Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Grounded.

Hmmm … leaving kind of a big footprint there, aren’t you, Anti-Lincoln? Seems like you’ve been feeding on a pretty good pasture lately, am I right? No? Ah, okay.

Well, the gravity’s back. Isn’t that good new?. And now all of us weigh about twenty pounds more than before. Just a little side benefit of Mitch’s latest project. (YEAH, MITCH … THANKS A LOT. Turn that gravity thing down a little, willya?) Something tells me we will need to replace the floor joists in this crumbling old ruin of a hammer mill … except that I don’t know how to do that and I wouldn’t know a floor joist if it hit me upside of the head.

Mitch has got this whole gravity thing figured out. He describes swarms of little invisible magnet-like  particles he calls “gravitons”. Apparently these little critters swarm around you by the thousands, holding you down as the world spins out of control. Without their persistent intercession, we would all fly off into space, the earth shaking us off as it rotates on its axis. Mitch thinks of them as the quantum mechanical equivalent of guardian angels … which is the reason why he hates them with a mad man’s passion. He went into a bit of a rage last night about gravitons, swiping at the invisible particles like he was shooing away mosquitoes. At one point, he appeared to have caught one between his thumb and forefinger, but his triumph was short-lived – the little specter slipped away, eliciting a yelp from the mad scientist as if he had touched a hot stove.

Here they come again, Mitch.Okay, so …. that guy’s crazy. And, as Mr. Spock once observed, madness has no reason … but it can have a goal. That’s what Mitch’s anti-gravity machine was all about. The device attracts gravitons like a bug zapper, apparently, though it doesn’t zap them … it just keeps them busy so that they can’t hold the rest of us down. (You always thought it was THE MAN that was holding you down, but no, says Mitch, it’s the gravitons!) Anyhow, it kind of worked for about a week, then something went bust. That happens a lot with mad science tinkerers like Mitch. Hell, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dozens of glitches, but hell … he’s family.

So we’re back on the ground, for the nonce. We’ll see what the weekend brings. I’ve got my bike helmet on, just in case.

 

Pro-gravity.

We’re fresh out of duct tape, man. All gone. And no,  I don’t have any large magnets. That wouldn’t work anyway – the floors aren’t made of metal, fool. Geez.

Yeah, I’m getting asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions by my house-mates, bandmates, mill-mates, etc. again. Everybody’s all worked up about our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee and his latest raft of experiments. (Why he keeps them on a raft, I cannot say.) Mitch has been working on selectively negating gravitation, which really should be impossible … I mean, we all wish it was impossible, but apparently it’s not. Naturally, his experimental subject was the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s longtime squathouse, and a place where gravity has always reigned supreme … until now.

Now, most people have a sense of how gravity works, but for those of you unfamiliar with the ways of this mysterious unseen power, here’s a primer: it holds you down. That’s it. When people talk about being held down in life, they’re talking about gravity. When Bruce Springsteen sings “I’m goin’ down, down, down, down,” he’s singing about gravity. When some politician is making a speech, imploring his audience to understand the gravity of a given situation, that politician is … well … you get where I’m going with that. How does it work? That’s complicated. Einstein had his ideas about this. More recent work has detected gravitational waves. My personal view is that there is a enormous horseshoe magnet buried deep in the earth. Next time we do a subterranean tour, I’m going to check that theory out.

YikesRight, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.

Thing is, most of us are pro-gravity. Hence the search for duct tape, glue, velcro, etc. Or maybe we should just pull the plug on Mitch’s gizmo. Worth a go, right?

Strange gravity.

I don’t know, man. That song seems kind of dark. Dark, but in a happy way. Yeah … that’s the way we do it around here, am I right? No … that was a rhetorical question. Never mind.

Oh, hello. It’s your old pal Bozo. I mean, Joe-zo. (That might have been my clown name if I had chosen another, slightly divergent path in life, but I digress.) Having a little band meeting here. Joe? Present. Matt? Present. Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Present, to the extent that an automaton can ever be TRULY present, but setting philosophical questions aside … Mitch Macaphee? Not present. Actually, in truth it’s just me and Matt, and the topic is songwriting.

It goes like this. He’s got songs, I’ve got songs … all God’s children got songs. That said, they’re all based on subject matter that’s, well, a little dark. Dark matter, if you will. Now, it’s not surprising that we would use the stuff that makes up the bulk of the universe as the substance of our songs. You never lack for material.  Even so, songwriting can be a lot like pulling teeth … except the pay isn’t nearly as good. And either way you go, somebody ends up toothless. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Aye aye, sir.

I don't see any dark matter. Oh ... right.Well, I’ve wandered a bit. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: we tend to write happy little songs about big nasty things. This month we appear to be back on the fascist beat again. Next month, who knows? Some other grave subject matter that can be turned into a nursery rhyme or a mambo. That’s the way it works round these parts. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. (Yes, I’m a Marxist. My favorite is Groucho, but it’s not a strong preference.)

Speaking of work, it has been nearly forever since our last THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. I just want to assure our five listeners that, yes, we will post more episodes this fall and, yes, they will be ridiculous. It’s been a busy year, folks. I’d explain why, but I’ve got too much to do right now. Excuses, excuses, right? Sheesh.

New step.

Huh. Never saw THAT one before. Do that again, Anti Lincoln. Wow. Are you sure that was developed in the 1850s? It looks a little post modern to me.

Ah, readers. Greetings. Here’s a handy tip: You know you have waaaay too much time on your hands when you spend a perfectly good afternoon listening to the antimatter 16th president explain that po-mo was invented by General McClellan. For chrissake … everybody knows it didn’t emerge until the later on in the Grant administration. I’ll tell you, in Anti Lincoln’s tiny mind, history is a total confidence game. If he were the actual Great Emancipator (or Posi-Lincoln, as it were), he would understand the importance of history. Posi-Lincoln loved history more than chicken fricassee. (And he loved chicken fricassee.)

We’re still in songwriting mode over here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York. Every day I pick up my superannuated acoustic guitar and start strumming the five chords I learned as a teenager, hoping to coax another number out of them. How many possible combinations are there? I’m going to find out! Note: if you know the answer to this eternal question, put it in the comments. I’m sure it involves some kind of advanced mathematical calculation that is considerably beyond my ken. Though why I’m always asking Ken to figure stuff out for me I don’t know.

Is that a trombone, man?Of course, it’s not like it was in the old days. Way back then, we would write songs the old-fashioned way: by knocking branches against rocks for a few hours, then scratching the changes out in the dirt floor of our primitive caves. A little later on, the trombone was invented, though that was of little utility since none of us actually plays the trombone. (True story: Every time Matt tries to play trombone, he loses a tooth … which is just another way of saying that he only has a limited number of plays in him.) No, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Lowery Organ that we began to move forward expeditiously into an era of serious songwriting. Then we got silly. Super silly.

The rest is history, folks. You can read all about it right here. Now, back to that new dance step. And a one, and a two …

Strum and dang.

Let’s see …. how does the barre system go again? Oh, right. It’s freaking impossible. Forgot that part. Back to the banjo chords then. I wonder how good songwriters handle questions like this.

Yes, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m attempting to write some songs this week. Well, I should say one song, but that’s being somewhat generous. I can’t let Matt carry the entire burden of composing for Big Green. What kind of brother would that make me? I’ll tell you what kind. My kind, that’s what. Just STAY OUT OF IT. Anyway … that’s why I’m handling this guitar. Notice I didn’t say “playing”. That’s a bridge too far … and this song of mine doesn’t even have a bridge.

Frankly, I don’t see how Matt does it. He dreams up these songs, harmonizes them in about twenty minutes down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, then tracks the suckers. Me? I get some lame idea, knock it around in my head for a couple of days, and then either the lyrics come all at once or they drop from the sky in fragments, sometimes six months, sometimes a year apart. In some instances I do songwriting at a glacial pace. You can actually watch me evolve during the course of writing a single song. (When I wrote the first verse, I was an Australopithecus. Now look at me! Definitely Peking man.}

Okay, hit "record" or whatever.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.

Hey, we all have our process. That’s what makes us human, right? Doing dumb shit, then figuring out how to improve on a bad thing. That’s the Big Green way.

Back to work.

Where do you plug this thing in again? Hmmm. That looks like a 220 outlet. Are you sure I won’t blow my amp sky high? Okay, then I’ll take your word for it. Now …. what’s that funny smell?

Oh, hi, dear readers. As you can see, I’ve decided to discontinue my internal exile to the shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill and return to our basement studio where all kinds of trouble are made. Hey, the summer’s over, right? Time to stop wasting time on pointless pursuits and get back down to the serious business that has been the bedrock of Big Green since our founding: more pointless pursuits. Like songwriting and recording. And doing funny voices. Honking on kazoos. That sort of thing. Do I need to paint a picture? Good … because I DON’T KNOW HOW.

So things are happening. The leaves are turning red and yellow, for one thing. For another, we launched a new web site. Looks a hell of a lot like the old one, only with a new home page (see www.big-green.net ) and a new free WordPress theme. Just another example of cheapskatery run amok. What a useless waste of human potential. (Hey … that could be the title of my memoir.) Sure, we COULD have gotten a new abandoned hammer mill to live in, maybe one with running water even, but NO … new web site comes first in our twisted little world. Priorities!

Now, where the hell did I put that wire?As you may have guessed, I am trying to re-acquaint myself with recording technologies after a summer of copying tapes and taping copies. A few weeks in that garden shed and it all looks like an undifferentiated tangle of wires and metal boxes to me. That’s kind of what our studios always look like, but the fact that I’m taking note of it now tells me that I’ve got some remedial learning ahead of me. Fortunately, with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I can reconstruct my keyboard workstation to a point where noise comes out of it and goes into the recorder thingy. Do that until the blue smoke comes out, and then you have a record. Or at least I think you do.

No worries – I’ll get this right before my brother walks in here with five new songs, fresh from the farm. Farm fresh production … that’s Big Green!

 

Listing wildly.

Man, it gets cold out here at night, even in August. This place needs windows. I don’t mean the open kind … I mean the kind that close. You know … with glass and everything.

Yes, I’m still sleeping out here in the shack that stands crookedly in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our lowly squathouse here in upstate New York. This kind of reminds me of the old days, when we had that two-room lean-to in Sri Lanka. What was that like? Well, it was a lot like this. Except warmer. Ah, things were different then. A stiff wind would blow the whole house down, for one thing. And the air was filled with song. (I won’t say which song, but frankly, it wasn’t one of my personal favorites.)

I’ve taken this opportunity to redecorate in here, you know … put up a little wall paper. Very little. Because of our lack of budget, of course, I have to use existing materials. But you make the best of what you have, right? And what I have is old set lists and some second hand school paste. Now the place is plastered in the things, and you can see the clumsily scrawled repertoire of a hundred poor-paying gigs going back decades. So now every time I turn my head, even when I’m doing my neck stretches, I have to ask myself, “Did we REALLY play Neil Young’s Lookout, Joe at the Metro in 1992?” or “Why would we follow Sensory Man with Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner?” Truly questions for the ages.

Now THAT was living rough.Okay, well the wind is kicking up a bit, and my little shack is swaying from side to side, making the set lists flap like little white flags nailed to the wall. It’s almost as if the place is hoping to surrender to our extreme weather. I’m going to pack up my ripped up duffel and scurry back into the relative safety of the Hammer Mill. Hopefully Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is not running one of those land drone experiments of his. Last week he was running some dog-like autonomous robot around the ground floor, programming it to shoot deadly lasers at anything that moved. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t have more company out here in the shack.

Hmmmmm. Good Old Boys Roundup. Haven’t played that one since our Middlebury College gig in ’93. Time to revisit.

In the shed.

I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed. Just shut the door on the way out. And turn off the lights. Oh, right … there are no lights. Never mind.

Oh man – just try to get some privacy around this place. You’d think living in a massive old abandoned mill we wouldn’t have this kind of problem, but you’d be surprised at how small this place gets when everybody is home. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, starts rattling his test tubes around and looking for things to detonate. Marvin (my personal assistant) does his exercise routines, rolling around the shop floor on his casters. Matt watches his birds on screens of various sizes. Anti-Lincoln reads the Gettysburg address backwards for the unpteenth time (I think he’s trying to make a point). Even the mansized tuber gets in the way. It’s mayhem!

So, hey, I’ve moved out to the potting shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. It was necessary to evict the mansized tuber, since the shed’s only big enough for one of us, but he’s resourceful — I’m sure wherever he lands he’ll put down roots. Some people think I’m wood shedding out here, but it’s nothing that productive. I’m just enjoying the quietude, the solitude, the … I don’t know … darkitude. It’s like taking that vacation that I never take, to that place I’ve never been, with money I’ve never earned. Call it never never land. Or call it anything you want – it’s a freaking shed!

Get lost!Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.

Right, so … if you’re looking for me, try the shed. Knock twice if I don’t owe you money.

Which bucket?

I know it’s the dead of summer, but I’m tired of all this drag-and-drop bullshit. Can’t we take a break and hang out in the courtyard for an hour or two, sipping cool drinks and listening to some boss tunes? No? Sheesh.

Okay, so yes, I’m frittering away my summer in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, keeping my head down, concentrating on the task before me. What task is that, you may ask? And well you may. Archiving, my friends, archiving. Plowing through decades of audio tape, capturing songs that have never been committed to a hard drive; songs recorded on primitive ribbons of tape, stored away in shoeboxes, and nearly forgotten. Literally hundreds of recordings, the overwhelming majority made by Matt in the privacy of my abandoned bedroom.

Who says you can't carry a tune in a bucket?It’s an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I’ve made pretty good progress. I’ve gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I’m pruning around the edges, looking for songs that I know exist but haven’t located on tape as of yet. I’m also trying to fit all of Matt’s Christmas song collections into appropriate buckets — he did about eleven of them, starting with a handful of songs in 1985 up through 1995. They represent a subset of his total output, but even so, it amounts to about 60 – 70 songs. I’m curating them so that at some point interested parties can listen to each year’s collection in its original sequence.

What’s the point of this pointless exercise? Well, it’s one way to kill a summer … before the summer kills me. It’s kill or be killed in this era of climate change. So I wind my way down to the cool basement and dig through old banker boxes looking for buried treasure from the forgotten eighties. (Forgotten because no one seems to remember much of what happened during that decade.) At some point, I will find a way to post versions of at least a selection of these songs, though I must admit that my preference is for building that big, honking web jukebox I mentioned a few weeks back – just belly up to the interactive console and pick a number between one and three hundred. Sounds like a plan.

Hey, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) …. close the door on your way out. And yes … that’s my way of saying GET OUT.

Stage fright.

I spy with my little eye … a boiler. Right over there. You can’t see that? It’s as big as a commercial refrigerator, for chrissake! What? Oh, right … I forgot to turn the lights on. Been here too long, man … I know this place like the back of my hand.

Well, here we are in the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, trying to survive the onslaught of another cycle of global warming-fueled temperature extremes. You have to fill you time with something, right? As I mentioned last week, we tossed around the idea of doing another interstellar tour. That is to say, I tossed it to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), he tossed it back, then I tossed it to Antimatter Lincoln, and he dunked it into the ancient cistern. Call me Kreskin, but it seems to me like nobody wants to do this tour thing.

Somehow it’s not a surprise. We haven’t been live on stage in a few years, and at that point, the idea of it starts to seem alien and hostile. Now, as it happens, most of our interstellar audiences are both alien AND hostile, so that’s not such a bad thing. Still, I shudder to think of what might happen if we attempt a show on an outdoor stage on Titan and just freeze up like statues. (Not from fright, you understand – the surface temperature of Titan is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. My point is … aside from being frozen solid, we might be intimidated by the crowd as well.)

Cold as Titan. Now I know what that old saying means.I’m guessing there’s a little pill we can take for stage fright. And there’s probably one we can take for 290 degrees below, too. I’m sure we’re not the only band to grapple with these types of questions. Why, I hear Mumford and Sons spent a week on Neptune waiting for a connecting flight to Proxima Centauri. Nobody said this was going to be easy, people. Look on the bright side. We have Mitch Macaphee, our own in-house mad scientist, who will no doubt contrive (or perhaps borrow from one of his fellow madmen) an appropriately appointed interstellar spacecraft. We’ve got, I don’t know … Marvin, who can … lift very heavy things. We’ve got the mansized tuber who … will not be joining us because he’s taken root in the garden. Okay, scratch that.

Anyhow, the jury’s out on this tour, people. Don’t look at me – tell it to the band. They’ve been in the basement too long.