Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

When all your sharps sound flat.

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2000 Years to Christmas

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!

Usual Rubbish

Social media killed the radio star.

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2000 Years to Christmas

I spy with my little eye … a chair! Right, that’s the one. Now your turn. Well now … you can’t say chair, because I just did and there’s only one in the room. Pick something else, damn it!

Sheesh – that’s the trouble with playing parlor games here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. For one thing, there’s no parlor. Even worse, it seems no one in our entourage has ever played a game before. Not even Parcheesi! We are creatures of the road, my friends, driven by eternal wanderlust. Except, of course, for most of the last twenty-five years, during which we’ve been nailed in one spot.

Sure, I know – if we’ve got all this time on our hands, why the hell aren’t we recording? Why aren’t we putting out new episodes of THIS IS BIG GREEN or NED TREK? Well, that’s a good question. I would add that to our list of Freakishly Unanswerable Questions, but then that dude would call me a “dink” again, and then I couldn’t show my face in my fifth grade classroom should 1970 ever return.

Turn it down, the radio

They say video killed the radio star. Well, we never were radio stars, but we got killed none the less – not by video, though. No, sir – social media killed us. It wore us down to a nub. Just look at what it did to Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! His hands are mere claws. And the mansized tuber – he is now a helpless Facebook addict, scrolling and scrolling his life away. Pathetic!

Not like that, you idiot! Use the hockey stick.

As official spokesperson for Big Green, I do spend a little time on Facebook, Twitter, and … uh …. some other stuff. But I’m not living on that shit. And frankly, it’s the podcasts that took it out of us. At its peak, THIS IS BIG GREEN was posting 12 shows a year, half of them musicals, which meant five, six, sometimes eight new songs recorded and finished in time to post, along with an hour-long episode of Ned Trek. Holy mother – I get tired just THINKING about it.

Hammock time, geezers

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we’re retiring. For one thing, we can’t afford to. For another thing, we’ve barely even started. We’re like the Elias Sandoval of indie music. “We could have made this planet into a garden!” (It’s from classic Star Trek. Ask your mother. Or better yet, you’re moron father.)

Will we do more episodes of TIBG? Probably, but we are definitely on hiatus. Those buzzards circling over the mill, they’re just waiting on a friend. Then it’s off to the rookery. As for us, we should probably switch to backgammon. I think even Marvin could figure THAT out.

Usual Rubbish

Taking the words WAY too literally.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Jesus, man … another song about geoscience? Just wait until Mitch gets his hands on that. What’s the topic this time – gravitation? I guess he’s already fucked with that sufficiently. Still, I worry.

Yeah, that’s right. No one wants to see your friends in Big Green just moping around the abandoned hammer mill like a bunch of sad sacks, bickering with one another. So we make an extra effort to smile when we get visitors. And if we’re not in the mood, we get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do it for us. No, he doesn’t have anything like what you might call a mouth, but he’s got some grill work to show, and that will do in a pinch.

What’s the beef? Nothing serious. Just interrogating my illustrious brother Matt about the subject matter of his recent songwriting. Some of you may recall that his lyrics have spawned some trouble in the past. No, they’re not controversial or obscene in any way, but they do give Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, some bad ideas. And he tends to take our song lyrics very literally.

The Question of George

A couple of years ago it was Matt’s song “Why Not Call It George?”, the lyric for which has always sounded to me, in part, like a bulleted list of mad-man items:

Gravity can: (a) make your mind flow out from your tongue; (b) take your eyes downtown to see the nuns all bunched up on the tiles; (c) pull your lips back from your smile

(Hear it yourself: Check out our live version of the song on our YouTube channel.)

Parts of that song made Mitch think he could (dare I say it?) rule … the world! Or at least reverse continental drift and reclaim Pangaea. I got nervous when he started spending months at a time in the lab … and the ground started shaking. Not. good.

This doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Eruption Imminent!

Then there was “Volcano Man”, a track from our 2nd album, International House. Mitch started obsessing over that one as well. You know how grade school kids sometimes build those baking soda volcanoes for school projects? Well, that’s a miniature version of what we had to deal with around this dump. Of course, Mitch had to open a vent straight down to the Earth’s molten caramel center, just so that the ‘cano was authentic. He was doing it with an upside-down rocket, Crack In The World style. What a mess!

Anyhow, I’ve tried to encourage Matt to write songs about less volatile things. You know, like …. butterflies, or cobblestones, or vegetable stew. Maybe you’ve got some suggestions that don’t suck (like these do).

Usual Rubbish

Daddy took the t-bird away (Damn him!)

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yes, yes …. I know it’s warm out. It’s hot as all hell in here, for crying out loud. Go ahead and open a few windows in the foundry room. You’ll need a ladder and a hook. And if anything catches fire, best call the hook and ladder.

Well, it’s predictable that as soon as the warm weather settles in, members of the Big Green entourage start getting restless. These long winters in an abandoned hammer mill can really take it out of you. But I have to say, summers are no better. It gets hot enough in here to melt all those discarded hammer heads. (I see claw-head hammers bubbling.) Who can blame the crew for wanting a little fresh air, right?

Of course, some of their notions about recreational activities are a little, let’s say, non-standard and unrealistic. Just to be clear, we don’t have an entertainment budget. We also don’t have a transportation budget. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we don’t have any kind of budget, period. We scratch and scrape for every morsel, but because we are a collectivist institution, we all share the workload. This morning I was on scratch duty. Tomorrow it will be scraping.

Surf’s Up On The Erie!

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spent too much of the winter months watching beach movies. He’s got it into his little brass noggin that he wants to go water skiing on the New York State Barge Canal, which runs right by our mill. I keep telling him the damn thing isn’t deep enough or … well … watery enough to water ski on, but he’s insisting.

He thinks if he gets enough speed, he’ll be able to do some jumps even, but dude, there isn’t enough speed in the world for you to manage that.

Looks a little too placid to me, man.

But You’re Not Ben, Abe

For his own part, Anti-Lincoln has decided to fly a kite in the middle of Little Falls, on the busiest street in this tiny city. He obviously thinks his status as an antimatter former president is going to keep him from having his ass hauled to jail like the other miscreants. I’m not so sure.

I reminded him that it was Ben Franklin, not Abe Lincoln, that was the historical American personage who flew kites in the cartoon shows of my youth. (That was how he invented electricity.) His rejoinder? “What part of anti-Lincoln do you not understand?” Fair cop.

Mitch Macaphee, on the other hand, considers true recreation to be curling up with a bottle of Thunderbird. Until daddy takes it away, of course.

Usual Rubbish

Climbing the ladder up into the basement

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2000 Years to Christmas

Nobody knows the troubles we’ve seen, Tubey. Nobody knows but Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen …..

Oh, hey, there. Just singing a mournful little tune to the mansized tuber, now reachable on Facebook. Lord knows, we don’t like to complain here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – the fact is, we LOVE to complain, particularly anti-matter Lincoln (or A-Link as his friends now call him), who’s been complaining about the war since …. well, since the war. (He’s not specific about which war, but I think it was one of the badder ones.)

Hey, look … everybody has their bumps coming up the ladder. As the saying goes, be nice to everyone you meet on the way up the ladder, because they’ll be the same people you meet on your way down. What is the relevance of that statement? I have no idea. We’ve never been anywhere near that damn ladder. Couldn’t say if it’s wood or aluminum. That’s the kind of complaining I’m talking about.

Changing Pre-History

Now, I know we’ve spun a few tales about our origin story, but like any band, we needed to have an interesting back story, and I’m not saying it’s not true, but …. we may have embellished one or two details here and there. That’s as far as I’ll go, but bear this in mind – the Freakishly Unanswerable Questions are as true as the day is long. And the day is long, my friends.

Well, anyway … that’s the band’s story. Our individual stories are a bit more complicated. Take mine (please!). Back when we were concerned with making something like a living, we all had side gigs to support our Big Green habit. Mine were mostly playing in other bands, as I had no other skills and no inclination to develop any more.

The Bad Side Of Massachusetts

Here’s an anecdote. One band I played in with one of the co-founders of Big Green, Ned Danison, was an almost total waste of time. I remember a gig we had in Western Mass, an awful town whose name I won’t mention (North Adams) where we played a hotel gig, five nights a week for a couple of weeks at a time. The place has probably improved since four decades ago, I imagine, but back then …. hoo boy. The lodgings were adequate, but the money was crap, the music was awful, and the place was full of crazy people.

Did anything happen of interest? No. Ned and I worked on some songs that never saw the light of day. Was it a stepping stone to greater things? No. It was just another crappy gig. Not the first, and certainly not the last.

Don’t Listen To Me!

This is my way of saying, don’t follow my example. Don’t listen to anything that I say! If you’re reading this now, STOP WHILE YOU STILL CAN. Or start a band. Up to you, really. Don’t let me influence you.

Uncategorized

Unmasked at the CHENEY Hammer Mill (again).

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hey, I heard the regulations have changed. So you can take the damn thing off, now. That’s right, it came down just a few days ago. Some dude in a tie said so. So this is from the suits, man. What do you mean that’s weak sauce? I’m hip, dude, I’m hip!

Oh, man … why does everything have to end up in an argument around this place? Something to do with the atmosphere here inside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. It gets a little stuffy, especially in the warmer months, and that contributes to a kind of contagious psychosis. I’m not a doctor, of course, but I play one on the internet, and where I come from, this is a bad thing!

Old news is good news

Anyway, we get our news a little bit late here in this forgotten corner of the world. We’re only now hearing that the COVID regulations in New York have been relaxed, and we can start dropping the mask when we’ve gotten our vaccinations worked out. (And we did, by the way – the shots were free, so our attitude is basically gimme some of that.) How liberating, right? What a welcome relief … right?

Wrong, apparently. At least according to some of my squat mates. Several are refusing to drop the mask, for a variety of reasons. Now, I tend to discount the claims of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber, as neither one of them needed to wear a mask in the first place. (Not that disputes with them are anything new – see, for example, this post from 2007.) But when it comes to the mammalian members of our entourage, it’s a different story entirely.

You see, the thing is … all of the human members of Big Green, as well as our various hangers-on – I mean, assistants – feel that the masks generally improve our looks. I don’t disagree. We’re getting a little crusty around the edges, and unlike artisan bread, not in a particularly appetizing way. I for one have taken to drawing more attractive facial features on my masks, like a full rack of normal teeth or a mustache that isn’t dominated by gray hair.

The anti-Lincoln project

Take anti-Lincoln (please!). He needs an oversized mask to cover his festering gob. Frankly, it makes him look like an old-time bank robber. Or a railroad industry lawyer, which … well …. the actual Lincoln in fact was. Frankly, I think he and the others just don’t like the smell of the Hammer Mill in Spring. Why they don’t just say so, I don’t know. This place reeks! Say it loud!

Usual Rubbish

Late to the party.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Here comes another one, hot off the presses. Just in time for the presidential election. Wait, what? When did that happen? Five months ago? I’ll be damned.

Oh, hey there. Just plying our usual trade here in Big Green land. (For those of you listening to an audio version of this blog, I don’t mean Greenland’s big sister; I mean the land of Big Green, the indie rock combo from space. Or from time. From somewhere not here and now, suffice to say.)

I’m guessing more than a few of you think we just while away the hours, conversing with the flowers here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where flowers grow up through the cracks in the shop floor. Well, I hate to disillusion any of our legions of followers, but we are far more industrious than that, my friends – far more. (Someone on the internet once claimed we were the laziest band in music. I almost fell out of my string hammock when I heard that one.)

Long-time listeners know that Big Green’s most recent material is mostly topical, ripped-from-the-headlines kind of stuff. And when I say “headlines”, I don’t mean today’s paper. More like last month’s paper … or last year’s. You see, the thing is, whatever the political situation may be at any given time, when things go septic, we start writing songs about it.

That’s the genesis of our second album, International House, which was basically our document on the Bush II administration. Then there was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which was made up of songs about the life and times of 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry, our honorary cousin. Since then, we’ve written and recorded scores of songs for our podcast feature Ned Trek, many of which were about right-wing politicians in general and Trump in particular.

Huh. I guess it's time to release our song about that awesome blimp.

Okay, so you get the topical part. Now here’s the rest of the story – we’re always freaking late to the party. We released International House in the waning days of the Bush Administration – like, the last couple of months. And when did we release Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? In 2013, a year after Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race! So in keeping with our long tradition of being far, far behind the curve, we are just now in the process of pulling together some songs from our Ned Trek collection, including a number that focus on Trump, months after the fucker left office. As Mr. Ned himself would say, “What the hell!”

In any case, we’ll keep you posted on any new releases from Big Green over the next year or so. In the meantime, we’re looking at posting International House on our YouTube channel, as that’s the only one of our albums that is not available on the YT. Look for the latest on our Twitter feed or our Facebook page. (There, Marvin – I’ve name checked all of our social media properties. Are you happy now?)

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)

Usual Rubbish

Assault with Batteries.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Look, I don’t have any space in my room for this goddamn thing. And no, it can’t go in the freaking studio – it’s cramped enough in there as it is. Christ, why do you think we’ve been playing all those Cramps covers? Tight as a tick.

Yeah, that’s right – we’re having a bit of a disagreement again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our adopted home. (When they say beloved bands have gone to a farm upstate, this is where they go, my friends.) Nothing new around here. Tempers wear thin after a Winter like this one, am I right. I said, AM I RIGHT? Damn it, this COVID shutdown is even making hermits like us feel claustrophobic. Even the mansized tuber, not exactly a social butterfly, has gotten so cagey he’s decided to resurrect his long-neglected Facebook account. And hell, if he’s just dying to do something useful, I told him he should just do all of our posts while I sit back in an abandoned easy chair and enjoy some expired cider from a bell jar glass. Life of Riley.

What are we arguing about? Here’s the beef: the international space station recently jettisoned a space pallet full of spent batteries, sending it down towards an almost certain burn-up reentry. Sounds like a bit of mundane space news, right? Well, not to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Like the rest of us, he likes to make use of discarded bits and bobs. Come to think of it, that’s principally what Marvin is made of. And so when he heard this story, it was like he discovered the pot of gold at the end of the Van Allen belt. Marvin may be a lifeless piece of tin (don’t tell him I said so), but he’s smart enough to know that even spent batteries have a little juice in them. So he appealed to his creator, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, and talked him into pointing his tractor beam (actually, Trevor James Constable’s abandoned orgone generating device) at the discarded space pallet so that he could drag it to earth.

Here she comes, Mitch. Steady, now ...

Okay, so Mitch cranked up the tractor beam, and the whole Mill started to shake like a leaf. Before long, we could see this bloody thing hovering over the building, emitting an unearthly glow, like an aura. Mitch somewhat expertly guided the thing into our central courtyard and landed it with a dull thud. It was hot as a toaster oven on a late-Summer Saturday morning in 1974, just after the kids had breakfast and before dad shook off his hangover enough to start hollering again. (Okay … that simile went a little sideways.) But by the end of the afternoon, Marvin was able to retrieve some of the spent nickel-hydrogen batteries and install them into his personal recharging station (which, I swear, looks like a jukebox). Now he wants me to find somewhere in the mill to stow the space pallet, but I keep telling the stupid automaton that it’s too damn big.

We need a pallet garage. One of the bigger ones. Where’s my Sharper Image catalog?

Usual Rubbish

Banjogeddon.

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2000 Years to Christmas

So, wait a minute. You say the Chicago tuning is like the top strings on a guitar? Is that so? What about the standard plectrum tuning? Oh … and I think I turned the peg too many times … unless it’s supposed to sound like that. My bad.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a session. No, it’s not the kind of session we usually have here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted squat-house in upstate New York) – something a bit more prosaic. As always, Big Green is making do with whatever is around us at any given time. When we made 2000 Years To Christmas, for instance, we were short on effects, so we had to use the mill’s steam HVAC system to get some decent reverb. Then, when faced with a shortage of horn players during the sessions for International House, we had to retrofit the mill’s HVAC system so it could be used as a brass section. And when our mastering deck broke down in the middle of mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, in a moment of desperation we routed the tracks through the HVAC system, which may explain why that album sounds the way it does. (There has to be a reason.)

Right, so we’re sorting through the songs we’ve written and recorded since 2013, mostly Ned Trek related numbers, with an eye to enhancing the tracks before attempting to release them to the public. And in more than one case, it seems like we’re a little light on the stringed instruments. Only trouble is, our guitars are all out at the guitar laundry …. I mean, the tech. The only thing we have left is a four-string banjo left here by the “Old Ones.” (How many centuries ago? Even Ruk doesn’t remember.) The strings are made of some nameless substance that I’m afraid may have once been a living thing. The tuners are worn away to nubs. There isn’t a good thing to be said about the remains of this instrument. In other words, it’s a perfect addition to our next album … whatever that may be called. (Something with banjo in the title?)

Hey, that's great, Abe.

I have to tell you, it’s been close to a decade since I last played a banjo. (And what’s worse than that, even then, I never knew how to play the effing thing.) That’s why I’m working with our resident expert, Antimatter Lincoln, on how to at least tune the instrument. He prefers the Chicago tuning, being a former resident of antimatter Illinois (or Sionilli, as they call it). After that, he started giving me some pointers. Things like, “Don’t cross the street with your eyes closed,” and “Keep your feet under your knees at all times,” and who could forget, “Avoid the Ford Theatre on April 15, 1865.” No pointers on how to play the banjo, but he did rip into a couple of songs while I was in the room, and let me tell you … he makes me look like a good banjo player. (Notice I said “look” and not “sound”.)

This may end up with some kind of dueling banjos standoff between me and Anti-Lincoln. Who will prevail? Music, my friends … that’s who.