Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Next on the list.

Let’s see. Step three hundred seventeen. Plug lead E7 into jack B47. Check. Step three hundred eighteen. Remove cap from light-pipe cable and insert into port F1. Check.

Finished yet? Nearly ready.Oh, my goodness. Didn’t know you were reading this. Bet your eyes are glazing over. I’m just working through the instructions for this do-it-yourself project studio. It came in a big, flat box, some assembly required. In fact, quite a bit of assembly required. That explains the bargain-basement price. That fellow in Bangalore seemed very anxious to unload this little gem. At least he was an engineer – I am, at best, technically challenged, and at worst, a danger to public safety. Have you ever manually wound a transformer before? I know I haven’t.

Typically I would leave such menial tasks to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but as you may have noticed from the last few postings, he has been making himself quite scarce. Last week he took a trip to Cincinnati to visit the National Museum of Robotics and Animatronics. Didn’t even know such a thing existed. Anyway, he was gone for about five days, came back with a few scratches and a cardboard pirate hat for his trouble. I know … it sounds suspicious to me as well, but there are certain questions you just should never ask of your personal robot assistant.

Why are we building our own studio? Well … the one we have right now is getting a little long in the tooth. I expect you know this, as I’ve mentioned it often enough. Big Green has recorded one album (2000 Years To Christmas) on an eight-track Tascam DTRS system, two albums (International House and Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) on a Roland VS-2480 with various peripherals. The eight track machine is basically a doorstop. The VS-2480 is 13 years old and is not well. It’s choked with projects and has no practical means of exporting data. We are still recording on that system, but just around the edges … gently, gently. Hence … the do it yourself studio. Either that or a Kickstarter Campaign. Still scratching our heads on that.

Head scratching, step three: Press nail of index finger on scalp and move finger back-and-forth.

Usual Rubbish

Missing month.

Could have sworn I left it around here someplace. Have you seen it, Marvin? Oh, right. You’ve deactivated yourself for the holidays. Sounds nice … enjoy your break. How ’bout you, mansized tuber? Oh, yeah. He planted himself in the courtyard, out of earshot. Smart move. Wish I’d thought of that.

What am I searching for? The lost month of June, that’s what. It was here a minute ago, seems like, and now, POOF! Gone-zo. And with it, apparently, the June episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Okay, well … it’s not quite as mysterious as that. Our promised June episode is still in production, and not quite finished. Part of the reason is that we are lazy slags, but aside from that, frankly, it’s been a very complicated episode. A full-on, hour long episode of Ned Trek incorporating no less than six original Big Green songs. I am only now finishing out the songs, adding some incidental parts, mixing, etc. Working like a dog over here. (Well, a lazy kind of dog, anyway.)

Like a dawgOkay, I know what this sounds like. It sounds like pretty much every month this year, right? January’s podcast got pushed into February, March’s into April, April’s into May, and now June has evaporated. Four shows in six months is not exactly a land speed record, even for Big Green, so what can I say. As we try to raise our production values from the sub, sub-basement where they reside to the dank level of goodness just above that, we are finding that it takes a bit more effort than just plain sucking.

This is kind of how Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick was born. We started out with a bunch of hastily recorded sketches, then started tracking those, making them marginally more complex until they reached the same level of quality (or lack thereof) as our officially released albums, International House and 2000 Years to Christmas. We’re beginning to do the same deal with these Ned Trek songs, though they make the Cowboy Scat numbers seem, well, normal by comparison. This is some weird shit, man.

Stay tuned … we will post sometime soon. If it takes longer than we anticipate, we might toss in a clip show or something. Another cop out! Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Usual Rubbish

Moving to Ironia.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who arbitrarily find something to complain about. Especially when it involves pointless grousing about other people. I HATE PEOPLE LIKE THAT.

Right, you guessed it. I was being ironic just then. Some people do that for a living. Me? I’m ironic in my spare time. Actually, it’s not merely a matter of personal whim. We’ve just taken on a marketing consultant recommended by our somewhat lackluster label, Loathsome Prick Records. I would tell you her name, but she told me her name must never be spoken. In any case, she – I will call her “Noname” … which rhymes with Edamame in my tiny mind – is going to help us “position” Big Green in the international indie music marketplace. That’s something our label tells us we need to do, like, RIGHT NOW.

Okay, so… part of that new positioning is that we should start being more ironic. I know what you’re going to say, and I am appalled… APPALLED that you would even think of such a thing! No, really… I know that we’ve been living, breathing, writing, playing, singing, exemplifying irony for more than two decades now. I know that our entire first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and its follow-up, International House, were both frantic fits of festering irony. Trouble is, from a marketing perspective, none of that counts. It’s more about being seen to be ironic. “Noname” is insistent that we apply at least half of each waking hour working on ostentatious displays of irony.

My response to that has been, well, typical for me. I put Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on the case. Never send a man to do what a personal robot assistant can do for him – that’s what I always say, without a hint of irony. I asked Mitch Macaphee to program some irony into his sorry ass, and Mitch obliged, punching numbers into his little hand-held remote, pointing it at Marvin and saying the magic words: Obey! Obey! Marvin wheeled out the door and into the streets of Little Falls, dodging shoppers on a mission to ironyland. Sure enough, when we went out to the grocery store for some day old bread, there was Marvin, in front of Magillicuddy’s Hardware, ringing a bell and wearing a Santa-style hat, an old paint bucket on the sidewalk in front of him. Was he raising money? God, no. He was demonstrating the absurdity of a world in which robots in Santa garb can panhandle out of season without even raising an eyebrow. In short, he was practicing… that’s right …. starts with an “i”.

Here’s something else that starts with an “i”: I’ve had it with this for the nonce. Noname be damned, I’m hitting the sack. (Or perhaps merely mocking those who do so in earnest. Who can say?)