Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Everything but the bathroom sink

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.

More than a few blocks from factory village

2000 Years to Christmas

You know what they say, man. Everyone as time went by got a little bit older and a little bit slower. Stay in the toaster long enough, and hell, you’re toast. Stick a fork in it. Insert your favorite over-the-hill cliche here.

Hey, lookit – I know I’ve been more reflective over the past year than in previous years. When your ass starts to get old, it spends more time looking back. (It can hardly do anything else, actually.) I’ve posted a few reflections on the bad old days. Spun a few yarns about scraping the bottom of the barrel of backwater live music. Hey, there’s always room for one more story, right? Maybe.

Hippy anniversary

It happens that this spring is the 35th anniversary of a little project that coincided with the birth of Big Green, back in the eighties. I’m thinking of this now not so much because of the anniversary, but because I’ve been digitizing a video of a 1987 gig I played with Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and Ned’s childhood friend, the late songwriter Dale Haskell.

Dale had recorded an album around that time, and we played a few gigs to promote it locally in the Albany, NY, area. It wasn’t a big production, of course – we were broke, and Dale didn’t have access to a proper studio, so he tracked the album on a cassette portastudio and ran the cassette copies of the album off manually. (We all did that shit back then, because … well, see the previous sentence.)

God save the queen

Ned and I were trying to find work for Big Green – unsuccessfully, of course. Dale had helped us out with some demo work, and we agreed to back him up on his project. He booked three dates at QE2 in Albany, a club that is now called the Fuse Box, I believe, housed in an ancient White Tower burger joint on Central Ave.

At one of those gigs, in April 1987, we opened for the Athens, GA art rock band Love Tractor. Our photographer friend Leif Zurmuhlen brought his VHS camcorder to the gig and taped our set. At some point over the last thirty years, Leif gave me the tape and it’s been sitting in my television cabinet for decades. Until last week, that is, when I transferred it to MP4.

Ned, me, and Dale

Achtung, baby

Sadly, Dale passed away last year after some troubled times. I had told him via Facebook that I had the tape sometime over the previous year, but didn’t have the means to transcribe it until recently, by which time he was gone. If I can get the audio to sound decent, I’ll drop it via the Big Green Youtube channel in the next few weeks. Promises, promises.

Kind of a kick seeing Ned and me playing together, frankly. Ned’s doubling on keys and lead guitar; I’m thumping on my Fender P-bass, wearing a white tee shirt with the word “ACHTUNG” in block letters across my scrawny chest. God, those days sucked. But they had their moments.

Another day, another blizzard.

2000 Years to Christmas

I know it’s not the 20th anniversary any more. Stop reminding me! We’re practically at the 23-year mark, for crying out loud. I’m just too damn lazy to change the promo. Mea culpa, okay? MEA CULPA, GODDAMMIT!

Whoops, sorry. Was a bit on edge just then. I was talking to our advertising manager, otherwise known as Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He keeps telling me that I left the 2000 Years To Christmas billboard up too long. The suggestion is ludicrous. Accurate, but ludicrous. I didn’t program him to tell me the truth. (To tell the truth, I actually didn’t program him at all.)

Incremental sales … without the increments

It actually doesn’t much matter whether or not we advertise, frankly. We don’t sell a lot of units, which may be a function of the fact that we don’t put out a lot of new material. I am being generous, of course – we haven’t put out a new album in nine freaking years. Where did that time go? Same place all time goes – into the hole, after the sun. (What does that mean? Well, I had an explanation, but I dropped that into the hole as well.)

Hey, it’s not like you can’t find our albums on the internets. They’re out there. If you look around for 2000 Years To Christmas, you’ll find it in a boatload of places, including many I’ve never heard of, and some destinations I’ve never been to. In fact, that album is on so many outlets, you’d think we would be selling them left and right just by osmosis … or inertia … or some other physical principle. You know what I mean – you toss your album out into the street, and eventually someone will come by and pick it up. (We’re still eagerly awaiting that day.)

With an effing vengeance

It’s not like we couldn’t use a little extra scratch. Winter is descending upon us like a frozen shroud. Or a great frozen wall, dropped by the ice gods. Or some other metaphor I can’t think of because I’m too damn cold. What the hell, do you want me to draw you a picture? There’s white stuff falling from the clouds. It’s snowing in New York. Hal-lah-freaking-loo-yah.

Of course, the mansized tuber is taking necessary precautions, moving in from the courtyard and squeezing into a planter for the duration. Marvin is avoiding the out of doors, which is a little hard to do, as we are officially out of doors. (We broke one last week, and we don’t have any spares.) The rest of us are just huddling around stoves and registers, waiting for it all to be over. So, in other words, a really productive week around the abandoned hammer mill.

Nice place to spend the winter.

Modern insensibilities

One thing I hadn’t counted on with the onset of global warming is the degree to which people’s expectations about winter weather would dramatically change. There’s going to be 10 to 16 inches of new snow on the ground when this week is over, and they talk about it like it’s a natural disaster. Back twenty years ago or so, we used to call that Tuesday. Or Tuesday and Friday.

Hell, we had a method back then for telling how bad the snowstorm is. It was called looking out the window. In other words, if you could look out the window and see something, anything other than white, it wasn’t that bad. The whole mill was like one of those measuring sticks. If the drifts meet the top of the second story windows, well …. it will have snowed a bit.

There’s a little tip to take home with you – no charge.