Tag Archives: internets

Planning a tour on the ground floor

Get Music Here

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!)

Getting a little love on the internets

2000 Years to Christmas

I think you ought to run those numbers again, man. Seriously. I thought you were a statistician. You’re not? I thought every robot was a statistician! Learn something new every day, even in statistics.

Hey howdy, folks! Happy new year from your favorite band in the universe. And while we’re at it, happy new year from us, Big Green, the band you’ve likely never heard of. Chances are good you’ve never seen us perform or listened to our songs or picked up one of our CDs. Nothing wrong with that, of course – you’re just moving with the majority. (Go against the herd, man!)

Running with the numbers

I’ve called upon the small coterie of experts in our midst, namely, Mitch Macaphee and his greatest invention (or not), Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to help increase our internet plays a bit. My assumption is that they know all about the internets. One way or the other, they can hardly do worse than we have ourselves.

Take our recent nano concerts (please). The highest number of plays we’ve gotten was 25 on one of the songs; most are in the teens or single digits. Piss poor by any standard. Now, the pretentious artist in me says that we make music for its own sake, not for the approval of the audience. But that artist in me still likes to eat. And frankly he’s not paying rent on the space he’s occupying. I think anyone can see that that’s not fair.

Hit factory, shit factory

Leave us face it, Big Green is not a titan among indie bands. The Big Green video with the highest number of plays is our live version of I Hate Your Face, which comes in at a whopping 688 views. Not exactly setting any land speed records there, my friends. Our single from 2012, One Small Step, has been viewed 219 times on YouTube as of this writing. Again … not earth shaking.

Hey, look .... there's a blip over there in December.

In particular, our song Pagan Christmas, off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, gets a bunch of plays around the holidays via streaming services, etc. By “a bunch,” I mean hundreds. Of course, via the music streaming services we get maybe 700 song plays a year. Somebody in Romania listened to our asses. How they found them with both hands I couldn’t tell you.

Happen upon us sometime

Hey, you know what they say about marketing on the internet. You don’t? Well, don’t ask me. I’m not some kind of marketing expert or something. What I do know is that, in this capitalist paradise known as digital sales, putting something on the web without paid promotion is like tossing something into the street and hoping someone happens upon it.

You know, that sounds like a good job for Marvin. HEY MARVIN – TAKE THIS BOX OF DISCS AND START TOSSING THEM AROUND RANDOMLY. THERE’S A GOOD FELLOW.

Digi green.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm. Try shift-F7. No good? Okay, wait. Isn’t there a big red button somewhere that gets you out of this shit? No? Huh. I must be thinking of the clothes washer.

Oh, yeah … hi. Well, as you might have guessed, your friends in Big Green are struggling to make ends meet, like most bands these days. It’s not easy. Frankly, it’s downright discouraging sometimes. This week, we spent at least three days trying to get the ends to meet, only to discover that the metaphor apparently doesn’t involve bringing ends together into a kind of loop, but, well … something quite different, it seems. There goes another three days! We spend time like company scrip at a Massey coal mine. (Which reminds me …. sixteen tons!)

Okay, so, a lot of bands are now doing digital performances in order to comply with social distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are passing the digital hat, and that’s all good … very much like the sound of that. This whole thing has prompted a brisk discussion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – should we start doing live performances via YouTube, Facebook, etc.? Should we record performances and just toss them up there? Or should we run around in circles, waving our arms above our heads and yelling “Catastrophe! Catastrophe!”? If we do that, maybe Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can hold up my smart phone and send it out on YouTube, Facebook, etc. Yes, a brisk conversation … brisk as Lipton Tea.

Okay, Marvin. Now hold the camera high.

Trouble is, nearly all of us are technically challenged when it comes to the internets. I’m not even sure how this blog works. I type shit into, press a button, and hey-presto, there it is, on the internets. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to broadcasting something into the ether, something that requires cameras, microphones, digital input devices, modems, routers, CAT6 cables, tin foil hats, clown shoes, cardboard backdrops, etc., we start getting into areas that are less familiar to us simple country folk. Sure, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee knows a thing or two about the internets, but every time we ask him for advice or assistance, he comes back with some claptrap about inventing an alternative to the internets. Always has to start from scratch, that Mitch. (God help us if he encounters that itch he cannot scratch.)

So, short answer, we’ll see if Shift-F7 gets us anywhere in the short run. Got better suggestions for magical key commands? Send them our way!