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This is Big Green: Hangover Edition 2013

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This Is Big Green: January 2013

Big Green shares the agony of the morning after with another installment of Ned Trek, space travel’s only talking horse, plus three Big Green songs and some assorted groaning. Cheers.

This is Big Green – Hangover Edition 2013. Features: 1) Song: Volcano Man, by Big Green; 2) Ned Trek VI: The further adventures of Romney’s talking horse; 3) Song: Johnny’s Gun (demo version), by Big Green; 4) Put the phone down: Our sucky science fiction future, and other topics; 5) Song: Oh, Larry, by Big Green; 6) Turn it down, the radio; 7) Talk of language; 8) Ignominious implosion.

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Usual Rubbish

Lookout. Below.

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Okay, now where was I? Wait, don’t tell me. I was complaining about…. something…. No, not the song “Something”. I rather fancy that. Something to do with Web servers.

F'shaw
BG goes all traditional-like.

No matter. Here we are, back to the blog. What’s happening at the mill? Lots. Working on the January podcast, now days behind schedule. Later every month, right? That’s the natural course of business here in Big Green – land. Still…. our first installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN should be worth the wait, if you like weird, asinine, and abysmally non-commercial media content. True hallmarks of the TIBG brand.

Smell something burning? Neither do I. But (and this is the point) we bloody well should, and here’s why … Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is supposed to be thinking up a viable creation myth for our upcoming collection of songs attributed to and written in tribute to cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. The album – Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – is such a monumental event in our lives, it fairly demands a creation myth of its very own. As such, we handed that task off to Marvin, and by rights the smoke should be pouring out of his brass visor as we speak.

It is not, my friends. What can I tell you? So look, we’ll just have to cook it up ourselves, I guess, without the help of robotian inspiration. We’re thinking something along the lines of “The Creeping Terror”. Cowboy Scat is all that remains of an epic musical written about the arc of cousin Rick’s political career. Only on the eve of its production, the script was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe. Such a tragedy!

Okay, well … we can flesh that out a bit. Give us time. Maybe Marvin can work with …. on second thought, maybe not. Scratch that, friends.

Usual Rubbish

Under the holiday hood.

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Man goddamn, it’s come and gone again, hasn’t it? Those freaking holidays seem to take fifty years to get here and then they’re gone in five seconds. And we’ve only done one miracle ride!*

Anyway, as some of you already know, we have posted our second annual Christmas podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN: Holidaze 2012, a nearly 100-minute extravaganza that dwarfs even the titanic pointlessness of last year’s effort and renders anew the promise of fractured Christmases to come. Many of you know that I am not given to wild exaggeration, but I have to say that THIS holiday special is THE MOST AMAZING HOLIDAY SPECIAL since the BIRTH of THE JESUS. Let me emphasize that I have to say that because, well, our sponsor, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., has demanded a higher number of downloads on this episode. And when they don’t get what they want, they get something else … which is ugly. So… gun to my head, I most certainly would.

All right – no lie, there is a lot in this episode. Here’s a run-down of the hoedown, with times listed, so you can skip to the parts you like:

    • Ned Trek V (3:18 ) – Mr. Ned and Willard take another romp through the inter-dimensional void of classic television shows, with hilarious consequences. (Introduced as always by a particularly cheesy-sounding Lee Majors.)
    • Put The Phone Down (39:20) – Matt and I launch right in to a lively holiday discussion. Riveting, as usual.
    • Charlie in the Box and the first Semi-Automatic Christmas (42:45) – A whimsical tale of Charlie, Hermy, and the putsch in Santa’s workshop. (a Reeking-Ass production.)

A nice gift idea. From crazy town.

  • Song: Merry Christmas, Children (59:40) – New recording of a previously unreleased Christmas song Matt wrote back in the day. We tried to produce this song for 2000 Years To Christmas, but ended up abandoning the track. This was done over the last three weeks or so.
  • Song: Father Christmas (1:06:43) – Another from Matt’s ample stable of Christmas songs – a new, previously unreleased recording, just in time for freaking Christmas. Again, recorded over the last few weeks – lightning fast for us. Mixed it in my sleep as you can probably tell.
  • Song: Martha’s Christmas (1:12:04) – A cut off of our 1999 album 2000 Years to Christmas. A brief, ironic (because it was the ’90s) ode to the doyen of holiday decor, Martha Stewart.
  • Song: Christmas Spirit (1:17:23) – More from the Matt Perry Christmas songbook. New recording of a previously unreleased song, this one a nod to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A little more holiday mythology, hurriedly recorded and packaged with a bow.
  • Matt’s Christmas Bird Count tale (1:20:00) – Matt tells of getting impaled on an invasive species of weed while managing the annual bird survey. A chilling tale of heroism.
  • Song: Head Cheese Log (1:35:09) – Another cut from 2000 Years To Christmas, this one the album closer, a calliope waltz imagining a yule log made of head cheese. Yeah, we got some ‘splainin’ to do, but that bus left the station a long time ago, friend.

Anywho, that’s what we have in the Christmas stocking for you all. (There may be a moldy orange in the heel, as well – take a look.) If you want to hear the music without the podcast, contact us and we’ll put it together for you. Enjoy!

* “Miracle ride” involves driving around looking at cheesy Christmas displays, referred to by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison as “Christmas miracles.”

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This Is Big Green: Holidaze 2012

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This Is Big Green: Holidaze (December) 2012

Big Green marks the pagan holiday known as Christmas with a full-blown installment of Ned the talking horse, three new Big Green songs, and more. Dig it.

This is Big Green – Holidaze 2012. Features: 1) Ned Trek V, starring Mr. Ned, Romney’s Dancing Horse; 2) Skit: Charlie in the Box and the first semi-automatic Christmas; 3) Put the phone down: Holidays and the recently departed remembered; 4) Song: Merry Christmas, Children, by Big Green; 5) Song: Father Christmas, by Big Green; 6) Song: Martha’s Christmas, by Big Green; 7) Song: Christmas Spirit, by Big Green; 8 ) Matt’s encounter with an invasive species; 9) Song: Head Cheese Log, by Big Green; 10) We collapse in festive exhaustion

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Usual Rubbish

Readying.

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The studio is stuffed to the gills already. Yes, it has gills! How do you think it breathes underwater? Didn’t you go to grammar school? Oh, right.

Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.

Anyhow… the quintessential American holiday is now over. (We also survived that day that comes before Black Friday … what do they call it? Thanksgiving?) Time to fold up the balloons, disassemble the parade floats, and send the marching bands marching home. While many find the Macy parade enjoyable, it is not a simple matter to serve as the end point of that annual extravaganza. Just finding enough space to store deflated Spiderman is proving more challenging than you might imagine. Sure, without air in his ass, he’s smaller, but – and this is important – not all that much smaller. And then there’s those freaking Smurfs.


As you can imagine, every nook and cranny in the mill is stuffed with gear from the parade. You can hardly turn around in the studio these days. Still, we press on. Matt and I did a couple more mixes for Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick this past week. Gonna be a bit hard with all these deflated balloons lying around, but we’ll manage. Fortunately, many of Rick’s songs are country-like numbers, so the mixing is fairly simple. We take a naturalist approach – not too much FX, not too much compression. Just record it clean, mix it pure, and pour it into a tall, clear glass to check for impurities before quaffing it down. Pure audio ambrosia, that’s what I’m talking about. Sure ding.

We’re also furiously preparing for the holiday episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. Last year raised the bar a bit – two hours of pure horseshit. Not sure how to top that without a bigger shovel, but we’ll try.

Usual Rubbish

Helladay house.

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What? What time is it? It’s too early, tubey. You’ll get your Miracle Gro at 9:00 and not before. Christ on a bike.

Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)

Excuse that digression. Hope you had a wonderful, glorious Thanksgiving, full of holiday cheer and/or anticipation (if you spent most of it queueing up in front of Wal-Mart or Best Buy). Perhaps you spent part of your morning watching the bizarre spectacle known as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I certainly did. It’s kind of a tradition around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where you don’t ordinarily get exposed to a lot of unfiltered promotional messages (aside from the ones that come on soup can labels).

Little known fact about the Hammer Mill: This is actually the end-point of the T-day parade. It’s a lot longer a procession than most people think. Folks get the mistaken impression that the march ends with the arrival of ersatz Santa Claus in front of Macy’s. Not true. For most of the next day and a half, the floats and balloons come marching up the West Side Highway, take the G.W. Bridge over to the Palisades Parkway, then pick up the NYS Thruway and process all the way up to the Little Falls exit. In a gesture of magnanimous welcome, we throw the compound doors open to them and allow them into the Hammer Mill courtyard for a little R&R. Then Mitch Macaphee and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) aid their technicians in deflating the enormous parade balloons and packing them away for another year. True* story.

Sure, you thought Christmas was just a throwaway songwriting theme for us. Oh ye of little faith.

* Note: veracity of story subject to unverifiable truth conditions. Contact Big Green for details.

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This Is Big Green: Thanksgaffing 2012

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This Is Big Green:
Thanksgaffing (November) 2012

Big Green celebrates the harvest feasting season with a rich menu that includes two previously unreleased Big Green rough tracks, an extended Mr. Ned in Space episode, and more. Over the river … and out.

Features: 1) Song: My Bed, by Big Green; 2) Mr. Ned, Romney’s Dancing Horse, Episode 4; 3) Put the phone down: Election post-mortem with Matt; 4) Excoriating, John McCain; 5) Song: Box of Crackers, by Big Green; 6) Matt lectures at Gander Mountain, looks ahead to hunting season; 7) Remembering George McGovern; 8.) Song: It should’ve been me, by Rick Perry and the Dapper Dudes; 9) Time for us to go

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Usual Rubbish

Splitting Lincoln.

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I think I left my guitar plugged in. I’ve been hearing that buzzing all night freaking long. What’s that? It’s the orgone generating device? Jesus on a bike … that thing again?

Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.

Never can tell what’ going to happen with mad science technology. Just ask Mitch Macaphee – he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant) after all. Anyway, anti-Lincoln must have dialed the wrong settings into that orgone generating device because it split him into two equal parts: Jerry Lewis and Doris Day. Close, right? Fortunately, that thing has an undo button. I like the 1950s as much as any man (which may, in fact, amount to not at all) but I don’t want dead decades following me around like  a zombie. Ever have that problem? Thought so.

Well, we’ve got another podcast in the can. Another groundbreaking episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring as many as three songs (including one previously unreleased Rick Perry number), a rather lengthy and convoluted episode of Ned, the Talking Dressage Horse, and the usual copious amount of pointless blather my illustrious brother and I put forth on a monthly basis. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost much … in fact, it doesn’t cost anything at all. Free media! Liberty! That’s what podcasting is all about, right? That’s why we’re aboard her…… Oh, right. I should keep the Star Trek quotes to a minimum. My apologies.

Best move along. We’re expecting workmen any minute. There are still a few copper pipes left in the hammer mill, so they’ll be stopping by to remove them. (In lieu of rent.)

Usual Rubbish

Songageddon.

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Are you all right? You sure? Good, good. Yeah, we’re okay. Head above water, you know. Always a good thing.

Oh, sorry. I was just on the phone with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who wisely chose this week to travel to Madagascar for a conference on … I don’t know, monster-making best practices, something like that. Good time to leave, what with the hurricane and all that. Up here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we implemented our disaster preparedness plan. Basically that involves closing the windows, drawing the curtains, and blocking our ears. Occasionally someone lights a candle. (When it comes to disasters, we’re not good.)

Fortunately, the gods of rock and water were smiling down upon us this past Monday-Tuesday. That monster storm took an extreme left hook and missed us clean, somehow. Not that you could tell that was the case by looking at this Hammer Mill. It appears as though it’s been through hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and pestilence. (Some would argue we qualify as pestilence, but what do they know? Them and their stinking badges.) One could hardly imagine how this place would handle high winds and higher water, and here we are on the banks of the mighty Mohawk River, just waiting to get clobbered.

We didn’t have anything like a hurricane party. Still working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Matt and I have been mixing for the most part over the last few weeks, but this week we worked on a new Rick song, possibly the closer for the album. To my count, that makes about 47 Rick Perry songs written and recorded over the past year. (That may be a little high, but then…. so are you, most likely. That’s right – I’m looking at YOU, stoner!) If you want to do your own unofficial census, just play back some of our podcast episodes from the last year. We’ve been posting rough drafts since last September or so – half-recorded songs, to be embellished later. Why do this? Input! We want to hear from you. (That’s right, stoner … I’m talking to you…)

Hope you got through the storm in one piece. I’d better get back to Mitch. Don’t want to keep him on hold too long, or he might invent something dangerous.

Usual Rubbish

The month that was.

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Wait, shhh… Did you hear that sound? Yeah, that sound. That’s the sound of another podcast being posted. Praise be.

What’s in the program this month? Well…. pretty much anything we could find lying about the Hammer Mill. Bits and bobs, as they say. Is it lame? You be the judge! My lips are sealed on the quality issue. But I will talk about what’s in the bulging box that is THIS IS BIG GREEN – OCTOBERCAST 2012. An hour and twenty of sheer audio madness, featuring:

Mr. Ned, Romney’s Talking Horse – Episode 3: Ned Trek. The most ambitious in the Mr. Ned series yet, Romney’s famous talking dressage horse takes Willard on a journey through a space/time wormhole to an alternative dimension of television mediocrity. Yes, Mitt is made commander of the starship Free Enterprise, and he and his crew of neocons take on an extraterrestrial threat that only a cash-starved special effects department could conjure. Hi-jinx ensue. (Special guest appearance by former president Richard Nixon.)

Song: Paradise. This is a rough mix (basically faders up) of a recording we started a few months ago as part of a long project focused on resurrecting some of our older songs that were never properly recorded or released. Paradise is a song ripped from Matt’s back pages. Not sure what it’s about – you’d have to ask him – but it’s got elements of archeology in it, which is something that has shown up in some of his other songs, like Primitive, Christmas with the Australopithecus, and others. Probably watched too many Dr. Leakey T.V. specials back in the ’70s, that’s my guess.

Song: Kublai Khan. Another Matt song from about the same period. Actually, this one is  loosely themed on the live and exploits of Sun Myung Moon, late founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times.  Given that our podcast is typically focused on this sort (i.e. dead people), I can hardly believe that we neglected to mention the salient fact that Dr. Moon passed away. Next episode!

That’s about all for this month. Give it a listen, and then send your complaints to:

Mitt Romney
Governor of Sucktopia
Richy Richland, New Hamphire.