Wednesday, January 26, 2005 :::
 
Music From the Mint Green Nest: A Love Song

When I began this zine in 1992, it was all of a piece with a burgeoning energy, desire, need, obsession with giving something back to the dominant social movement of my life and times, yes, that's right, just gimme indie rock. I'm not embarassed, not anymore. I'm willing to consider that I should have been, but I'm not.

The culmination, and what with better planning, better sense, better knowledge, would have been the heroic capstone of that burst of energy and cash and time circa 1992-97 should have been the double vinyl release of Meringue's Music from the Mint Green Nest, on my label Cherry Smash. What I didn't realize sufficiently that Feb. 1997 was way too late to release something vinyl-only if you expected to sell any of them. As a result, 500 of them litter my living room and closets to this day.

But I still Believe. Lots of total strangers, loving them in a very sincere, they-aren't-my-drinking-buddies, I'm-not-trying-to-be-a-tastemaker way wrote me letters about how much they loved it. One of them, God bless 'im, bought a turntable just for it.

I've already broken faith with the original concept of Surrender #6 in service of trying to sell my book about Burning Man (and it has worked, that thing has sold an amount in 5 months that makes me happy.) I'll do it again to remind some portion of the world that Meringue made a really special album almost 9 years ago--damn--and some people noticed.

Go here. And here. I remember standing, weary with amazement, the first time I saw Trey, Frog, Roger, and Chris jamming all night long in the wayback of the Hardback. (They let you do that, the local dominant music club, then and there in Gainesville Fla. Just let you set up and do your thing all night if you needed to. Hey, that's what clubs are for, right?) Then I decided to put out their records. I remember hearing the disconnected vocal and guitar bits in Trey's living room during the year-long process of making Mint Green Nest. I remember the last time I played it and was renewed and refreshed and happy yet again, a flower I did a little bit, what I could, to nurture, and it is still blossoming and giving off a unique and irreplacable fragrance.

"Nothing sounds as good as I Remember That." If you lived it, you deserve, if you want it, a moment to torment the Present and the Future with your past. At least a chance to try, storing fragments of boxes of vinyl against a ruin that will, God bless us, never come. We may not get older and better but we get, if we try, older and bigger but the best part of it is sometimes these delightful and sweet and brilliant old moments that keep forming that Biggerness.

However, that this record is a moment in time for me is my problem, or glory, or however I choose to take it. But I believe the children are our future, and all God's children will one day dance in some garden where the metal burnished flame-flowers hang sideways from purple-spotted mushroom huts with warmly humming dancing bears and gnomes playing endless card games with young punks drunk for the third time, and this album will be all they hear in their hearts.


::: posted by Brian at 5:28 PM

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