Tag Archives: Dale Haskell

What the hell is next – a boat ride?

2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, we tried that. Nobody makes money doing that shit any more. Think of something else. What? Oh, god no. That’s not even a thing, dude. Where have you been for the last forty years? Right here? Oh, that’s right. Never mind.

Well, here we are, friends, facing the onset of another spring in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. This may be our twentieth, but I’m not entirely certain. Somebody page back through the blog posts. Don’t stop until you see Trevor James Constable and some dude who looks like a nebula. (If you run across Big Zamboola, you’re getting closer.)

Nickel’s worth of difference

Times being what they are, we’ve been scraping around for new ways to make a few bucks. So far, no luck. I’ve been polling everyone in our little entourage for new ideas. Even old ideas are welcome, so long as they come with a 90 day warranty. Trouble is, the members of our entourage pretty much don’t have lives, so they’ve got nothing new to say that we haven’t all heard fifteen times. It’s somewhat discouraging, I will allow.

Today antimatter Lincoln was piping up with a few tarnished gems. He suggested doing something called matching pennies, which apparently is a game for two people who have nothing better to do than to slap pennies on a wooden table in hopes of filling their pockets with loose change. Back in the day, he used to raise fifty, maybe a hundred pennies in a single day playing this game. When I slapped that idea down, he suggested something called matching nickels.

Hey, that penny matches your face.

New ideas in old bottles

I suppose when all else fails, we could just play music and ask people to pay us, like we used to do when we were younger. But where’s the challenge in that? It just sounds too easy. Aside from that, we live in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s more like the outskirts of nowhere. There aren’t a lot of good venues in this burg, my friend. Not that any good venues would hire us, but … well, you know what I mean.

Of course, back in the day, I would play practically any gig to keep the lights on. I played in clubs, in fields, in hotels, on boats, at casinos – you name it. One time I did a gig with a Dixieland band on a cheesy cruise ship. It’s the kind of thing you flog your way through, mostly fail at, then slink away with your pockets full of ill-gotten gains. Did I care, really? Nah. It was a job, man, just a job. But I was twenty-something then, and a bit short on brains.

Hey, check this out

All this week I’ve been posting songs from that April 1987 Factory Village gig on our YouTube Channel. Take a look and check out Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and me backing up our late friend, songwriter Dale Haskell, on stage at QE2 in Albany, NY – Eleven tracks in all, opening for Love Tractor.

Putting the pieces back together

2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I checked that drawer. And the one below it. Jesus, I checked all of them, okay? It’s simply not there. And no, the lizard people didn’t steal it during the night. We would have heard them, Abe, and incidentally …. THERE ARE NO LIZARD PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET.

Hoo, man. You have to talk until you’re green in the face before people get the idea around here. Especially with someone like anti-matter Lincoln, who believes every conspiracy theory he hears on YouTube or Instagram or whatever the fuck. I mean, the guy’s positronic doppelganger was assassinated, so he sees plots everywhere. I suppose it’s hard to trust in times like these … especially when you’re Lincoln.

As anniversaries go …

Well, it should surprise no one that Big Green has reached its coral anniversary. That’s right – the traditional gift on your thirty-fifth is not the Electric Light Orchestra box set, it’s some ossified sea exoskeletons. Hope you enjoy! No question but that 35 years is a long effing time to be together, whatever the hell you’re doing or even trying to do. No wonder people are throwing sea-floor rocks at each other.

So, what does the coral anniversary mean? That your marriage is hung up on the reef? Could explain a lot about Big Green, am I right? We haven’t put out an album since 2013’s Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Not that anyone is counting (aside from me), but that’s the second longest time we’ve gone between albums. Of course, the irony is that we’ve actually already recorded several albums worth of material yet to be released.

The reason for the ceasin’

So, what is our excuse for this behavior? I’m going to go with laziness. We’re a bunch of useless layabouts, no good to anyone. Ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – he does most of the heavy lifting around here. The only break he gets from heavy lifting is when he’s doing all of the light lifting. Some might think this arrangement leaves us with more time to create content, but we seldom take the opportunity to do so.

Turns out you're right. We're just a bunch of lazy mothers.

I suppose it’s fair to point out that this isn’t the first fallow period we’ve gone through as a group. Even at our inception, when most bands are hopping around like jackrabbits, looking for the next venue, we were kind of … um …. meh. We did rehearsals. We recorded. We wrote. But gigs? Not so many that first year. In fact, I was playing in other bands just to keep the lights on.

Up from the archives

Speaking of other bands, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I found an old tape of a gig Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and I played back in 1987, when we were just getting the band started. The video is grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but I digitized it anyway and started throwing it up on YouTube. The gig was in support of the release of our friend Dale Haskell’s album Factory Village, and it was captured on video by another friend, crack photographer Leif Zurmuhlen.

Check out the playlist if you want to see Ned and me framming away on stage at Albany’s famed QE2 club. And while you’re there on YouTube, try to avoid those rabbit holes anti-Lincoln is always falling into.

More than a few blocks from factory village

2000 Years to Christmas

You know what they say, man. Everyone as time went by got a little bit older and a little bit slower. Stay in the toaster long enough, and hell, you’re toast. Stick a fork in it. Insert your favorite over-the-hill cliche here.

Hey, lookit – I know I’ve been more reflective over the past year than in previous years. When your ass starts to get old, it spends more time looking back. (It can hardly do anything else, actually.) I’ve posted a few reflections on the bad old days. Spun a few yarns about scraping the bottom of the barrel of backwater live music. Hey, there’s always room for one more story, right? Maybe.

Hippy anniversary

It happens that this spring is the 35th anniversary of a little project that coincided with the birth of Big Green, back in the eighties. I’m thinking of this now not so much because of the anniversary, but because I’ve been digitizing a video of a 1987 gig I played with Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and Ned’s childhood friend, the late songwriter Dale Haskell.

Dale had recorded an album around that time, and we played a few gigs to promote it locally in the Albany, NY, area. It wasn’t a big production, of course – we were broke, and Dale didn’t have access to a proper studio, so he tracked the album on a cassette portastudio and ran the cassette copies of the album off manually. (We all did that shit back then, because … well, see the previous sentence.)

God save the queen

Ned and I were trying to find work for Big Green – unsuccessfully, of course. Dale had helped us out with some demo work, and we agreed to back him up on his project. He booked three dates at QE2 in Albany, a club that is now called the Fuse Box, I believe, housed in an ancient White Tower burger joint on Central Ave.

At one of those gigs, in April 1987, we opened for the Athens, GA art rock band Love Tractor. Our photographer friend Leif Zurmuhlen brought his VHS camcorder to the gig and taped our set. At some point over the last thirty years, Leif gave me the tape and it’s been sitting in my television cabinet for decades. Until last week, that is, when I transferred it to MP4.

Ned, me, and Dale

Achtung, baby

Sadly, Dale passed away last year after some troubled times. I had told him via Facebook that I had the tape sometime over the previous year, but didn’t have the means to transcribe it until recently, by which time he was gone. If I can get the audio to sound decent, I’ll drop it via the Big Green Youtube channel in the next few weeks. Promises, promises.

Kind of a kick seeing Ned and me playing together, frankly. Ned’s doubling on keys and lead guitar; I’m thumping on my Fender P-bass, wearing a white tee shirt with the word “ACHTUNG” in block letters across my scrawny chest. God, those days sucked. But they had their moments.