We just did that, man. It’s still summer, right? What? October! What the hell … we’ve got some work to do. First task: find out what happened to July. (I know I left it around here somewhere.)
Oh … hi, friends of Big Green. Seems like I’ve lost track of time just a bit. I’m off by about three months, but hey … who hasn’t lost a quarter, right? It’s probably somewhere deep in the sofa cushions. Except that we don’t have a cushioned sofa here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Just chairs. Stark wooden chairs. We sit, straight as a board, until the darkness comes, then we retire. It’s hard, but it keeps us honest. (Honestly … it’s hard! The chair, that is.) We ain’t got no time for no podcast stuff round these parts, no how. Now GIT! Ah …. sed …. GIT!
Whoops … lapsed in to Bobby Sweet mode just then. (Not to worry. Bobby Sweet wouldn’t hurt no one. He just has a hankering for big guns.) Yeah, I can blame the calendar, I can blame my momentary lapses into stereotypical rural jargon, but when you come right down to it, the fault is mine. We haven’t posted a podcast in three months, and it’s because we haven’t finished an episode in that long. Hell, it took me all summer and half of the fall to write the script for the upcoming installment of Ned Trek. We recorded the audio last week in a couple of hours, and now it’s off to editorial. Which is to say, we need to cut the living shit out of it.
Hey, anyone out there who works with audio and video knows, this stuff is time consuming. Especially when you’re a lazy sloth like me. I’m a bit more like Bobby Sweet than I care to let on, truth be told. I like to sit back and strum on my old guitar, pound out a few chords on the old piano, drop some canned fruit in the old blender and swear at the fact that it still doesn’t work. All I can say is that, despite the distractions, we are working on the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and it will appear very soon. Which is to say, it won’t be another quarter. Maybe a nickel. Stay tuned!
While he’s been busy with that and Matt’s been busy with falcons, I’ve been woodshedding a bit, trying to teach my arms to play the piano again. (It’s faster than teaching your legs.) The archiving project is nearly complete, at least the part about digitizing songs from analog tapes. I still need to clean them up, sort them, etc. Some of them are pretty spare; others come with a vest and a second pair of pants. The whole nine yards, as they say. (I don’t know why they say these things.)
Let’s face it … we’re crappy capitalists. (Or crapitalists, if you will.) Matt has no interest in money or notoriety. As for me, well, I couldn’t sell songs to my mother … and I did ask nicely. In a world that measures quality in terms of the price the product commands, we strain to reach the lowest rung. Our production quality is commensurate with the resources available to us. (i.e., we’re not recording at Big Blue North, even though it’s right up the freaking street.) We are evolving in that respect, but like Issa’s snail, slowly … slowly.
We could sell old stock out of said boutique. We’ve got hammer handles. There’s also a bunch of old music lying around in various forms. We could sell CDs, but since we only have three full-length releases and a couple of EPs, that would make us a bit like the Scotch Boutique on 70s era Saturday Night Live. (Ask YouTube … or your mother.) I keep digging up old recordings from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. If people still recorded on cassettes, we could just tape over the tabs and sell those. (Ask your … oh, never mind.)
We’re not only musically obscure, Big Green is also socially obscure, I’m proud-ish to say. We’re the only band I can think of who, when moving into an abandoned hammer mill, draws pointed comments of “there goes the neighborhood” from across the brickyard. Fact is, we’re not even good enough to live in a condemned building. But we don’t let THAT stop us. No, sir … and thanks to the ingenuity of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee (just back from MonsterCom, an annual gathering of like-minded crazy doctors in Madagascar), none of those local hostiles can get within thirty feet of our front door without being stopped by an impenetrable force field. (At least I’m told that it’s there. Either that, or no one wants anything to do with us. Which is more likely? You decide, my friends.)
Actually, we’re recording a handful of songs, including some older numbers we’ve never properly tracked before using modern technology. There are a couple of new ones in the works. I am trying to write around this eclectic mishmash of musical material. As you know, we are sticklers for continuity and comprehensibility. And quality. And irony. Massive irony. Heh heh.
Thankfully, life is a lot simpler now. We have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) haul all of our water from the brook. Except now, unlike then, we have indoor plumbing (our lean-to was very old-school), so Marvin just dumps the water into the cistern and we tap it. Modern conveniences! When Marvin’s batteries run a little low, we ask Anti-Lincoln to do it, and he always says no. We still ask, though. Everybody pulls his own weight around here. Everybody except the mansized tuber, who needs a little help. But what the hell – he’s a freaking plant. Can’t expect him to grow arms and legs and start jumping around anytime soon. (Or can we …. ?)
technologies. In any case, down the memory hole they go … unless I left them in my other pants. Marvin? Have you seen my other pants?