Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Stuff and … stuff.

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What the fudge. Mother of pearl. Is that the phone again? Take it off the hook – I’m busy, damn it. Busy as John Henry.

What am I doing? Working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A decidedly low-tech collection, recorded in the clammy basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill hear in soggy upstate New York, hammered out with great care and aplomb, dropped out of a three story window, and tied in a bow for your enjoyment. We hope you will be pleased, most pleased. Or at least, not angry, like our landlord, who is demanding all of the proceeds from our album sales in return for 47 months of back rent. (Turns out someone owns this dump after all. Who knew?)

Anyroad, yes, yes, I’m working on a CD package for the limited run we will be burning, mostly for giveaways. Cowboy Scat is going to begin life as a digital release, for the most part. We’ll send a copy to Nashville, one to Texas, one to Wyoming, and a few more of those big, square states out there. The drier the better. We may even send you a copy, one one condition: Don’t Tell Rick!

Yeah, Cousin Rick might be sore when he hears these songs. Can’t blame us. We merely culled them from the score of a musical whose libretto was lost on Lake Tahoe in the 1970s and never recovered. A musical that somehow predicted the meteoric presidential ambitions of a man barely out of short pants by that time. A truly prophetic work! Had it lived….

So, why am I doing the album art …. again … after such a mediocre performance on our previous albums? Simple answer: we are cheapskates. Why the hell else would we be squatting in this abandoned mill for the past ten years plus?

And as they say, it’s the stingy man who pays the most. So … back to my payment plan. Keep those cards and letter coming.

Usual Rubbish

Into the pod.

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Hey, why wouldn’t I want to explain our podcast? You think it speaks for itself? It’s only a little podcast; it needs someone to run interference. Not so hard to understand.

Did you listen to this month’s podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, the May 2013 episode? I’ll take that as a no. Still, you might be missing out on something extra … well … strange. Wouldn’t want to be the only one who didn’t partake, right?

This was a relatively lively episode, full of bright sallies of wit and infinite jest. Here are some highlights (and no, I don’t mean the magazine most often perused in dental office waiting rooms):

NED TREK X: A PLEA FOR ARMS – Our latest installment of our increasingly possible podcast dramatic series, Ned Trek, featuring Captain Willard Mittilius Romney, commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and his talking dressage horse / first officer Mr. Ned. This time out, Willard leads a landing party back to one of the outerspace backwaters he attempted to convert during his callow youth. Special guest star is …. (that would be telling!)

PUT THE PHONE DOWN – Matt and I talk through a broad range of topics and pull news from the pages of the October 1941 issue of Country Gentleman. Care for a Lucky, anyone? It’s the cigarette recommended by 6 out of 10 doctors.

SONG: Surprise Party – This recording was made back in 1987 on a four track Tascam portastudio casette machine; another deep archival bit, rescued from a murky past. Written to mark someone’s birthday.

SONG: Don’t Tell Rick – First posting of a rough mix of our new song, Don’t Tell Rick, which will accompany the release of our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. We are having second thoughts about all the stuff we said about Rick, obviously, and well, he’s got guns and rangers. Any questions on that?

SONG: Dinos – We’ve played this number before on the podcast. This has got to be the most ridiculous recording we’ve ever made, but you be the judge. I simply can’t say anymore.

Hey, may … download it. It’s freakin’ free, which means you, too, can afford it.

Usual Rubbish

Lookout: Cleveland.

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Is it coming round again? Hah. Some mad scientist YOU turned out to be. I could get better weather reports from an open window. Stupid Macaphee.

Mitch and his diabolical machine
Mitch and his diabolical machine

Yes, hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, located in upstate New York, once a land of relatively stable weather, but now … rollicking storms. Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a bowling alley, our sorry asses parked in the lanes. I keep wondering if all this atmospheric upheaval is in anyway related to that massive gizmo Mitch Macaphee is always messing with. He just built it last month, and it’s got dials and levers and wheels and lights, and it belches black smoke into the air above the mill. Just like old times, really. Then it rains like hell.

If my suspicions are correct, I suppose that means I owe you all an apology. Or at least Mitch does. Understand – we do not control Mitch, we just utilize his expertise from time to time. He can be quite handy with minor repairs on spacecraft, for instance, like that time when our ion drive went out halfway to Neptune, and we didn’t have a space buoy, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got automatonic space sickness and couldn’t do the EVA to fix our guidance tracking antenna, so we had to send Major West, and … well…

It gets more complicated after that. Suffice to say, Mitch means well, even if he is trying to destroy the planet (well … he put that on his bucket list, at least). We will try to keep you posted on new developments as Mitch continues to twirl knobs, throw switches, and rub his hands together in glee.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for our upcoming May podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which will feature another spellbinding episode of Ned Trek, some previously unreleased music tracks, and ridiculous conversation about killer chickens and other phenomena.

Keep an ear out, too. It’s really more about hearing than anything else.

Usual Rubbish

Fire away.

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Where did I leave my garlic press? Marvin? Marvin! Jesus. What kind of a dung hole is this, anyway?

Oh yeah … that kind of a dung hole. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill kind. A place where garlic presses go to die, apparently. This is the third one I’ve lost this month. And I used to have a blender, seems like, though our electrical service is a bit spotty anyway, so it hardly matters that that thing disappeared. Somebody around this mill has sticky fingers. I’m looking at you, mansized tuber! Oh, right. No fingers. Still … those roots seem a little grabby.

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is helping me today with my weekly chore of straightening out the kitchen. Don’t know if any of you have ever lived with a rock band, but let me tell you – no one wrecks a kitchen more completely than wayward musicians, down on their luck. Open cans of kipper snacks strewn about like poker chips. Half-eaten bowls of cereal. Do I have to draw you a picture?

It gets worse … particularly when we’re producing an album. People tend to keep strange hours … like ninety-seven o’clock (really strange hours). There’s a lot of work that goes into putting together an album as complex and nuanced as Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. You may think it’s just another crackpot enterprise, cooked up by a bunch of ass-clowns in upstate New York. And, well … you’re right, but (and this is important) there’s still a lot of work that goes into putting it together. (Is there an echo in here?)

Right now, the song count on this sucker is at 21. I can’t guarantee it will stay there, but if it does, it will be the longest album we ever made and maybe a little too long for a standard CD. Thank god those little discs are as archaic as dinosaurs! Digital releases mean no limits! Make it 35 songs! Quick, write 14 more!

All right, back to the search.

Usual Rubbish

End game.

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I’ll hold the ingots, and you swing the hammer. No, wait. We have to heat them up first. Where’s my butane lighter? Left it on the stove, I think….

Oh, hi. Just caught the core members of Big Green (and its motley entourage) in the process of preparting our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, for publication and distribution. Very complicated process. You know how bizarrely complex our creative process can get; the very task of writing and recording these albums involves no less than 14,000 individual muscle actions per song (and that’s not including all the grimacing). Christ on a bike – by the time we got our last album International House to market in 2008, my face muscles were frozen in place until well after the holidays.

So, how does the manufacturing and distribution work? Simple. We melt down the .wav files into a slurry, pour them into rectangular forms, and cut them into shards – or “ingots” – about the size of a pack of cigarettes. We get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to sand the edges off of each block of music, then carefully insert them through the mail-slot like hole in the specialized distribution mechanism our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee fashioned for us during his last vaction in Barbados. (He was bored with all of the waterskiing.) That sends the ingots deep into cyberspace and the hungry ears of listeners all across the universe.

Now, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick presents a special challenge. Let me explain. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, had 13 tracks. International House had 16. Cowboy Scat promises to include no less than 21 tracks! An unheard of bonanza, true, but think of the ingots! So many corners to sand down… Poor Marvin! What’s more, because Cowboy Scat is rumored to be the soundtrack to a lost musical, each track is attributed to a different music group that sounds strangely like us. That simple fact complicates its distribution in ways that I cannot describe here … for reasons … I cannot describe here.

Anyway, none of these difficulties will dissuade us. We will release this album – you have Mitch’s personal guarantee. (Just leave me out of it, okay?)

Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

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Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?

Usual Rubbish

Ripping yarns.

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Glad we got that sorted out. Another rogue operation shut down. Try to behave yourself from now on, Marvin. Marvin? MARVIN!!!

Nice Romney dupe, dude!Right, well…. lots to keep track of. I know it may look easy, being a member of the virtual rock band Big Green, but there’s more to this than meets the eyes (or ears, for that matter).  Plenty of demands on our time; enough tasks to fill this drafty old abandoned hammer mill to the rafters, quite frankly. Sure, I know – we haven’t gone on tour in a couple of years. No impromptu trips to Neptune, for instance, to take in the annual Methane Fest or perform at one of our favorite hyper-gravity venues (The Flathouse is particularly memorable, for me at least). But there’s more to being a band than performing, you know. Much more.

I have described in previous posts our grueling production schedule for our upcoming collection, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A full album of 15 to 20 new songs in about a year’s time – that’s greased lightning in our world, my friends. Sure, I know – these are songs culled from a musical about the life, times, and presidential ambitions of our cousin Rick Perry, governor of the great state of Texas, and as such each number will be performed by a different musical ensemble (all of whom strangely resemble us). But it’s a big project nonetheless. Hands full, over here … hands full!

Then there’s our monthly podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, an extravaganza of useless gibberish, lovingly packaged and delivered to our listeners via iTunes. Each episode includes previously unreleased music as well as another installment of our continuing series, Ned Trek – the bizarre outer-space adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his First Officer/Dressage Horse Mr. Ned, on board the Starship Free Enterprise. Last month, this most derivative crew of space adventurers visited the surface of Ozark 5, an outpost run by Gov. Louie Gomert, thereby initiating a series of unfortunate events that resulted in a titanic struggle, mano a mano, between Captain Romney and a giant ear of corn. Gripping drama.

So, sure … we’re occupied. It just looks like we’re a bunch of lazy lunks squatting in an abandoned mill.

Usual Rubbish

Advance!

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You did what to the whom? When was that again? Christ on a bike – I thought you agreed to stop running these freaking rogue operations out of the basement. What’s that? You ran it out of the attic? That’s not the point!

You did what, now?Ah, hello. Just caught me in the midst of yet another dressing down of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who, apparently, has some kind of crackpot entrepreneurial streak wired into him. (I need to talk to his inventor, the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, about this.) Every time I turn around … and I mean every time, like, if I were to turn around right now it would happen … he’s got some new racket going. It’s like living with an audio-animatronic P.T. Barnum. Only with slightly less calliope music.

What’s the latest? Well, Marvin has been taking advance orders on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, a collection of Norwegian carpenter songs … I mean, songs from a now-lost rock opera about the trials and tribulations of our cousin Rick Perry, Governor of Texas … an album which is now in post production and almost ready to rumble. (I understand the musical itself was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe … rumor has it, anyway.) Even before we’ve pressed the first MP3 in that painstaking way we do (note: we use a panini press to squeeze all the goodness into every compressed file), Marvin has rifled money out of our market with the promise of delivery later this year.

I see a couple of problems here. First, Marvin has only been taking orders from extraterrestrials. That raises some ethical questions, of course, but also pragmatic ones. For instance, how do we deliver on orders from Aldebaran Seven, placed by etheric entities only Marvin can see with his advanced optical scanners? Even more importantly, how do we bank “money” that is in the form of microwave transmissions from a distant galaxy. I think those are generally considered non negotiable currency here in the U.S. of A. Not on Aldebaran Seven, however.

Bottom line: We’re going to have a legion of hopping-mad Aldeberans after our sorry asses when we fail to fulfill these orders. Bloody robot! Second time this month!

Usual Rubbish

Scatology.

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That’s right, it’s “crab nebula”. What does it mean? How the hell should I know? What am I, some kind of astronomer or something?

Jesus Christ on a bike (which he may well could have been, had he lived in modern times), your brother goes and writes a song lyric and the next thing you know people expect you to tell them what the Sam Hill it means. If I knew that, then I would know what the hell Matt is talking about half the time when he talks … and I clearly don’t, even though he is my own flesh and blood. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. It’s his songs that are heavy. Mucho heavy, baby.

What song am I being asked about? Well, it’s one of the tracks on our forthcoming album … I mean, collection, entitled Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Rumor has it the songs are part of the soundtrack of a musical about our cousin Rick Perry, but that the musical itself was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe.) The song in question is called “Evening Crab Nebula”, and it takes the form of three pieces of sage advice to Cousin Rick from one of his political consultants; one pep talk regarding his primary opponents; one cautionary trope about unseating a president; and this observation about the dangers of being too devout in your beliefs:

If you’re gonna’ follow that evening star
better be sure how wise you are
If you’re gonna’ follow that evening star
better not follow it all too far
or you’ll be choked and froze in the vacuum of space
Can’t treat the Crab Nebula
like it’s there to direct yuh
by pointing out some pertinent
biblical place

Now is that so hard to decipher? Well, of course it is. All political advice is that way, right? That’s why those consultants get the big bucks. (Where have I heard that lyric before? Hmmmm….)

Usual Rubbish

Mixing business.

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What time is it again? Morning already? Christ on a bike. If I don’t start getting some sleep, you’ll have to take over the bailing duties.

The voice of reasonOoops. Sorry. Didn’t realize I was typing this into a blog post (or that anyone was looking at me from the imaginary wall-side of my three-walled room). We were in the process of working out chore assignments here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on this cold March morning in upstate New York, home of … well, abandoned factories … and crack-head shooters … and nervous deer. Come visit anytime!

The thing is, we are working diligently on the mixing of our next album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – an odd, patchy collection of songs from a forgotten musical about Cousin (Governor) Rick Perry (the score for which, legend has it, was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe back in the seventies. True story). This painstaking work can sometimes last one, maybe two hours at a stretch, over an unrelenting schedule of nearly one evening per week, pushing late into the early evening hours. It’s as much as a person can do to keep body and soul together in this pressure cooker. Stop the madness!

All right, I have pulled myself together. (Phew!) Why are we keeping such a punishing schedule? Well, blame our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (a.k.a. Hegephonic Records). They will stop at nothing. First they send the Indonesian military after us. (That’s usually last for most people.) Then they take the unprecedented step of reprogramming Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of robotic taskmaster. Every time I freaking turn around now, Marvin’s giving me the dagger eyes and running a tape loop of John Cameron Swayze saying, “Did you do it yet? Did you do it yet?” (Strangely, Marvin also offers us Camel cigarettes, as if Hegemonic implanted some Swayze DNA in his hard drive.)

How to do all this without sleep? I should ask our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, who hasn’t slept in years. (Hell, if I’d done half of what he’s done just during our relatively brief acquaintance, I’d never sleep again.)