Hi, and welcome to The Big Red Solo Tour. I am Big Red, your gracious host.
The Big Red Solo Tour includes all musicians living and dead, playing songs by me, Grateful Dead covers, and a scattering of classics that everyone loves. We currently play in bars and small venues here in the Northern Kentucky area, the all-time coolest place to be and be from. For live shows we are a Grateful Dead-themed band called “The Heart of Gold Band”. My favorite people and my favorite songs. I feel so lucky. And, even though jamming is essential, people want to sing along, so we focus on songs that are the most fun to sing along to. It’s the most fulfilling thing at live music performances, and that’s all there is to it. It’s therapeutic. And for the other covers we do, you’ll probably know the hook.
I feel like what we do live qualifies as a “show”. We play together and sing together and do our version of these tunes. We have a number of our own songs that we play that are well-received. So I call it our “mission”, to roll into a place and do our thing and make it fun and comfortable. The Dead Rescue Mission. It’s a great challenge. These days it’s all about the live show, and it’s exciting to be a part of it. On this site there is a 90 or so minute recording that we did in a studio in February, where we mimicked a typical gig by playing all together in the studio’s big room. Went through the songs once, no over-dubs or final mixing. See what you think. We’ll add more soon.
For the live gigging band for the Big Red Solo Tour (BRST) we have my brother Joe on the bass guitar, and his son Nate is our drummer. And two brothers, Dave and Alex Bitter, play the guitars. I play an electric piano, and we all sing. There’s nothing solo really, although I have done a few solo gigs. I am not that big, and though I was a redhead it was never that red really, and now it’s white. But I adopted the moniker “Big Red” for a friends newspaper we did in the early 90s, and I use it to refer to myself in third person, and I introduce myself to people usually as “Big Red”, though people just call me Red.
Back in the 90s our gang would wing it as a cover band we called “The Elite Band”, doing the Brown-eyed girl kind of stuff at parties and get-togethers, but we almost never rehearsed and it got kinda stale. Then Joe formed a side band with a girl singer and they worked up several of his originals and it turns out he’s a real good songwriter. I then formed my own outfit, around 2010, and I half-jokingly called it “The Big Red Solo Tour”, and I went out and did about 5 or 6 solo gigs in local bars, playing some of my own songs, and things like Billy Joel and Jackson Browne songs, things the family band didn’t do. And it was fun. Then Nate got old enough to play drums, and I started playing with him and his friends, which included Dave and Alex Bitter, who are true deadheads, and that how we got to where we are.
When we played those gigs in the 90s and 2000s as “The Elite Band”, I caught onto songwriting. I was in my early 30s. I have written about 45 of them now. We made a record of my first 10 in 1996 at a studio called The Stork over in Highland Heights (KY), owned by an OB doctor. In three weeks we made “This Elite Band”, and it was a surprise how much people liked it, especially young kids, like teenagers. It remains a great listen all these years later, and it’s right here on the site and you can see what you think.
Three years later we went into a studio and made the album “Songs For The Modern Age”, my next ten songs. It is also loaded here. The first album featured a lot of personal-themed songs, whereas the second, like the name implies, looks more at the big picture of the world around us.
Then there was a lull in the songwriting for a lot of reasons. But they still trickled out. And around 2014 or so I got this idea of assembling them all together as some sort of rock opera about these times we’re living in, The Modern Age. I had decided on two acts, of 11 songs each. The first eleven would be about personal themes of coming of age in The Modern Age, and the second half would be songs about all of us together as a society. So for maybe the last 8 years I have managed to do a project where I introduce each song, describe why it fits in this opera, then it plays, and I come back for a brief discussion, or to quote it maybe, and then introduce the next song. It is an epic effort, and I have no idea if one day a would-be enthusiast would make a stage production out of it. I have a website dedicated to the opera (modernageopera.com) and there’s a link to it from this site. And it’s all there. There’s text that comes with the lyrics on the site, and click play and away you go. So easy nowadays.
On the rock opera, The Modern Age, five of the songs were recorded on This Elite Band, and 8 of them are from Songs For The Modern Age. There are eight that are demo-level recordings, and one is a Joe Song, “Barstool”. I had hoped to try to make a finished product as an album, but right now that’s not feasible. I mean, do people even make “albums” of songs anymore? I guess yes. But it’s so hard, getting everyone together for it, keeping the momentum until it’s done, and then what? One answer: gradually add them all to possibilities on the Big Red Solo Tour. Because it’s all about the moment now. The live performance. But still, if only for the sport of it, songs ought to be recorded as good as possible for posterity. I had decided on a name of the next ten (or so) anyway: “Images”. But there are about 20+ songs that are at the demo stage, and I’ve loaded as many here are I have. Hopefully some day I can achieve a finished project.
So that’s what I’ve got for you. At this point there’s no way to contact the site. I just can’t be real public. I will likely post upcoming shows at some point, and we average about one every 6 weeks. So thanks for stopping in and I hope you enjoy it.
Oh, one more thing. There is another link on this site to my third website, “bigredthemd.com”. There I have attempted to create an Emergency Room where people can go and look up any number of complaints at “Big Red’s ER”. I have covered a lot of ground on this site from my vast knowledge and experience with people from my day job, and it’s surely more helpful than any other site out there. And I have added a few recipes too, including how to make my grandmother’s Italian bread. And, like all three of the sites, there are no ads.