I know it’s the dead of summer, but I’m tired of all this drag-and-drop bullshit. Can’t we take a break and hang out in the courtyard for an hour or two, sipping cool drinks and listening to some boss tunes? No? Sheesh.
Okay, so yes, I’m frittering away my summer in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, keeping my head down, concentrating on the task before me. What task is that, you may ask? And well you may. Archiving, my friends, archiving. Plowing through decades of audio tape, capturing songs that have never been committed to a hard drive; songs recorded on primitive ribbons of tape, stored away in shoeboxes, and nearly forgotten. Literally hundreds of recordings, the overwhelming majority made by Matt in the privacy of my abandoned bedroom.
It’s an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I’ve made pretty good progress. I’ve gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I’m pruning around the edges, looking for songs that I know exist but haven’t located on tape as of yet. I’m also trying to fit all of Matt’s Christmas song collections into appropriate buckets — he did about eleven of them, starting with a handful of songs in 1985 up through 1995. They represent a subset of his total output, but even so, it amounts to about 60 – 70 songs. I’m curating them so that at some point interested parties can listen to each year’s collection in its original sequence.
What’s the point of this pointless exercise? Well, it’s one way to kill a summer … before the summer kills me. It’s kill or be killed in this era of climate change. So I wind my way down to the cool basement and dig through old banker boxes looking for buried treasure from the forgotten eighties. (Forgotten because no one seems to remember much of what happened during that decade.) At some point, I will find a way to post versions of at least a selection of these songs, though I must admit that my preference is for building that big, honking web jukebox I mentioned a few weeks back – just belly up to the interactive console and pick a number between one and three hundred. Sounds like a plan.
Hey, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) …. close the door on your way out. And yes … that’s my way of saying GET OUT.
It had occurred to a few of us that we should take the opportunity of this asteroid fly-by to gather some important data on this mysterious visitor from deep space – data that could provide answers to vital questions like, “what color is it?” and “is there a Starbucks there yet?” How would we go about this? Well, we have Marvin (my personal robot assistant). And we have Mitch Macaphee’s model volcano. If we put one in to the other at the right moment, there’s a moderate chance that item A (Marvin) could reach escape velocity and, maybe, navigate his way to the asteroid. And when I say “moderate”, I mean a degree of probability that is, perhaps, calculable if and only if we were willing to make the effort to calculate it. And, well … we’re not. So, Marvin? GET IN THAT VOLCANO!
that’s the point. You see? When all else fails, the truth will out!
Song: Nimrod – Perle song lamenting his frustrations as commander of the Nimrod 7, the misunderstandings … it’s like everybody speaks a different language! Heavy is the head … and kind of heavy the song.
That wasn’t for you. There was a carpenter ant on my back. I’ve never been able to understand why they are named for something that is almost the precise antithesis of what they do for a living – namely, eat your house alive. (Carpenters, last I looked, build you house alive.) It’s another example of what we call the “Pelican Cove Principle” – naming things for either (1) something completely inappropriate to the thing named, or (2) something you destroyed to build the thing. For example: Pelican Cove was a tony bedroom community that had no pelicans and no cove, so it complied with principle (1). Then there’s Applewood Drive back in my hometown – a road built through an ancient stand of heirloom apple trees which were, of course, ripped out to make room for McMansions. You get the idea.
Right now we’re kind of winging it, I admit … though that’s a bit more considered a state than we’re usually in during recording sessions. I boot up the new system, punch a few keys, then start playing whatever instrument is called for – piano, sousaphone, kazoo, triangle, whatever – and realize a few moments later that nothing has been captured. Rinse and repeat. I need a team of scientists! And I don’t mean mad scientists – we’re all set on that score. If we were to ask Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, to reconfigure our studio, we would end up with something on the order of what Magic Alex threw together for the Beatles back in the Apple Records days, i.e., a decorative, non-functional studio full of flashing lights with a speaker for every track and other non sequitur features.
Okay, I’m not going to dip into one of those “things were simpler in the old days” reveries, but what I’m describing are both first-world problems and 21st Century foibles of a type that would have baffled us back when we started this moth-eaten music collective known as Big Green. When we first started using that moniker in 1986-7, we were working with people out around Albany, NY. Matt was writing songs like a mad man, just as he does today. Only there was no internet, no smartphones, no simple way of getting your music out there other than standing on a stage or hawking home-made cassette tapes at the local record shop. Kids these days!
Hey … that’s what you get for living in a backwater. No disrespect, my local friends – I freaking love it here. But staying busy as a musician, an artist, a writer … anything creative has always been a struggle. It may be a bit easier now than it was twenty or thirty years ago, now that there are more local indie music venues and a whole “thing” that has grown up around that “scene”, man. Yeah, man. So you have to store your nuts in the fall and hope you have enough to tide you over until the sun returns. Or at least until the moon returns.
Put The Phone Down – We start with some strained renditions of a song by The Troggs, as sung by Peter Lorre, the Daleks from Dr. Who, and others, then rip right into a discussion of current affairs. That more or less follows the theme of my political rant this week – the assholes vs. the fuckers, in essence, though we also spend some time on “Bernie or Bust” and the Green Party. (Don’t get me started!)