Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

Steady Cam.

2000 Years to Christmas

Try to stand still, man. You’re shaking the picture. It looks like there’s an earthquake going on, like Big Green meets the last days of Pompeii. That was a volcano? Okay, so …. Big Green meets the big one. Or Big Green bites the big one. Now that’s more believable.

Oh, hi, Big Green fans. Sure, we know you’re not “fans”, exactly … just casual acquaintances who drop by every once in a while to see what’s on fire at the mill this time around. We’ll take it! Sorry to disappoint – there’s nothing on fire at the moment. I’m, of course, not counting the perpetual St. Elmo’s fire that our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has had burning in his lab since the day he got here. (And no, I don’t mean he has a VHS tape of the movie running in perpetuity – he actually has a plasma corona discharge simulator in his lab … running in perpetuity. I think he likes the glow.) No, we’re having a normal week for once. Though our normal is, well, not particularly normal. More nermal than normal. Nothing blew up, that’s basically it.

As you know, we’ve been trying – like many other bands – to adjust to the virtual marketplace in this era of Coronavirus shutdowns and social distancing. And like many bands from a previous era, we’re having more than our share of difficulties. Doing performances on Zoom, for instance, is less than optimal, even for musicians who have some facility with digital technologies. For people like us, it’s just hopeless, and we have had to resort to other, less frequently used technologies, like long cardboard tubes, or old-style megaphones, or just hiring someone to carry our tunes around in a bucket. (Fact is, nobody in this town could carry a tune in a bucket to save his or her life.) For people used to just standing on a stage and letting the music happen, for better or for worse, this pandemic is …. well …. lethal!

Can you try to get both me AND the piano into the shot ... Scorcese?

This week, though, we stumbled upon another option. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a body cam built into him. I think his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, was imagining he could sell Marvin to the police for use as a ludicrous robo-cop of some sort, but that didn’t pan out. Anyhow, Marvin can be our camera operator, and because he’s set up for wi-fi, we can route him into our hacked modem, push the signal up to the main fiber hub, and send our music out to thousands of potential listeners. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the capacity to record anything, so we have to do all of our songs live. And damn it, the fucker just can’t stand still. Every time we count something in, he starts rolling around. I think he’s trying to pull off a crane shot or something. We keep telling him to stop watching music videos so much, but these are COVID times, and frankly, he’s got little else to do.

Okay, so when you see a performance from us, if it looks a little shaky, that’s NOT because we live in a fault zone. It’s artistry at work, my friends. Cinematic artistry.

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)

Usual Rubbish

Assault with Batteries.

2000 Years to Christmas

Look, I don’t have any space in my room for this goddamn thing. And no, it can’t go in the freaking studio – it’s cramped enough in there as it is. Christ, why do you think we’ve been playing all those Cramps covers? Tight as a tick.

Yeah, that’s right – we’re having a bit of a disagreement again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our adopted home. (When they say beloved bands have gone to a farm upstate, this is where they go, my friends.) Nothing new around here. Tempers wear thin after a Winter like this one, am I right. I said, AM I RIGHT? Damn it, this COVID shutdown is even making hermits like us feel claustrophobic. Even the mansized tuber, not exactly a social butterfly, has gotten so cagey he’s decided to resurrect his long-neglected Facebook account. And hell, if he’s just dying to do something useful, I told him he should just do all of our posts while I sit back in an abandoned easy chair and enjoy some expired cider from a bell jar glass. Life of Riley.

What are we arguing about? Here’s the beef: the international space station recently jettisoned a space pallet full of spent batteries, sending it down towards an almost certain burn-up reentry. Sounds like a bit of mundane space news, right? Well, not to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Like the rest of us, he likes to make use of discarded bits and bobs. Come to think of it, that’s principally what Marvin is made of. And so when he heard this story, it was like he discovered the pot of gold at the end of the Van Allen belt. Marvin may be a lifeless piece of tin (don’t tell him I said so), but he’s smart enough to know that even spent batteries have a little juice in them. So he appealed to his creator, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, and talked him into pointing his tractor beam (actually, Trevor James Constable’s abandoned orgone generating device) at the discarded space pallet so that he could drag it to earth.

Here she comes, Mitch. Steady, now ...

Okay, so Mitch cranked up the tractor beam, and the whole Mill started to shake like a leaf. Before long, we could see this bloody thing hovering over the building, emitting an unearthly glow, like an aura. Mitch somewhat expertly guided the thing into our central courtyard and landed it with a dull thud. It was hot as a toaster oven on a late-Summer Saturday morning in 1974, just after the kids had breakfast and before dad shook off his hangover enough to start hollering again. (Okay … that simile went a little sideways.) But by the end of the afternoon, Marvin was able to retrieve some of the spent nickel-hydrogen batteries and install them into his personal recharging station (which, I swear, looks like a jukebox). Now he wants me to find somewhere in the mill to stow the space pallet, but I keep telling the stupid automaton that it’s too damn big.

We need a pallet garage. One of the bigger ones. Where’s my Sharper Image catalog?