Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Casting bread upon the whatever.

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Hey howdee, everybody! It’s your old friend Joe of Big Green. Yeee-haw, have we got an amazing blog post for you this week. Shit boy howdy. (Did I say “howdy” yet?)

"Cousin" Rick
"Cousin" Rick

My apologies. I’m just practicing up for the promotional tour we’ll be embarking upon to plug our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, a collection of songs written by, for, of, and around our dear cousin, Rick Perry, governor of Texas, author of all we hold dear, inventor of the syrup gin, holder of the three-cards (in 3-card Monte … don’t know where I’m going with that). Rumor has it that the album is a recreated soundtrack from a musical that was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe in 1978. Someone apparently went back in time for that particular Nevada vacation. Rumor has it, anyway.

Okay, so … we’re practicing, to be sure. What else? Well, we posted the February episode of our ludicrous podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, just this past week. What kind of trouble did we get ourselves into? That’s a tall order, my friend. Just download the sucker and find out. It’s about 100 minutes of pure audio ecstasy, prepared for pod by yours truly and my somewhat more complicated brother, Matt Perry esq. Here are some highlights:

Ned Trek VII: The Last Moon of Frutoonius – the latest episode in the continuing saga of Willard Mitt Romney, commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and his talking dressage horse / first officer, Mr. Ned. This month, Willard, Ned, and Doc Coburn lock horns with rogue operator Newt Gingrich and his strange, other-worldly (or other-moonly) alien fifth wife.

Songs – We spin “Asteroid” from our album, International House, in celebration of our recent near-miss (or in the words of the immortal George Carlin, “near-hit”) by a large asteroid. We also play a lost demo from that same project, a song called “Say You Will” that never made it on to the finished album. Lastly, we play “Beautiful Grid”, a recording from about 1991 or so produced by Bob Acquaviva of Mere Mortals fame, featuring Tony (Ace) Butera on guitar – this is off our “President’s Brain is Missing” EP.

….and several butchers aprons. Got to get back to it. Time’s a-wasting. Enjoy!

Usual Rubbish

Cheer up.

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Get out of my room, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You too, tubey. I’m having one of my captain sunshine days, as you can tell. In fact, I’m rear-admiral motherfucking sunshine today, mister.

This means war
In a bit of a mood today.

Oh, fuck…. I mean, fudge. Didn’t know you were listening in. Sorry you had to hear that outburst. Nerves are getting a little frayed around the hammer mill just lately. What the hell, I’ve been sleeping in an abandoned hammer-stock storage silo for the last 10 years, springs poking out of my mattress like in those old cartoons, the windows leaky and cracked, the mortar crumbling to dust between ancient bricks. Not to put too fine a point on it – this place is a DUMP. Now I know why they abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill.

What’s that? They condemned the place? What the hell, Marvin … you had that in your memory banks all this time? Weren’t you just dying to tell me at some point before this? Irrelevant?!? I’ve obviously got to talk to your inventor about upgrading your relevance sensor. To say nothing of your gaydar. The freaking boy scouts should hire your ass. (Damn, there I go again! Sorry, people of Earth.)

I’ve got a case of what’s called Dyspepsia Engineeris, an affliction that usually strikes individuals in the middle of a large music post-production process. Mixing an album consumes every ounce of your creativity, and hell … I’ve only got two ounces to begin with. Needless to say, we haven’t been producing new material, just finishing what’s already in the can. We have, however, dug up some old, previously unreleased stuff that we can play on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, in the spaces where we might ordinarily have published new production. We’ll pour some of that in before it posts, I promise you. And one day, one day, we will return to making music (as opposed to merely mixing it).

Well … now that I’ve chased all of my friends away, I guess I can get back to … to … mixing. Arrgh.

Usual Rubbish

Pop goes it.

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Lift the needle. Right about … there. That’s good. Now let’s do the next one. Excellent. We will soon have my entire LP collection transferred to 8-track cartridges, at long last.

Eight tracks
A little timely advice for Marvin

Oh, hello. Just catching up on some housekeeping. You know how it is, especially when you’re living the dream here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Time gets away from you, and you end up neglecting all that stuff you meant to do, had to do, were legally obligated to do, etc. I’m only just now getting around to filing my tax returns for 1983. I think my extension may have run out, but I’m not sure. There’s a stack of letters from the IRS I’ve yet to open….

Right, so I’m falling behind. I think we all are here in Big Green land. Fact is, cousin Rick Perry has a song by that name on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. It goes something like this….

I’m fallin’ behind, I’m fallin’ behind
T’ain’t never lost before
Always won when I tried
I tell them just what they want to hear
Just as sure as God made corn subsidies
No abortions, no exceptions
We’ll nail scripture to the trees.

Oh, I love Jesus more than any man ever dared
to love another man!
And I remember what he said in the sermon on the mount
Well, some of it.

(c) 2013 by Big Green

…And so on. Now I know that some long-time listeners of Big Green (and there are at least two or three of you out there) will see this and think, What the fuck are they doing? I thought these guys did pop music. This is just irony-soaked cowboy ballads! Well, that’s not exactly right, my friends. You see, Cowboy Scat is a collection of songs from a lost musical about the political trajectory of dear cousin Rick, each number performed by a different group (so the creation myth goes). Some of them are cowpoke groups, some rock, some pop, some weird German 80’s disco, some … well, you get the idea. And you’ll get it even more when we finish mixing the sucker and finally release it into the wild.

Which reminds me. When I do the budget for this release, I have to make sure to include a line for transfer to 8-track. Don’t want to leave any listeners out, no matter what decade they live in.

Usual Rubbish

Lookout. Below.

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Okay, now where was I? Wait, don’t tell me. I was complaining about…. something…. No, not the song “Something”. I rather fancy that. Something to do with Web servers.

F'shaw
BG goes all traditional-like.

No matter. Here we are, back to the blog. What’s happening at the mill? Lots. Working on the January podcast, now days behind schedule. Later every month, right? That’s the natural course of business here in Big Green – land. Still…. our first installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN should be worth the wait, if you like weird, asinine, and abysmally non-commercial media content. True hallmarks of the TIBG brand.

Smell something burning? Neither do I. But (and this is the point) we bloody well should, and here’s why … Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is supposed to be thinking up a viable creation myth for our upcoming collection of songs attributed to and written in tribute to cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. The album – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – is such a monumental event in our lives, it fairly demands a creation myth of its very own. As such, we handed that task off to Marvin, and by rights the smoke should be pouring out of his brass visor as we speak.

It is not, my friends. What can I tell you? So look, we’ll just have to cook it up ourselves, I guess, without the help of robotian inspiration. We’re thinking something along the lines of “The Creeping Terror”. Cowboy Scat is all that remains of an epic musical written about the arc of cousin Rick’s political career. Only on the eve of its production, the script was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe. Such a tragedy!

Okay, well … we can flesh that out a bit. Give us time. Maybe Marvin can work with …. on second thought, maybe not. Scratch that, friends.

Usual Rubbish

Readying.

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The studio is stuffed to the gills already. Yes, it has gills! How do you think it breathes underwater? Didn’t you go to grammar school? Oh, right.

Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.

Anyhow… the quintessential American holiday is now over. (We also survived that day that comes before Black Friday … what do they call it? Thanksgiving?) Time to fold up the balloons, disassemble the parade floats, and send the marching bands marching home. While many find the Macy parade enjoyable, it is not a simple matter to serve as the end point of that annual extravaganza. Just finding enough space to store deflated Spiderman is proving more challenging than you might imagine. Sure, without air in his ass, he’s smaller, but – and this is important – not all that much smaller. And then there’s those freaking Smurfs.


As you can imagine, every nook and cranny in the mill is stuffed with gear from the parade. You can hardly turn around in the studio these days. Still, we press on. Matt and I did a couple more mixes for Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick this past week. Gonna be a bit hard with all these deflated balloons lying around, but we’ll manage. Fortunately, many of Rick’s songs are country-like numbers, so the mixing is fairly simple. We take a naturalist approach – not too much FX, not too much compression. Just record it clean, mix it pure, and pour it into a tall, clear glass to check for impurities before quaffing it down. Pure audio ambrosia, that’s what I’m talking about. Sure ding.

We’re also furiously preparing for the holiday episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. Last year raised the bar a bit – two hours of pure horseshit. Not sure how to top that without a bigger shovel, but we’ll try.

Usual Rubbish

Songageddon.

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Are you all right? You sure? Good, good. Yeah, we’re okay. Head above water, you know. Always a good thing.

Oh, sorry. I was just on the phone with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who wisely chose this week to travel to Madagascar for a conference on … I don’t know, monster-making best practices, something like that. Good time to leave, what with the hurricane and all that. Up here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we implemented our disaster preparedness plan. Basically that involves closing the windows, drawing the curtains, and blocking our ears. Occasionally someone lights a candle. (When it comes to disasters, we’re not good.)

Fortunately, the gods of rock and water were smiling down upon us this past Monday-Tuesday. That monster storm took an extreme left hook and missed us clean, somehow. Not that you could tell that was the case by looking at this Hammer Mill. It appears as though it’s been through hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and pestilence. (Some would argue we qualify as pestilence, but what do they know? Them and their stinking badges.) One could hardly imagine how this place would handle high winds and higher water, and here we are on the banks of the mighty Mohawk River, just waiting to get clobbered.

We didn’t have anything like a hurricane party. Still working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Matt and I have been mixing for the most part over the last few weeks, but this week we worked on a new Rick song, possibly the closer for the album. To my count, that makes about 47 Rick Perry songs written and recorded over the past year. (That may be a little high, but then…. so are you, most likely. That’s right – I’m looking at YOU, stoner!) If you want to do your own unofficial census, just play back some of our podcast episodes from the last year. We’ve been posting rough drafts since last September or so – half-recorded songs, to be embellished later. Why do this? Input! We want to hear from you. (That’s right, stoner … I’m talking to you…)

Hope you got through the storm in one piece. I’d better get back to Mitch. Don’t want to keep him on hold too long, or he might invent something dangerous.

Usual Rubbish

There is a town.

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Well it’s been a while. Time to open up the old mailbag, right? Right, then, right!

Here’s a little missive from alert listener Ozymandius Lake in southern Nevada, somewhere near the Arizona border. (“No fixed address” is a strange name for a street, but anyway…)

Dear ignorant buggers,

It is manifestly obvious to me, Ozymandius Lake, that you people are a bunch of frauds. Stinking, lousy frauds! I may have no fixed address, but that doesn’t mean I’m gullible. You don’t live in the Cheney Hammer Mill! That place was knocked down decades ago. And even if it hadn’t been, it was hardly large enough to accommodate everything that you claim happens there. And that Rick Perry album you’re producing – there ain’t no such thing. I’ve been living in these bottoms for nigh onto twenty years, and I ain’t never seen no Rick Perry album.

Yours respectfully,

O.L.

Well, Ozymandius – taking your last comment first – I would have to say, “look upon my works and despair”, because there is indeed a Rick Perry album on the way, Big Green is indeed producing it, and it is called Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. If you received our podcast out there in Nevada (I think we have a repeater in Reno), you would know that’s true. As for the mill, if it doesn’t exist, I’ve been sleeping in the street for the last ten years. Could explain a lot. I’ll look into it. Thanks, Oz!

Here’s another one, this from Polly (Esther) Batson in Paolo Alto, California…

Dear Big Green,

You haven’t said anything about Big Zamboola in months. Did he return to his home solar system, or is he just lurking quietly in the the cloistered basement of the mill, keeping his titanic gravitational forces to himself?

Best,

Polly

Thanks for the letter, Polly. Didn’t know people wrote letters anymore in this age of Twitter, Facebook, blah blah blah. Anywho, no worries about Big Zamboola. He has kept quiet, true, over the past year or so, mainly because he shares with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, that transcendental quality of being an gaseous entity of no determinate shape or density. Sometimes he just pops up out of nowhere, like a jack in the box. Zamboola in the box, we call him.

Okay, back to the non-existent studio with me to work on that non-existent album. If only I had known of its insubstantial nature before I started working on it!

 

Usual Rubbish

Jupiter rising.

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Great red what? Jesus christmas, I don’t have time for that. I’m trying to stay focused on the Mars mission. Then there’s Voyager, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system already… whoops. Someone’s reading this. Look busy!

Hi, friend(s). You may wonder what I’m rambling about. Though probably not, if you’ve visited this blog before. We run on and on about pretty much anything that flows into our heads. Hell, I was looking at a pizza menu the other day that featured deep-fried Oreos. But does anyone want to hear about it? God no. So we’re going to talk about something more interesting today …. like Jupiter. (The planet, not the derivative Roman god.)

The other day some massive asteroid supposedly hit Jupiter. I say “supposedly” because, to be perfectly frank, I think this incident is actually the work of our mad science advisor, Mitchington V. S. Macaphee III, M.S.D., C.M.F.  (For the curious, his honorifics are short for Doctor of Mad Science, conferred by the University of Berzerkistan, and Crazy Mother Fucker … not so much a degree as a description.) Mitch got the interplanetary exploration bug this past summer with the recent Mars probe (which he almost immediately hacked into for his own nefarious purposes). But Mars wasn’t big enough for him. Eventually he turned his attention to the king Kahoona of planets …. (wait for it!) … Jupiter.

Okay, so here’s how our household works. Those of us who are not involved in the hard sciences share the upper levels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (I myself occupy a suite just outside the old forge room, basically a storage bay where they kept the hammer handles. I sleep on hammer handles, is what I’m saying.) Down in the basement, next to our makeshift production studio, Mitch Macaphee maintains a mad science lab where he builds, I don’t know, little projects like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), time travel devices, and … crucially… interstellar space vehicles.

You have to understand the fevered mind of the mad scientist. Jupiter has a red spot, right? Mitch sees that as a challenge. Can he make a blue spot? How hard would it be? Would they call it the Great Macaphee Spot if he succeeded?

What happened next should be kind of obvious. I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask me, but sometime last week there was a loud, rocket-like sound in the early morning hours, and the next thing I know, Jupiter has two spots instead of one. Or so Mitch tells me, anyway. Sheesh. I’ve got an album to produce. And a podcast to finish. Don’t bother me with such trifles!

Usual Rubbish

Process, process.

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Smallest town in the biggest state. Father Joseph, what would be my fate? So starts this month’s anthem of the Hammer Mill. Can’t get that tune out of my head, man!

This writing finds us chin deep in production for our next album. Imagine Matt and me in a roomful of 1-inch Ampex tape, all spooled out and tangled like Don Knotts had it in his space capsule in The Reluctant Astronaut. Yes, we always aspire to such heights. “Why not the best?” we ask ourselves, and the answer, of course, is obvious. (Go right to the source and ask the horse.)

Why do we do this thing over and over again? This “making an album” thing? We’re past the age of consent (well past) and not famous on our home planet. Our best-selling album is welded to the hull of Voyager as it makes its way out of our solar system. (We sold one copy to NASA. They bought it because it features a lead vocal by the late Kurt Waldheim.) The fact is, we are driven. When Big Green first rose out of the primordial soup of the mid 1980s, we had several choices. They were:

1) Go back into the soup! It was quite good, actually. Always like a little ginger in with the carrots. Mmmmm-boy.

2) Start a band, but instead of an indie rock group that has to make its own albums, something less demanding. Call it “Various Artists”. That way, on our first day of existence we would have dozens, perhaps hundreds of albums to our credit, many containing hit songs from every era. Instant popularity! Just add crack!

3) Start an indie rock group that has to make its own albums. With help, of course, from our mad science adviser, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the indefatigable mansized tuber, a couple of Lincolns, and others. (Don’t want to suggest for a moment that we do all this work alone!)

So here we are, patching the rough road that is Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, preparing for final mixes and looking for obvious holes. Hey, there’s a good name for a band: The Obvious Holes. Beats the Recognizable Hicks any day.

Keep your eyes open for more fadeout grooves. Think of them as shards left over in the manufacture of the next album. Or something.

Usual Rubbish

All about process.

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Thursday night is still good for me. What about the rest of the week? I’m busy, that’s what. Man’s got to sleep sometime, you know. Blame it on the diurnal rotation of the earth and the fact that my ancestors evolved on this miserable pimple of a planet! (Oh, crikey … now I’m borrowing throwaway phrases from minor characters in Lost in Space.)

What do you say to someone who sleeps six and a half days a week? WAKE UP! That might work. I’ve got a little problem in that direction, I admit. It’s prompted me to ask Mitch Macaphee to install some kind of alarm clock function in Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He gave me a look that would melt iron, but w.t.f. – why shouldn’t I expect a sophisticated robot to have a level of functionality one might expect from a ten dollar wristwatch? (Mitch told me to go out and buy a ten dollar wristwatch, actually. He has a point.)

What’s this got to do with Big Green, the larger world of indie music, and the fate of the universe in general? Over here at the Hammer Mill, we’re always hashing out when to do what. Thursday night is usually the time Matt and I get together to work out arrangements, record, etc. That’s happening at something of a snail’s pace by most people’s standards – by Big Green standards, however, it’s greased lightning. Just look at our discography. Two albums in 15 years, plus some assorted EP and single releases. It took us five years – FIVE YEARS – to record, mix, master, and release our last album, International House. Every time I hear it, I am reminded of …. well, just about everything that happened during that five years. Talk about a mnemonic device!

Anyhow, our upcoming album – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – is coming along a hell of a lot faster than that. We’ve got basic tracks for all of the songs recorded; mostly tweaking to do from this point forward. Most of the songs have been featured in first draft form on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so you can hear proto-mixes of almost the entire album if you can stand listening to us gab hours on end. And do bad imitations of famous people. And sing impromptu songs. And insult the dead.

Okay… so you probably haven’t heard the first drafts. Just look for the finished product. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some sleeping to do.