Tag Archives: She Caught The Katy

Usual Rubbish

One Long-ass road back from the Joyous lake

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Get Music Here

Think we ought to go? Nah, maybe not. Though I don’t know. Maybe we CAN go. But we probably shouldn’t. And anyway, who the hell is going to pay? Not me, man. Unless they take bottle caps. With the bottles still attached.

Hello, blog friends. It may seem like you’ve caught us in another serious controversy, but that’s not the case. We’re just sitting here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and shooting the breeze about this thing we should have done, this thing we shouldn’t, and so on. Kind of amazing that we all get along with each other so well after spending so many years with these dumb, lousy-ass fuckers. There’s a lot of love here.

Who caught the Katy?

What are we sparring about? Well, I’m gonna tell you. I was browsing the internets, clicking through the facebooks, and I saw an ad for Taj Mahal’s upcoming tour. No, I’m not talking about the ornate monument in Agra. I’m talking about the blues singer, Taj Mahal, who I started listening to as a wee lad of twenty-one, thanks to my dear friend Ellen Everett.

In our earliest incarnations of the band that came to be called Big Green, we played a few Taj covers and I always liked the dude. (We even included one of this songs on our 1986 demo, posted here.) When I saw that he’s planning to play Woodstock (Levon Helm studios), it reminded me of the time, back in the 80s, when a group of us humped our way down to Woodstock to hear him perform at a famous now-defunct club called the Joyous Lake.

Lost weekend … or weekdays

I can’t remember what year it was – maybe 1984? My illustrious brother Matt, our guitarist then, the late Tim Walsh, Phil Ross, our drummer, and I piled into somebody’s car, drove to Woodstock, had a cheap cafe dinner, and trooped over to the Joyous Lake to buy tickets. As we were standing there, waiting for the tix, I turned around and saw the man himself, Taj Mahal, having an early dinner, gabbing with Rick Danko from The Band.

Left me a mule to ride!

I remember him putting on a really good performance that night, mostly solo, playing an electric guitar, I think a drobo, and an upright piano. He kicked the shit out of Johnny Rivers’s Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu on that piano, as I recall. As an added bonus, the horn player Howard Johnson came up and accompanied Taj on a couple of songs, playing one on a tuba and the other on a piccolo. Taj also did a nice, quiet version of his arrangement for Johnny Too Bad.

Then what? I’ll tell you …

I don’t remember what happened next. We went home, we slept, we played, we slept …. rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this week, I see the ad for Taj’s gig in Woodstock, and I think, man, I should go. Only trouble is, it’s sold out at $100 a ticket for general seating. Good going, Taj! You can still pull them in.

Guess I’ll just have to suffice with another rendition of She Caught The Katy, or Fishin’ Blues, or Corrina. Where’s my non-existent dobro?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Inside July (2020).

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2000 Years to Christmas

I told you to drop it on Sunday. Did you drop it? No, no …. the PODCAST, not the quart of milk. I KNOW you dropped the milk, for crying out loud. Jesus Christmas.

Hah … speaking of Christmas, we had a little present for you this week in the form of a new installment of our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Call it Christmas in July, or call it swiss cheese … whatever you like. The audience is always right, am I right? (Only when I’m in the audience.) Sure, it wasn’t as … um … generously proportioned as many of our previous installments. There was no Ned Trek episode, true. And there was no Matt, but we will do something about that soon, my friends. I just have to pry him away from the falcons and beavers long enough to talk into a mic for half an hour. Should be child’s play. (NOT).

Anyway, so what was in this episode, eh? Here’s some of what we inserted, minus the leavening – a veritable audio flatbread of goodness:

Put the phone down. I talk a whole bunch of trash about Big Green’s origin story, its origins, and its origins’ origins. We did, as it turns out, embellish the truth a little bit, but not so much as to cause discomfort. Then I tell the tale of our first demo, which we’ve posted on this very blog. Knowing that most who listen to the podcast never visit our site, I then elected to PLAY the four-song demo on the podcast.

Song: A Name And A Face. Written by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison, this song is actually a pretty apt description of hook-up culture in the 1980s. Ned and I do the singing, Ned plays guitar and some key parts, I play piano, Matt’s on bass, and club drummer Pete Young is on drums. Somewhat sloppy recording, but it sounds clear enough after 30-odd years in the closet.

Song: She Caught The Katy. This is a Taj Mahal song we used to do as part of our club show. I do the singing and the piano part, Ned does guitar and keys, Matt plays his Rick bass, and Pete Young joins us on drums.

I'm ready, Mitch. Press "record"!

Song: Bad Boy. Lennon and McCartney song that Ned loved. He sings, and the rest of us play our various instruments. The only switch here is that the drums are played by singer/songwriter Dale Haskell, friend of the band and school chum of Ned.

Song: Slippin’ and Slidin’. Our attempt at a Little Richard number. It’s a little beyond me, frankly, but I give the vocal a try while Ned, Matt, and Pete Young back me up.

Song: Just Five Seconds. This is a recording from the early nineties, after Ned left the band. Matt wrote this one and does the main vocal. Recorded in Bob Acquaviva’s studio in Utica, NY. Pete Young or Dale on drums? Trick question – it’s a freaking drum machine.

Song: Grandfather’s War. I stumble through an impromptu rendition of this old number from the eighties. Frankly, it sounds better with the beer hall banter in the background.

Song: Nutcracker. One of the many Christmas songs by Matt that didn’t get on to 2000 Years To Christmas. This is a kind of hard-driving number, cheaply recorded on a cassette portastudio back in the late eighties, I think. 1989? Probably.

Song: Honest Man. A song of mine from the nineties, recorded with Matt on my old eight-track DTRS system. Another scratch demo, fit for nought but our tattered old podcast.

That was about it. Enjoy the show. And if you don’t, well … there’s more where that came from.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: July 2020

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Big Green emerges from COVID isolation with the cheap-ass monologue that is our July show, featuring some old music, some slightly less old music, some audio hand-waving, and more. Bring it on.

This is Big Green – July 2020. Features: 1) Put the phone down: Joe laments the continuing absence of Matt and debunks Big Green’s founding mythology; 2) Song: A Name And A Face, performed by Big Green; 3) Song: She Caught The Katy, performed by Big Green; 4) Song: Bad Boy, performed by Big Green; 5) Song: Slippin’ and Slidin’, performed by Big Green; 6) More disposable back story about the band; 7) Song: Just Five Seconds, by Big Green; 8) Impromptu romp through grandfather’s war; 9) Song: Nutcracker, by Big Green; 10) All about Christmas; 11) Song: Honest Man, by Big Green; 12) Time for us (me) to go.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Usual Rubbish

Names and faces.

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2000 Years to Christmas

What the hell. Was it THAT long ago? No way! Effing 1986 was … uh … oh, right. I’m leaving out a few decades. Fuck, we’re old. Where’s my porridge?

Nothing like a little trip down memory lane to lift your spirits, right? Just be sure not to take a right at the light – that road goes straight to crazy town. Spent the morning listening to recordings from our first year as a band, 1986. Actually, not the WHOLE morning, as there are only a handful of recordings. We did everything on a shoestring back then, and you don’t have to be a recording technology specialist to know that shoestrings are a very low-fidelity substitute for magnetic tape. Fact is, Big Green co-founder Ned Danison had the use of his brother’s recording studio, and we piled in there one weekend and plowed through a four-song demo that got us, well …. exactly nowhere, but it’s a nice conversation piece. (See? I’m talking about it even now, thirty three years later.)

That was a hot summer, too. Or maybe it was all of those wine coolers. Either way, we were going through what another guitar player friend of ours termed “the Brr-roke Period”, fighting the mice for scraps, sharing smokes, sleeping on people’s floors. (At one point it got so bad we were forced to sleep on somebody’s walls.) Of course, being white people, we were never REALLY REALLY poor, just poor as seen on T.V., like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck carving that bean into paper thin slices, so thin you could see through it, and squeezing the slices between similarly translucent slices of bread. I suppose in that metaphor, I played Donald, quacking madly in frustration at our made-for-television penury. Poor suburban waif! No bean for his sandwich!

Us in the 80s

Yeah, well … we didn’t have an entourage of helpers back then. No Mitch Macaphee to help with mad science solutions. No Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to tie our shoes and balance our checkbooks. No checkbooks (because, wait for it …. we were broke). We didn’t even have a drummer, for crying out loud, or at least none that would stick with us long enough to play a gig. So that summer of 1986 (or was it the fall? No matter.) when we got the use of John Danison’s 8-track garage studio, we recorded three tracks with a session drummer we knew from around Albany, NY at that time, a guy by the name of Pete Young. Two of the tracks were cover songs from our stage set at that time – “She Caught The Katy”, by Taj Mahal, which we played on THIS IS BIG GREEN back in 2012, and Little Richard’s “Slipping and Sliding”. We also did one of Ned’s songs, entitled “A Name And A Face”, which kind of amusingly chronicles a one-night stand of the drunken eighties variety – an alt-rock walk of shame, if you will.

That was our demo. It went nowhere. Pete left the group before he even joined. Ned left the group the next year. And here you have us – the remainders of a random idea for a group, 34 years ago, chronicled in that hastily produced demo …. which I will post one of these days. Stay tuned!

Postscript

One of these days came sooner than I thought. Here is that four-song cassette demo we recorded back in 1986, over in Ballston Spa, NY.

1986 Big Green Demo