Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

Late to the party.

2000 Years to Christmas

Here comes another one, hot off the presses. Just in time for the presidential election. Wait, what? When did that happen? Five months ago? I’ll be damned.

Oh, hey there. Just plying our usual trade here in Big Green land. (For those of you listening to an audio version of this blog, I don’t mean Greenland’s big sister; I mean the land of Big Green, the indie rock combo from space. Or from time. From somewhere not here and now, suffice to say.)

I’m guessing more than a few of you think we just while away the hours, conversing with the flowers here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where flowers grow up through the cracks in the shop floor. Well, I hate to disillusion any of our legions of followers, but we are far more industrious than that, my friends – far more. (Someone on the internet once claimed we were the laziest band in music. I almost fell out of my string hammock when I heard that one.)

Long-time listeners know that Big Green’s most recent material is mostly topical, ripped-from-the-headlines kind of stuff. And when I say “headlines”, I don’t mean today’s paper. More like last month’s paper … or last year’s. You see, the thing is, whatever the political situation may be at any given time, when things go septic, we start writing songs about it.

That’s the genesis of our second album, International House, which was basically our document on the Bush II administration. Then there was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which was made up of songs about the life and times of 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry, our honorary cousin. Since then, we’ve written and recorded scores of songs for our podcast feature Ned Trek, many of which were about right-wing politicians in general and Trump in particular.

Huh. I guess it's time to release our song about that awesome blimp.

Okay, so you get the topical part. Now here’s the rest of the story – we’re always freaking late to the party. We released International House in the waning days of the Bush Administration – like, the last couple of months. And when did we release Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? In 2013, a year after Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race! So in keeping with our long tradition of being far, far behind the curve, we are just now in the process of pulling together some songs from our Ned Trek collection, including a number that focus on Trump, months after the fucker left office. As Mr. Ned himself would say, “What the hell!”

In any case, we’ll keep you posted on any new releases from Big Green over the next year or so. In the meantime, we’re looking at posting International House on our YouTube channel, as that’s the only one of our albums that is not available on the YT. Look for the latest on our Twitter feed or our Facebook page. (There, Marvin – I’ve name checked all of our social media properties. Are you happy now?)

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?