Tag Archives: album

Usual Rubbish

Target: clue.

Bloody hell … my mirror cracked. No, I didn’t smash it with a hammer … I just looked into it, trying to freaking shave. Jesus, I’m old. Hey .. can I use your mirror?

Yeah, we’re cracking mirrors around here, no doubt about it. Looking back on about 30 years of making music under the same moniker, and it’s a little stupefying, frankly. True fact: Big Green was founded in 1986 and it’s still kind of rolling, give or take a few members. But regardless of the lineup, we still have the same DNA. The clueless core has remained intact … it hasn’t gone sub-critical yet. That’s ’cause we’re blood, man. Blood brothers, inseparable. (Particularly so, since Matt does most of the work.)

As we continue working on the next raft of songs, I’ve been taking a few minutes here and there to listen to our previous releases, for context if nothing else. Actually, part of it is taking note of stuff that I hate so that I can resolve not to make the same bonehead plays again and again. (Hey … how about that as a name for the next album: Bonehead Plays? Anyone?) Then there’s the stylistic question: what pigeonhole will we be placed in? And will the pigeon charge us rent? I don’t know about you, but my experience tells me that pigeons are lousy landlords. When something goes funky, like a leaking faucet or a broken mirror, they never send a proper workman … just some brother-in-law pigeon who owes them a favor.

We're type-cast ... and it's all Abe's faultOkay, I digress. Here’s the thing. Our first album had a holiday (i.e. Christmas) theme. The second was more of a straight rock record. The third was a mock country album. And yet, when you look us up in any of the music services, we tend to get chucked into “Holiday” or “Seasonal” categories, no matter what genre we assign to the album when we post it. The collection we’re working on rolls all over the stylistic map, starting in Alaska and ending up in Madagascar. Some pretty crazy shit, man. Look for it under “Holiday”.

Prisoners of our past, in search of a clue. That’s the glory of … that’s the story of Big Green. Happy 30th anniversary, kids.

Usual Rubbish

Thingmaker.

Well, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. A song is a thing. I think we can all agree on that. And I can also say, without fear of contradiction, that every song, no matter how insipid, is about some thing. That’s a no-brainer.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to make an album based on the melodramatic story arc of what can be described as a spacebound horse opera? Simple – break out the thingmaker! What is that, a hot plate, right? Anybody out there on the internets old enough to remember thingmakers? Sure … you plug the thing in, heat it up, pour goop into a mold, cook the mold on the hot plate, then chew on the plastic junk you create or electrocute yourself by pouring the cooling reservoir water on the thingmaker. Great fun.

Anyway … what we do is not that dissimilar from playing with a thingmaker. Let’s say that our overactive idiotic imaginations are the “goop”, if you will. I suppose the “mold” is the usual genres we work within, mostly rock, some bogus country, some other weird stuff we can’t define. Then of course, there’s the thingmaker itself, our superannuated recording system – a Roland VS-2480 deck we bought fifteen years ago to replace my now shipwrecked Tascam DTRS DA-88 deck. And let’s face it, that sucker is not that far removed from a thingmaker.

Great production valuesWe’ve started to use Cubase a bit over the last two years, just out of necessity, but we’re kind of locked into the thingmaker, despite the fact that it’s got a beastly 486 processor and a primitive proprietary “closed” operating system – and I do mean closed! There’s literally one way to get data out of that thing other than via analog audio outputs, and that’s through the coaxial digital outputs. There is no system that currently supports Roland’s (again) proprietary R-Bus data ports. The only other bus is SCSI, which of course is toast. The CD burner doesn’t work. The optical audio outs don’t appear to work either. Thingmaker.

Hey … that’s what Big Green is all about, right? Making something from nothing. With nothing. And for nothing. It’s what we do.

Usual Rubbish

Jupiter rising.

Great red what? Jesus christmas, I don’t have time for that. I’m trying to stay focused on the Mars mission. Then there’s Voyager, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system already… whoops. Someone’s reading this. Look busy!

Hi, friend(s). You may wonder what I’m rambling about. Though probably not, if you’ve visited this blog before. We run on and on about pretty much anything that flows into our heads. Hell, I was looking at a pizza menu the other day that featured deep-fried Oreos. But does anyone want to hear about it? God no. So we’re going to talk about something more interesting today …. like Jupiter. (The planet, not the derivative Roman god.)

The other day some massive asteroid supposedly hit Jupiter. I say “supposedly” because, to be perfectly frank, I think this incident is actually the work of our mad science advisor, Mitchington V. S. Macaphee III, M.S.D., C.M.F.  (For the curious, his honorifics are short for Doctor of Mad Science, conferred by the University of Berzerkistan, and Crazy Mother Fucker … not so much a degree as a description.) Mitch got the interplanetary exploration bug this past summer with the recent Mars probe (which he almost immediately hacked into for his own nefarious purposes). But Mars wasn’t big enough for him. Eventually he turned his attention to the king Kahoona of planets …. (wait for it!) … Jupiter.

Okay, so here’s how our household works. Those of us who are not involved in the hard sciences share the upper levels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (I myself occupy a suite just outside the old forge room, basically a storage bay where they kept the hammer handles. I sleep on hammer handles, is what I’m saying.) Down in the basement, next to our makeshift production studio, Mitch Macaphee maintains a mad science lab where he builds, I don’t know, little projects like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), time travel devices, and … crucially… interstellar space vehicles.

You have to understand the fevered mind of the mad scientist. Jupiter has a red spot, right? Mitch sees that as a challenge. Can he make a blue spot? How hard would it be? Would they call it the Great Macaphee Spot if he succeeded?

What happened next should be kind of obvious. I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask me, but sometime last week there was a loud, rocket-like sound in the early morning hours, and the next thing I know, Jupiter has two spots instead of one. Or so Mitch tells me, anyway. Sheesh. I’ve got an album to produce. And a podcast to finish. Don’t bother me with such trifles!