Tag Archives: mitch

A fungible outcome.

Okay, who’s going to Betelgeuse for the advance mission? Let’s see a show of hands. I meant now, boys, right now. Is that it? Nearly one hand. Call it none.

Man oh Manischewitz, do I have to do everything myself? (No, I wasn’t asking for a show of hands on THAT.) All I ask is a little cooperation on a deadly dangerous deep-space excursion, and I get nothing. Bunch of layabouts. Looks like I’ll have to do it myself – just me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yeah, I mean you, Marvin. I know you didn’t put your hand up. What part of “my personal robot assistant” do you not understand, eh? Sheesh. I’m going to have to ask Mitch to program some obedience into that boy…. when he gets back from Mad Science-a-ganza in Sao Paolo. (Doesn’t sound hugely scientific to me, but…. my studies were in the humanities.)

Yeah, you see, Tiny Montgomery (our sometimes booking agent) has arranged a performance in the Betelgeuse system as part of Big Green’s upcoming [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 – by “part of” I mean to say, it’s the only gig he’s booked thus far. (Tiny’s getting a slow start.) Naturally, we’re getting a little anxious about this seeming exception to Tiny’s near unbroken record of rejection by the managers of interstellar music venues from here to Andromeda. I thought it only prudent that one of us should go out there and check the venue out. And hell, everyone thought it was a GREAT idea so long as they thought I would be doing the honors. But enough about that.

I have to say, truth be known, I prefer recording and broadcasting to live performances most days of the week. That’s why Matt and I are working tirelessly (no tires needed, in fact) on our new audio podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN!, the maiden episode of which should be posted in the upcoming weeks. What’s it about? Well, my friend, it’s the whole Big Green package – talk and jive, live performances (pre recorded, of course), rare sides, reviews, a promo or two. In short, we’ll know when we get there. But one way or the other, here it comes. No, you don’t have to thank us. All part of the service.

As always, we’re just trying to get you more of what you like least about us. Hmmm… did I say that right? Hands?

Planageddon.

I’m not sure about that, Matt. I don’t know if I want to play that song. How about “Dinos”? No? Are you sure? Okay… you suggest one. “World of Satisfaction”? Naaaah.

Oh, hello. Didn’t notice you peering through that LCD screen. As you can see, we’re working on a set list for our first engagement on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. No, that’s not a place keeper – that’s the name Tiny Montgomery suggested last week, and none of us has come up with anything better (let alone tried to, you know, insert the name). It’s always kind of a back and forth on the set lists – that’s only natural when you have hundreds of songs. Yes, literally hundreds… all wrapped up in a little box. We take turns, reaching a hand into the box. I’ll read one song title and Matt will knock it down. Then he grabs one and reads it. I’ll say he’s an asshole. Then he throws the box at me. And I’ll yell, “MOM! HE’S DOIN’ IT AGAIN!” And then we’re BOTH in trouble.

Okay, so that’s freaking childish, I know. But not to worry – we always come up with set lists in the end. Then we freaking ignore then, nine times out of ten. No, we’re not affecting an artistic temperament. It’s just that, frankly, it gets kind of dark on the stages we play on, and those lists are just plain hard to read. So we start calling tunes. If we call the same tune twice in a single night, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) issues a loud beeping sound. Chances are we will remember what that’s supposed to mean and withdraw the selection. Hey…. everybody has their process. Ours is surely no less sound than the one used by, say, My Morning Jacket.  (I can’t say, because I don’t know what they do. I’m just picking examples at random – don’t listen to me.)

I’m just noticing how often I use the epithet “freaking”. You all know what I mean. In any case, preparing for an arduous interstellar tour is no picnic, as many of you know. There are songs to rehearse, air tanks to compress, space suits to air out, missiles to hire, maps to download – no end to the punch list. (It’s actually more like a punch and kick list.) Not getting a lot of help, either. Both Lincolns are dead to the world after a night of carousing. The mansized tuber is out in the garden, communing with his little herb-garden cousins. Mitch Macaphee has taken the next two weeks off to attend a mad science conference in Brazil. I feel like the prisoner of freaking Zenda. (There’s that epithet again!)

Not to worry. We’ve been down this bumpy road before, and it’s always come out…. well … bumpy. So be it.

Take down.

Calling all cars. One Adam Twelve. C-Q, C-Q. What the… – this thing is faulty as hell, Mitch! You call this emergency communications? I call it trash.

Well, as you might imagine, we’re trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we’re getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything… needs staking… down.  Not sure when that’s likely to come up, but if it does, we’ll be ready. Then, of course, I’ve got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they’re moldy and motheaten, but we’re talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program!

Mitch Macaphee came up with some walkie talkies that we can carry around with us in case the lights go out. As you can tell from my earlier outburst, they don’t work so well. Not sure where he put his hands on the components. My suspicion is that he just bought them at a yard sale somewhere in town, probably from some 12-year-old entrepreneur willing to bilk an aging mad scientist. Hell, I used some of my best phony call signals, and nothing! Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t copy me… and he was standing five feet away. (Perhaps his hearing circuits were on the blink. Another Mitch triumph.)

Our thought was emergency communications, of course. We’ve got some other measures we can take, too. Like running down the cellar. Sure, that’s where our studio is, but that’s okay – we can combine hiding from the storm with rehearsal. Should be a huge time saver this year, as it thundered and rained every day in May, I think. In fact, flood water was pouring down the basement stairs at a couple of points. I had to ask Marvin to act as a dehumidifier for a few days. (We just stuff him full of cotton wool and reverse the polarity on a couple of his cooling fans, then plant a bucket under him to catch the condensation. How easy is that?)

I know… we should treat Marvin better. We’re not nice. Guess it’s time we went back on the road again, work off some of this nastiness. Road trip!

Air break.

All right – give it back. It’s my turn to use the gas mask. More than ten minutes counts as a “bogart”, right? Fifteen minutes? All right…

Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)

Seriously, I hate this time of year. Mitch Macaphee always goes way over the top, trying to one-up the other mad scientists on the block (by “block”, they mean solar system… they’ve got a different name for everything). Last year it was an anti-gravity machine. I spent the better part of April sleeping on the ceiling. (And that was the better part.) The year before, some kind of trans-dimensional salad shooter, I believe – not his most ambitious endeavor, I must say. Close to ten years ago, he actually got an honorable mention for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who Mitch built from odds and spares in his one-room lab back in old Jakarta.

It’s a bit hard to get into the spirit of this competition, especially when Mitch’s obsession is sucking all the air out of the room. That’s not a metaphor: he has invented a machine that sucks all the air out of a room. Don’t bother trying to work out the practical applications for such a device – he is a mad scientist. What part of mad scientist do you not understand? He’s cobbled together some kind of contraption that’s belching black smoke as we speak. John thought to tap our old militant neighbor, Gung-Ho, for some surplus gas masks, but he could only spare one. Hence, the ensuing competition.

Hmmmm… what do you think? Can we hold our breath until August? We shall see.

Plugging.

Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.

As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.

There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 

Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.

Small step.


No, I can’t hang upside down. Not for three hours, for chrissake… from a helicopter. Why don’t you just turn the camera upside down? Never thought of THAT, did you? (You did… ?)

Oh, hi. Just walked in on another acrimonious production meeting here  at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We keep a tight production schedule around here, let me tell you, averaging as many as one music video a year (sometimes more). Yes, breakneck speed rivaling our audio production schedule. Punishing! Matt is our director, though he sometimes puts Mitch Macaphee in charge of the second unit. Video production does not come naturally to our mad science advisor, I’m the first to say. He tends to confuse special effects with reality. (I can’t quite bring myself to ask him how he faked that exploding building in our last video…. too afraid of the truth.)

Okay, so… we’re releasing a single. A goofy little number called “One Small Step”. All I can say about it is that it attempts to explain the unexplainable, namely the moon landing, Armstrong’s flubbed first words from the cratered surface of Luna, and the severe mental and metaphysical consequences of that flubbing. The video? Well…. it features cameos by two ex presidents (both deceased) – one puts in a screaming sax solo. It features spectacular (or spectacularly dumb) depictions of interplanetary travel. And… well, what else can I say but watch it and judge for yourself.

“One Small Step” is one of those songs that has been sitting around for a time, waiting to be finished, begging to be released. They’re like errant children, you know? You make them, they start to grow, and next thing you know – before they even think about striking out on their own – they’re giving you a massive pain in the ass. “One Small Step” hung around for a while; we redid it, remixed it, changed it up…. then just threw our hands in the air. It was never going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or even a tailor or dry cleaner. So it’s just a song; Matt gave it a fittingly bizarre video, and the rest is history. (Or will be history, once it’s past.)

Here’s hoping you enjoy this modest little number. Now if you’ll excuse me, my helicopter awaits.

The life.


I hate it when I misplace things. Where the hell did I put that sucker? You don’t suppose…? Oh, no. No, that’s too awful to contemplate. I refuse to concede the possibility of such an unhappy happenstance.

Oh, hi. Just spitballing here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Nothing to get excited about. Between Big Green tours, as you may already know, we tend to blow a lot of time in contemplation and various other pointless activities. Not because we are perennial time-wasters, you understand. No, no – it’s the ascetic lifestyle we aspire to. I know most bands drown themselves in drink, cloud their minds with illicit drugs, and indulge in multifarious pleasures of the flesh. Not this crew, my little friend – not a bit of it. We are like monks. (Did I say monks? I meant monkeys. Or Monkees. You take your pick.) We sit about, scratch, toss things at one another… until somebody says, get up there and play.

Funny thing is, when we play, it’s actually quite a lot like sitting around, scratching, and tossing things at one another. We just do it with guitars, drums, keys, etc. Some hollering as well. You see, this is why we are so popular on other planets (and in certain remote areas frequented only by wild animals). Big Green has never really broken into the terrestrial human market, though we’re certainly not averse to that. This may be mildly enlightening for those who have pondered the seemingly prevalent space references in our music. Songs like, well, Evening Crab Nebula (a Christmas song)…

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 ya’
by pointing out some pertinent biblical place

That’s just one example. And yeah, we’re aiming that at both an Earthbound audience and those folks out there in spaceland. Got to name-check a few communities they’re likely to recognize – kind of like those pop songs that have place names in them (like Huey Lewis naming cities at the end of “Heart of Rock and Roll”, for instance). When we’re up in the Crab Nebula, they wait for this song. They start waving their tentacles and nodding their oddly misshapen heads. It’s a gas.

So, sure… we may be different. But we take pride in our difference. For us, it makes all the difference that we’re different. And…. that’s all I’ve got.

Scandalizing my name.


Hmmm…. forgot my password. What was the name of that lawyer who wrote me last week? Zul something. Hey – somebody scroll up to last week’s post and pass me the guy’s name, will you? I need my password back!

Ah, got it. Scratched into my computer monitor, right about where the password field appears on the screen. Pretty clever, huh? No one would think of looking for it there! Let’s see… what is up at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill that might be of interest to you. Little inventory here. I think Mitch Macaphee is working on an experiment (either that or Qaddafi’s bombers are getting closer). Matt is either changing strings on a guitar, feeding animals, or transposing our heads with those of lunar astronauts. (A specialty of his.) Johnny White is catching up on his technical manuals, I believe. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has shut himself down for the weekend, taking a little break from his newly founded religious cult. I won’t get into what the Lincolns are up to.

Me? I’m Googling our names on the internets. Can’t say as I’m happy about what I’ve found. I’m not talking about album searches – 2000 Years To Christmas turns up about 18,000 hits, mostly music sites. (Though one strangely attributes authorship of several songs to the brothers Gibb. First I’ve heard of it.) No surprises there. But hell, one thing that came up was a positive slam by writer Naomi Klein during her appearance on Democracy Now! this past Wednesday. Klein – a favorite author, I confess – made this troubling statement about Big Green:

“…most of the big green groups are loath to talk about economics and often don’t want to see themselves as being part of a left at all, see climate change as an issue that transcends politics entirely….  a lot of the big green groups, are also in a kind of denial.” 

I read this and I was like, hey…. hold on a minute, Naomi. For one thing, I object to the claim that there is more than one Big Green out there. Sure, I know – other bands have used the name, but I think you will agree, no one has worn it more shamelessly than we. Secondly, it’s simply not true. We talk about economics all the time! We have to – we’re as broke as church mice in a less-than-optimal church. And hell, if we’re in denial, that’s because it’s part of our creative process. Can’t fault us for that. I can’t speak for the other Big Greens, but that’s the story with us.

Man. The internets are getting less and less congenial every time I go there.

Schism.


Give me that back door religion, give me that back door religion, give me that back door religion, it’s good enough for me!

That’s the song we’re singing here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been plying his new trade as preacher, flock-leader, and chief financial officer of the local diocese of the Space Hippie Sect. Yes, it’s a religion he made up using bits and pieces from Hulu reruns he watches in his ample spare time (contrary to common belief, robots are slothful creatures generally, their servos idle nearly 65% of the time). Turns out it was time well wasted, as the converts have been trudging in, eyes glazed, arms extended in front of them, hungry for spiritual guidance. Didn’t know Marvin was so good at getting money out of people. Must be new programming… for somebody.

How do we of Big Green feel about floating our household on donations to a church hastily invented by a renegade robot? Well, not bad, actually, times being what they are. It’s always good to see a small business owner succeed, and if Marvin isn’t that, I don’t know what he is. And even though the church gatherings involve a good deal of tuneless singing and electric space-banjo playing, they pay for the lights, the heat, the occasional pizza. Life is good. At least until the police arrive. (Note to police: If you read this blog regularly, please be advised that this is “satire” and therefore constitutionally protected speech, not a Web-based confession of ill deeds. Nor is this claim a lame effort to keep you from breaking up this great little scam we’ve got going….. um… in the satire.)

Okay, so maybe it’s not completely on the up and up. At least it beats the down and down… hands down. Why, even Mitch Macaphee seems to think Marvin’s on to something, and he rarely admits to any interest in money or valuables, unless they can be easily converted into experimental subjects. (A true scientist, our Mitch.) And face it, we’ve sold our integrity a whole lot more cheaply than this in days past. Those of you who have followed us since… well… three weeks ago know that this is true.

Well, off to another revival meeting. Trouble is – when the faithful decide it’s time to go to Eden, what then? ROAD TRIP!

Boom goes the dynamite.


No, Mitch… I’ve never been to Rome. Yes, I’ve seen pictures of the Coliseum, but I’m not sure where you’re going with this. It’s a nice thing in its place, but…

Oh, hi. Just having a word with Big Green’s mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, professor of interstellar astro-geology ….and explosives, apparently. (He’s got tenure at the school of hard knocks.) It’s endearing to see a proud father try to help his son. In saying so, I don’t mean to suggest that what Mitch is engaged in right now in any way resembles that wholesome impulse. No, no… that would require some modicum of sanity. I’m afraid Mitch is both attempting to help his creation, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and blow his ass to kingdom come. Unintentionally, perhaps, but nevertheless… this is what he is attempting.

Let me ‘splain you. (Damn… I’m starting to talk like Tom Coburn at a confirmation hearing!) Marvin got himself a little gig as a bomb-sniffing robot over at the local Homeland Security training center, where people in space suits pretend to decontaminate children’s birthday parties populated by life-size plastic kids and a genuine layer cake. How’s he doing? Good as can be expected for a novice. You know how it is – you get your claws singed once or twice and, hey – you know better, right? That’s been Marvin’s experience. Never an overachiever, you know. I like to encourage him, particularly when it means he’ll be bringing home a few bucks for the housekeeping. (See, he also does the housekeeping. We’ve convinced him he should pay us for that. Long story.)

Anyway, Mitch thinks Marvin should be moving a bit faster in his training. So he’s begun to devise little problems for him to solve right here at home. One such problem – an explosive device of frightening magnitude – was planted in a broom closet just downstairs from my bedroom. Marvin defused it, fortunately… though I think it was a lucky break, frankly. (He stepped on it while sweeping out the hall and apparently pulled the ignition wire loose.) Next it was dynamite in the oven – enough to blow a massive hole in the side of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. This is what prompted Mitch’s reverie about the Coliseum. (He thinks we could turn the mill into a tourist destination if it looked more like ruins.)

Not sure how this is going to come out, but you’re likely to hear. Just listen for a distant boom. That’s us!