Tag Archives: podcast

Down for the count.

November 2, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Okay, I think we have this thing settled. Everyone in agreement? No? Good. We value diversity of perspective here at Big Green. Especially when LIVES HANG IN THE BALANCE….

Sorry, friends. I hate to raise my voice, but sometimes you just have to. With sketchy-looking promoters breathing down our necks (and judging by the aroma, they had limburger hoagies for lunch), we are still hashing out the details of our means of transport on our rapidly approaching interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our latest album. We have, in fact, identified a rent-a-wreck spacecraft that is within our budget. It’s being offered by a subsidiary of our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., operating on the planet Neptune. Fortunately, they deliver. (But only as far as the moon. I guess that extra 239,000 miles is a bridge too far for these goons.)

Okay, my thought was this. We program Marvin (my personal assistant) with the ability to fly the craft from the moon back to Earth. Then we, well, get him to the moon somehow. Matt suggested one of those really big rubber bands, stretched between the legs of the St. Louis Arch – just aim and shoot! Sure, that sounds good, dear brother, but how the hell are we going to get to St. Lookin' good, Marvin. Louis? We can’t even get to the moon, for chrissake. Then there’s always the option of telemetry – just flying the ship here by remote control. But with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a hammock in Madagascar for the fourth consecutive month, we haven’t the means of contriving such a device.

Damn … if that hammock were only here instead of Madagascar, we could maybe use that instead of the rubber band. Hmmmmm…

Anyhow, I saw a picture of the ship, and it looks pretty tight. Kind of like a 1979 Oldsmobile diesel station wagon, only a little less buff. (Matt doesn’t see what I’m seeing. He thinks it’s a death trap. I see only goodness and niceness.) If I can share it with you, damn it, I will.

Well … while we’re waiting for the countdown to begin, we’ve got a podcast to finish. So, down to the basement, man the mics! Stop making sense!

Usual Rubbish

Under the hood of lost September.

October 12, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Is this the new itinerary? Looks like last week’s. Which, if I recall correctly, was a hastily updated photocopy of the flight path for Voyager 2. That mission didn’t end well, my fine friend, just you remember.

Yes, yes … we are still preparing the ground for our upcoming interstellar tour to support celestial sales of Big Green’s latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. The itinerary thus far includes stops on gas giants, molten moons, and frozen asteroids hurtling into black holes. Couple of snags, that’s all. Nothing to get excited about. (Man Jack Jesus, this band has to work like an animal to find an audience.)

In the meantime, we have plucked the lost September episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN from the jaws of non-existence (if such a state of being can be said to have anything resembling jaws), and good thing, too: we needed an October episode very badly indeed. What’s it all about? Well, you could give it a listen. Or you could just ask us … and if you did, we would most likely tell you it includes:

Anyhow, the “lost” September episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN includes:

Ned Trek XIII: Specter’s Stepchildren. Our running satire of Star Trek, Mr. Edd, and the Romney presidential campaign continues with this gripping episode. Mr. Welsh is being coaxed into serving as a sound engineer for powerful aliens who force songs out of Mr. Ned, Mr. Pearl, Rev. Doc Coburn, and Willard Mittilius himself…. with hilarious consequences. Five (or is it six?) new Big Green songs, never before heard, one sung by a horse, one sung by a robot Nixon, one sung by space aliens (accompanied by John Ashcroft), one sung by a chickenhawk neocon (guess who). Don’t miss it.

Idle conversation. As usual, Matt and I ramble on for about 20 minutes about vital issues of the day, random snippets from days past. We talk about our dad, about space probes, about god knows what. Something else, I’m sure. No spotlight songs resurrected from the past this month – we spent our song quota in the Ned Trek episode.

That’s what we’ve got. Now, back to travel plans. Where’s that sextant?

Usual Rubbish

Yonder bound.

September 21, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn’t I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can’t you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!!

I'm your Lincoln Concierge Christ on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it’s no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too … I remember those awful days…), not a hand’s turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg.

Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I’ve seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling cheap rum that he got from god-knows-where. But his positive doppelganger, Lincoln, tries to keep busy in imaginative though annoying ways. (I keep telling him, I can’t afford a big fat car – it’s just not in the game plan. But just try telling Lincoln not to sell you something.)

Marvin is always coming up with pass-times, as well as hair-brained schemes for making money. But I think he’s hit a wall, and it’s understandable. Even his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, has wandered off to richer pastures, taking advantage of some time-share property he invented in Madagascar. (Something about hanging gardens … though I’m not sure about what stage of insanity he was in when he told me about it.) So Marvin sits and rusts a little every day, his battery running down. He needs a change of scene, and so do the rest of us.

That’s why I have started making inquiries about doing an interplanetary tour to support extraterrestrial sales of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Spoiler alert: Terrestrial sales have been abysmal.) Stay tuned for details. Big Green out.

Usual Rubbish

Alrighty, then.

September 7, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

What the hell. Is that what we sounded like back then? We still sound like that now! Man freaking god damn. It’s like being sealed in amber.

Back then Greetings from the Mill of our discontent. Well, it’s mild discontent, let’s say. Been a long time since the book of love. Wait … why did I say that? Oh, right – I was listening to tapes from the 70s and 80s, so naturally my mind goes back to my neighbor’s Led Zepplin albums. (I didn’t have any; just Simon and Garfunkel, Josh White, and Mario Lanza. Oh, and some weird stuff.) We didn’t sound anything like them, of course. In fact, we sounded strangely like us in the 2010’s. It’s as if we’ve been playing the same tune for forty years. FOR FORTY YEARS…!

Why am I listening to old recordings? Simple … we live in an abandoned hammer mill, we haven’t toured in three years, and there’s nothing else the fuck to do around this dump. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is discontented. He even forgot to plug himself in the night before last – now that’s just plain careless.

Speaking of carelesss … I left my wallet in the bathroom. Anything could have happened to it in this den of thieves. Of course, there’ nothing in it except a couple of wadded up notes and a Canadian quarter I tried to drop into a soda machine last week. (The thing spit it back at me, making a compressor hum that sounded eerily like “Oh, Canada.”) Sometimes we fail to value those things that are the most valuable, like … I don’t know … gold, and/or money. And friends, of course. Rich, rich friends.

Yes, as you can see, we’ve been couped up in this mill way too long. It’s high time we went back on tour, this time to promote Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. That would put us back on track, get our heads in order, crisp our bacon, rock our clown, etc. It might also leave us with some fresh metaphors. Nothing like an interstellar tour to generate some really awesome metaphors.

Hey … don’t forget to check out THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast for August. It’s weird, yes, but you know what you’re getting, and the price is right (i.e. free).

Usual Rubbish

August arrives late.

August 31, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Well, that was strange. It was just the end of July, and now look at us. Summer evaporated – must have been all that sun.

It took a few weeks, but Matt and I finally got around to thinking that we should post an August episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. I’m sure some of you may have thought we were taking an August break, much like our political class and most people of means in Europe do every year about this time, but no soap. Let’s get this clear: Big Green is a WORKING band. They’ll be no slackers around this abandoned hammer mill, my friends. Yeah, I’m looking at YOU, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). It’s up every morning at 5 a.m. and sweat!

Phew, that was exhausting. Anywho, what do we have on the podcast this month? Well, let’s have a look-see. First off, we’ve got a special episode of Ned Trek, entitled Ned Trek XII: The Manassery. Introduced by Lee Majors, as always, this ludicrous extravaganza features a peerless pantheon of figures from the American conservative tradition, including Ronald Reagan in a role inspired by that of Captain Christopher Pike, post disaster. A must-listen for anyone with way, way, way too much time on their hands.

Then there’s Matt and my usual broad-ranging conversation about nothing in particular, interrupted not once but twice by previously unreleased recordings of Big Green songs. The first, “Plenty of Time, Plenty of Blood”, is a number pulled from the archives; another four-track cassette recording, probably from 1990-91, somewhere in there. The second, right at the end of the podcast, is a recent recording of a song called “Ask For Leave”. This is one of those rough-draft recordings, not quite fully tracked, which we did a hasty mix on for the podcast.

Yeah, I know – it goes on a bit too long. But if you can stand two hours of THIS IS BIG GREEN, perhaps you can also endure 78 minutes of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our new album. Give it a listen. (If you’re short on scratch in these hard times, contact us and we’ll send you a copy gratis, while supplies last.)

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: August 2013

Audio August 30, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

This is Big Green – August 2013. Yet another special 2-hour podcast, featuring: 1) Ned Trek XII: The Manassery; 2) Put the Phone Down: Matt and Joe look back on two years of podcast not-so-goodness; 3) Woodpecker nest report; 4) Brubaker: A brief history; 5) Googling Cavanaugh; 6) Song: Plenty of Time, Plenty of Blood, by Big Green; 7) NSA spying scandal; 8) Song: Ask For Leave, by Big Green; 9) Exit, already. Download at your own peril … but for chrissake, download it!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Usual Rubbish

Another week.

August 26, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Here we are, another week ahead, one behind. I feel like a week sandwich.

Not much time to gab. What’s new? We recorded another installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN this week, and I realize now that we never decided what the hell recordings we were going to cut into the show. We’ve got a truckload, of course. I know one that Matt had suggested is going to be included – an old ’90s recording we did on Matt’s 4-track cassette machine. Lo-fi, yes … but hey, that’s how we roll.

We’ve also got some half-finished recordings we started before turning to Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. This is a project we’ll probably pick up on again. Matt in particular has a huge backlog of songs we’ve never properly recorded, so we started hammering away at those (only natural, living in a hammer mill. Everything looks like a nail, right?) We’ve got some technical issues to work through … like a low-cost multitrack deck that is coughing up blood after producing two albums. But we’ll make adjustments, no doubt. Anywho … another one of those recordings will probably surface on this month’s podcast.

We’ll also have another episode of Ned Trek – this is Ned Trek 12, I think, every bit as ludicrous as the previous 11. We’ve been talking about spinning this off into its own podcast, just because they’re getting so long. Or making it into an animated YouTube features. Or pounding nails through it and launching it into space. Who knows what we’ll do? We certainly don’t.

All right, sandman’s beating me to death. Time to bail. Hope all is well in Swaziland. Or Madagascar. Or wherever the hell you are.

Usual Rubbish

What’s in the box? (part 3)

August 17, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Holy mother of pearl. My throat is in shreds. Just got done with a 23-page script for the next episode of Ned Trek, a now-regular feature on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Spoiler alert: I do the voice of Reagan. Well….

All that yakking can make a man sore tired. And tomorrow I play the 47th in a 194-part series known as the reunion gigs of Puttin’ on the Ritz, a band of many, many strange people (and I am one).

But that is not what you’re here for, to be sure. No, no, I’m sure you’re anxious for me to conclude my three-part explanation of the 21 songs contained on Big Green’s new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. It’s like waiting for the next episode of Downton Abbey or Breaking Bad … except that those things are, well, good-ish.

Anywho, here’s the splainin’ … and then, to bed, damnit.

Santorum From Behind – Sounds obscene, I know, but it’s necessary, believe me. Now that he’s out of the race, Rick is just trying to give old Mitt some helpful hints about that that object in his rear view mirror that’s closer than it appears.

Santiny – A meditation on Santorum, the Rick with the unsearchable name. I hear he keeps a fetus in a jar … a fetus named “Santiny”. You gotta pray.

Aw Shoot – In a world beyond time … Okay, this is like the theme song to a bad Euro-Sci Fi flick, except it’s about Rick. Unnamed German band takes the long view of Rick’s run, with hilarious consequences. Aw …. shoot.

Am I Really Rick Perry? – A thoughtful Rick contemplates the nature of his own identity, the thingness of things, the rightness of right, and so on, bidding a fond farewell to Andy Breitbart. Kind of a fifties vibe to this one. L.S.D. did exist then, didn’t it?

Poor Dick – Our cousin’s hero, Dick Cheney, is in trouble deep. Who better to save his considerable bacon than Ranger Rick himself. What’s the caper? Find a suitable ticker for transplanting into the heart of darkness. Poach it from another true believer… with hilarious consequences. Another country number, pure and simple.

Flying Up Ricky – Hit with the rapture, Rick disappears into thin air, leaving behind a crew of lamenting braceros, ever grateful for his able abuse. Ah, gratitude. A bit of ersatz salsa on this one.

Lone Star – Our cousin finds his true calling at the Lord’s side during his temporary sojourn in the great beyond, remembering all there is left for him to do in his desert home. Think Susan Boyle after a sex change operation (and major throat surgery).

What’ll You Do Now, Rick? – Next steps are always tricky, expecially when you tripped over most of the previous ones. Someone drafts a legend for Rick. Rock-ish.

It Should’ve Been Me – The last word from our good cousin: “You’re never alone in Texas when you can play with your dong.” Country exit reminiscent of country entrance.

Usual Rubbish

What’s in the box?

August 3, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

Lots going on these days. New podcast, new album, new burnish on Marvin (my personal robot assistant) … everything is new around the hammer mill these days.

This might be a good time to talk about our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick … namely, what’s on it, what complex themes, tortured melodies, and convoluted stories are behind each track. Isn’t that the era we live in? The age of the “back story”, where every reality show has interview sequences in which the stars talk about how they feel about the bogus melodramatic scene they were just in? Yeah, well … we’re not doing that.

Here’s a little run down of the tracks, until I run out of breath. (There’s twenty-one of them, for pity’s sake!)

Fed Up – This is the opening manifesto, the raison d’etre for Cousin Rick Perry’s political ambitions, in which Rick lays out his grievances with the federal government, creeping socialism, intrusive gravity, and what-not. Style: real, down-home country music, served up on a chipped blue plate, just the way you like it. Haw.

This Cracker’s in Paradise – Cousin Rick has a dream about being president, singing “Jesus came a-voting, and I have reaped divine right.” He shares his vision for the first term of the eternal Perry Presidency. Style: funky power ballad. Or something.

Savin’ Myself for America – All right, so running for president isn’t a dream. Turns out it’s hard! But Cousin Rick is determined, right? Style: hint of Roy Orbison rockabilly.

North Camp Pasture – A dirge-like ode to Cousin Rick’s hunting camp formerly known by another name, and the sordid history that follows him like a rabid dog. Style: folk ballad.

Sing, Rick Perry, Sing! – The story of Rick’s rise from young man on the prairie to politician to the crackhead Governor of prayer. Style: well, it varies a bit from country walk to primitive dance to 60s rock sing-along.

Awesome Hair – Hey, who can deny it? Cousin Rick has some fabulous folicles. How does he do it? Only his hairdresser knows, and he’s dishing up the recipe in this number. Style: swing with the Satchmo dial turned up to seven.

To be continued…

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: July 2013

July 29, 2013 Joe Leave a comment

This is Big Green – July Jubilee 2013. A special two-hour Big Green podcast, featuring 1) Ned Trek XI: The Space Libbies – Beaming Down to Ayn; 2) Put the Phone Down: Matt and Joe consider problems with the sun, damage at Spring Farm, and other issues; 3) Remembrance of things past (not Proust); 4) Song: Nothing But Time, by Big Green; 5) Big Green considers evident racism, among other things; 6) Live impromptu performance: All I Want, by Big Green; 7) Ideas for promoting Big Green’s new album, Cowboy Scat, in outer space; 8. Song: In Your Dreams, demo version, by Big Green; 9) Exit.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Official site of the band Big Green