My back pages.

Hmmm, let’s see …. here’s a fragment. I think I wrote this in 1987. Or maybe a couple of years before that. Yeah, more like ’85. It’s got tahini stains on it, and I swore off tahini in ’86.
Yes, here we are, doing what upstate New Yorkers typically do during the colder months, when we’re all frozen in place, afraid to leave our homes, waiting for the waxing sun to favor us once again – digging through the archives! Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve got lots of room for old cardboard boxes and file folders, hundreds of which have somehow found their way here from wherever we came from previously. I don’t know about you, but all of my possessions follow me around like a lost dog. I just don’t have the heart to turn them away. Poor little motherless stand mixer! You’ll always have a home with me!

Right, well … I don’t want to trouble you with some shabby inventory of my personal possessions. I’m mostly interested in old compositions from the early days of Big Green, when we were all knee-high to a locust. Ah yes, I remember those days well, piled into our spartan garret, scribbling away into repurposed notepads leftover from school, crossing out drafts of expository writing essays and replacing them with angry verse, channeling the angst of a then-young generation choking on its collective anger over … uh … having to do expository writing essays. And a couple of other things. Hey, those were the immediate post-punk years. We all started on Dylan and the Beatles as pre-teens, then moved on to the harder stuff when we were 20. Those 60s hipsters were our gateway drug.


So, what are we finding? Old songs, pieces of songs, idea tapes, etc. I’m guessing there’s an album in this somewhere, though it’s going to look a lot like that Mousetrap board game by the time it’s finished. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to help me evaluate what to do with all of this old material. That’s a fairly simple process. I find some lyrics, I insert them into Marvin’s scanner, and the music goes round and round, whoa, whoa, whoa, and it comes out as a series of numbers. I then look up the numbers on the decoder ring Mitch Macaphee built for me (coincidentally, it looks just like the ones I used to get in my Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes) which renders a “yes” or a “no”. If it’s yes, then we consider turning it into something. If it’s no, well, into the bin it goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of nos, frankly. Either there’s something wrong with this ring, or I really sucked my way through the eighties. It’s one of the other, folks.