Tag Archives: Marvin

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.

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.

I said, Oh man, God Damn that Dream!

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I told you, I don’t have the money. You can look in my guitar case – go ahead. Here’s he key to the padlock. Rummage through the back of my amp. There’s nothing in there but decades-old cigarette butts and some tortoise shell picks I never use. Hey, get your hands off me! Where are you taking me? HALP!

What the …. ? Oh. So it was just a dream. What an em-effing relief. Thank you, Jeebus. Sorry, folks – I must have dozed off in the middle of our conversation. Dreamland is a bizarro world. Squares look like circles, time collects in puddles, and people eat potato chips with a fork. And that’s just in my normal dreams. Thing is, I almost never have bad dreams, unless I’m dreaming about our old corporate record label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. Which is what I was dreaming about a little more than five minutes ago (according to the time puddle).

Bad old days

I know most bands tend to reflect back upon their careers and celebrate their own youthful missteps and flights of folly. Yeah, well, that’s not us. We’re constantly re-litigating the past, and as a result, I’ve gotten at least one grisly visit from a knuckle-scraping denizen of our former label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. And yes, it was in dreamland, that’s true, but tell that to my dream self – to him, it’s just land, right? Does a fish know she’s underwater? Well, does she?

Dream or no, it brought me back to those bad old days when sinners were murdered for the greater good. No, wait – that’s a song lyric. What I really mean is those days when we were laboring under the watchful eye of our multinational record label, which was actually just a subsidiary of a big ass mineral extraction company that was busily grinding Papua New Guinea to a pulp. Like most capitalists, they just squeezed the juice right out of us. And when they got tired of drinking Big Green juice, they demanded pomegranate juice, I think because of its antioxidant properties. (Capitalists are nothing if not guarded about their own well-being.)

No redoubt too remote

I’m assuming I don’t need to repeat for this audience the full details of our sordid parting-of-the-ways with Hegemonic. Suffice to say that they didn’t take the announcement of our divorce with equanimity. Turned out that a contract meant a bit more to them than it did to yours truly, and so Big Green was kind of in the soup for a few weeks … or months … or maybe eight years. You lose track of time in deep space, and the further out you go in space, the further back you go in time.

Think it's safe to come out yet?

What am I talking about? Good question. Here’s a mediocre answer. When confronted with the hired thugs of our deeply disappointed corporate overlords, we turned to the one man who could help us in our hour of need: our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man who closed the space warp up again (bet you didn’t know that!), and so on. With his help, we were wisked into deep, deep space where no thug would ever find us. Until now, that is …. now that NASA has uncovered the primordial star field that was our exclusive recluse. DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!

But it was just a dream

Fortunately, we won’t need the hiding place, at least not yet. Unless Hegemonic’s dream thugs break out into the waking world. Or continue to confront us in our REM sleep. No doubt those guys are back to doing what they love best – poisoning indigenous water supplies in remote areas of the world for quick profit. That’s the ticket, boys.

Trying not to be anti-social on social media

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You know, there are better things you could be doing with your time. Like, I don’t know …. mowing the lawn. Oh, right – we don’t have a lawn. How about rearranging the bricks in the courtyard? That’s one task that won’t do itself. Or beating the rugs. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment, but they’ve really crossed a line with me over the past few weeks.

Oh, hello, reader(s). You just caught me in the middle of berating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being industrious enough. Yes, I know – he’s an automaton, he only responds to programming, I’m not being fair, etc., etc. The thing is, I don’t know how to program a robot, and his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, is not speaking to anyone this week. All I have left is a dressing down, robot or no.

Multi-platform clusterfuck

Marvin has a few responsibilities as my personal robot assistant. One is taking charge of Big Green’s social media presence. I should say here that Marvin is in no way an expert in this area. (You could pretty much say that about any area.) When it came to deciding who would take that job on, however, we quickly determined that none of us know anything about it. Ultimately, it came down to him being a robot. That’s a lot closer to being the internet than we humans are.

Not every band is successful online. In fact, many are not. But few are as unsuccessful online as Big Green. I hate to be boastful here, but if they gave out a trophy for being obscure, we would have walked away with it a dozen times over. We’ve been on online platforms for almost twenty years, starting with MP3.com, which isn’t even a thing anymore, then The Orchard, CDBaby, and a few others I can’t even remember. Our sales? Less than stellar. Let’s just say, we’ve got some remainders lying about.

Find us on Face-where?

Then there’s the major social media sites/apps, like Facebook, etc. Big Green has been on Facebook for, I don’t know, ten years? More? Not sure. We started a Twitter feed ages ago, but we only got onto Instagram earlier this year. Mostly, these platforms are designed so that your listeners can interact with you easily, share posts, etc. We get some of that, but not much, and don’t sell anything via any of those sites. (I blame Marvin.)

Well, get to it, man!

Actually, with the low number of visits we get, our Facebook page is probably the safest place on the internet. You can probably store your passwords, bank account and routing numbers, and social security number on there and they would all be safe as houses. Ditto with Twitter. I give Big Green a few mercy likes on Twitter posts, but not too often, because mostly their content is crap. (What am I saying??) Instagram gets a little more activity, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re a dead letter on social media. Own it, baby – own it!

New horizons

Anyone else would just give it up. But not us. We don’t know the meaning of the word quit. We think it has something to do with work, but none of us is sure. And since we have a general aversion to work, our consideration goes no farther than that.

Anyway, we just signed up for BandCamp and set up a new page at big-green.bandcamp.com. Why did we do it? Well, like Everest, it’s there … and we’re not. Except that now we are. Hey, if you’re on BandCamp, give us a mercy follow. That’s right – encourage us!

Planning a tour on the ground floor

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Okay, I really think you have the order of operations wrong. One thing has to come before the other thing, and you’ve got the wrong thing first. Dude, it’s not that hard – why are you blinking those lights so frantically? This isn’t differential calculus … whatever the hell THAT is.

Oh, hey, out there in normal people land. Just having a little conversation here, nothing to get excited about. Just a handful of friends getting together for a quick jawbone. That’s a big motherfucker, man. I’ve seen smaller jawbones on a donkey. Whoa, is that the time? Okay, well … gotta go, guys! Great chewing the fat with you.

Right … now that I’m out of earshot, JEEEsus, what a bunch of asshats. That’s what I get for raising the issue of touring again. Let me ‘splain.

Cart before the horse

You know the old saying: don’t put the cart before the horse. For one thing, the horse might decide to drive away in the cart. And if you’re applying a different meaning to the expression “put X before Y”, you should always prioritize animals over inanimate objects. That’s a no brainer. (Or perhaps a YES brainer. But I digress.)

I guess the point is, I seem to me among a stark minority of members of Big Green’s broader entourage who believe that we should RECORD and RELEASE an album before we go on tour promoting it, not after. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t get his little brass head around that idea. I mean, I can understand why antimatter Lincoln would be in favor of the before plan – he’s from that backwards universe where everyone eats corn on the cob vertically rather than horizontally.

I don't know, Abe. That doesn't look right to me.

What’s that you say?

Now, some of you out there may be asking, what album? And yes, I know lately we’ve been doing little more than posting old archival video of us playing random songs. But just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t snow in the living room as well. (I’ve got to stop using so many cliches, particularly the ones that don’t make any sense.) The simple fact is, we’ve got some songs … a whole lot of them.

What are we doing with said songs? We’re incubating the fuckers. We’re tossing parts back and forth, writing chord charts, barking into microphones, squinting at pages of poorly recorded verse. We’re pulling things apart and patching them back together with bailing wire and scotch tape. We’re …. killing time, frankly. It’s just fun to play new stuff, even when you’re doing it over the internets.

Why the internets? Matt is sequestered in his naturalist redoubt, watching birds, feeding beavers, and somehow writing scores of new songs. So we use sophisticated web-based technology to do our dirty work. Because that’s how we roll.

Where to begin. So many choices.

Now, if we were to go on tour … AFTER finishing the new album, we could start on that pulsar I talked about last week. Nobody’s played there yet, so we could finally be the first to market with something. (Damn, we suck at capitalism!)