Tag Archives: podcast

Usual Rubbish

Preppin’ for Tex.

Leave a comment

Got your cowboy hat yet? Oh. Okay, why the hell not? Just go downtown, walk into the cowboy supply store, and pull a ten-gallon hat off the rack. What’s so hard about that?

Oh… hey, man. Caught me, once again, in the midst of lecturing the help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) refers to it derisively as “reprogramming”, but you know better. All I asked him to do was to purchase his own cowboy gear – that’s all. Is that so unreasonable? Am I expected to pay for everything around here? What the hell – I’m the “job creator”, right? I’m the one using “air quotes” left and right. Haven’t I done my part in this employer-robot assistant relationship? Huh?

Okay, so why am I asking Marvin to dress up like Tex? So that he’ll match the rest of us, of course, when we start shooting videos to support our upcoming album of Cousin Rick Perry songs. What the hell, we can’t release an album of songs nominally by the governor of Texas without donning ten-gallon (or, at least, 5-liter) headgear. That would be tantamount to malpractice. And what is malpractice but a crutch for cats who can’t blow? (Okay… I murdered that quote, but it had it coming.)

Admittedly, there is more to making a new album than getting matching cowboy suits. Much more. Like shoes. And pizza boxes. Bubble-stuff in a plastic jar. What else? Hmmmm. Corn husks. Put them all in a cement mixer and flip the switch, baby. Round and round they go, and after a few hours, pour it out into a six-up mold and start stamping out those CD’s. Nothing to it.

What about the music part of it? Details, details. We’re working on it, that’s all I can say. All of those first-draft podcast songs? We’re polishing them to a sparkling luster. We’re patching them up like ten miles of bad road. We’re turning knobs, flipping switches, and cranking …. cranks. We’re making the little lights flash like glow-bugs. That’s a bit of doing.

So, yes… we will have an album. Big Green will crawl again across the shattered landscape of American music anyhow. In cowboy hats. Yee-haw.

Usual Rubbish

Thing is.

Leave a comment

What’s that? What’s that you say? Can’t hear ya, young man. You’ll have to speak up a bit. Nah, I’m not deaf. I’m either old or living on top of a fracking operation. Or maybe both.

Yeah, hey howdy. Welcome back to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, where the winters are cold and the derricks run day and night, pulverizing the shale that supports the very ground we walk on to squeeze every last iota of value out of the battered slag that is America. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, our once and future corporate overlords, are working this little piece of borrowed real estate like it’s Irian Jaya and they’re Freeport McMoran. But…. I digress. Always like to start on a bright note. Now on to more serious matters.

Well, it took some doing with all of this earth moving and earth shaking (movers and shakers are we), but we managed to post the June episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Another titanic installment of … well … nothing in particular. Though we have included not one but two first-draft recordings of Rick Perry songs. Could be worth a listen …. just advance over about half an hour of insane blather and you’ll hear the first one; a funky little number called “Aw, Shoot.” It offers, in its own ludicrous way, a thumbnail sketch of cousin Rick Perry’s trajectory from simple country dummkopf to dummkopf on a national stage already. Sounds vaguely like an early 80s soundtrack cut. Think Bam-Bam on Mars. Some of you know what I’m saying.

The other Rick Perry song is, well, an ode to his staying power. He’ll be there, that’s all he’s saying. Wherever there’s a law beatin’ up a gun, he’ll come on like a burning sun. And so it goes.  Big Green will be putting out a collection of cousin Rick songs later this year, with polished up and enhanced selections from these podcasts, plus additional material. (I’m not going to say what kind of material. It may be music, may be fracking fluid. Not sure there’s a difference.)

This month’s podcast also features a Big Green number from back in 2004, called The President’s Brain is Missing. It’s about our old friend George W. Bush, who seemed to fancy himself something of a martial type back in those days. Seemed like he should have a “Green Beret” type theme associated with his heroic exploits, so we just made him one.

Well, there’s the work whistle. Won’t be able to hear myself think for the next 12 hours, so I’ll sign off now.  WHIRRRRRRRRR……

Usual Rubbish

Background noises.

Leave a comment

Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well…

Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren’t necessarily compatible, but that’s …. well, that’s just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people’s ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell … just like flowers.

Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two albums. You can hear someone eating lunch in the background of just about every song. It’s only gotten worse over the years, as more people congregate in the cultural Mecca that the Hammer Mill has become over these last twelve years. Our podcast is a good illustration of that. Last month, I think you could hear a truck backing up through most of our incoherent rambling. Unless it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) making that beep, beep, beep as he rolled backwards in terror and revulsion during a particularly noxious tirade.

Noxious tirades – not a bad name for a collection of podcast excerpts.

Then, of course, there’s all that noise in the background of our “first draft” recordings, included in each episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That thing that sounds like a banjo in “Fallin’ Behind”? Yeah, well… that was a banjo. But it might just as well have been the hot water pipes just above our mastering deck, down in the sub-basement studio we call home. Hey, they’re first drafts. You expect a little bit of rough, don’t you? Otherwise they would be finished productions, right? THAT COMES LATER.

Not much later, admittedly. Have to get to work on that. Expect a new album sometime later this year…. assuming we haven’t been hydrofracked to kingdom come by then.

Usual Rubbish

What next.

Leave a comment

Sweepin’ up after that big storm. Man, the weather these days. Good goddamn thing that global warming story turned out to be a hoax. If it’d been true, we’d be worried about all this extreme weather. But no, no…. everything’s fine. Experts agree.

No, today’s not contrary Wednesday. It’s contrary every freaking day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. I’m spouting that stuff about global warming in hopes of ingratiating ourselves to a potential corporate sponsor. Who, you may ask? Well, it’s someone Big Green worked with before – Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., king of the extractive industries. Tearing Earth a new Asshole since 1953™. From the tar sands of Alberta to the gold mines of Irian Jaya to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, the name Hegemonic has been synonymous with … well, with making big piles of money out of big piles of slag. Who better to shake down for some cash, right?

Oh, yes… I know what you’re going to say: This will lead to evil and sadness. Stop the hurting, you’ll say, and start the helping.  But fear not, my friend. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (also known as “Hegephonic”) is an enlightened actor in the extractive industries. It says right here in this May 2007 press release when they began work in Mindanao. Back when there was a Mindanao. Okay, bad example. Nonetheless, our “friends” at Hegemonic can be of great assistance to us, and as luck would have it, we have something of value to them as well. Something they want very, very badly.

Wait for it!

It’s mineral rights to the Cheney Hammer Mill. You see, by happy geological accident, the Utica Shale and the Marcellus Shale converge right below the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That means there’s an Auntie Maude’s Fortune of natural gas right below our feet. And no, this isn’t another one of those mad schemes cooked up by Mitch Macaphee. Unlike the mercantile tunnel to China (now plugged), this is a sure thing. All we have to do is let them rip down the mill and gouge their way into the Earth’s crust like a titanic bloodsucker, drawing the lifeblood from our dying planet and selling it by the cubic foot to heat the McMansions of exurban neo-yuppies. Nothing to it.

One other thing that interests them: Freakenstein. I think they see him as some kind of secret weapon against union organizers. We tried to interest them in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but he’s simply not intimidating enough.

Usual Rubbish

Total recall.

Leave a comment

No, no. Good monster. You don’t want to kill your benefactor, do you? Here … have some more porridge, there’s a good chap. (Hoo boy.)

Oh, hi. Yep, that’s right; I’m in the process of talking down one of Mitch Macaphee’s greatest creations (at least in his own estimation). Yes, it seems that Freakenstein, once set loose by Dr. Macaphee, did a tear around the neighborhood, pulling up lamp posts, opening fire hydrants, and generally making a nuisance of himself. He went into the local pawn shop and got a few items out of hock – items he, of course, had no personal connection with (since he was only just invented and has never known the joys of personal property) but nonetheless liked anyway. What did he use for money? No cash needed … when you’re Freakenstein.

Okay, so … predictably, the complaints start rolling in from all over town. And it’s clear that we need to do something about this. It was a bit like when Big Zamboola first got here and started throwing his hyper-energized magnetic fields all over the place. Or like Matt’s used vegetable stand (every item guaranteed recovered from passing produce trucks).  What do those things have in common? Not much, except the fact that people complained mightily about them. That’s what happened with Freakenstein, prompting us to ask Mitch to call his sorry ass back to the mill.

Well, so Mitch deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and put him on the task. He was clever enough to fire up Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device and point it in the general direction of the monster. Well, land o’ goshen, that worked like laying out breadcrumbs – he just followed that beam right back here, his arms loaded with ill-gotten swag (mostly from the pawn shop), some worn-looking Bean boots on his oversized paddles. Now it falls to me to talk him out of trashing the mill … even worse than it’s trashed now, that is. And hell, he’s feisty. (I don’t mean he likes listening to Feist, either. Literalist.)

Well, somehow in the midst of all this pointless activity, I had time to post another episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, now available on iTunes. Check it out, manzie. And keep an eye on your fire hydrants. Never know.

Usual Rubbish

Freakenstein.

Leave a comment

I know. I shouldn’t have interrupted him with my petty complaints. He’s a mad scientist, not a T.V. and stereo repair man. My bad, totally. Dude.

Oh, yes… that’s right. We are not the only ones reading this. Sorry out there in the blogosphere. Big Green is in the midst of a band meeting of sorts. No, we don’t typically do these. Like most groups, we all live together in our funky (i.e. “groovy”) musician bachelor pad, with the retro sixties modular furniture and gooseneck lamps of the type you might find in Darrin Stevens’ house (assuming he actually had a house and not just a set that is, in essence, a house sawed in half). My point is…. um … (yes… it was a house sawed in half, perhaps by some kind of witchcraft, or … craft services….) Damn it!

Okay, I’ll stay on point. We’re meeting about that thing, that bloodthirsty killer. No, not “The Thing”, as in the sci-fi movie “The Thing”. I mean the thing that Mitch Macaphee created in his spare time. He was working on it last week when I tried to pull him off so he could fix our monitor power amp. Simple work for a genius, right? I mean, he freaking invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant) using spare parts, bailing wire, etc.  Well, he had some more spare parts and, as I said, some spare time, and …. well … he invented some kind of killin’ machine.

What is it called? You may well ask. After all, how else are you going to avoid it, right? Mitch isn’t really good at names. I mean, we call it Freakenstein, but that’s just because we’re not really good at names either. Only Mitch can control it; only he can call it back. But Mitch is like the stereotypical insurance salesman of mad scientists. Once he sells a policy, you never hear from him again. That’s the way Mitch works. He builds something, sets it loose on an unsuspecting public, and then forgets about it. On to the next thing. And if it goes on a mad rampage, well… that’s as it may be.   

How can you protect yourself? Well… I asked Mitch, and the only thing that will ward Freakenstein off is that helmet Mr. Spock wears – you know the one. You saw it in the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog every year, right? Well…. should’ve asked Santa for it back in 1967, because that’s the thing that scares the fertilizer out of Freakenstein.  

 Okay…. band meeting over. I move to adjourn. Anyone second? Freakenstein seconds. Meeting is adj….   FREAKENSTEIN?!?

Usual Rubbish

Sing it loud.

Leave a comment

Blowout. Another switch gone. Our gear is in the toilet, my friend. Aging, threadbare … disgusting. Oh, well.

Yep, we’ve got technical difficulties. Nothing new. Last week it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that went on the blink. No, I mean literally – he wouldn’t stop blinking. I think it’s all that time he spent taking phone calls when our voicemail broke down. Poor tin bastard. Then there goes another diode, and here we are on a tight budget, just like the rest of America. (Even Mitch, his creator, is too busy to tend to him.) Mother of pearl. Still, I suppose we can do without a power amp. We can just pretend we have active speakers instead of passive, and the power of imagination will carry the day. As it always does. The end.

Right, well…. we’re not typically given to wishful thinking here at Big Green. No, we are practical mofo’s, not those flighty kinda imagineering mofo’s you read about in the Sunday paper.  Fact is, we’re recording an album and we need to freaking hear the bastard – we all admit that. To deny it would be just plain silly.

What’s the album about? Glad you asked. Give a listen to the last episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN, wherein I believe we give a rough explanation of the project. I believe we do – don’t quote me on that. It’s probably somewhere between our seventeen apologies for the previous month’s episode and our airing of cousin Rick Perry’s latest song, “Come Back Mean”, which features the immortal lyric:

Kick me a dog
Go scour the neighborhood
Bring me the best kickin’ dog you can find
Go get me Planned Parenthood

Old Rick is singing from the heart right there. (Though it does sound eerily reminiscent of another organ slightly to the south.)

Yes, so… we’re taking all of cousin Rick’s songs, polishing them up a little bit, and placing them on a long playing record (a.k.a. a bunch of MP3s) where they can be downloaded by the likes of you. What you’re hearing on the podcast are “first drafts” – rough mixes of basic tracks. What you will hear on the final album (working title: “Cowboy Scat”) will be finished pieces (of something), which in many cases may sound…. substantially like the podcast versions …. but (and this is important) not necessarily!

Okay, well… I’ve wandered a bit. Nothing new there. Ooops. And there goes the light switch. Technology!

Usual Rubbish

Trifecta.

Leave a comment

Can’t hear you. Can you turn it up? I don’t know… to eleven, or maybe thirteen. Still nothing. Play harder, faster…. oh, wait. Didn’t plug your cord into the console. Sorry. Sorrrreeeee…

Oh, hi. Hey … don’t let anybody tell you (in case anybody ever tries) that producing yourself is easy. It’s not, man, and I’ll tell you why. You are the engineer. And the guitar tech. And the arranger. You get the drinks. And the snacks. It’s bloody maddening – I even have to oil Marvin (my personal robot assistant) when he starts to squeak over there on the percussion riser. Anyway… we’re elbow deep in production on our next album. Yes, it’s a themed piece … almost a rock opera, except with a lot less coherence. It grapples with monumental themes … if you understand monumental to mean, simply, mental.

It’s been busy ’round these parts, I don’t mind saying. Busier than we’re used to, quite frankly. Recording, of course. Then there’s our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. The frenetic pace of once a month is enough to exhaust anyone not used to exertion. Oh, and also … we released a new video of one of the many songs recorded by “cousin” Rick Perry – a little number named “Devil Romney” that was featured on the podcast a couple of episodes ago. That was exhausting. Matt did all the work, of course… but it was plain exhausting just watching him. And then that upload to YouTube really took it out of me.

We are, of course, still making plans for our upcoming trip to the moon as an advance team for the Gingrich campaign. I know what you’re going to say – he dropped out …. of the presidential race. Yes, we know that. But he’s still going to be the nominee. He said so himself, you know. I can only imagine this means he is going to be installed as King of the Moon any day now. I have, in fact, written a celebratory march to commemorate his coronation – a somewhat stilted jubilee for our bloated monarch. If I can find where I left my energy and motivation, I may just have it ready for the next podcast episode.

Until then, please help yourself to the slabs of content we’ve been flinging out in every direction like frisbees. I’ll be in the cellar, making widgets.

 

Usual Rubbish

What the frank.

2 Comments

Frank, dropped it again. Gosh darn the blankety-heck. What the bacon-and-eggs is the matter with this motor-trucking washing machine? Cheese and crackers!

Oh, yeah… it’s that time of the week again. Time for all of you out there in cyberspace to peek inside the mad vortex of Big Green’s life here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Sorry about all of that salty language a moment ago. Our clothes washing device (enormously handy invention) is no longer operating properly, causing frustration, even something akin to anger and resentment. Strange, we humans. I do hope my outburst didn’t cause you any consternation. If needed, counseling is available on Big Green’s counseling page.

Okay, so… as you can see, I have been remanded to sensitivity training. I’m having to edit my language (What the frank! Who in hades do these rubber chuckers think they are?) and regularly evince concern over the effect my words and actions may be having on those who experience them. You see, ever since Matt and I started our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN (the April episode has just been posted, btw ), we’ve had to be a bit more mindful of the things that fall randomly out of our mouths when a microphone is placed in front of us. I, for one, have said some hurtful things … things I have had cause to regret. Oh, yes … words that hurt.

What precisely? Well…. listen to the March podcast and you’ll get an idea. For instance, typically we pay our respects to fallen celebrities. Last month it was Davy Jones of the Monkees and Andrew Breitbart of the Interwebs. As Matt pointed out on the air, I was a little less than sufficiently solemn about our remembrance. (I believe I went so far as to suggest Davy may have been taken by primate poachers, which was wrong … just wrong.) This month’s episode is no improvement, and I’m sure I’ll be apologizing when May rolls around. Thank god this isn’t a weekly show! I’ve already said things I regret since posting it. There isn’t enough sensitivity training in the universe for the likes of me.

Fortunately, we have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to monitor our transgressions. It takes a robot, they say. Or a village. Same deal.

Usual Rubbish

Anudder home.

Leave a comment

Where did I put my html tags? I thought I packed them with my socks, but they don’t appear to be in there. WFT, man…. getting a new home is always such a pain.

No, friends. We have not abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That would be something you might expect from the department of redundancy department (of redundancy). We have, however, abandoned our old web site and moved into a new one, designed by, I don’t know, professional web designers… as opposed to my sorry ass, who threw together our last site with Front Page and some tweezers … not to mention some cracked old photo manipulation software. Yeah, that’s right. Do I have to draw you a picture? (Actually… that would have been better than what came out of that software.)

Anywho… out with the old, in with the new. We’ve been using WordPress for Hammermill Days (and, earlier, Notes from Sri Lanka) for over five years, and so we thought, hey, why not build the whole freaking site using the same software? It actually works, you can edit it from anywhere using a Web browser…. How easy is that? Too easy! That’s what Mitch Macaphee says. Being a mad scientist, he thinks things should be hard … at least as hard as building Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was. Sure, he built Marvin out of spare parts and bric-a-brac he had lying about his lab, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. Building a sentient being never is, my friends.

Now, the cynical and suspicious-minded amongst you (and you all know who you are) will imagine that this web site face lift is all about our supreme ambition to become special assistants to inevitable president-elect and future king of the moon Newt Gingrich; that we somehow abandoned and discarded our illin’, aging old web site for a shiny, sexy younger one, like … well, like … something some politician did once. That is a dirty lie. Fact is, we have already been invited by Newt Gingrich – future president and current Lincoln in his own mind – to advise him on interplanetary relations including, most specifically, his plans for our nearest neighbor in space. In point of fact, we will be a bit like the late Richard Holbrook, who was given the Af-Pak portfolio. (We will be in charge of the Moon, Mars, and Saturn, so it might be called the LunaMaSa portfolio, in media culture shorthand-speak.)

So anyway… welcome to Big Green’s new home on the Web. Take a look around. Kick the tires. Leave comments. Move in to one of the pages and order expensive dinners. Glad to have yuh.