What’s to celebrate? Well … a lot of things, Mr. anti-President. Like, I don’t know … the lack of snow? Ummmm …. mail delivery? The persistence of our life-giving sun? Okay … I got nothing.
Hey, what the hell, we appear to settling into a bit of a post-holiday funk here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Like most bands of our generation, we like to get funky, and there’s not time like the post-holidays for a little funk-a-delic framming. Why not, right? Matt’s got a Fender Stratocaster for the first time in his life (sure, he’s had it for three years, but still … ). I’ve got my Korg SV-1 with funky clav sounds and something that sounds like a 70s Farfisa organ. So when it comes to post-holiday funk, we’re loaded for bear.
It’s fair to say that we don’t have a reputation as a jam band. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done it a whole lot. Big Green rehearsals were usually just jam sessions, interrupted periodically by some swearing and hand waving. Our gigs were kind of ragged back in the day, and I’m not at all sure what we would sound like live right now, on planet Earth, with its normal gravity and its oxygen-rich air. Not the same as playing on the semi-molten surface of Neptune. Nothing like the venues on Henson’s Planet. (What are those like? Well, I guess you’ll just have to ask Henson.)
I guess what brought this to mind was listening back to some old live recordings we have kicking around the mill. They’re all on analog audio cassettes, so I have to plug them into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who helpfully has a cassette deck built into his abdomen, and a couple of mini stereo speakers on either side of his oddly misshapen brass head. (He’s like a walking ’80s boombox … except for the walking part.) Anyway, we would extend cover songs to keep people dancing or milling about or doing whatever they were doing that didn’t involve chucking things at us. That typically entailed some longish guitar solo by whoever was working with us at that time – either the amazing Jeremy Shaw or the astonishing Tony “Ace” Butera, either one of whom could shred hard enough to peel the paint off the walls. (Though, in all honesty, most of the venues we played in those days didn’t have a lot of paint left on the walls.)
So … here’s to the funky jam. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers. Let me hear you say “yeah.” Now let me hear you say “Madagascar”. Now … uh … I got nothing.
