Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

April comes late.

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Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right … not the red button. Never hit the red button.

Mr. Ned and crew on the bridgeOh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It’s like a series of tubes, I’m told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself – like the internets – a machine.

As you may already know, we’ve just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month’s show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here’s a little rundown:

Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager. In this thrilling episode of the adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned on board the starship Free Enterprise, Willard and his crew of severe conservatives (and George Takei) are faced with their greatest challenge yet: making small talk with an audio-animatronic Richard Nixon. Oh, and there’s Edward Teller’s all-consuming Emergency Manager 9000, an ultimate computer bent on taking over the universe. That, too.

Music: We revisit the “live” duet version of our song “You’re Edward Teller”, in honor of the physicist’s appearance on Ned Trek. We dredge up another demo from the International House project – a scratch version of the song “Do It (Every Time)”. A bit later on, you’ll hear our more recent (still unreleased) recording of Matt’s song “Jit Jaguar”, one of my favorite Big Green recordings ever, owing to its primitive simplicity. (Easy to please, what can I say?). We close out with an adhoc rendering of “Special Kind of Blood”.

Gab fest: In our “Put The Phone Down” segment we engage in a wide ranging discussion of the late Ritchie Havens’ amazing thumb, Margaret Thatcher’s departure, the press response to the Boston Marathon bombing, our old-school recording methods, and other pointless drivel.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments always welcome. We’ll read anything on the podcast, anything. Be our guest, for chrissake. More later.

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

Robo-pontiff?

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Don’t mind me, or the deafening clatter you hear. That’s just the sound of me working on our next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, the podcast we hammer together every month or so. Why hammer it, you say? W.t.f. – we live in a hammer mill, for Pete’s sake. (Jesus, I’ve been doing that lame Romney imitation way too long.)

Our next pope?
Our next pope?

I suppose if you listen regularly to our podcast, it probably seems like not a lot of work goes into creating it – that it’s sort of slapped together randomly, like a salami sandwich made by someone who’s got a five minute lunch break. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yea, we take pains in building each episode, agonizing over every detail, every nuance. We spend weeks drafting the scripts. (Oh yes, even our random-sounding conversations are completely scripted.) Then it’s another week nailing down the timing, the miscues, the poor pronunciation, the stupidity. (We spend an entire day on inanity. Why? Because it’s worth it.)

Now, as you know, Big Green is a decidedly low-tech operation. We don’t have fancy cameras, microphones, or any of that new-fangled electricity. (Okay, well … yeah, that we have.) Our studio is primitive beyond redemption, and we are forced to record the spoken bits of the podcast without the aid of standard teleprompters. The best we can do is key the entire script into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), store it in his electronic brain, and ask him to display it on his anterior video monitor. Sure, we have to squint to read it, but it’s better than rattling a piece of paper in front of live mics.

The trouble with this method is that there are unintended consequences. Like this month, we talked about the Pope retiring. Once the lines from that script got into Marvin’s tiny brain, it started percolating through his various logic circuits, and the next thing we knew he was trying pointy hats on for size. He seems to have convinced himself that he’s in the running to replace Pope Benedict. (I think the idea appeals to his creator, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who would very much like to be the power behind the pontiff.)

Would you like to see Marvin as the next pope? Let us know. Send us your thoughts and we’ll read them on the next episode.

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

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

Splitting Lincoln.

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I think I left my guitar plugged in. I’ve been hearing that buzzing all night freaking long. What’s that? It’s the orgone generating device? Jesus on a bike … that thing again?

Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.

Never can tell what’ going to happen with mad science technology. Just ask Mitch Macaphee – he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant) after all. Anyway, anti-Lincoln must have dialed the wrong settings into that orgone generating device because it split him into two equal parts: Jerry Lewis and Doris Day. Close, right? Fortunately, that thing has an undo button. I like the 1950s as much as any man (which may, in fact, amount to not at all) but I don’t want dead decades following me around like  a zombie. Ever have that problem? Thought so.

Well, we’ve got another podcast in the can. Another groundbreaking episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring as many as three songs (including one previously unreleased Rick Perry number), a rather lengthy and convoluted episode of Ned, the Talking Dressage Horse, and the usual copious amount of pointless blather my illustrious brother and I put forth on a monthly basis. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost much … in fact, it doesn’t cost anything at all. Free media! Liberty! That’s what podcasting is all about, right? That’s why we’re aboard her…… Oh, right. I should keep the Star Trek quotes to a minimum. My apologies.

Best move along. We’re expecting workmen any minute. There are still a few copper pipes left in the hammer mill, so they’ll be stopping by to remove them. (In lieu of rent.)

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

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.