More than a few blocks from factory village

 2000 Years to Christmas

You know what they say, man. Everyone as time went by got a little bit older and a little bit slower. Stay in the toaster long enough, and hell, you’re toast. Stick a fork in it. Insert your favorite over-the-hill cliche here.

Hey, lookit – I know I’ve been more reflective over the past year than in previous years. When your ass starts to get old, it spends more time looking back. (It can hardly do anything else, actually.) I’ve posted a few reflections on the bad old days. Spun a few yarns about scraping the bottom of the barrel of backwater live music. Hey, there’s always room for one more story, right? Maybe.

Hippy anniversary

It happens that this spring is the 35th anniversary of a little project that coincided with the birth of Big Green, back in the eighties. I’m thinking of this now not so much because of the anniversary, but because I’ve been digitizing a video of a 1987 gig I played with Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and Ned’s childhood friend, the late songwriter Dale Haskell.

Dale had recorded an album around that time, and we played a few gigs to promote it locally in the Albany, NY, area. It wasn’t a big production, of course – we were broke, and Dale didn’t have access to a proper studio, so he tracked the album on a cassette portastudio and ran the cassette copies of the album off manually. (We all did that shit back then, because … well, see the previous sentence.)

God save the queen

Ned and I were trying to find work for Big Green – unsuccessfully, of course. Dale had helped us out with some demo work, and we agreed to back him up on his project. He booked three dates at QE2 in Albany, a club that is now called the Fuse Box, I believe, housed in an ancient White Tower burger joint on Central Ave.

At one of those gigs, in April 1987, we opened for the Athens, GA art rock band Love Tractor. Our photographer friend Leif Zurmuhlen brought his VHS camcorder to the gig and taped our set. At some point over the last thirty years, Leif gave me the tape and it’s been sitting in my television cabinet for decades. Until last week, that is, when I transferred it to MP4.

Ned, me, and Dale

Achtung, baby

Sadly, Dale passed away last year after some troubled times. I had told him via Facebook that I had the tape sometime over the previous year, but didn’t have the means to transcribe it until recently, by which time he was gone. If I can get the audio to sound decent, I’ll drop it via the Big Green Youtube channel in the next few weeks. Promises, promises.

Kind of a kick seeing Ned and me playing together, frankly. Ned’s doubling on keys and lead guitar; I’m thumping on my Fender P-bass, wearing a white tee shirt with the word “ACHTUNG” in block letters across my scrawny chest. God, those days sucked. But they had their moments.

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