greatest invention (or not), Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to help increase our internet plays a bit. My assumption is that they know all about the internets. One way or the other, they can hardly do worse than we have ourselves.

Take our recent nano concerts (please). The highest number of plays we’ve gotten was 25 on one of the songs; most are in the teens or single digits. Piss poor by any standard. Now, the pretentious artist in me says that we make music for its own sake, not for the approval of the audience. But that artist in me still likes to eat. And frankly he’s not paying rent on the space he’s occupying. I think anyone can see that that’s not fair.

Hit factory, shit factory

Leave us face it, Big Green is not a titan among indie bands. The Big Green video with the highest number of plays is our live version of I Hate Your Face, which comes in at a whopping 688 views. Not exactly setting any land speed records there, my friends. Our single from 2012, One Small Step, has been viewed 219 times on YouTube as of this writing. Again … not earth shaking.

Hey, look .... there's a blip over there in December.

In particular, our song Pagan Christmas, off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, gets a bunch of plays around the holidays via streaming services, etc. By “a bunch,” I mean hundreds. Of course, via the music streaming services we get maybe 700 song plays a year. Somebody in Romania listened to our asses. How they found them with both hands I couldn’t tell you.

Happen upon us sometime

Hey, you know what they say about marketing on the internet. You don’t? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not some kind of marketing expert or something. What I do know is that, in this capitalist paradise known as digital sales, putting something on the web without paid promotion is like tossing something into the street and hoping someone happens upon it.

You know, that sounds like a good job for Marvin. HEY MARVIN – TAKE THIS BOX OF DISCS AND START TOSSING THEM AROUND RANDOMLY. THERE’S A GOOD FELLOW.

Usual Rubbish

How to put on the worst concert ever

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I don’t have time for greeting cards. Take them away, Marvin. Give them to the kids down the street. Or some monkeys in the zoo. I don’t care, man – just GET THEM OUT OF HERE!

Sorry for my all-caps utterance, friends. You know how stressful the holidays can be, particularly when your robot doesn’t follow instructions. Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m constantly reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Far from it! We get along like nothing else I can name. (Take my word for the fact that that’s a good thing.)

Like you, we are engaged in a last-minute frenzy in preparation for Christmas, New Years, and other assorted observances. And this year it has been made a bit more complicated by my plan to put on yet another nano concert, like the one I did earlier this year. Turns out concert are more fun when you (a) play an instrument you can play, and (b) involve other people in your music-making. Who knew?

Hello out there!

As luck would have it, we live in a time of burgeoning COVID. It’s like being on a plague ship, minus the pleasure of a south sea cruise. The upshot for us musicians, of course, is that we can’t stand each other’s company … I mean, we can’t BE in each other’s company. If we share the same space, the smell …. I mean, the VIRUS might kill us. (As is my custom, when reading that line, I pronounce the word “kill” as KEEEL.)

Some may accuse me of harboring resentments for other musicians. That is not the case. I don’t harbor them, I nurture them. But in the end, we must all get along, at least better than we did at the beginning. So we need the means to play together in a way that won’t leave us all dead. (Again, following my personal custom, I pronounce the word “dead” as DAY-ID.)

Hello? Do you read me?

Sophisticated technology unleashed

Right, so how do you play together without being together? Technology! There’s this thing called the internets, and I’m guessing it just might catch on. You just set up your instrument at one end, play like the devil, and the music goes round and round, woah woah woah, and it comes out there. My advisors (Mitch Macaphee) tell me that there’s room enough in the internet tube for music to go both ways, so you can jam with someone on the other end of the tube. Holy cats!

Now, I know Mitch has suggested some crazy things in the past. Shit like that gonzo underground tour he dreamed up a few years back. But this time, THIS time, he may be on to something. Or just on something. In any case, yesterday he handed me the business end of something that looked like one of those Dr. Seuss instruments, like the Zimbaphone or whatever the hell. If you hold the thing up to your ear, you can vaguely hear something that sounds like Matt playing his guit-fiddle. Damndest thing.

Let’s get ready for something … anything

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for something. And if I have anything to do with it, it will involve me playing musical instruments into the Dr. Seuss invention known as the internets. When and if that happens, you will be the first to know. Or maybe the second or third to know, but certainly in the top ten.

Usual Rubbish

The worst of all possible universes

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2000 Years to Christmas

Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year.

Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way.

Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer

Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the Christmas iceberg here in Big Green land. There’s plenty more where those came from. You’ll see!

Some of those songs are from Matt’s early period, when he recorded Christmas songs on his 4-track cassette deck and distributed them as low-rent, labor-intensive gifts. And then there are some songs from the Ned Trek period, which covers the second half of the 2010s and, technically, is still underway. Many songs in this latter group feature funny voices and bizarre ass lyrics. Oh, and many in the former group, as well.

All about the wormhole

I wish I could say that everyone is looking forward to the holiday season. Fact is, I squat with a bunch of sad sacks. Take Mitch Macaphee (please!). Our Mad Science advisor has spent the past three weeks laughing up his sleeve at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for that is simple – Mitch has been conjuring wormholes into alternate universes since long before Zuck was a tike. The notion of someone creating a fake universe seems hilariously redundant to him.

Okay, so here’s my question: what if Mitch finds out you can make money at that Zuck scam? Will he borrow Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine and rip open the fabric of space/time? Will he then charge punters fifty bucks a head to step through and shake hands with purple protozoa-men from the fourth dimension? And last, but perhaps most importantly, will he share the proceeds with us? THAT’s what keeps ME up at night.

So, is this your answer to the Metaverse?

The reason for the seizin’

In any case, our Christmas season is starting out like all the rest of them have: fighting off the bailiffs. As you know, we’ve been squatting in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of two decades (or, perhaps, the worst part). The local authorities, bless their hearts, have been trying to evict us for most of that time. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without an eviction notice!

Thus far, we have let our nasty upstairs neighbors answer the door when the cops come calling. Frankly, I think they’ve forgotten we still live down here. And truth be told, I am in no mood to remind them.

Usual Rubbish

Dispatch from the string recycling center

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hey … this one doesn’t have so much twang in it. No, not Tang! Twang! You know – the sound that doesn’t occur when you pluck this dead-ass string you gave me. That’s the stuff.

Yeah, hiya, folks. It’s your old pal Joe from Big Green. No, don’t get up – just relax and have another glass of lemonade. We believe in hospitality here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our longtime squat house. You’re more than welcome to stop by, take a seat, and watch us attempt to record pop music using stone knives and bear skins.

Friends of the band will know that I’ve been framming on the guitar just lately, as seen in my recent nano-concert on YouTube. I’m not a virtuoso, to put it mildly. In fact, I beat that mother like Betty Crocker, even when I’m practicing. That’s why I found myself in need of replacement strings.

The principle of scarcity

Now, with MOST bands, when someone breaks a string, someone else runs up with a fully stringed and pre-tuned spare guitar. The musician need not trouble him/herself with menial maintenance duties and can concentrate on the performance. The music deserves their FULL attention, and that is exactly what it gets.

Well, that’s not the way things work around the hammer mill. When i snap a string, I start looking for some old set I left lying around five years ago, then pirate it for a spare. We simply don’t have a running inventory of replacement strings – that would demand too much in the way of resources. And for all you macroeconomics students out there, that means strings are scarce, real scarce.

Doc takes a detour

Sure, I know what you’re thinking: we have a mad scientist at our disposal. Why not utilize his talents towards keeping our instruments in good working order? Well, aside from the fact that Mitch Macaphee never thinks of himself as part of our entourage, the fact is that he’s skipped town.

Where did he go? Way on down to Texas. He thought he’d slip into the Q-Anon subgroup rally in Dallas to see if JFK junior might be interested in underwriting some of his projects. (Yeah, I know …. I told him.) In the end, though, those Q-folks can spot a fed when they see one. Though I think what probably gave Mitch away was his decision to bring Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him. Even in a crowd of crazy, that makes you kind of stand out.

Hey, is JFK Jr. behind that robot?

The Macaphee bail fund

From what I understand about Texas law, it may be illegal to have an unregistered automaton. If that’s the case, Mitch might wind up in the crowbar hotel. We may have to resort to GoFundMe or the like. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe we can use part of the proceeds to buy some freaking guitar strings.

Usual Rubbish

Putting a gloss on that broken shoe

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yep, they just keep rolling in. That’s what Mitch tells me, anyhow. We’re rich, baby, rich. Unless, of course, our mad science advisor is lying to us. For what reason? Madness has no reason, captain. But it can have a goal.

Well, THAT got weird quick. No matter. Just living the dream here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted home. Now that we’ve started performing again, at least in the digital space, we’re finding some small reason to celebrate. Not that we don’t have cheerful moments from time to time. We’re Big Green, after all, not Big Blue. That’s a whole different thing.

Chasing the residuals

Anyway, so we launched this nano solo concert featuring yours truly, Joe of Big Green. And, of course, we assumed that the residuals would start rolling in like oranges on a down ramp. Au contraire, mon frer! Not a farthing found its way to us, not a sausage. We shook the YouTube machine upside-down a few times, but it was no use.

Now, ordinarily this would upset any band. But Big Green is not any band, my friend. Don’t forget – we are a collectivist institution. It’s share and share alike around here. We have built a post-capitalist artist collective in the abandoned mill we call home, and we have no desire for the typical consumer comforts. When we make a sandwich, it’s big enough for five. In other words, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) doesn’t get any. But I digress.

An attempt at radical redistribution

Dennis Moore proved decades ago that redistribution of wealth is trickier than he thought. Among the members of Big Green and our extended network of cast offs, we have tried various methods of radical redistribution over the years. It comes more naturally to some than to others. Anti-Lincoln, for instance, has an innately redistributive ethos: what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is mine. At least you know where he stands!

I don’t want to suggest that we completely eschew standard currency. That’s simply not true. We accept all types of money, from dollars to lire to Aldebaran Quatloos. In fact, we see playing music for money as a form of radical wealth redistribution – exchanging something abstract and intangible for something concrete. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly crazy about accepting payment in concrete. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Sandwiches aren't for robots.

Barrelling toward the future

Last week, the garbage collectors tried a kind of informal redistribution of capital. The took our recycling container and dropped it on our neighbor’s lawn. What’s more, they took the recycling container that belongs to our neighbor on the other side and dropped it on our step. I’m pretty sure this is a signal from the solid waste workers that the revolution is nigh.

Hey, when the revolution comes, we’ll all be rich. That’s right – our new leaders will insist on calling everyone Rich. (I believe it’s an homage to a fallen comrade.)

(P.S. – Don’t forget to check out our nano-concert. New posts coming this week – stay tuned.)

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A really, really bad week for a camping holiday

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2000 Years to Christmas

Did you pack the sleeping bags? Good, good. How about the hurricane lamps? Excellent. Now there was something else we were planning to bring along. What the hell was it? Oh, right. Marshmallows.

Well, it is August, and as you know, most of the world goes on vacation during the course of this high summer month. (I mean most of the northern hemisphere, of course. Below the equator it’s freaking winter.) Big Green is no exception. While the French bug out on August 1, we typically wait until August 21st just to give them a head start. Not that they have anything to worry about – we seldom get beyond the stage of packing our stuff before the wheels come off.

Faulty transport technologies

Okay, so, that wasn’t a metaphor. The wheels actually came off of our rented vehicle. Not surprising, given the liberal terms they offered us. Faced with the prospect of embarking on a walking vacation, we obviously started looking into other options. Now, not everyone has access to a mad scientist, and while it’s tempting to just ask the dude to whip together some kind of land rover hover craft, we don’t want to take the easy way out. (Besides, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is in Madagascar for a conference.)

My first thought was to press-gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into hitching himself up to a donkey cart and pulling us along. He has solar batteries and motorized feet, so it’s not as far-fetched as it seems. Well, when he refused, we were left with few good options. The only ones worth considering were, hitch anti-Lincoln up to a donkey cart, or settle for a stay-cation in the Cheney Hammer Mill courtyard.

Face it, man. It's too tough to toast 'em.

Free water from the sky-gods

I hate to say that the wheels came off of our stay-cation plans, but they kind of did, even though technically speaking, wheels were not required. As soon as we pitched our tent in the courtyard, it started coming down … in buckets. Again – not a metaphor. It was literally raining buckets! Now I know that rain is a blessing in many parts of the world. But too much of a good thing is, well … not a good thing.

You couldn’t describe what happened next as anything like a vacation. I’m basing that on firm metrics. For instance, there was no recurring campfire. No s’mores were made. (Marvin tried to make the s’mores work, but water and graham crackers don’t mix.) No one carved a birch bark canoe. I know these aren’t universally recognized benchmarks, but they give you a rough picture. Bloody weather!

You can’t go home again

The fact is, when you’re home, you can’t go home again. Though, interestingly, when you open a door, you can close it … again. In any case, slinking back home from a failed stay-cation took about two minutes. Hardly a walk of shame. (I think the minimum length for a walk of shame is five minutes, but don’t quote me.)

Usual Rubbish

You heard it here first (and last).

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2000 Years to Christmas

Note: The following is a partial transcript from an interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry. The interviewer was conducted by Marvin (my personal robot assistant).

Part one: The first part

Marvin: In your early years, Big Green lived in not one, but TWO houses on the same street in Castleton-On-Hudson, NY. WTF were you thinking?

JP: Glad you asked me this question, Marvin. (Which is to say, I’m glad I asked your inventor, Mitch Macaphee, to program this question into your tiny brass skull.) The answer is, I haven’t a freaking clue. All I know is that the two houses were next door to one another. One of them had a claw-foot tub. The other had holes in the porch roof. Am I getting warmer?

Marvin: We all are getting warmer, due to climate change. Moving on. Big Green has released three studio albums thus far, the most recent being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013). And though all three are of questionable value, Cowboy Scat is by far the sketchiest. And so, again, I say, WTF were you thinking?

JP: Thanks for that question, Marvin. That was clearly inserted into your memory banks just to piss me off. I admit that we tossed Cowboy Scat together in a hurry. It’s a collection of songs written and recorded for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.

We were posting the podcast every month, and we would rush to complete at least one or two songs for the show. At the end of a year or so, we decided to make an album out of them. So we patched about 21 of them together with tape and dropped them into the internet. Like everything else we’ve ever done, it’s been a drug on the market (that’s an antiquated term that means we haven’t sold many). But hell … we’re crappy capitalists. So what’s new?

If Big Green does it, it's a flop.

Part two: Looking ahead

Marvin: Okay, so does that mean your next album will be a bunch of songs from some random podcast?

JP: No, not some random podcast – OUR podcast segment known as Ned Trek, which we recorded from 2014 to 2018. Why are you so damned belligerent?

Marvin: That does not compute.

JP: Well, then COMPUTE HARDER.

Okay, so it’s very likely that at least one of our future projects will involve pulling together some of the more than 100 songs we wrote and recorded for Ned Trek. Though they are, indeed, podcast songs, we spent a bit more time on them than the Cowboy Scat numbers. Does that mean they’re better? Well ….. I’m a poor judge of that. The only thing I can practically guarantee is that our next album(s) will be a total commercial flop. That is OUR promise to YOU, Big Green listeners!

Okay, what else you got? I’ve got some time wasting to catch up on.

And lastly, the last … part

Marvin: Where did you leave that jar of paraffin chutney I bought? That stuff is damned expensive!

JP: What the …. ? Damn it, Mitch – stop dropping your questions into my interview! I don’t know where your fucking chutney is! It’s bloody inedible, for one thing. And for another thing …. fuck you!

Marvin: Anything you’d like to add that might interest our listeners?

JP: Sure. There’s an abandoned car just up the block. If you know anything about AMC Pacers, this might be just the vehicle for you. There are some raccoons living in it, but they’re pretty nice – I’m sure they wouldn’t mind sharing the car.

Usual Rubbish

Old home week arrives at the hammer mill.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell!

Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill.

Reaching back dimly

Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The sky was darkened by flocks of pterodactyls. And I was groping around the ancient city of Albany, looking for a steady gig so that I could keep the light bulb burning (the one dangling from the hairy cord just below the ceiling).

There were a bunch of clubs around Albany back in the 80s, and when I got there in January of 1981, they were all hurting. New York had just raised the drinking age to 21 that very month, which meant most of the college students who crowded into bars on the weekend were now prohibited from doing so. In other words, the perfect time to start gigging in the Capital District.

It's old home week!

Friend of a friend of a friend

The only band I played with in Albany back in 1980-81 was the pre-Big Green group I started with my brother Matt, my SUNY New Paltz drummer friend Phil, and our guitarist friend Tim Walsh, who died some years back. After failing miserably, I went back to Albany in 1984 to play with a commercial club band. Let’s call that group PROMISE MARGARINE, or PROMISE for short.

A couple of years later, the drummer from PROMISE got his bandleader to hire me for another commercial gig in a band I’ll call CANDYASS. The keyboard player in that band was Big Green co-founder Ned Danison (I was playing bass). We started working on songs, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening, Big Green emerged from the pastel colored ether of the eighties club scene around Albany, NY.

Love-in spoonful

As it happens, I heard from Ned this past week, and he shared a relatively recent song of his that sounds more than a bit like Big Green. It’s called Houston, We Have A Love-In. Give it a listen and shake your fist at us for being so damn awesome.

You can also hear our four-song Big Green demo, featuring Ned, on this very web site here.