Tag Archives: tuber

What’s new.

Well, it’s finally coming down. The snow that is. And the lamp post. Yes, you heard me right – the lamp post came down … and Jim Bob is responsible.

Okay, truth is… I don’t know for certain that Jim Bob is responsible. It may well have been Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who knocked the lamp post down during the first snow storm of the year. Here it is, the week after Christmas, and people are still driving like it’s July. Spoiled by global warming, I suppose. In any case, I only have myself to blame. It was I who suggested that Marvin serve as our chauffeur until a suitable replacement might be found. What? You didn’t know we had people driving us around? Well, that’s because we haven’t up until now. We’ve just recently adopted the Bowie-esque doctrine of acting successful to become successful. It’s like priming the pump, man.

Why this sudden obsession? Well, as you know, we of Big Green weren’t exactly born with the word “success” tattooed on our butts. (Mine has something else entirely tattooed onto it. I’m giving you twelve guesses what that might be.)  We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for lo these past three decades, playing in dives, recording in the basement on superannuated technology, scratching for every inch, inching for every scratch…. you get the picture. (Actually, you get the sound file. We don’t do pictures.) What have we got to show for it? A second-hand robot chauffeur, that’s what. And one that can’t avoid major obstacles.

I know, I know – I shouldn’t complain, what with this being the season of kindness and gratitude. (Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sees it more as the season of mindlessness and attitude, but that’s how he rolls.) We’re still recording, still flailing away at the canon, committing item after item from the seemingly bottomless vat of unrecorded material to virtual tape. You can hear the results of these sessions on our podcast, This Is Big Green, where we post first drafts of songs we will eventually release as our next album(s).

So sure, we live in a drafty mill, no fuel for the fire, no food in the fridge, no miracle grow for the mansized tuber (not that he needs it).  But we’ve got something more valuable than any of that: a gift coupon to Tony’s pizza, good for another three days. To the limo… and damn the lamp posts!

Practice makes … practice.

One…. two…. One-two-three-four! *SMASH* Wait, hold it. Tubey, you okay? Was that your last planter? Christmas. We’ve got to go to the garden store, damn it.

Oh, hiya. Geezus, you’d think being idle and ensconced in an abandoned hammer mill would offer endless opportunities to rehearse, jam, arrange, etc. Seems like every time we try to do it, something comes up. For instance, this week I’ve got custody of the mansized tuber. (Matt had him last week. Hey – that’s the terms of the adoption agreement, what do you want from me?) I guess I never realized what a handful he can be. He’s at a difficult age for tubers; you know, that time when they either become a full-fledged plant or get mashed up into some kind of traditional dish. I have to think that, for tubey, it’s going to be the former outcome, but he doesn’t seem convinced. Now he jumps at every noise. And as you might expect, rehearsal generates a lot of noises.

Okay, so when he jerks to one side at the sound of a crash cymbal, falls off his pedestal, and cracks his planter into a thousand pieces, is that my bad? Do I bear responsibility not only for the damages but for the psychological trauma, the pain and suffering, the fibrous bruising Tubey endures as a result of his own nervousness? I think not. And yet, having custody of him does imply a level of accountability. Man god damn, this will be the THIRD king-size pottery planter I’ve had to buy on my meager income in the last five days. How much is enough? I’d just like the president and some of those congressional leaders to walk a mile in my shoes – they think THEY have it tough….

Granted, we don’t have any jobs booked for Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start working up some numbers. Matt’s polishing up his tiny guitar (it’s about the size of a badminton racket, perhaps smaller), John’s pounding away on some soup kettles. I’ve replaced a few broken tines in the Fender Rhodes 73. The plan is to play whatever we know as many times as we can stand it. That’s called rehearsal. If no one interrupts us, life is good. Only now…

Well, now I’m going to the plant store. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will tag along to do the carrying. Then it’s back to work… I hope.

Planageddon.

I’m not sure about that, Matt. I don’t know if I want to play that song. How about “Dinos”? No? Are you sure? Okay… you suggest one. “World of Satisfaction”? Naaaah.

Oh, hello. Didn’t notice you peering through that LCD screen. As you can see, we’re working on a set list for our first engagement on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. No, that’s not a place keeper – that’s the name Tiny Montgomery suggested last week, and none of us has come up with anything better (let alone tried to, you know, insert the name). It’s always kind of a back and forth on the set lists – that’s only natural when you have hundreds of songs. Yes, literally hundreds… all wrapped up in a little box. We take turns, reaching a hand into the box. I’ll read one song title and Matt will knock it down. Then he grabs one and reads it. I’ll say he’s an asshole. Then he throws the box at me. And I’ll yell, “MOM! HE’S DOIN’ IT AGAIN!” And then we’re BOTH in trouble.

Okay, so that’s freaking childish, I know. But not to worry – we always come up with set lists in the end. Then we freaking ignore then, nine times out of ten. No, we’re not affecting an artistic temperament. It’s just that, frankly, it gets kind of dark on the stages we play on, and those lists are just plain hard to read. So we start calling tunes. If we call the same tune twice in a single night, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) issues a loud beeping sound. Chances are we will remember what that’s supposed to mean and withdraw the selection. Hey…. everybody has their process. Ours is surely no less sound than the one used by, say, My Morning Jacket.  (I can’t say, because I don’t know what they do. I’m just picking examples at random – don’t listen to me.)

I’m just noticing how often I use the epithet “freaking”. You all know what I mean. In any case, preparing for an arduous interstellar tour is no picnic, as many of you know. There are songs to rehearse, air tanks to compress, space suits to air out, missiles to hire, maps to download – no end to the punch list. (It’s actually more like a punch and kick list.) Not getting a lot of help, either. Both Lincolns are dead to the world after a night of carousing. The mansized tuber is out in the garden, communing with his little herb-garden cousins. Mitch Macaphee has taken the next two weeks off to attend a mad science conference in Brazil. I feel like the prisoner of freaking Zenda. (There’s that epithet again!)

Not to worry. We’ve been down this bumpy road before, and it’s always come out…. well … bumpy. So be it.

Dawg days.

Things are heating up around here. Not surprising. I left the mansized tuber in charge of the thermostats. Bugger was born in a greenhouse, what the hell was I thinking?

Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as “North America”, just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months – a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won’t.) It doesn’t take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It’s like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain.

Okay, so… what’s my summer project going to be? Could be any of a number of things. As Big Green has no interstellar tour booked, I may play a few gigs with my old cover band, Putting On The Ritz (a.k.a. the only group with an audience that can put up with me for more than five gigs in a row). Well, that’s one thing. Another is to get a podcast going – a project Matt and I had started, then forgotten about, maybe six months ago. Could try that again. Then there’s all those recordings lying around either half-finished or just gathering dust. Summer might be a good time to sort through all that stuff.

Then there’s recording, of course. We could try that, for a change. Let’s not get crazy.

Matt’s been working on his Facebook posts from Spring Farm Cares – video postings and blog entries. Check it out. I’ve been liking it o-plenty. Now that’s a summer project, friends. Would that I could be that ambitious. About the best I can do is sit around strumming Ian Anderson songs on Matt’s battered 1978 Aspen six-string acoustic. Hey – set up a Web cam and there’s your podcast, buck. 

Hmmm. How many more problems can I solve sitting on my ass? Not sure. It’s TOR:CON 4 over here at the hammer mill. Batten down the hatches!

Backroom deal.


Was there a ‘splosion? Kind of hard to tell around this place. If Bin Laden dropped by here, he’d probably say, “What the hell do they need me for? They’re kicking their own ass.” (Apologies to Richard Pryor.)

Just keeping it real here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as you might expect. During these hard times, it’s the same story everywhere, right? Making the ends meet in the middle. We’ve got the ends, but frankly… no middle. And if the ends justify the means, which they almost NEVER do, well then… um…. okay, I lost my train of thought. But no matter. We are doing what we do, and being what we be. That’s what Big Green is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her. RISK… RISK IS OUR BUSINESS. (Oh, Jesus… now I’m quoting Star Trek lines. Someone call the doctor! And make sure he IS a doctor, and not a mechanic. D’oh!)

So much for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his experiment with industriousness. Turns out he’s lazy and shiftless… just like all those OTHER robots. [Ed. note: Mr. Perry’s opinions are his alone and do not represent the views of the administrators of HammermillDays.com, its parent company, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., or anyone even tangentially associated with Perry who may be afraid, very afraid of robots.] Actually, Marvin has decided to hang up the bomb-sniffing robot gig, which is just as well. I think he’s focusing more on show business now. I saw him trying a “Renegade Robot from Mars” outfit on the other day. (Circus is in town, I hear.)

That’s not the only experiment in money making going on here at the mill. Aside from yours truly, everyone in this dump is trying to turn an easy buck. Probably the most worrysome is the mansized tuber, who has decided to try his hand at being a music promoter. He can credit his experience with us as having built up some expertise in those fibrous mental tissues of his, credibly or not. I understand his first client is a band called “Logo and the Positioning Statement”. Hardly a challenging first try, frankly. Sounds like the kind of group that markets itself.  

Hey – I just found a quarter in the sofa. Probably many more where that came from. Or not. (So much for optimism.)

Hard times.


Where the hell is that banjo? What…. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is using it again? Jesus… how’s a brother supposed to sing the blues around here?

Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That’s the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin’s doing it, I don’t know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as …. well … rare earths. We’ve got lots of common earths. My point is… we’re freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted!

Well, if we have a middle name, it’s innovation. Big Innovation Green, that’s us. (People often associate another middle name with us… I believe it begins with an “f”). We’re constantly thinking of ways to float the overloaded boat of our miserable lives and careers. Sometimes that thinking involves a lot of bad ideas, it’s true. The vegetable stand never worked out, for instance. Not enough profit in selling discarded carrots and onions that fell off the back of the turnip truck. (Not to mention the offense that enterprise gave to our companion, the man-sized tuber.)

Speaking of bad ideas, Marvin had one. The gears were spinning hard inside that brass noggin of his. Next thing we knew, he was wheeling off to the local constabulary, resume in claw, looking for a personnel officer. You see, he’d run across an article in the local paper about how the police we’re saving up for one of those bomb-fetching robots you see on T.V. once in a while. It occurred to Marvin that he should, perhaps, apply for the position – that the amount of money they would spend on a robot could constitute a salary of sorts. That’s the story we got from Anti-Lincoln, anyway. My guess is that he sold Marvin to the cops and invented that cock and bull story to cover his own sorry ass.

I’ll tell you something, Anti-Lincoln…. you’re going to need something larger than that pathetic little lie. Thanks to you, Marvin is sniffing out explosives. Shame, Abe, shame.

The thing is.


Just settling in here. Man, but it’s good to be back home! If by home, you mean … something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill.

It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.

So, yeah, it’s snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear’s ass. Basically we’re confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the treadmill. Hour after hour he pedals away. What’s the point? Perhaps in his robot mind he is actually going somewhere interesting. (Actually, Matt thinks he’s road testing some new kind of lithium battery.) The Lincolns are catching up on their reading. Carl Sandberg is the selection this week. (Last week, too, as it happens.) And Mitch Macaphee? Off to the lab, creating something that may enable him to (dare I say it?) rule…. the world…! (Or perhaps making a club sandwich. Turns out it’s a very similar process.)

How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.

Man, it’s cold. Maybe I can get Mitch to try some kind of fusion reaction to generate a little heat in here. Not too hot, you understand…. (he measures everything in Kelvin scale).

 

New Year’s Video:

Lost in found.


That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there’s that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar.

Oh, hi, friends of Big Green. Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt… all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole “Papa Bear”). The advice we’d been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it’s just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that.

So, yeah… we’re here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? No climax… Why else? We’ve gone something like 60 gazillion miles in the last seven weeks and what the hell do we have to show, eh? No cash, no kudos, no nothing. Bloody flop.  Still, we’re indefatigable (except for the man-sized tuber, who hasn’t been out of his terrarium since three stops ago). So we’ve already spent a couple of days on Pluto, the big brass buckle of the Kuiper Belt, jamming out to a frozen house, making the icicles shake, rattle, and crack. (No rolling on Pluto. They have a code, you know.)

There are three things you need to know about this Kuiper Belt place. The first is that it’s bloody cold. I think you might have guessed. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has tanked out his battery half a dozen times since we got here. The second is that this place is like the solar system’s lost and found. Apparently everything that gets lost on Earth (and everywhere else in Sol’s neighborhood) ends up here. For instance, there are literally billions of odd socks floating around and between the asteroids. Explains a lot. That stuff they call “dark matter”? Socks. Just socks. I think it’s just centrifugal force, spinning everything out to the rim. Now you know.

The third thing is that… some of these venues are so small, it’s almost impossible to perform. Right now, I’m straddling two of these Kuiper Belt objects, my keys parked on a third, playing to an audience perched on dozens more within earshot. Keee-razy.

At the pad.


Packing the ship. And not a moment too soon, I might add. Anyone seen my slipper socks? Ah, yes. Thank you kindly. Can’t go to Neptune without those.

Well, we’ve attempted to do everything that needed to be done in preparation for our trip to the stars – readying Big Green for our upcoming interstellar tour ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE. We’ve dotted every “t” and crossed every “i” (or every eye, perhaps). So many details to be considered. Much of it, on this type of outing, is best left to the scientists. Questions like, “There’s no air in space. How do we breathe?” Not sure we’ve got that little detail worked out yet, but sometimes you can’t solve every problem prior to lift off. Sure, I’d like everything to be perfect and set out in a straight line. But that’s not always possible, my friends. Sometimes, good enough has to be good enough. Good enough?

Right. How do we know we’re in “Go” condition? Complicated formula. Once again, the scientists… they have to earn their keep. But to give a rough idea, I fed the question to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and he came up with the following criteria:

  • ITEM: Sandwiches. Space is a very inhospitable environment, full of hostile creatures, obstinate club owners (same thing), and the total lack of sandwiches. That’s right – Space is chock full of no sandwiches whatsoever, so you better just pack yourself some… and pronto.   
  • ITEM: Rubber souls. No, not the Beatles album, though it’s a personal favorite. I’m talking shoes here, people. (Hence my obsession with slipper socks earlier.) There’s questionable gravity out yonder; in some venues, virtually no gravity at all. We need extra traction to keep our feet on that stage. (Can’t tell you how many horn players we’ve lost to unaccommodating footwear choices.) 
  • ITEM: Robot polish. I ask you, how is a band going to keep its brass plated robot shining like the sun if… if… HEY… HOW DID THAT GET IN THERE? MARVIN!!!

Okay, so it’s not a perfect list. As I said before, if we were to wait for things to be perfect, we would be waiting our whole lives through. So… we’re past perfect.

Capital!


That thing you just said five minutes ago. Say it again. No, not that – the OTHER thing you said. The thing that wasn’t some dumb-ass comment. Whoa… calm down, Hemingway!

Sensitive artists, these rock musicians. Well, let me qualify that. I’m actually referring to the individuals, human and non-human, who hang around with rock musicians. I’m talking about your man-sized tuber, your Marvin (my personal robot assistant), your Mitch Macaphee, your Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, etc. We of Big Green proper (brother Matt, brother-in-law John, and I) have asked these hangers-on for suggestions on where we should take the next interstellar tour. Of course, this is a bit like placing 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters and hoping for Hamlet to pop out of one of the carriages. Still, you do get lucky from time to time, and just today – I swear – one of them made a suggestion that made sense. Actual sense, in a wholly non-ironic way.

What am I babbling about? I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. (Ahem…) Mitch Macaphee spouted something that sounded like a reasonable suggestion – let’s begin the next tour on Betelgeuse, he said. (Not the exact words, but close enough. In fact, he may have been coughing up a stuffed grape leaf.) The logic behind this is obvious. Betelgeuse is enormous – many times the size of our own sun. Why not start big, right? Am I right? Okay… so maybe the logic isn’t so obvious. In any case, we’ve played in the Betelgeuse system before, and as I remember, those shapeless globs of protoplasm we found there listened better than most of our terrestrial audiences. (At least they appeared to; they were all bubbly by the end of the show.)

I’m sure you think we should find better things to do with our time than idly ponder the finer points of our tour itinerary when, in fact, it is totally out of our hands… and into the calloused paws of our promoter, Admiral Gonutz (ret.). Well, if you want to know the sad truth…. we don’t. This is the stuff that music biz is made of, friends. A little bit of playing and a whole lot of waiting around to play, as Keith Richards put it many long years ago. I personally prefer John Lennon’s response when someone asked him how he liked France, and he said something like, it was a car and a plane and a car and a room and a car and a plane. With us, it’s more like a skateboard and a rocket and an airless void and a volcano and an ocean and a steamboat and an ambulance and a mental ward.

Okay, anybody else got suggestions? Big Zamboola, perhaps? Marvin? C’mon, let’s have it, chaps!