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Usual Rubbish

This just in.

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Getting some feedback on our recent episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, the monthly podcast we wrap together with gaffer tape and bailing wire (whatever the hell THAT is), stuffing it full of discarded hammer components left lying around from a previous era here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s a smart podcast … about as smart as a box full of hammer heads. Yep, yep … we’ve got at least one brain between us. And then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He has an ELECTRONIC brain.

Okay, where was I? Ah, yes. Feedback. What has it been like? Kind of a whistling, whining sound that drops in and out. I think I left the speakers on while we were recording. Annoying, but tolerable. I suppose you were thinking by feedback I meant audience reactions to the podcast. Oh, no … that’s not what I had in mind at all. I couldn’t possibly post those comments here. The FCC would jump all over my shit. (And likely they’ll complain about that last sentence, as well.)

What can be said, right? Some may have taken offense at the latest episode of Ned Trek, featuring Willard Mitt Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned. Others may have objected to the blank verse I quoted from the poet Google YouTube (the automated video transcription bard), to wit:

uh,
about that system work so if you can see the slow-speed and very moment
antiquated castle green too
this is reviewing
uh… or it’s it’s mean-spirited
means german personal assistant
stats apparently to
little it’s little bit please
know the other night
the other side of the form of walnut

Not half bad … not that I’m an expert at this sort of thing. Maybe we’ve just reached an age when verse is not all that dissimilar from randomly generated word combinations. Auto poetry … what a concept!

So anyway … we may start writing some songs this way. Start with raw lyrics, read them into a video camera, post the video to YouTube and generate the transcript. Then re-record it as a song. It would sound! (Ask your father where that comes from.) The pop music equivalent of re-fried beans or twice baked potatoes.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

Usual Rubbish

Stuff and … things.

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Lots to say, nothing to think. Not usually a great combination … but it’s a positive boon when it comes to podcasting.

Enemy ears are listening
Hey... who knew?

So, how are you then? Well, I trust. Hope the foot trouble is better. That’s right, friends, we’re turning over a new leaf here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. From now on, Big Green is going to be all about people. Good old retail public relations. Connecting with the folks – that’s us, Jack. (See? We even call you by your first name, providing your first name is “Jack”.) I’ve found that holing ourselves up in our basement studio mixing songs and swearing at each other is no way to run a rodeo, let alone a pop music combo. Neither is failing to settle our account with the local feed store, or dropping a box of tacks in the middle of main street. Verily I say unto you – none of these things redounds to the benefit of our public image.

Anywho, we’re tuning over a new leaf … a Big, Green leaf. We’re extending the hand of friendship to all and sundry. (Whoops … I’m sorry, that’s Awl and Sundree, the law firm that’s handling our squatter’s rights claim, pro bono, of course.) Part of that whole thing I’m yakking about is our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, now in it’s second big year. Every month, a fresh new assault on the ears and sensibilities. That’s how we connect with John Q. Public and Nancy K. Everybody, not to mention Rover T. Dog and Sprinkles A. Cat. Nobody is left out, nobody!

Fact is, that’s kind of a problem, too, I’m told. Why is that? Well, I’m gonna tell you. Our anti-terrorism adviser and former lean-to neighbor Gung-Ho has warned that not only “friendlies” are listening to our podcast each month. No, it’s not just mom and pop and the kids, and maybe grandpa out there in the kitchen, brewing the crystal meth. Because of our connected world, Gung-Ho tells us, America’s enemies may be listening as well. They may be writing down everything we say and using it as a weapon against us. Chilling thoughts indeed.

As we record this month’s podcast this week, we will remain vigilant, per Gung-Ho’s timely admonition. I should hate to think that we might inadvertently lend assistance to the “Axis of Evil.”

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

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

Helladay house.

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What? What time is it? It’s too early, tubey. You’ll get your Miracle Gro at 9:00 and not before. Christ on a bike.

Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)

Excuse that digression. Hope you had a wonderful, glorious Thanksgiving, full of holiday cheer and/or anticipation (if you spent most of it queueing up in front of Wal-Mart or Best Buy). Perhaps you spent part of your morning watching the bizarre spectacle known as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I certainly did. It’s kind of a tradition around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where you don’t ordinarily get exposed to a lot of unfiltered promotional messages (aside from the ones that come on soup can labels).

Little known fact about the Hammer Mill: This is actually the end-point of the T-day parade. It’s a lot longer a procession than most people think. Folks get the mistaken impression that the march ends with the arrival of ersatz Santa Claus in front of Macy’s. Not true. For most of the next day and a half, the floats and balloons come marching up the West Side Highway, take the G.W. Bridge over to the Palisades Parkway, then pick up the NYS Thruway and process all the way up to the Little Falls exit. In a gesture of magnanimous welcome, we throw the compound doors open to them and allow them into the Hammer Mill courtyard for a little R&R. Then Mitch Macaphee and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) aid their technicians in deflating the enormous parade balloons and packing them away for another year. True* story.

Sure, you thought Christmas was just a throwaway songwriting theme for us. Oh ye of little faith.

* Note: veracity of story subject to unverifiable truth conditions. Contact Big Green for details.

Usual Rubbish

Honest, Abe?

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No, no. Not that hat. That’s a porkpie hat. Don’t you know anything? The great emancipator would never have worn a hat like that. Not unless he played the saxophone. (Did he play the saxophone? Best ask.)

Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)

Anyway, there was that. Then there was the new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lincoln. That naturally perked up more than a few ears around this hammer mill, let me tell you … four ears in particular: the ones on Lincoln and his anti-matter doppelganger, Anti-Lincoln, both still acting as historical figures in residence with Big Green. Well, naturally enough, Lincoln (the positive one) took issue with some of the historical details in the new film. “I never said that!” I could hear him exclaim as he watched his pirated copy. “And that crap about vampires – none of that ever happened!” (I  think he got his hands on the wrong DVD, frankly, but… it’s not my place to say anything.)

Anti-Lincoln, on the other hand, was strangely pensive about the whole matter. I thought for sure, with his irrepressible temper, that he would blow sky high, rail at the heavens, demanding justice and revenge. Nothing of the sort. He’s been doing a Lincoln Memorial imitation now for the last three days. I just can’t get a rise out of him. I’ll tell you, nature abhors a vacuum, so it may not surprise you that some of the other denizens and hangers-on we have around the hammer mill are getting into the Lincoln act, trying to channel Anti-Lincoln’s stifled rage. Mansized tuber is one, though he can’t get the hat quite right. And don’t even ask about Marvin’s dime store beard.

Well, we’ll work it all out, I’m certain. Now … back to the podcast hellscape.

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

The month that was.

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Wait, shhh… Did you hear that sound? Yeah, that sound. That’s the sound of another podcast being posted. Praise be.

What’s in the program this month? Well…. pretty much anything we could find lying about the Hammer Mill. Bits and bobs, as they say. Is it lame? You be the judge! My lips are sealed on the quality issue. But I will talk about what’s in the bulging box that is THIS IS BIG GREEN – OCTOBERCAST 2012. An hour and twenty of sheer audio madness, featuring:

Mr. Ned, Romney’s Talking Horse – Episode 3: Ned Trek. The most ambitious in the Mr. Ned series yet, Romney’s famous talking dressage horse takes Willard on a journey through a space/time wormhole to an alternative dimension of television mediocrity. Yes, Mitt is made commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and he and his crew of neocons take on an extraterrestrial threat that only a cash-starved special effects department could conjure. Hi-jinx ensue. (Special guest appearance by former president Richard Nixon.)

Song: Paradise. This is a rough mix (basically faders up) of a recording we started a few months ago as part of a long project focused on resurrecting some of our older songs that were never properly recorded or released. Paradise is a song ripped from Matt’s back pages. Not sure what it’s about – you’d have to ask him – but it’s got elements of archeology in it, which is something that has shown up in some of his other songs, like Primitive, Christmas with the Australopithecus, and others. Probably watched too many Dr. Leakey T.V. specials back in the ’70s, that’s my guess.

Song: Kublai Khan. Another Matt song from about the same period. Actually, this one is  loosely themed on the live and exploits of Sun Myung Moon, late founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times.  Given that our podcast is typically focused on this sort (i.e. dead people), I can hardly believe that we neglected to mention the salient fact that Dr. Moon passed away. Next episode!

That’s about all for this month. Give it a listen, and then send your complaints to:

Mitt Romney
Governor of Sucktopia
Richy Richland, New Hamphire.

Usual Rubbish

Deafening me with science.

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A little louder. Little louder still. Forget headroom! We like our albums LOUD. Turn it up just as LOUD as you can. What? Leave the room? In the middle of a mix?

Okay, well that‘s discouraging. Here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home in upstate New York, mixing our … I mean, cousin Rick’s new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and I’m just discovering now that I am a lousy engineer. Who know (aside from everyone who listens to my work)? Thank the god of your choice that I have Matt Perry to work with, a.k.a. “Mr. Ears” himself. No, that’s not because he wears Spock-like ear extensions. I’m not saying he doesn’t, mind you … I’m just saying that’s not the reason for the moniker. Though after being summarily ejected from our mixing session due to excessive loudness, I’m thinking about calling him “Mr. Mouth” from now on.

Not sure how Matt can mix an album with his ears ringing, having been recently mentioned by NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Waleed Abdalati in a speech to students about why he became a scientist in the first place. (Waleed was a neighbor and Matt’s best friend back in the day.) They used to play astronaut in our backyard (as well as the vast stretch of open fields that existed there at that time – perfect landscape for an alien planet). Waleed went on to be an engineer and climate scientist; Matt a conservation officer at a wildlife sanctuary. Waleed works for NASA. Matt wrote One Small Step. So in his own way, each has made his contribution to the nation’s space effort.

Still, I can make a contribution to mixing this album, and I’ll tell you how. One word: Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I’ll just program him to do my bidding, send him into the studio, and he’ll turn all the knobs up to eleven. We’ll be able to hear this album from space, even when it’s not being played. Woo-hoo!

Okay…. enough about me. Just wanted to let you know that the latest episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN is now available. Two new “rough draft” recordings by Rick Perry, another episode of Nedd the Dancing Horse, and a brief remembrance of Neil Armstrong, first man on another world. Not bad for free. Check it out.

Did you say something? Couldn’t hear you over the LOUD MUSIC.