Editor’s note: There is no editor for this blog. I’m the night janitor, emptying the trash cans and spreading the refuse thin enough on the floor that no one notices. I’m on my smoke break, but I’m taking this opportunity to say that what follows is the rest of that lame interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry.
Part one: The bad van
Marvin: Rumor has it that Big Green and its various precursors had some of the worst vehicles in the history of indie bands. That’s quite a distinction. Care to expand on that?
JP: Glad to, Marvin. Of course, back when we were just starting out, a bunch of dewy-eyed kids with a song in our hearts and a sandwich in our hip pockets, we had a 1973 C-10 pickup with a cap on the bed. It had gaping holes, rust, primer, five different shades of orange paint, etc. In fact, it had so many pieces missing, we called it “Ruck” (i.e. not quite a truck).
I’ll spare you the grisly details of driving Ruck to gigs. Suffice to say that, at least once, I had to crawl under the sucker at the traffic light on the intersection of Central Ave and Lark in Albany, NY and tighten the gearshift linkage, which kept unscrewing itself. Once was enough.
Then we had Moby, a 1970 Econoline Supervan, former ambulance, that I bought at auction. It had duct tape over the “Ambulance” decal on the hood. On a good day it got 11 miles per gallon. It …. was a bad van.
Finally, we had a brown, mid-eighties Econoline that we took on the road a few times, including a gig up at Middlebury College. It was in January and the heat didn’t work, so we were frozen solid by the time we got home. To make matters worse, it would stall at idle. It was, in short, another bad van. I sold it, nameless, to lettuce man.
Marvin: Sad end to a sad story.
JP: The hell it is. Move on!
Shifting the Marlboro stacks
Marvin: Perhaps even worse than your vehicles were your PA systems. Can you talk about that a bit.
JP: I could, but you probably wouldn’t understand what I’m saying because the PA system sucks so bad.
Marvin: What was that? I can’t hear you!
JP: Back in the seventies, when the skies were black with flocks of hooting pterodactyls, we invested in a small PA. No, not the kind you see these days, with powered speakers, etc. This was a Marlboro PA, with two boxy speakers and what looked like a cheap knock-off fender guitar head with four volume pots. Pro tip: pull the volume pot and you get reverb!
Okay, so we moved to Albany and had to get something marginally better than the twin kazoos. And we did just that. We bought two of those old Shure tower speakers, with like half-a-dozen five-inch speakers in a vertical array. And when that didn’t work, we got two Cerwin-Vega 15″ cabinets that we used for years after that. The Marlboro stacks became our monitors.
Marvin: Where are they now?
JP: I’m sitting on them. They make a jolly comfortable chesterfield.
Living in a tiny little burg in upstate New York as we do, you tend to intellectualize big problems like climate change. Nothing makes it more concrete than an afternoon on the Garden State Parkway or the New Jersey Turnpike. Millions of vehicles in a mad crush, turning the road into a massive parking lot around the major exits, everyone struggling to get just one car length ahead of the next fucker. At one point in a particularly slow-moving traffic jam on a railroad overpass I was flanked by a tractor trailer carrying fuel while beneath us passed one of those amazingly long tanker trains. When no one’s moving, there’s little to do but think, and it’s moments like that when I start thinking … we have a little problem.