Man, it has been a long time. But not THAT long. Still, I forgot how the hell that last song ended. And track number seven I don’t remember doing at all! My head is like a cotton swab. Mother of pearl.
Hi, everybody. Now, I don’t want to create the impression that Big Green is one of those old man groups that just reflects back on their own sorry history. That said, I was archiving some old recordings this week. As it happens, that’s what bands sometimes do when they … I don’t know … reach a certain age. I DON’T WANT TO DISCUSS IT.
Whoops – sorry. Anyway, got the chance to listen back to some stuff and it occurred to me that our second album, International House, is nearing a kind of significant anniversary. Quite a coincidence, that.
What’s the coincidence, Joe?
Well, I’m gonna tell you. As you will see in my Political Rant this week, this is also the twentieth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Who can forget those heady days back in the early 2000s, when the ground was still smoking from 9/11 and W. Bush was heating up the pork and beans, getting ready to watch some good bomb-dropping? I know I can’t (though fuck knows I’ve tried).
The coincidence is this: it is also the 14th anniversary of International House, which included a number of songs that bear on the early war on terror. The one I kept thinking of today was Enter the Mind, a song Matt wrote about the CIA black sites. Now, some might say that 14 is not a significant anniversary. I beg to differ! I’ll have you know that 14 is the ivory anniversary … or is it the one when you give your spouse the box set of Electric Light Orchestra’s greatest hits? Always get those mixed up. (They’re both the same color, you see.)
A fitting observance. Or not.
There are a lot of ways we could observe this ivory anniversary of International House. We might, for instance, move into a house and out of this drafty abandoned mill. We might throw stones into the middle of the street and hope that passing baptist ministers happen upon them. Or we could, I don’t know, put the whole damn album on YouTube. Either way, we could do something other than talk about it.
Frankly, I’m not a big fan of promoting old product. International House was our album-length retrospective on the W. Bush years. Some of the shit we were complaining about back then is still in effect today. But it’s still a period piece, if you will. We wanted an exclamation point on that sucker, not a period, but there you go.
There’s a place in time
Hey, look – we all have history. We all came from somewhere and are headed somewhere else. Maybe those two somewheres are the same-wheres – who knows? The way I see it, if we concentrate on the present long enough, it will be the past. And if we turn our eyes to the future, that future will soon be the present. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.
And so, I’ll listen to more old recordings this week. You gotta know where you’ve been before you work out where you’re going. Had enough of cliches? There’s more where that came from!