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Usual Rubbish

Strange gravity.

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I don’t know, man. That song seems kind of dark. Dark, but in a happy way. Yeah … that’s the way we do it around here, am I right? No … that was a rhetorical question. Never mind.

Oh, hello. It’s your old pal Bozo. I mean, Joe-zo. (That might have been my clown name if I had chosen another, slightly divergent path in life, but I digress.) Having a little band meeting here. Joe? Present. Matt? Present. Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Present, to the extent that an automaton can ever be TRULY present, but setting philosophical questions aside … Mitch Macaphee? Not present. Actually, in truth it’s just me and Matt, and the topic is songwriting.

It goes like this. He’s got songs, I’ve got songs … all God’s children got songs. That said, they’re all based on subject matter that’s, well, a little dark. Dark matter, if you will. Now, it’s not surprising that we would use the stuff that makes up the bulk of the universe as the substance of our songs. You never lack for material.  Even so, songwriting can be a lot like pulling teeth … except the pay isn’t nearly as good. And either way you go, somebody ends up toothless. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Aye aye, sir.

I don't see any dark matter. Oh ... right.Well, I’ve wandered a bit. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: we tend to write happy little songs about big nasty things. This month we appear to be back on the fascist beat again. Next month, who knows? Some other grave subject matter that can be turned into a nursery rhyme or a mambo. That’s the way it works round these parts. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. (Yes, I’m a Marxist. My favorite is Groucho, but it’s not a strong preference.)

Speaking of work, it has been nearly forever since our last THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. I just want to assure our five listeners that, yes, we will post more episodes this fall and, yes, they will be ridiculous. It’s been a busy year, folks. I’d explain why, but I’ve got too much to do right now. Excuses, excuses, right? Sheesh.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: June 2018

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Big Green returns after a 5 month hiatus with a powerhouse marathon edition of TIBG, featuring another musical episode of Ned Trek, eight brand new songs, a little crazy talk, some crazier singing, and much more. We’re back, baby!

This is Big Green – June 2018. Features: 1) Ned Trek 37: Return to the Carl; 2) Song: Light Thing, by Big Green; 3) Song: Sagan’s Song, by Big Green; 4) Song: Risk Is Your Business, by Big Green; 5) Song: Congratulations, by Big Green; 6) Song: Teller, by Big Green; 7) Song: The Other Side, by Big Green; 8) Song: Fat Captain, by Big Green; 9) Song: Blow The Man Down, by Big Green; 10) Put the phone down: an impromptu rendition of All Saints Come, by Big Green; 11) The songs, explained; 12) Dueling imitations of famous people; 13) Falcon watch update: Monday is Monkey Day; 14) A visit with Bernie Jetson; 15) Thelonius Ingraham and the Hand; 16) Stupit talk: growing down; 17) Time to go.

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Usual Rubbish

Going up.

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What the hell’s that sound? The street sweepers again? Probably a lawn mower. Lawn mowing! What the hell is this neighborhood coming to?

Well, here I am, down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, tapping away at my keyboard as I often do this time of week. Strange how you can hear everything that’s going on outside from down here. Of course, there are probably mouse holes in this place you can drive a front-loader through. Though I have to admit – I myself have never seen a mouse drive a front-loader. It would be one way to defend themselves from those awful snap traps. Diabolical contraptions!

Anyway, summer has kind of arrived here in upstate New York, now that we’re on the climate change calendar, so naturally my mind turns to more leisurely pursuits. I know what you’re thinking – what on Earth could be more leisurely than being a member of a band that never plays anywhere? Well, you might be surprised by my response to that question. I find all kinds of pointless uses for my time. My illustrious brother Matt, not so much – always doing things, that one. Me? My natural state is at rest. And while I spend most of the year going up the stairs, in the summer I go down them.

This thing's friggin' WRECKED!My summer pass-times usually include deep archive stuff – you know, threading old reel-to-reel tapes onto antiquated and dysfunctional playback machines, just to get a momentary listen in to what they contain. We have a few of those, and many, many audio cassettes with both stereo and four-track content. We also have Hi-8 DAT tapes from our Tascam DA-88 days (the system we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas) and, of course, standard DAT cassettes. I’m guessing that if you add it all up, it would amount to less content than we’ve produced in just the last five years, but it may be close. Matt did a lot of recordings in the 80s and 90s – probably hundreds of original songs.

Oh, then of course there’s our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. My guess is that we will be posting the next episode in just a few days,  but I’m terrible at predicting things, so I won’t say anything. Beyond what I just said. Arrgghh … I’m no good at this. Should probably be mowing the lawn.

Usual Rubbish

Inside December/January.

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Did you toss it up there? Good. High enough for everyone to reach, I hope. Sometimes you have to warm the arm up a bit, like the old windmill baseball pitch, then let it fly, and hopefully it lands right in the sweet spot. That’s pretty much all you can do. Server technology is tricky as hell.

Oh, hi. As you may or may not know, we posted our Holiday/New Year episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, this past week, and already it’s generating serious buzz. No, seriously … I try to listen to it, and all I get is a buzz. (I’m told that’s my ear buds.) Now, if YOU listen to it, you’re likely to hear the following:

NED TREK 35: The Romney Christmas Special / Ned Trek Reunion Special. Well, we tried to make an extravaganza this year, and obviously failed. Then we tried to get the lousy show up in time for Christmas, and, again, we failed. However, it has been posted in time for New Year’s, and this special Ned Trek is certainly worthy of a holiday as nondescript as New Year’s. The intention was to put together something that resembles one of those lame reunion specials for The Brady Bunch or The Manson Family (hint: one of those is fake), including some unknown hireling actor playing Jan (or in our case, playing Perle). Also featured is Jimmy Sweetwater, the guy inside the Nixon robot (not the voice actor). The “special” is variously hosted by Gladston Goodstein (aka Peter Lorre), Dr. Carl Sagan, and Lee Majors.

Embedded in the show are six Big Green songs, including:

Romney Christmas Special Theme Song – A ludicrous little number featuring Nixon, Kissinger, actual Perle, Ned, Willard and other voices. Covers some of the thematic underpinnings of this failed adventure in audio entertainment.

Christmas Business – Another Willard number capturing the true confiscatory spirit of the holidays. Refreshingly brief.

Sorry, man. You're not needed this year.Plastic Head – This song is a slight redo of a number Matt did for his 1988 Christmas tape, this version sung by Ned. All about a vehicular encounter with a roadside Christmas miracle coupled with metaphysical transposition. Just listen – you’ll get it.

Bobby Sweet – A new song, roughly about America’s gun culture. At Christmas.

Christmas To End – This is another retread of a song Matt wrote for one of his gift tapes, this one from 1994, re-recorded as a Sulu song. Let the war on Christmas begin … again.

He Does It For Spite – Re-recording of a song from Matt’s legendary 1990 Christmas tape, about a spoiler spirit from the great beyond. True story.

PUT THE PHONE DOWN. Matt and I talk about … uh … I don’t know what. We do bad accents, talk about beavers, sing weird songs, and generally make merry by the standards of this dark time. Hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it. (And hopefully a whole lot more.)

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: December 2017

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Big Green hoists a frosty mug to the holidays with a special yuletide episode of Ned Trek, some weird new songs, and surly banter of a most disagreeable variety. Onward!

This is Big Green – December 2017. Features: 1) Ned Trek 35: The Romney Christmas Special / Ned Trek Reunion Special; 2) Song: Romney Christmas Special theme, by Big Green; 3) Song: Christmas Business, by Big Green; 4) Song: Plastic Head, by Big Green; 5) Song: Bobby Sweet, by Big Green; 6) Song: Christmas To End, by Big Green; 7) Song: He Does It For Spite, by Big Green; 8) Put the phone down: No robots for Christmas; 9) Bad Irish accents; 10) People who died in 2017; 11) Tens of Wives (an impromptu ditty); 12) Beaver pond update; 13) The nacho cheese song; 14) Time to go.

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Usual Rubbish

Know well.

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Let’s see how we’re doing here. Shovel the front walk? Check. Peruse the local shops for root vegetables to give to the children? Check. Decorate the forge room with robots? Check. Yep, I haven’t done ANY of those things. (I keep checklists of things not done; a “to-don’t” list, if you will.)

I don’t think I have to tell you that Christmas is a very special time of year around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. No, this I think you know well. Not because we’re religious or Jesus freaks or anything like that. No, the specialness is more about quietude. This sleepy little corner of post-industrial upstate New York gets a little sleepier around the holidays, mostly because people take off to visit relatives, friends, etc., in far-flung corners of the globe, leaving the village almost entirely to ourselves. No beeping delivery trucks backing up to loading docks. No drunken neighbors threatening the kid next door. Peace on Earth, man.

Even Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has taken off for the week. It looked like he was packing for a conference, but he told me he was headed for some sort of family reunion in Aberdeen. That made me scratch my head. “Do you really need to pack the death ray pistol?” I asked cautiously. He just smiled. Sucks to be HIS second cousin this year. (Maybe any year.)

Hey, you look great, Marvin.This year, I took the bother to replace some of Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s lights with Christmas bulbs. So yes, he blinks red, green, and gold now when he talks or performs some computational task. (Oh, yes …. he computes. He’s a regular Turing machine, our Marvin … well … a touring machine, at least.) In previous years, we would trim the mansized tuber, in lieu of a Christmas tree, but he’s not having that this year. He’s getting a little touchy as he gets older. Age 18 is a difficult time for sweet potatoes, I hear.

Oh, and don’t think we’ve forgotten you this year. We’re still working on our 2017 Holiday Extravaganza episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which I don’t mind saying is not in the least bit extravagant. I’ve been doing mixes all week and we should be posting soon, so keep an eye on that empty spot under the tree. Just keep a close watch, then check Twitter or Facebook and see if we’ve posted yet.

Hey, if we don’t see you (and we won’t), happy Christmas and all the rest of it. Now … back to the checklist!

Usual Rubbish

Inside November. (Again.)

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Man, is that the wind? Sounds like a freaking freight train. There goes the good weather. It was a nice couple of days, but hey …. all good things must end. (Hey Marvin … got any more platitudes I can borrow? Thanks, man.)

Well, it’s November in upstate New York. Things start slowing down a little bit around these parts. That’s partly why we had time to finish another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN and post it this past week. Haven’t heard it yet? Well, this is what you have to look forward to:

Ned Trek 34 – Shitty and a Bit of a Stretch. Another Ned Trek non-musical episode, this one loosely based on the classic Star Trek script “City on the Edge of Forever,” originally written by famed sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison. Captain Willard, Mr. Ned, Mr. Perle, and the Nixon android all leap into Earth’s history in an attempt to stop a crazed Doc Coburn from changing the past and foreclosing on the future. Will they succeed? Well … robo Nixon does start a home for wayward clowns. That could make all the difference.

Put The Phone Down. Matt and I go into a wide-ranging discussion about Nixon’s happiest days, Seb Gorka’s descent back into internet racist rants, our somewhat spotty memories of the 1970s Eric Idle / Neil Innes parody of Beatle history called The Rutles, a look inside how Matt works on stuff, and a review of the television we used to watch with our parents back in the 1960s and 70s. Some impromptu singing and swanning about on various instruments.

Posted!Christmas Songs. We did a short block of Big Green Christmas songs by way of a little preview of the holidays to come. These include:

  • Christmas Green, a Willard song from one of our early Ned Trek episodes;
  • Jit Jaguar’s Christmas, a relatively recent recording of a quirky, older number we’ve played on the podcast before;
  • Horrible People, a Ned song from a few years ago, featuring the ubiquitous 40s guys on backup vocals;
  • Christmas Presence, a recent re-recording of one of Matt’s several takes on A Christmas Carol (this song appeared on his amazing 1994 Christmas cassette collection);
  • Make that Christmas Shine, another Willard song from that early Ned Trek Christmas special (the one with Santorum’s Christmas planet).

That’s about it for November. We have some more new stuff coming for the Holiday show, which will appear sometime around the holidays (hopefully).

Usual Rubbish

Light work.

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Okay, ready? On three … one, two, THREE! Arrrgh. I meant, on the count of three LIFT the freaking thing, not wave your hands in the air. What the hell’s the matter with you? It’s like you just don’t care.

Yeah, I guess you could say we’re having a little moving party here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted home for the last two decades. (I think we technically have squatter’s rights, but what law is there in a place such as this?) No, we’re not vacating the premises – far from it. I just wanted to move my piano from one room to another. No particular reason. Maybe that’s why I can’t get any cooperation out of this crew. I KNEW I should have done one of those leadership retreats! Curses.

Sure, there are useful things we could all be doing, but who’s got the time for that? I mean, I’ve been putting off restringing our borrowed electric guitar for about two weeks now. That sucker isn’t going to string itself, right? Things just keep getting in the way. Like Marvin (my personal assistant) – he got in the way yesterday when he was vacuuming the hall. To get to the guitar, I would have had to maneuvered around him. And well … I just don’t feel like stringing the guitar, Put your back into it!that’s the point. You see? When all else fails, the truth will out!

While we’re not moving things around at random, we are actually working on a music project. As I mentioned last week, it’s kind of similar to our first album in that we’re reworking some of the songs Matt wrote as low-rent Christmas gifts in the 1980s and 90s. The biggest difference is that we’re recording it for the podcast … and we’re twenty years older than we were for 2000 Years To Christmas. So this may sound more crotchety … or not. But hey … it’s free, right? To us, you’re all kids, and on Sundays, kids eat free. In fact, in my book, kids always eat free. That’s how we roll.

So, let’s put the piano the fuck over there, and let’s get recording, damn it. Christmas is almost here, right?

Usual Rubbish

Old stock.

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I think it’s over there, in that cardboard box. No, no – not that one! The one under that one. Or the one under that. I don’t know, just start opening boxes – I’ll tell you when to stop.

Oh, yes, that’s right … I have a fourth wall. Hello, then. What are we doing? Thanks for asking. We are digging through the Big Green archives again. And when I say “archives”, I’m talking about something that’s really much more rudimentary than that term suggests. Call it a series of boxes, some of which have the Kellogg rooster emblazoned on their side. Then there’s those round Quaker Oats boxes …. I used to make pretend ham radios out of those.

What we’re searching for is, well, some ideas for this year’s Christmas pageant extravaganza. Amazingly, there’s a lot of holiday material that hasn’t been released or even heard for the last ten years. Matt did, what, ten years of Christmas tapes, between 1986 and 1995, with one added on after that for good luck. We’ve got an enormous backlog of 4-track cassette recordings from that period, essentially demos, which we can harvest and repurpose like, I don’t know, sorting through a junk yard for something useful. Don’t ask me for metaphors this early in the morning!

So whatcha got, Lincoln?Now, I don’t want to leave you with the false impression that we are constantly recycling music from days of old. Not a bit of it! In fact, the songs on our last THIS IS BIG GREEN – Ned Trek extravaganza are all brand spanking new (and probably in need of that spanking). Not that we haven’t reached into the old grab back in past episodes. Usually around the holidays we start rummaging around for something that will fill a hole in the production. I’m thinking maybe we should just patch in some video of a local 2nd grade school orchestra playing Jingle Bells. Now THAT’S entertainment, people. (Literally every one of those cute little critters playing the same note, all together.)

Okay, so … yes, we’ll be working on a Christmas show. Because that’s how we roll here at Big Green. Next podcast will be another non-musical Ned Trek, then who knows … an actual album? Yikes!

Usual Rubbish

Inside September.

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You sent it up the chute already? Okay, then … well … I WAS going to put the good stuff into it first, but I guess it’s been long enough that people will settle for whatever they get. Oh, well … maybe next month.

Yes, you heard right – we’ve uploaded the September 2017 installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, and this seems like a really good time to talk about what’s inside that honking little MP3 file. Here goes:

Ned Trek 33: The Nimrod Seven. Incredibly, the thirty-third episode of our Star Trek parody, Ned Trek. This one’s based on the classic Star Trek first season episode entitled The Galileo 7, in which Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and some toss-aways get their shuttlecraft stranded on a hostile ape-infested planet.  Well, replace those three regulars with Perle, Coburn, and Sulu, change the shuttlecraft’s name to “The Nimrod 7”, then throw in Seb Gorka, Peter Lorre, the Nixon android, and a Mr. Stephanie or six and you’ve got a poorly-wrought morality play worthy of The Immortal or even fourth-season Big Valley. Oh, yes.

The Nimrod Seven contains no less than eight new Big Green songs:

Song: If You’re Listening To This – A somewhat country-fried Willard song that’s a musical and conceptual adaptation of the “final orders” video Captain Kirk left for McCoy and Spock in The Tholian Web. “You’ll have to use your creed and your opportunities; but temper them with profits from false securities.”  You get the drift.

Song: Commander I’m Dead – A Stephanie Q (or R?) song about the uses of a dead soldier to any canny leader of men. The only lyric I can think of that makes use of the hick-French term “Mercy Buckets”. Non-sequitur backing vocals by The Twenties Guys.

Song: Doctor In The House – A bit of musical braggadoccio from self-reputed alpha male and Nazi progeny Seb Gorka, recently departed from the Trump clusterfuck. Prepare yourself for choruses of “beta cuck”. Tell your wife: here comes Sebastian!

Song: Wait For You – A Doc Coburn song with a real 60s anthem rock vibe. I find myself humming this one a bit as I wait for us to invade all those other places in the travelog.

All settled in?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.

Song: Neocon Captain – Sulu’s number. Another anthem-like tune that likens the insufferable Perle to Captain Bligh (who ended up governor of New South Wales, by the way.) This is probably my favorite of the tranche (as Sulu songs often are), but you be the judge.

Song: Yo-Ho – A song from Mr. Welsh, with the usual Celtic overtones and undertones. The Yo-ho, Toe-ho chorus is probably borrowed from the Viking episode of Lost In Space, but don’t quote me.

Song: Nixon is Saving Us All – This Nixon song closes out the set; the android’s internal power source is used to fuel the crippled shuttlecraft and, as the title suggests, save us all! Favorite line: “Until we loose the surly bonds and touch God’s face; maybe drop some bombs.”

Put the Phone Down. Matt and I banter aimlessly (and occasionally break into song) about what we did over the summer, Seb Gorka, mechanical Nazi men, psycho Batman, and quite a bit more. Give it a listen, anyway.