Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Stuff and … stuff.

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What the fudge. Mother of pearl. Is that the phone again? Take it off the hook – I’m busy, damn it. Busy as John Henry.

What am I doing? Working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A decidedly low-tech collection, recorded in the clammy basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill hear in soggy upstate New York, hammered out with great care and aplomb, dropped out of a three story window, and tied in a bow for your enjoyment. We hope you will be pleased, most pleased. Or at least, not angry, like our landlord, who is demanding all of the proceeds from our album sales in return for 47 months of back rent. (Turns out someone owns this dump after all. Who knew?)

Anyroad, yes, yes, I’m working on a CD package for the limited run we will be burning, mostly for giveaways. Cowboy Scat is going to begin life as a digital release, for the most part. We’ll send a copy to Nashville, one to Texas, one to Wyoming, and a few more of those big, square states out there. The drier the better. We may even send you a copy, one one condition: Don’t Tell Rick!

Yeah, Cousin Rick might be sore when he hears these songs. Can’t blame us. We merely culled them from the score of a musical whose libretto was lost on Lake Tahoe in the 1970s and never recovered. A musical that somehow predicted the meteoric presidential ambitions of a man barely out of short pants by that time. A truly prophetic work! Had it lived….

So, why am I doing the album art …. again … after such a mediocre performance on our previous albums? Simple answer: we are cheapskates. Why the hell else would we be squatting in this abandoned mill for the past ten years plus?

And as they say, it’s the stingy man who pays the most. So … back to my payment plan. Keep those cards and letter coming.

Usual Rubbish

Into the pod.

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Hey, why wouldn’t I want to explain our podcast? You think it speaks for itself? It’s only a little podcast; it needs someone to run interference. Not so hard to understand.

Did you listen to this month’s podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, the May 2013 episode? I’ll take that as a no. Still, you might be missing out on something extra … well … strange. Wouldn’t want to be the only one who didn’t partake, right?

This was a relatively lively episode, full of bright sallies of wit and infinite jest. Here are some highlights (and no, I don’t mean the magazine most often perused in dental office waiting rooms):

NED TREK X: A PLEA FOR ARMS – Our latest installment of our increasingly possible podcast dramatic series, Ned Trek, featuring Captain Willard Mittilius Romney, commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and his talking dressage horse / first officer Mr. Ned. This time out, Willard leads a landing party back to one of the outerspace backwaters he attempted to convert during his callow youth. Special guest star is …. (that would be telling!)

PUT THE PHONE DOWN – Matt and I talk through a broad range of topics and pull news from the pages of the October 1941 issue of Country Gentleman. Care for a Lucky, anyone? It’s the cigarette recommended by 6 out of 10 doctors.

SONG: Surprise Party – This recording was made back in 1987 on a four track Tascam portastudio casette machine; another deep archival bit, rescued from a murky past. Written to mark someone’s birthday.

SONG: Don’t Tell Rick – First posting of a rough mix of our new song, Don’t Tell Rick, which will accompany the release of our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. We are having second thoughts about all the stuff we said about Rick, obviously, and well, he’s got guns and rangers. Any questions on that?

SONG: Dinos – We’ve played this number before on the podcast. This has got to be the most ridiculous recording we’ve ever made, but you be the judge. I simply can’t say anymore.

Hey, may … download it. It’s freakin’ free, which means you, too, can afford it.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: May 2013

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Big Green cries mayday with the tenth installment of Ned Trek, three Big Green songs, discussion of killer chickens, and more. Go clockwise round the pole.

This is Big Green – May 2013. Features:

1) Ned Trek X: A Plea For Arms;
2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe rip the news straight out of the October 1941 Country Gentleman;
3) Song: Surprise Party, by Big Green;
4) Talk of Joe’s Korg Poly 800;
5) Scandalrama;
6) Song: Don’t Tell Rick, by Big Green;
7) Matt’s encounter with a cute kller chicken;
8. DEC talk and movies with exclamation points in the title;
9) Song: Dinos, by Big Green;
10) Once around the pole and out

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Usual Rubbish

Lookout: Cleveland.

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Is it coming round again? Hah. Some mad scientist YOU turned out to be. I could get better weather reports from an open window. Stupid Macaphee.

Mitch and his diabolical machine
Mitch and his diabolical machine

Yes, hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, located in upstate New York, once a land of relatively stable weather, but now … rollicking storms. Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a bowling alley, our sorry asses parked in the lanes. I keep wondering if all this atmospheric upheaval is in anyway related to that massive gizmo Mitch Macaphee is always messing with. He just built it last month, and it’s got dials and levers and wheels and lights, and it belches black smoke into the air above the mill. Just like old times, really. Then it rains like hell.

If my suspicions are correct, I suppose that means I owe you all an apology. Or at least Mitch does. Understand – we do not control Mitch, we just utilize his expertise from time to time. He can be quite handy with minor repairs on spacecraft, for instance, like that time when our ion drive went out halfway to Neptune, and we didn’t have a space buoy, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got automatonic space sickness and couldn’t do the EVA to fix our guidance tracking antenna, so we had to send Major West, and … well…

It gets more complicated after that. Suffice to say, Mitch means well, even if he is trying to destroy the planet (well … he put that on his bucket list, at least). We will try to keep you posted on new developments as Mitch continues to twirl knobs, throw switches, and rub his hands together in glee.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for our upcoming May podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which will feature another spellbinding episode of Ned Trek, some previously unreleased music tracks, and ridiculous conversation about killer chickens and other phenomena.

Keep an ear out, too. It’s really more about hearing than anything else.

Usual Rubbish

Fire away.

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Where did I leave my garlic press? Marvin? Marvin! Jesus. What kind of a dung hole is this, anyway?

Oh yeah … that kind of a dung hole. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill kind. A place where garlic presses go to die, apparently. This is the third one I’ve lost this month. And I used to have a blender, seems like, though our electrical service is a bit spotty anyway, so it hardly matters that that thing disappeared. Somebody around this mill has sticky fingers. I’m looking at you, mansized tuber! Oh, right. No fingers. Still … those roots seem a little grabby.

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is helping me today with my weekly chore of straightening out the kitchen. Don’t know if any of you have ever lived with a rock band, but let me tell you – no one wrecks a kitchen more completely than wayward musicians, down on their luck. Open cans of kipper snacks strewn about like poker chips. Half-eaten bowls of cereal. Do I have to draw you a picture?

It gets worse … particularly when we’re producing an album. People tend to keep strange hours … like ninety-seven o’clock (really strange hours). There’s a lot of work that goes into putting together an album as complex and nuanced as Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. You may think it’s just another crackpot enterprise, cooked up by a bunch of ass-clowns in upstate New York. And, well … you’re right, but (and this is important) there’s still a lot of work that goes into putting it together. (Is there an echo in here?)

Right now, the song count on this sucker is at 21. I can’t guarantee it will stay there, but if it does, it will be the longest album we ever made and maybe a little too long for a standard CD. Thank god those little discs are as archaic as dinosaurs! Digital releases mean no limits! Make it 35 songs! Quick, write 14 more!

All right, back to the search.

Usual Rubbish

End game.

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I’ll hold the ingots, and you swing the hammer. No, wait. We have to heat them up first. Where’s my butane lighter? Left it on the stove, I think….

Oh, hi. Just caught the core members of Big Green (and its motley entourage) in the process of preparting our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, for publication and distribution. Very complicated process. You know how bizarrely complex our creative process can get; the very task of writing and recording these albums involves no less than 14,000 individual muscle actions per song (and that’s not including all the grimacing). Christ on a bike – by the time we got our last album International House to market in 2008, my face muscles were frozen in place until well after the holidays.

So, how does the manufacturing and distribution work? Simple. We melt down the .wav files into a slurry, pour them into rectangular forms, and cut them into shards – or “ingots” – about the size of a pack of cigarettes. We get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to sand the edges off of each block of music, then carefully insert them through the mail-slot like hole in the specialized distribution mechanism our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee fashioned for us during his last vaction in Barbados. (He was bored with all of the waterskiing.) That sends the ingots deep into cyberspace and the hungry ears of listeners all across the universe.

Now, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick presents a special challenge. Let me explain. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, had 13 tracks. International House had 16. Cowboy Scat promises to include no less than 21 tracks! An unheard of bonanza, true, but think of the ingots! So many corners to sand down… Poor Marvin! What’s more, because Cowboy Scat is rumored to be the soundtrack to a lost musical, each track is attributed to a different music group that sounds strangely like us. That simple fact complicates its distribution in ways that I cannot describe here … for reasons … I cannot describe here.

Anyway, none of these difficulties will dissuade us. We will release this album – you have Mitch’s personal guarantee. (Just leave me out of it, okay?)

Usual Rubbish

April comes late.

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Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right … not the red button. Never hit the red button.

Mr. Ned and crew on the bridgeOh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It’s like a series of tubes, I’m told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself – like the internets – a machine.

As you may already know, we’ve just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month’s show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here’s a little rundown:

Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager. In this thrilling episode of the adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned on board the starship Free Enterprise, Willard and his crew of severe conservatives (and George Takei) are faced with their greatest challenge yet: making small talk with an audio-animatronic Richard Nixon. Oh, and there’s Edward Teller’s all-consuming Emergency Manager 9000, an ultimate computer bent on taking over the universe. That, too.

Music: We revisit the “live” duet version of our song “You’re Edward Teller”, in honor of the physicist’s appearance on Ned Trek. We dredge up another demo from the International House project – a scratch version of the song “Do It (Every Time)”. A bit later on, you’ll hear our more recent (still unreleased) recording of Matt’s song “Jit Jaguar”, one of my favorite Big Green recordings ever, owing to its primitive simplicity. (Easy to please, what can I say?). We close out with an adhoc rendering of “Special Kind of Blood”.

Gab fest: In our “Put The Phone Down” segment we engage in a wide ranging discussion of the late Ritchie Havens’ amazing thumb, Margaret Thatcher’s departure, the press response to the Boston Marathon bombing, our old-school recording methods, and other pointless drivel.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments always welcome. We’ll read anything on the podcast, anything. Be our guest, for chrissake. More later.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: April Breakout 2013

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Big Green puts the ape in April with another episode of Ned Trek, three unreleased Big Green songs, some odd muttering, and more. Dress appropriately.

This is Big Green – April Breakout 2013. Features: 1) Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager; 2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe bring up the news like a cheap hotdog; 3) The rejected theme song; 4) Song: You’re Edward Teller, by Big Green; 5) How we used to record: the ugly truth; 6) Song: Do it every time (demo version), by Big Green; 7) On John King and other great journalists; 8) Remembering Margaret Thatcher, for real; 9) Song: Jit Jaguar, by Big Green; 10) Richie Havens and his thumb; 11) Ending with the immortal

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Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

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Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?

Usual Rubbish

Ripping yarns.

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Glad we got that sorted out. Another rogue operation shut down. Try to behave yourself from now on, Marvin. Marvin? MARVIN!!!

Nice Romney dupe, dude!Right, well…. lots to keep track of. I know it may look easy, being a member of the virtual rock band Big Green, but there’s more to this than meets the eyes (or ears, for that matter).  Plenty of demands on our time; enough tasks to fill this drafty old abandoned hammer mill to the rafters, quite frankly. Sure, I know – we haven’t gone on tour in a couple of years. No impromptu trips to Neptune, for instance, to take in the annual Methane Fest or perform at one of our favorite hyper-gravity venues (The Flathouse is particularly memorable, for me at least). But there’s more to being a band than performing, you know. Much more.

I have described in previous posts our grueling production schedule for our upcoming collection, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A full album of 15 to 20 new songs in about a year’s time – that’s greased lightning in our world, my friends. Sure, I know – these are songs culled from a musical about the life, times, and presidential ambitions of our cousin Rick Perry, governor of the great state of Texas, and as such each number will be performed by a different musical ensemble (all of whom strangely resemble us). But it’s a big project nonetheless. Hands full, over here … hands full!

Then there’s our monthly podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, an extravaganza of useless gibberish, lovingly packaged and delivered to our listeners via iTunes. Each episode includes previously unreleased music as well as another installment of our continuing series, Ned Trek – the bizarre outer-space adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his First Officer/Dressage Horse Mr. Ned, on board the Starship Free Enterprise. Last month, this most derivative crew of space adventurers visited the surface of Ozark 5, an outpost run by Gov. Louie Gomert, thereby initiating a series of unfortunate events that resulted in a titanic struggle, mano a mano, between Captain Romney and a giant ear of corn. Gripping drama.

So, sure … we’re occupied. It just looks like we’re a bunch of lazy lunks squatting in an abandoned mill.