Tag Archives: Bob Acquaviva

We will walk on the beautiful grid

As we work on new projects, we’re still mining the archives, and this week we tossed up a bit of musical ore (or slag) called Beautiful Grid. This is another track we recorded at AcqRock studio in Utica, NY as part of a demo project co-produced and underwritten by friend of Big Green Bob Acquaviva back in 1991.

We previously released Beautiful Grid as part of a very limited run EP back in the mid-2000s, along with three other numbers, but that’s a bit like tossing it out into the middle of the street and waiting for someone to happen upon it. So here it is again:

We shall walk on the beautiful grid
You’ll be inspired by the hymns that we pull from the sky
And on the streets
By and by
So will lend me all I need
To survive

What’s Behind Just Five Seconds

Our latest archive pick, Just Five Seconds, was recorded back in 1991, if memory serves, at AcqRock studio in Utica, NY. The track’s co-producer and sponsor was Bob Acquaviva, friend of Big Green, founder of the band Mere Mortals, producer, and all-around awesome dude. That’s the short story on how we made it. But what’s it about? Hmmm….

Tough question. Songs are always about a bunch of things and nothing in particular. But here’s a piece of the puzzle. Matt wrote this song after the 1987 collapse of the Schoharie Bridge on the New York State Thruway. He and our niece Mona were traveling along that stretch of highway that particular day and were held up in the consequent traffic jam. That was some of the input behind that lyric:

You could have been over the side
You could have been in the water
I was just two cars back
There was nothing I could have done to save you
You could have been drowning, or
You might have been broken to bits
I was just driving by
There was nothing I could have thrown to you

I just inspected those bridge supports
I checked them off as I ate my lunch
My pen said “years and years”

Ripped straight from the headlines. (35 years ago, of course.)

Scratching out a whole new way of itching

Get Music Here

Okay, that club on Route 5 … was that the Garden Cafe or Looney Tunes? It feels more like the latter than the former, frankly. Jesus, what the hell am I asking YOU for? The only thing YOU remember is random facts about some log cabin and the battle of Gettysburg. And even THAT you get backwards. (Though to you it seems forwards.)

In case you’re worried, no, we’re not writing a memoir of Big Green. Who the fuck would buy that? If nothing else, I can practically guarantee that there will never be a (1) tell-all retrospective, (2) drippy bio-pic, or (3) lost journal having to do with this, the world’s most obscure indie rock group that ever recorded more than 100 of their own songs. That said, we will milk it for a blog post or two. The first one was last week; the second, this week. The third will have to wait its turn.

Back to the Early ’90s

So anyway, in the early nineties we made the questionable decision of basing ourselves in the Utica, NY area, our home town, which at the time was not on a particular upswing culturally. We started by working with guitarist Armand Catalano, playing clubs and campuses around the region, serving up our own songs plus an assortment of covers. As I mentioned last week, the guitar seat in Big Green was governed by the rules of musical chairs, pretty much. Armand played with us, then friend of the band Steve Bennett, and later, other friend of the band Jeremy Shaw.

This was fine, except when we got confused and called guitarists by the wrong first name. There were occasional gaps as well, unsurprisingly. But the gigs we played then represented the least of what was going on in our tiny little world. None of them were in the least high-profile events. We opened for Mere Mortals at MVCC sometime in 1991 , I think. We opened once for Joe Bonamassa’s Bloodline at what is now known as SUNY Poly in Utica, probably in 1993. We played Middlebury College one New Year’s, if I recall correctly. And then there were a bunch of dead end bars.

The output was put out

The thing was, by the early nineties, Matt Perry was writing songs like a house afire. He was writing his Christmas numbers – a new album every holiday season. And he was cranking out a bunch in-between. (No, he didn’t write songs about Saint Swithin’s day – that’s just an ugly rumor about Big Green that some meteorologist started.) We were doing piles of demo recordings, and we managed to get into a studio a few times (the former AcqRok, thanks to friend of Big Green Bob Acquaviva of Mere Mortals.)

We had some live recordings as well. We’ve played a few of them on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and there are a few more we haven’t posted as of yet. Probably the best ones of these are the DAT recordings we made in Jeremy Shaw’s basement in 1993 (or ’94? I don’t freaking know.). Then there was the video demo done by some hipster dude named Angel who worked at a vegetarian restaurant and considered the VHS tape he recorded for us some kind of masterpiece (when it wasn’t).

Yesterday is not today

So, the upshot of all this is, we have a better audio record of the 1990s than we do of the 1980s, when the only technology we could afford was a bic lighter and a pack of Marlboros. Ever try to run sound through a pack of Marlboros? It ain’t pretty. Makes a kazoo sound like a brass freaking band.