GREEN

Soooo…you want to know about Green, huh? This is their “bio.”You have to go down this street here. The lights are out and it’s dark. There’s a turn right up ahead and you can’t see around the bend. What are those echoes? I heard that. Let’s go in this door here. Hurry.This van is one of those yellow and white Volkswagen 60s kind that can go about sixty miles-per, but don’t push it. We’re out West, heading for the Cavern Club in L.A. John and I found Ben Turpin’s star on Hollywood Boulevard. Swirling smoke and tight tights. Mods and rockers. Vipers in the palms.Why isn’t Amsterdam around the corner? Where is the only place on earth that you can climb into the Milky Way? The old cantilever bridge levels into the Mikado. We saw the Queen. There was no code phrase. There was only a jaunt by Rembrandt’s house down to the coffee shop near the canal. Carnal carnivals and cricket in the square where the Saturday market is. I know why the Brabants and Brueghels and Vermeer’s shade walk down this brick-paved lane. Why in a candle-lit bar or in the hangman’s house do you look at me with silver cloud and sunshine in your eyes?We were the savant garde edge and cut our own throat. But we plastered it with rhythm and blues. And flowers grew from Birmingham to San Fran to Winnipeg to Hoboken and tumbled from the speakers. We played with: The Lyres and Milkmen and Uncle Toup and The Ish and Psycho Daisies and Get Smart! and MOTO and The Hollowmen and Silos and Fuzztones and Connells and dB’s and Viceroys and Joe King Carasco, and ‘Mats and Johnny Angel and pumpkins and suns sawn in half and Bullet La Volta Don’t you tell me what rock’n’roll is!? Don’t even try to tell me. And that’s not even the half of it.Bob Stinson came to see us in Minneapolis. Jeff Pezatti in 'Den Bosch. Ira Robbins in New York. We met Rob Harink in Nijmegen and Peter Verstraelen in Antwerp. Hans and Vera; Dorothy and Fred. By an old stone church--not the one in New Market--the one in Hove by a convent and the pump, the one with a plastic Virgin soap bottle in the kitchen window, we met with Frank and Linda. Christa in Koln. Lojte. Hello to all of you we saw and talked to. Thank you for the shelter and well wishes.Clay plays the bass on an old Fender P through a Trace Elliot that he got while he was in the Watusis. Mark pounds the skins. He shimmers and crashes on cymbals of metal hiss. He smokes and says that the world has shrunk so much that it makes sense to keep dry. Jeff was wondering when it would come to this. When he puts on his silver-glitter guitar he always thinks of Don Rich and Buck Owens and Chet and Robert and Eric and George and Eddie and Jimmy and Jimi and Chuck. Jason is still in the stratosphere, playing whatever music the universe sends through his soul. Why can’t you?Copyright 2007 GangGreen Records