Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Taking Thanks.

November 27, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Everyone assembled? Good. What’s that? Marvin, you’re not assembled yet? Okay, hold everything, people. Where’s Marvin’s quick-start manual?

Oh, hello, everyone. Well, the holidays are upon us once again – a very special time in the world of Big Green, I can tell you. It has been said that we know how to celebrate Christmas like no other alt-rock band in history. Now, I don’t know who said that exactly and how they would know, but that’s what I’ve been told, and I’m sticking to my story. In any case, it’s undeniably true that few rock bands have started their recording careers with ostensible Christmas albums, and that we are among that very intimate club of unfortunates. What we haven’t done, of course, is release a Thanksgiving collection, but I don’t think we’re alone there. And I’m not counting albums that were released around Thanksgiving … not the same damn thing at all!

Okay, well … not sure where I was going with that. Let’s just say that, here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’re all thankful for a number of enumerated blessings, including many that don’t often receive the thanks they deserve, such as:

Our Roof – Often underrated and unappreciated, our roof keeps the rain off of us for the most part, particularly the parts that don’t have gaping holes in them. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would be a rusting hulk fit for naught if it weren’t for the remarkable weather-defeating properties of this amazing human invention. Indispensable!

Our Floor – Constantly overlooked (largely due to its location relative to our normal line of sight as humans), the floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill is an important part of the supporting infrastructure beneath us that keeps us from falling through the Earth’s crust into the hot, chewy center of our planet. Trust me – after surviving a subterranean tour or two, we fully understand the danger!

Hold on, Granny! Here's what you can be thankful for ...

The Air – Hey, it’s easy to forget the stuff you get for free, right? Corporate capitalism has yet to put a price tag on the air we breathe, and so, for the time being, it is still part of what remains of the commons, in the wake of capitalist enclosure. Sure, they may stick it in bottles and sell it to you by the foot-pound while you’re lying in a hospital bed, but short of that, open your windows wide and help yourself to an endless supply of life-giving gasses. You’re welcome!

Gravity – Who says science has to have a satisfactory answer for everything before we can fully appreciate it? Let’s hear it for freaking gravity – that mysterious magnetic power that keeps us from flying off into space and exploding into a cloud of atomized protoplasm. I know it has its problematic aspects, as those who have hung from a cliff or two may attest, but by and large, it’s a lifesaver, and for that we can’t thank gravity enough. (Don’t forget – without gravity, air, floors, and ceilings are basically useless.)

I could go on, but then you’d hate me for keeping you from your holiday dinners. So let me end by saying THANK YOU for listening. Now, start gorging … and remember – no gravity, no feast.

Usual Rubbish

Missing Pieces.

November 20, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Well, then, where the hell is it? I left it right here. Jesus mother of pearl, everything grows legs around here, the moment you turn your back. I’m living in a den of thieves! An abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill full of thieves!

Oh, hi. Just getting down to our yearly inventory of band equipment; a kind of rejuvenating exercise that keeps us prepped for any performance or recording opportunities that may come our way at random. Are we getting offers? Well …. not as such. in fact, big fat nothing. That phone hasn’t rung in weeks. Sure, that may be down to the fact that I unplugged it from the wall, but hell …. all that was calling us was creditors, looking for cash. Stupid creditors! They should have known better than to lend money to us. We’re just not trustworthy. (Especially that man-sized tuber. He has deep roots in the Genovese crime family. Um … actually, we’re only certain that he has deep roots – it was our assumption that they at some point touch something associated with the Genovese crime family.)

Anyway, our inventory turned up some missing items. Somebody walked off with my stomp-box phaser, for instance. If I still played a Fender Rhodes and needed a cheap organ sound, I would be using that thing. Of course, there are several missing cords and at least one mic stand. Also, our DA-88 8-track digital tape recorder apparently had its insides hollowed out and is now a mere shell of itself. If you stick a Hi-8 tape into its tape-hole, the only sound you will hear will be that of the cassette dropping uselessly to the floor plate inside the unit. You’ve heard of people breaking into houses and stealing all of the copper pipes and wires? Yeah … I think they broke into our 8-track machine. And they stole all eight tracks.

Hey! That's my jumbo country western guitar!

See, here’s the thing about living in a squat house: you’ve got zero security and absolutely no right to complain. I mean, what are we going to do … call the cops? They’ll just laugh at us, then take us down to the station where they can laugh at their own convenience. Now, I would like to think that these actions demonstrate the authorities’ well-concealed determination to house the houseless – a jail cell is, in a certain sense, a roof over your head, right? But that’s Panglossian nonsense. In any case (and I recognize that I’ve wandered a bit), every November we discover that things have gone missing, grown little legs and walked away. What can I say? We haven’t had a steady guitar player for many years, and yet stuff still continues to walk out of here. (Yeah, that was an unfair slam on guitar players. Mea culpa.)

Word to our readers: if you go to a garage sale in this area and you see deeply discounted used band equipment (including my goddamn guitar tuner), call our dumb asses.

Usual Rubbish

Designated shopper.

November 13, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Okay, I know I drew the short straw. Let’s give it another go, shall we? Best two out of three. Ready …. steady … pull. Damn. Short straw again. Best three out of five?

Oh, hi. I’ll be honest – I’ve never been much of a gambler. And yet here we are, drawing straws to see who will go out and do the weekly shopping. Now I know what you’re going to say – “Joe!” you’d say, “You have a personal robot assistant. Why not send HIM out to shop?” Very good question. The trouble is, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is a dead ringer for some rogue ripoff automaton that has been terrorizing the local shops for a good six months. No matter how we identify Marvin as distinctly himself, the store owners around here lack the … um … subtlety to imagine that Marvin might not only be a totally different robot but, in fact, one that shares none of the nefarious habits of the nasty robot. Appearances can be deceiving! Look at us, for crying out loud. You’d think we were a band or something.

Why do we need someone to do our shopping? Pretty obvious, isn’t it? I mean, this whole county has gone COVID crazy. Frankly, I wouldn’t walk across the street in this town without a hazmat suit. Or maybe one of those survive-a-balls the Yes Men came up with a few years ago. It’s getting hairy out there, people – very hairy indeed. Who would blame us for sending Marvin out with a couple of sacks and a claw full of dollars, our shopping list written in grease pencil on his brass belly? That’s what any reasonable people in our circumstances would do, right? I mean, picture yourself in an abandoned hammer mill with a bunch of out-of-work musicians and some oddball hangers-on (including a robot and a man-sized tuber) … what would you do, dear reader? I mean … aside from getting a life?

Wow. I feel safer just looking at those things.

Actually, it turns out that the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is probably the ideal location for quarantine. Think about it – it’s isolated. Nobody comes here except bill collectors. The place is riddled with holes, so air flows freely throughout the structure – all of the air is replaced every 45 minutes. (Trouble is, it’s replaced by Cool Whip.) Frankly, they should be sending COVID positive people here to ride it out, or folks that have been exposed and need to stay our of circulation for fourteen days. In fact, I’m surprised the local officials haven’t thought of that. Unless, of course, they’re reading this blog. Yikes! FORGET I SAID ANYTHING. THIS IS A TERRIBLE PLACE …. DON’T COME HERE.

Usual Rubbish

Virtual signalling.

October 30, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Is this thing on? What? I think you’re muted, man. Yeah …. the little audio symbol has a cross-out graphic superimposed on it. Huh. Funny how that works.

Oh, hi. Yeah, the century is finally catching up with us … or we’re catching up with it. It’s no secret that we of Big Green tend towards the Luddite side of the ledger. When a visitor asks us to turn the heat up a bit in the Cheney Hammer Mill, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. When a neighbor asks us for a cup of sugar or a pint of milk, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. (That’s just something we do when people ask us stuff. Don’t ask me why … or, well, you know what we’ll do.)

So, while as a band we were relatively early to the internet and early adopters of MP3 files (as well as early arrivals in the blogosphere), a lot of this newfangled technology is way over our heads. I would ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to explain it to me, but he is literally made out of old plumbing fixtures and doesn’t know the first thing about interactive stuff. Sure, he interacts with the rest of us, but not in any sophisticated way – mostly just flashing lights and beeps, meted out in various coded combinations. (Fun fact: seven flashes and eleven beeps translates to “George Washington, our first president”.) So when our business associates asked to meet with us, and then told us we needed to do it through Zoom or some other thingy, we were a little confused. I mean, I know what a computer is. Does that get me anywhere?

I guess you could blame our ignorance on an over reliance on expert advisors, like our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. Not every band has a mad science advisor, you know … or a personal robot assistant. After a while, they do become like a crutch. We’re so used to just calling Mitch over every time we have a little problem, like, I don’t know … booking a gig on Aldebaran Five. That presents a logistical issue that we, as artists, are not particularly comfortable with attempting to solve on our own. So we get Mitch to invent some kind of ion propulsion system that could either blow us to kingdom come or propel us to Aldebaran Five. Or strand us on Aldebaran Four, just short of the mark. That’s a possibility, too. Trouble is …. Mitch never uses Zoom, so he can’t help our sorry asses on this one.

Hey … if we manage to conquer conference call technology, I guess we won’t be able to claim that 2020 was a total loss.

Usual Rubbish

String theory.

October 23, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Hmmm, yeah. We’re getting close to the expiration date on THAT little scam. Hard to sustain that 20th anniversary narrative for more than a year, right? And hell, we missed the International House tenth anniversary. And people are beginning to figure out that our Volcano Man recording is not the famous one from the comedy movie. What’s the next grift, Lincoln? And how do we keep it secret? Thank god almighty Marvin isn’t typing this conversation into the blog … right …. Marvin …. ?

Oh, damn! Uh …. we were just working on the … um … lines for a play we’re writing about corrupt musicians. Fictional corrupt musicians. Pretty convincing, huh? Sure, like most writers, we draw on life experience. I mean, your first play is bound to be a veiled autobiography, right? It’s hard to imagine a band getting by on grift alone. It’s simply not remunerative enough, for one thing. Then before you know it you’re squatting in abandoned buildings, like maybe an old mill somewhere in upstate New York. Fighting the cockroaches for crumbs. One of these days we’re going to win one of those fights, after which we will all dine sumptuously. Or at least anti-Lincoln will – his favorite snack is stray crumbs, which, if you think about it, is the antimatter equivalent of chicken fricassee, the posi-matter Lincoln’s favorite snack. It all adds up, doesn’t it?

Okay, well … you’ve got us dead to rights. Whatever we may be as musicians and songwriters, we are utter failures at making money in any legitimate way. The closest thing we’ve come to steady day-labor was probably that two or three weeks when we rented the man-sized tuber out as an ornamental plant for a local bank lobby. (We convinced them he was a ficus. They may know all about money over there, but they’re no ornamental plant experts.) Then there was that brief period when we lent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to the Police Department as a traffic direction automaton, though that was only useful when the town had blackouts. (Marvin’s inventor Mitch Macaphee went so far as to contrive a couple of power failures just to increase demand on his robot creation.)

These revenue streams have dried up, unfortunately. Man-sized tuber and Marvin are practically in open revolt. Who can blame them, right? It’s not like we take it upon ourselves to rent our aging bodies out as manikins, substandard as they might be. We can scrape just about enough money together each month to buy guitar strings. God help us if we ever need bass or piano strings! Once in a while we get a residuals check from interstellar MP3 sales, but it’s not enough to keep the lights on. What’s the solution? Another …. interstellar …. tour? No, that would be madness! After that last disaster a couple of years ago? Forget it! I’m not piling into another one of those slapped together space barges so that I can be piloted by a madman to some remote asteroid venue where there’s nothing to breathe but radioactive methane. That’s final.

Okay, Marvin – stop typing. Now …. when do we ship out for Aldebaran?

Usual Rubbish

Old Stock.

October 16, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

You’ve forgotten it again? Damn it, man! I hope you realize what this means. No, I mean, I really hope so … because I haven’t any idea what this means. Not a rhetorical question at all.

Oh, hey, everybody. I may be the only upstate New Yorker who says “hey” when he means “hi”. Or possibly not. In any case, hope all is well with you out there, beyond the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. The colder months are coming on up here in the great north country, and we’re still looking for things to burn for warmth. We ran out of old hammer handles years ago. Then went the stair railings. Next, we pulled up the Rochester floors in the old executive offices, just above the shop, and tossed them into the fireplace. Fuel got kind of scarce after that – I personally think it was a mistake to burn the fireplace mantel in the fireplace. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Last week we were giving capitalism just one more try. Well, it didn’t work out, my friends. In a world that demands success, all we can offer is failure. But we’re offering it on splendid terms – no money down. In fact, buy now and you pay nothing for six full weeks! Oops. Forgot myself. Yeah, we don’t have a lot of new products to offer the world, just some old stock in the form of about 800 copies of our first album, 250 copies of our second album, and maybe 20 copies of our third. (It’s like we learned something as we went along.) I’m sitting on them now as I write this, and let me tell you … they make lousy furniture.

Chuck another log in there. Or something.

Hey … we’ll get through. We always do. Last year, when things got tight, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to find a day job. He didn’t have a lot of experience, but he has that kind of honest, open face that people tend to trust, and somebody offered him an entry level position at a hot dog stand. Location? Wherever he pushed it. Three steps down from a food truck – maybe four – but food service none the less. I suppose if we find ourselves in a bind again this year, I can toss a chef’s hat on his brass noggin and see if he can’t get a job as a line cook in some space-themed eatery that doesn’t exist. (This IS upstate New York, for crying out loud.)

What’s that, Marvin? No. No, we can’t burn our CDs. The reason is simple – they’re more toxic when they’re on fire than when they’re being played on your stereo. Now, where’s that chef’s hat?

Usual Rubbish

Marvin’s Picks.

October 9, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Any sales this week? Huh. Didn’t think so. That album is a goddamn drug on the market. Which is a strange saying, as drugs sell pretty well, generally speaking …. much better than our albums. Damned capitalism!

Well, here we are, my friends. Your friends and comrades in Big Green, frittering away our time in this abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, dreaming of the days when we had things to eat other than fritters. (Actually, fritters are pretty economical, if you know how to make them. Two words: saw dust.) We were having our weekly planning meeting, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was delivering the quarterly sales report. How did it go? Well, the good news first – there were, indeed, sales. And yes, there was revenue. Though the amounts were so infinitesimal that they can neither be accurately calculated in natural numbers nor seen with the naked eye. (I tried clothing my eyes, but I still couldn’t see anything.)

Now, I know what you’re going to say: It’s not Marvin’s fault that sales of Big Green music have fallen through the crust of the earth. My response to that is simply … you’re letting him off too easy. We assigned Marvin the role of sales manager specifically so that he could take the blame for our continuing commercial failure. That may seem unfair, but he, being an automaton, does not grasp the concept of fairness. He is programmed for mirth and chagrin, but not that special feeling of annoyance and offense you get when someone is hurling insults at you and treating you unfairly. It just rolls off of him like … well … like insults off of a brass automaton. His primary contribution to the Big Green enterprise is to keep us from yelling at one another for our failings. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I find your numbers unconvincing. HarrUMPH!

Once in a while Marvin comes up with a suggestion worth more than a moment’s consideration. Recently he opined that we should set up a Patreon site and sell our songs and other junk to whomever. We hemmed and hawed over that for a while (Matt did most of the haw-ing), then decided to table it for the time being. What the hell are we going to sell, right? Baked goods, for crying out loud? Sure, we have songs. We have buttons. We have, uh … discs. Some of them even have music on them. I think we’ve got some guitar picks lying around. Though some of them have been claimed by Marvin – he uses them as shims when a contact goes wonky somewhere in his electronics bay. I suppose we could run a Patreon promotion – Marvin’s Picks: five for a buck. Or maybe not.

Damn. Capitalism is hard, man.

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

October 2, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!

Usual Rubbish

Time off.

September 25, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Hey … did I mention we had a special going? I did? Okay. Well … I won’t mention it again. Just pretend I didn’t say anything. Right, then …. night night.

Oh, hi. Just got off the phone with our manager. Yes, that’s right. It may surprise some of you to know that Big Green has management. Sure, it doesn’t look like we do from the outside. This band has always had a certain quality of randomness to it …. or perhaps an uncertain quality of randomness. Now, I’m not suggesting that that’s some kind of clever management ploy meant to drive buzz and idle speculation about the band …. what will they do next? Nah. It’s more that we simply have the worst management in the history of the music business, hands down.

Now, I don’t mean to sound overly critical. It’s just that we haven’t had a gig in the United States – yay, on the planet Earth, even – in more than 25 years. Our records go nowhere, unless it’s by accident (like our song Volcano Man, which is benefiting from a prolonged case of mistaken identity.). No hits. Not even any misses. Our three albums have performed as what used to be called “drugs on the market”, wanting for promotional investment in addition to being, well, strange. This is the kind of management that can be really discouraging, you know? Then there was the time he told us to wear matching orange Chuck Taylor high tops. God, those things looked stupid … especially on Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t even have feet.

Big Green has always had this kind of problem with management, labels (like Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.), hangers-on, that sort of thing. Back when we were kids, we had management for a brief time that booked us around the Albany, NY area. Our equipment was trash. I had a broken down Fender Rhodes piano, our PA was from hell – mixed components patched together in a haphazard fashion; a 100-watt QSC amp powering two Cerwin Vega cabinets … and belching smoke while it did it. We also had two Shure tower speakers, which were hands down the worst PA invention since the megaphone Rudy Vallee used to sing through. One time they booked us and another band to play alternate sets, except they had an actual PA system, pumping out a wall of sound while we were soldering patch cords on stage. It was like Loverboy vs. junior high electronics shop class.

So, yeah …. in retrospect, I guess our current management isn’t that bad. I’d rather take all this forced time off than play dozens more of those really lame gigs we used to play, back in the day.

Usual Rubbish

Old Man Fall.

September 18, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Yeah, I know, I know – heat costs money. Unless we start burning shit, right? I mean, we’ve got a lot of fuel in this joint, don’t we? And when that runs out, we’ve got a mad science advisor on hand. He can either invent some way to keep us warm, or we can burn those many notebooks he has, all stuffed with theorems to destroy whole planets. We’d be doing humanity a favor!

Howdy, everyone. Sure, we want to do humanity a favor. But we also want to do ourselves the favor of keeping from freezing to death. If the coming winter turns out to be anywhere near as chaotic as this past summer, people will be porting us out of this dump with a pair of ice tongs. Oh, the humanity! And yes, I am being a bit paranoid over the question of how we are going to heat this place, particularly as the nights are get colder and damper. And spookier. But let’s face it – as squatters here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we have no means of acquiring energy from mega-corporations and using it to keep ourselves toasty. Besides, the idea is loathsome to us. Give in to big corporations? Bah! We’d sooner, well …. burn something other than what they’re selling.

There are a lot of drawbacks to living in an abandoned hammer mill. Lack of heat is one of them, sure, but the real problem with our Big Green lifestyle is that we tend to sleep through the worst weather, no matter how bad it gets. That is not a good thing. It’s not that we’re particularly comfortable here. It’s just that we’ve been musicians so long that our diurnal clock has ceased to function properly. You’re supposed to be up all night, in bed half the day, then it’s supper for breakfast and you’re off. (Supper used to be my very favorite breakfast!) Of course, we used to drink like fish … or like fishes. Maybe just Phish. (I think they drink Saranac, actually.) If we still did that, well …. we’d jam more.

Which makes me think, hey …. in this weird ass COVID world we now inhabit, why don’t we join all of the other out-of-work musicians and start jamming on YouTube or Zoom or some other web platform? Well, I can think of one reason – our internet access is dotty, to say the least. I’d like to say we have a legitimate node or ingress to the Web here at the mill, but I don’t want to be accused of lying. Let’s just say that it’s sub-optimal, so if we ever do start cranking out virtual performances, live or pre-recorded, we’ll probably have to tap into somebody’s broadband wifi. I’m looking at you, Ken’s Barber Shoppe!

No doubt about it – Fall is the season that hangs us up the most. Always has been. But here at Big Green, we make the best of things, even if things are …. well … just things. Maybe we can convert Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of space heater. (He was partially constructed from an old hot water tank, as legend has it.)

Official site of the band Big Green