Feeling a bit reflective this week. And no, it’s not because I’m standing in front of a mirror. That’s just narcissism – whole different category of crazy. Besides, all of my mirrors cracked years ago.
Let me start from the beginning. This week I was trying to program Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to make guacamole, which is a challenge in as much as his programming consists of setting a combination of three-position switches in a certain configuration for a given task. Of course, Marvin was built by a mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee), so there’s no guide for what configuration will deliver what outcome, which leaves only trial and error. I was getting close to guacamole (I had found the right combination for gazpacho), but strangely I ended up programming him to replay demo recordings from our earliest days. (Who would’ve thunk those two things would be one toggle-click away from one another?)
Well, that got me thinking back to the days of yore (or days of Yor, Hunter of the Future), when we started this whole music thingy. Two score and two (or was it three?) years ago, Matt and I first picked up our guitars. Then we dropped them because they were too heavy for our little hands, in that we were young and all. Before long, we picked them up again, started plucking, strumming, dairning, nairn-ting (those are technical terms), and we started a little rhythm combo – Matt playing guitar, our friend Tim Walsh playing another guitar, me playing electric bass, and somebody, anybody, playing drums. (We finally settled on our friend Phil Ross, who was better than we deserved.)
Then one day (I think it was in 1979) Matt noticed that my guitar had fewer strings than his. He grabbed it out of my hands, leaving me no option but to start banging on the nearest piano. We did a few songs like that, then more, then more, more, more, and .. well … it became the new normal. Within a few years, we started to learn how to play our instruments, which really got in the way of the kind of music we were into, so we worked hard to forget all we knew. Thus Big Green was born.
Well, that’s the unofficial history of the band. For the official history, full of asinine exaggerations, see our Pre-History page. Now … back to that mirror.
