Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

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

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

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

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.)

Usual Rubbish

Hangups.

September 4, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Never mind, Lincoln, I’ll get it. Hello? Yes, this is the Cheney Hammer Mill. Who is this? Hello? HELLO? IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Actually, that’s probably not true. I just like to get the pot boiling a little bit before I start typing in earnest. Yes, like so many of you, we at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill get an unending stream of fundraising and advertising scam calls, each and every day. I’ll tell you, it’s hard to get about the work of an unemployed pop band if you’re getting interrupted every twenty-five minutes by a furiously ringing telephone. There are things that Big Green must not do to remain Big Green – these telemarketers are trying to take that away from us, and I won’t have it, do you understand?

I know what some of you are thinking right now. “Joe,” you’re thinking (and by the way, thank you for calling me by my given name) “Why don’t you just get an answering machine?” Good question, nameless interloper. The fact is, we already have an answering machine …. it’s called Marvin (my personal robot assistant). We just place the handset on his left shoulder and punch a few buttons, and our callers will be greeted by a tinny, stilted voice that sounds like an audio ransom note – words cut from different magazine articles and pasted together. Marvin then records their comments and plays them back to us while standing on one wheel. Sure, he squeaks and rusts more than your typical telephone answering machine, but hell … he’s here and willing to do the work, right?

Wrong number again? What a bunch of freaks.

Okay, so … now you’re thinking, “But, wait a minute, Joe. How come you guys have so much time on your hands that you can spend a pile of it worrying about stupid shit like this?” That’s an even better question, which is a short hand way of saying that I have no idea. The simple fact is, we can’t play in public spaces, we don’t have broadband so we can’t play remotely, and we’re in the midst of our Summer music production doldrums, which is to say that none of us feels like doing anything other than sleeping through September. But then every time I try to get a few extra winks, that phone starts ringing again. So, it turns out that your implied statement above is absolutely correct – we have done fuck-all this summer, and we’re getting antsy.

Somewhere, a phone was ringing. Sounds like a bad novel from the 70s.

Usual Rubbish

Safe and sorry.

August 28, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

You look like a freaking bank robber. Don’t you have anything else you can use? Try turning it inside out. Yeah, that’s it. Huh. Looks worse. Never mind, man …. it’s pointless.

Oh, hi. Just running though our safety protocols here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our long-time squat house. You never know when disaster may strike. Well …. that is, you never know in advance. I mean, you know when it strikes because it hits you right in the face. Anyway, the point is, we’re finally living up to the Boy Scouts of America creed: Be prepared! Your scout leader may be an abusive POS, so by all means … be prepared! (True fact: When I was a kid, I used to mix up the Boy Scouts with the Boys Clubs of America. But that was mostly because of television advertising – I never came within ten feet of either organization.)

Right, so we are taking precautions in the Hammer Mill. The executive committee of the Big Green collective (i.e. myself, Matt, and anti-Lincoln) decided on a mandatory mask policy. This didn’t go over well with the posse, particularly (and this seems a little surprising to outsiders) anti-Lincoln himself, who vowed to fight the decree to his last breath. After we supplied him with some Kentucky bourbon, he tied a bandana around his head and tried to get it over his ample nose, but no luck. He looked like a cartoon bandito from a corn chip commercial, and of course, we laughed, even though it’s a very serious situation …. very serious indeed, young man!

So, yeah, we’re protecting ourselves from COVID-19, like everybody else. We’ve got group members with pre-existing conditions … like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who tarnishes easily. But there are other dangers as well. No, I’m not talking about the landlords, though I do have my eye on them. There’s also fire. That’s right, fire. Here we were, considering a move up the Mohawk River to the abandoned Charlestown Mall, and just this past week, it burned to a cinder, sending toxic smoke into neighboring communities from Utica to Westmoreland to five other places you’ve probably never heard of. “Don the masks,” Mitch said, forgetting that there’s no one here named Don. “Marvin, the masks!” I corrected him, and Marvin started handing them out to all and sundry.

We’ll let you know when it’s safe to breathe easy. That’s right, Central New York …. you’ve got a friend.

Usual Rubbish

Summer doldrums.

August 21, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Hey …. turn the light off. It’s the middle of the freaking night, man. What? The sun? You mean the sun that the Earth orbits? What’s the sun doing out in the middle of the …. oh. Right. I need one of those twenty-four hour clocks.

Yeah, that’s right folks – I overslept again. I blame the season. Now, that comment would make even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) laugh up his brass sleeve, because I basically blame the season for everything. No work? Goddamn northern winters! No groceries? Stupid spring cleaning! I knew those cereal boxes would come in handy one day. No gravity? Dumbass autumn! That’s when Mitch Macaphee starts sharpening his antigravity skills in anticipation of the big mad science annual meeting in Berlin on October 17.

Here in upstate New York, it’s getting so that we only have two seasons anyway: coldish and hot. That means fewer scapegoats for our manifold failings. In any case, I blame my sleepiness on the doldrums of late summer, when that sun is beating down on the leaky roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, turning the third story of this heap into something like a brick oven. I always get snoozy in this weather. And the fact is, there isn’t a lot going on musically these days. COVID-19 has shut down all the clubs. Musicians are performing on Zoom and Google Hangouts, hoping for a mercy tip. It’s just a weird damn time to be alive.

I was saying to Matt the other day (he couldn’t hear me, of course, because he was out passing sweet potatoes to beavers) that these days are a lot like back in the day when we first started out. There were about five places to play around where we lived, and they were all dives. He was too young to get into a bar, but we got in anyway and jammed in front of rows of punters drinking their faces off and hollering for that Dave Mason song … you know, the one that goes blah blah blah and we just disagree! Nine times out of ten we’d get stiffed at the end of the night and have to burn the effing place down …. and then there would be even fewer places to play. I’m telling you, people, violence doesn’t pay! (Unless you’re paid to do it, of course.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think it’s that, well … don’t expect us to do much until it gets colder. Then expect to hear some complaining about how freaking cold it is in here.

Usual Rubbish

Tin pan valley.

August 14, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

This piano needs tuning. What? Yes, yes … I know it’s missing fourteen keys and there are rodents living in it, but nevertheless, the fact remains that IT STILL NEEDS TUNING. What kind of a place is this, anyway?

Oh, right … THAT kind of a place. I sometimes forget where I’m squatting. Abandoned hammer mills are notorious for having poorly maintained upright pianos. Even the ones that are fortunate enough to get converted to consignment stores or mini-malls are plagued with out-of-tune spinets and uprights. I think it’s the moisture, the rising damp, as it were. In any case, the instrument sitting in what used to be the machine shop here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill has seen better days … and not recently. I do have an old tuning hammer and have tried to wrack it up to somewhere close to concert C, but my reward has been paltry – mostly indents in my forehead from snapping piano strings. Ouch.

Why, you may ask, in this age of electronics do I need to be banging away at an old upright? Good question, nameless interlocutor! There are in fact several reasons:

Reason One: We neglected to pay our power bill. Turns out National Grid doesn’t have a great sense of humor about these things. They pulled the plug on us almost immediately. For a while we had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) chugging along on a treadmill tied to a generator, but, of course, he runs on electricity and, as such, could only generate enough electricity to walk on the treadmill. Sure, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, could come up with some kind of perpetual energy source, but he’s away at one of his innumerable conferences. (They’re planning something, those mad scientists. I just know it.)

Reason Two: We’re freaking broke, so it’s time to make some money at this asinine undertaking. I’ve dusted off my thirty year old edition of the Songwriter’s Market and I’m going to sit here at this piano and write pop songs for the biggies. Lots of ways you can go with this songwriting game, Mack. First … change your name to Mack. Then choose a genre. You might go with love songs, or maybe religious numbers. Hell, you can start with one and then use the same tunes for the other – just change “baby, baby, baby” to “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” or vice versa, and you’re all set. Before you know it, you’ll be looking at the birth of a regular tin pan alley in the Mohawk Valley.

Reason Three: Bored out of my gourd! This is the most boring summer ever. In these COVID-plagued days, what else is there to do but pound on distressed pianos and croon about better times? (Seriously, if you can think of shit to do around here, let us know.)

Official site of the band Big Green