Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Holiday table.

It can’t be morning yet, right? It’s still freaking dark outside. What? Oh, right. My night mask. I’ll just pull it off and … OH MY GOD … IT’S MORNING!

Well, that’s my revelation for today. What have you got? Hope you’re having a great holiday season, whether or not you celebrate any of the various commemorative feast-days that fall sometime around now. Like Trump in the White House, we’ve been staked out here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York (a.k.a. that farm upstate that every alt band goes to eventually) waiting for someone to tell us it’s safe to venture outside without proper shoes. That’s right – our shoes are a disgrace, my friends. No bones about it. And when you’ve got substandard shoes, Spring can’t come soon enough.

And while we’ve been cooped up in this drafty old barn, we’ve tried to busy ourselves with some low-budget Kringle-ing, sending out some old recordings via social media to our gaggle of patient friends, attempting to make up for the fact that we have nothing new finished … our latest batch is still in the oven, barely even browning at this point. Slow going, to be sure. Fortunately, we have an archive to keep us warm – the fruit of more than 30 years’ effort in the vineyards of no-budget songwriting, gigging, and music production. We’ve got everything from 1/4 inch reel to cassette to DAT tape to hard drives packed with ramblings, false starts, and even some complete songs. You never know what we’ll toss up next.

Okay, Marvin ... What have we got?Or maybe you will. Either way, that’s what we’re dropping on the holiday table under the tree. For a sampling, check our Twitter feed or visit our Soundcloud page and click play on any random upload. It is a mixed bag, I will admit, curated by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a tin ear … actually, two tin ears and an aluminum voicebox.  Our posts thus far have been mostly Christmas themed selections, including outtakes from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and some live takes previously featured on our YouTube page or on our Live from Neptune EP.  These are all full-rez .wav files, and a couple of the live tracks have been remastered, so give it a listen and let me know how much they suck … I mean, what you think.

Whoa, is that the time? Back to bed with me!

Usual Rubbish

Problem child.

Okay, blow out the candles. Try harder. Nope, nothing. Try again. What the hell … you’d think at your age you would have this worked out by now. Silly kid.

Right, so before you call child protective services, let me reassure you that we, of Big Green, are all biologically childless. The line stops here! And it’s just as well. No, sir … I was just in the midst of celebrating the nineteenth birthday of our first commercial release (a.k.a. album), 2000 Years to Christmas, which was released …. I don’t know … sometime after Christmas in 1999. Nice timing, right? Typical.  Anyway, that was a few weeks ago, and I’m glad to say it’s pretty small in the rear view mirror at this point.

So, 2000 Years To Christmas was our biggest seller. That’s not saying much. Of course, it was released relatively early in the era of online retail, and over the course of the succeeding decades it has wormed its way into any number of places online. A simple Google search on the title will show you what I mean. (Take a look at the image tab on that search if you want a cheap laugh.) It kind of has a life of is own, which is strange because we gave it life almost twenty years ago. It’s in those rebellious years, when your child tries to distance her/himself from you as much as possible. 2000 Year To Christmas never goes shopping with us anymore, and when it’s out with its friends and sees us on the street, it looks away.

They grow up so fast.We’re actually planning kind of a special party for its twentieth next year. Don’t tell it we said so – we’d like it to be a surprise. I was thinking maybe a nice new CD player, or one of those disc stands that holds maybe 200 albums. Hell, we could fill four of those with unsold copies of that thing. (Psst … don’t tell 2000 Years To Christmas that we said that, either.) In fact, forget we even had this conversation. Who are you again?

Right, well … maybe I’m being a little cautious. Nineteen is such an awkward age, and 2000 Years To Christmas still doesn’t know what it wants to do with its life.  Maybe trade school will be the thing. Maybe, I don’t know … maybe next year.

Usual Rubbish

Key notes.

Here’s the problem. I hit it and it goes “dang”, then “hummmmmmm….” I don’t want dang and hum. Who the hell wants dang and hum? Dumb-ass technology. I hate the internets!

Oh, sorry. I was just complaining to Big Green’s official instrument tech, the dude who lives in the basement. (Actually, I think he may be Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a pair of borrowed coveralls.) My 20-year-old keyboard is falling apart, though why I would expect it to survive more than 20 years is beyond me. I am appealing to our tech dude to do some work on it, just in case … just in case we end up playing somewhere again, sometime soon. You never know, right? Did I ever think I would play on the planet Neptune? Hell no. And yet that happened. Shit happens, right?

What’s ailing my old Roland A-90ex? Same thing that ails all similar midi controllers with expansion modules. It’s the counterweights to the keys …. they are just poorly designed and liable to crack and sometimes break right off.  Especially when you play like a ham-fisted ape (my own distinctive style). That’s when you get the “dang”, though it’s really more like a “clunk” or a “thud”. It’s actually not too different from a sound we used on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, only a little less resonant. So why am I complaining, right? Just crank up the resonance, there’s a good chap.

Dang!Right, so …. I realize this isn’t a technical blog. That’s not what you come here for. You come here for pithy observations and gripping tales of pointless adventures. For instance, I could tell you all about the festive autumnal arrangement in the hammer mill courtyard contrived by the mansized tuber in his spare time, but then this would seem like a gardening blog, and it’s anything but that. Or I could tell you about all the lawn signs that were dumped in our driveway following the mid-term elections, but then you’d think this was a political blog, and well …. sometimes it is, but  … not just now!

So, I will conclude this gripping tale of my keyboard repair adventure and return to whatever it was I was doing before I started talking about this. I think it was … repairing my piano. Right, then.