This is not the instrument I play. Mine is over there. You know, the one in the big wooden case that has to be pushed around on dollies. No, not THAT kind of dolly … the kind that’s flat and has WHEELS, damn it. Don’t you know ANYTHING?
Oh, goodness – my apologies. I had assumed that no one was reading this. I’m afraid you’ve caught us at kind of a difficult moment. You see, an alert listener – I believe someone in rural Idaho – suggested that we sound like people who play their instruments blindfolded. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I got the guys together and we donned our cartoon-like blindfolds, then started playing the first instrument we came upon.
Needless to say, this exercise was about as unenlightening as any we’ve attempted previously in our residency at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. But we try to be responsive to the demands of our audience. That is our lot as performers, is it not? (Some would say not.)
There’s a difference, man
Nevertheless, I would have to say that I did, in fact, learn something from this experience. For one thing, not all instruments are built the same. You tend to get kind of parochial when you play the same axe over and over, right? Well, hell – put a blindfold on and play the next axe you come across. You’ll discover that there are some remarkable differences between, say, a tuba and a mandolin.
To be fair, there is one thing those instruments have in common: I can’t play either one of them. Not that I haven’t tried to play unfamiliar instruments. Long time Big Green listeners will know that I played banjo on a couple of tracks, including “Falling Behind” on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our ex-governor (cousin) Rick Perry tribute album. You can also hear me playing banjo on “Box of Crackers”, a recording we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN (see our August 2019 episode).
What the hell’s the point of music, anyway?
Now, I’m not saying, on the basis of these crude recordings, that I can actually play the banjo. Far from it! But – and this is important – I can play it about as well as I play the bassoon. Which is to say, not really at all. You see, the bassoon is among the most difficult of the wind instruments to master. I was just explaining this to Prince Leopold the other day. It has a double reed and is the size of a bedpost. In fact, it looks like what you get when a bedpost fucks a clarinet (or vice versa).
Which naturally begs the question – what is the point of music, anyway? Like I do with most esoteric questions, I fed that one into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), whose patented eludian-Q9 melotronic brainalizer can work out any puzzle. (Except Rubic’s Cube. He’s still working on that one.)
Well, his lights flashed, his antennae twirled, he made whirring sounds, and then spit out a little piece of paper which read: “It is pointless.” There you have it, people! Stop wasting your lives! Put the damn bassoons away!
So, if I’m treating every songwriting project like the evolutionary ascent of man, that amounts to a lot of banjo-plucking primates. And that’s where many of my songs start out. I’ll find a chair somewhere in this big old barn of a place, throw my cheap-seat Martin D-1 across my leg and start playing the five chords I know best. If I stumble upon some progression or melody worth repeating, I can’t rely on memory alone. Fortunately, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an audio recording module, and if I can get him to stand still long enough, I can capture whatever the hell it is I’m working on and play it back later. If it happens in the middle of the night, the playback sounds like …. you guessed it …. banjo-plucking primates.
that sounds odd coming out of a confirmed collectivist, just bear in mind – Marvin doesn’t have any material or animal wants or needs. He runs off of a little breeder reactor in his chest cavity. I think it looks like a cake frosting pipe with some arteries painted on the outside – it bobs up and down and makes a noise that recalls to mind a beating heart. (Oh no, wait … that’s an episode of Lost in Space.)
So here I am, strumming the old D-1, grinding my fingers to a raw nub. I don’t use a flat pick. Nor any other kind of pick, actually. I just strum the strings with my thumb, forefinger and middle finger, mostly, and dud them out with the heel of my palm. It’s a cheap bastardization of that Joni Mitchell / Neil Young technique – pretty much the only method of playing six-string that I ever bothered to learn. Limited, yes, but when I play something in three, it’s pretty much useless, so I end up strumming like my fingers were a pick. (And by the time I’m finished, they pretty much WILL be a pick.)
What’s happening around this place? Usual kind of stuff. We’re preparing for the warm weather, which typically comes around this time in the northern hemisphere (for those of you browsing in from Madagascar). That’s kind of an involved process. We have to put out the fire we started in the basement last November. No, we don’t have a furnace – that’s for bourgeois rock bands and… what do they call them? …. symphony orchestras. Hell, no – no furnace for Big Green. We just bust up a bunch of old furniture, baskets, hammer stocks (of which there are many lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill), and other combustibles, chuck ’em down the basement stairs, light ’em up, and keep it going until March.
actual paint left is the stuff holding the windows closed.
Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That’s the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin’s doing it, I don’t know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as …. well … rare earths. We’ve got lots of common earths. My point is… we’re freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted!
turnip truck. (Not to mention the offense that enterprise gave to our companion, the man-sized tuber.)