Damn it. What the hell is up with this amp, Mitch? It’s ticking like a bomb. You didn’t, um … turn my amp into a bomb, did you? Did you?
Och, the challenges we face! And this hammer mill in the Winter, full as cold as a north wind blowing across Loch Lomond. What the … look at me! I’ve got foreign accent syndrome, the Scottish variety. How the hell did that happen? Where’s the justice, damn it? And I don’t mean the town justice. I know right where that dude is. Now … where was I … ?
Oh, right. Let me say up front – and this won’t be surprising to longtime followers of Big Green – that this band has always been technologically challenged. Back in the day (1980s and ’90s) it was because we had no money. Our PA was held together with duct tape. We used so much of the stuff that there was none left to plug the holes in our duct work. Pretty soon we had to start calling it gaffer tape so that the ducts wouldn’t feel left out. But then the gaffers started to complain. For chrissake, we didn’t even have any gaffers, and there they were, complaining about the freaking tape!
Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, now a classic of the genre (the genre being poor-selling albums). But still, our technological infrastructure was lacking. I remember us clustered around a single mic, warming our hands over a moth-eaten tube head, and fashioning CD packages out of bits of cardboard. Working our fingers to the bone!
So yes … in comparison to those difficult days, our current challenges seem light indeed. Nonetheless, it’s hard to make music in the modern era with 20th century instrumentation. Sure, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can sit in on a couple of instruments from time to time, but it’s hard to think of him as true automation. And without automation, you need many iterations of each take. That’s why our recording process is so damn slow …. we do it nice because we do it twice. Even thrice. Or fice.
Then there’s the exploding amps. That slows things down a bit, too.
So we’re walking into the twentieth year of this phase of Big Green’s existence, and really … not much has changed since 1999 except that our releases aren’t typically on CD anymore and we’re driving smarter cars. Other than that, everything’s about the same around the Hammer Mill. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) still has a lot of his original vacuum tubes, and his various grease fittings haven’t been lubricated since those early days. The mansized tuber is still man-sized …. he hasn’t grown into some kind of gnarly behemoth. And our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is still off his meds … at least the ones his doctor advised him to take so many years ago.