I know I dropped it around here somewhere. Marvin, have you seen it? What’s that? Oh, right … I dropped it on the internets. How could I forget?
Yes, well … we FINALLY got around to dropping a new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring Ned Trek 31: It’s a Profitable Life. Yes, it’s a Christmas special, so think of it as that fruitcake you never opened in December, shoved to the back of the fridge, and you happen upon it one cold February morning – a happy accident! Except that, well … it’s a fruitcake. So, like it or not, here’s what you’ll find alongside the pecans and candied fruit:
Ned Trek 31: It’s a Profitable Life – Our parody of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as played by your favorite Ned Trek characters: Captain Willard Mittilius Romney in the James Stewart role; Peter Lorre as the angel- (or, rather, devil- )in-training (Gladston Goodstein); Paul Ryan sitting in for the main character’s younger brother; Bernie Sanders as the bank examiner who ends up running the bank as a worker-owned enterprise, and so on. It even features Thomas Malthus, the 18th-19th Century political economist, as the boss fallen angel. An hour of cheap laughs and satirical tirades fit for no man.
Ned Trek 31 also includes 5 new Big Green songs:
- You Can’t Do Anything – Straight rock number sung by Sulu that asks the question, “Are you having fun?” then talks about fascists on the couch at Christmas. What more can you ask?
- You Asked Me How – A 6/8, fifties-sounding song sung by Ned himself. Hear me, Android!
- Fountainhead – Another rock number, sung in the “voice” of Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, about his favorite subject …. him, and his bankrupt philosophy.
- Christmas Without You – Doc Coburn song. If you listen carefully, you can hear a bad imitation of his colleague, Dr. John, in the background vocals.
- Christmas Pearls – A jaunty little Christmas Carol sung by Mr. Perle, in which he makes the case for his return as a top White House advisor on foreign policy, defense, and getting us into endless (but highly profitable) wars. In other words, a different version of the same song he always sings on Ned Trek.
Put The Phone Down – Our stranger than usual conversation opens with something like a song, ranges into some apologizing, lamenting the loss of John Hurt (whose resonant Shakespearean voice is often badly imitated on our podcast), a look back at my turkey house apartment in the 1980s, and wrap up with an impromptu version of Special Kind of Blood.
So, hey … Happy Holidays. Belated.
Okay, well … 50 songs is a lot for an album, even one of ours. Here’s where both the spacial and the semantic relationships actually come into play. What the hell is an album, right? It used to be an LP with a limited capacity; then a cassette, same deal; CD, same deal. In the digital music age, those limitations have vanished. No more four-disc box sets, right? It’s just a big virtual bag of MP3 or .wav files. So both the semantic and the spacial constraints are history, man. That means the only constraints on what to include in our next album are those pertaining to aesthetics and good judgment. (In our world, that means no freaking constraints at all!)
The gift of music is always an early resort for us. That’s basically how 
Fairy Dust – Another dirge by Sulu (the one original cast member that is somehow part of this “next degeneration” version of Star Trek). Very moody little number.
My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.
Herr Mr. Hair (timecode: 49:14). Perle’s song. Predictably, he’s trying to curry favor with the Hairta. Always another ego to be stroked (or combed in this case).
We’ve got a lot of back pages, and a lot of archival recordings from our various periods. I’m not talking about the Precambrian here – well, not exactly. More like the 1980s, 1990s. Our earliest incarnation of the band that became Big Green was probably 1979, about a year after I took up bass as an instrument. We’ve got studio recordings from 1981, ’82, and ’91 or so. I’ve got live recordings from 1993, mostly (Matt may have some earlier material squirreled away somewhere), most of which are pretty rough.