Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

One Long-ass road back from the Joyous lake

June 17, 2022 Joseph

Think we ought to go? Nah, maybe not. Though I don’t know. Maybe we CAN go. But we probably shouldn’t. And anyway, who the hell is going to pay? Not me, man. Unless they take bottle caps. With the bottles still attached.

Hello, blog friends. It may seem like you’ve caught us in another serious controversy, but that’s not the case. We’re just sitting here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and shooting the breeze about this thing we should have done, this thing we shouldn’t, and so on. Kind of amazing that we all get along with each other so well after spending so many years with these dumb, lousy-ass fuckers. There’s a lot of love here.

Who caught the Katy?

What are we sparring about? Well, I’m gonna tell you. I was browsing the internets, clicking through the facebooks, and I saw an ad for Taj Mahal’s upcoming tour. No, I’m not talking about the ornate monument in Agra. I’m talking about the blues singer, Taj Mahal, who I started listening to as a wee lad of twenty-one, thanks to my dear friend Ellen Everett.

In our earliest incarnations of the band that came to be called Big Green, we played a few Taj covers and I always liked the dude. (We even included one of this songs on our 1986 demo, posted here.) When I saw that he’s planning to play Woodstock (Levon Helm studios), it reminded me of the time, back in the 80s, when a group of us humped our way down to Woodstock to hear him perform at a famous now-defunct club called the Joyous Lake.

Lost weekend … or weekdays

I can’t remember what year it was – maybe 1984? My illustrious brother Matt, our guitarist then, the late Tim Walsh, Phil Ross, our drummer, and I piled into somebody’s car, drove to Woodstock, had a cheap cafe dinner, and trooped over to the Joyous Lake to buy tickets. As we were standing there, waiting for the tix, I turned around and saw the man himself, Taj Mahal, having an early dinner, gabbing with Rick Danko from The Band.

I remember him putting on a really good performance that night, mostly solo, playing an electric guitar, I think a drobo, and an upright piano. He kicked the shit out of Johnny Rivers’s Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu on that piano, as I recall. As an added bonus, the horn player Howard Johnson came up and accompanied Taj on a couple of songs, playing one on a tuba and the other on a piccolo. Taj also did a nice, quiet version of his arrangement for Johnny Too Bad.

Then what? I’ll tell you …

I don’t remember what happened next. We went home, we slept, we played, we slept …. rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this week, I see the ad for Taj’s gig in Woodstock, and I think, man, I should go. Only trouble is, it’s sold out at $100 a ticket for general seating. Good going, Taj! You can still pull them in.

Guess I’ll just have to suffice with another rendition of She Caught The Katy, or Fishin’ Blues, or Corrina. Where’s my non-existent dobro?

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Open the Door, Richard – It’s Mitch!

May 27, 2022 Joseph

I’ve seen that one before. That can be anything, for crying out loud. Just because a rock looks like bigfoot, doesn’t mean that there’s an actual bigfoot. And when you add Mars into the equation, all bets are off. Just call me when you find your missing clue.

Oh … hi, there. We’re just flipping through a few photographs. Typical suburban activity on a Thursday afternoon, am I right? Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that the residents of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill are as prone to random conspiracy theories as the general population. That said, conspiracy theories do have some purchase around the premises – even the ones that are easily debunked.

Vacation photos from the red planet

Take these rover images from Mars (please!). Everyone thinks they see something recognizable in the background. One object looks like a lawn ornament of some kind. Another looks like a still from that bigfoot video from way back. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is convinced that some Mars rock is his long-lost cousin Franklin. Never mind that he doesn’t have any cousins, Franklin looks nothing like that freaking space rock.

When I heard all this crap, I was about to launch into a diatribe about perception and how culturally situated all of these supposed sightings are. Easy mistake to make, right? If you’ve seen a lot of lawn ornaments in your time, then a rock that looks like a lawn ornament is going to ring a bell. Not sure how that explains the bigfoot sightings, unless some of my cohorts have been spending time amongst the local Susquatch population. (Not that such a thing exists …. or DOES it?)

Macaphee’s razor

Then there’s that shot that looks like a doorway on the surface of Mars. Immediately, people started speculating about what or who might live in there. Others suggested that it may be a Martian domicile that was recently abandoned, but I think that’s ludicrous. If something lived there and then decided to go on vacation to, say, Saturn – which is very lovely this time of year – mail would be stacked by the door at least a foot high. (That’s what’s called applying the scientific method.)

That rock looks a hell of a lot like Mitch.

It takes a scientist to bring speculation to a halt. The closest thing we have to that is Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, recently back from his conference in Buenos Aires. Turns out Mitch has a completely logical explanation for the phenomenon of the mysterious doorway on Mars. We showed him the picture, and he turned red as a beet. Apparently, that is the back door to his Martian redoubt – a spare lab on the red planet for when he really doesn’t want to be disturbed. Now that NASA knows where it is, of course, there goes the privacy.

Suggestion box

Right, so now Mitch needs a new redoubt. It needs to be 100% NASA-proof, so nothing on the inner planets. Maybe Uranus or Neptune. If you have any suggestions, please share them. You don’t want to be around Mitch when he’s out of sorts.

Usual Rubbish

Imitation is the sincerest form of larceny

May 20, 2022 Joseph

First, you solder the lead onto the post. Then you fire up the tube pre-amp. Once that’s glowing nicely, you crank up your guitar to 11 and turn the big, fat, plastic knob on the console until your ears pop. And that’s why they call it pop music.

Yes, hello, there, and welcome to another post. I am your postmaster general, Big Green Joe, stranded here in the decaying abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York. We’re here just trying to make a little music the old-fashioned way. What do I mean by old fashioned? I mean in the way of the old masters. And no, I don’t mean Da Vinci or Rembrandt. I mean the bands of the 1960s, when all recording was linear and destructive.

More money, more excuses

I don’t want to suggest that money doesn’t help a recording project succeed. The thing is, when you’re broke and living in an abandoned mill, you typically can’t afford much in the way of gear. So if we’re planning on doing another album, we need to improvise. Sure, we could just record it on a computer, like most kids do these days. But where’s the challenge in that? What good is getting a good sound when all you did was activate a plug-in? I want REAL tubes, damn it, and all the noise you can muster.

Old gear may be, well … old, but that doesn’t mean it’s not expensive. Indeed, some of that stuff is in high demand. Well … we can’t afford any of that shit. Fortunately, there’s a lot of old electrical gear lying around the hammer mill that hasn’t been used in decades. We’re talking toggle switches, radial knobs, terminals, chassis, and the like. Most of it was related to the assembly line for the hammers, of course. But if you patch stuff together, who’s to say what you might end up with. A machine that might (dare I say it?) control the world? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!

Lessons learned in short order

Hey, wasn't there a dumpster out here somewhere?

Okay, so that’s how we were thinking on Tuesday. By Thursday, we thought better of it. That was mainly because we ran out of fingers to singe. Damn it, Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) always made this stuff look so easy, but it turns out that there’s a trick to this invention routine. When he built Marvin (my personal robot assistant), for instance, he just used whatever was handy at the time. Where is he when you need him? At a conference, of course, in freaking Buenos Aires.

What were we able to build with all that junk? A pile of slightly more consolidated junk, that’s what. I’m not exactly the Liberty Valance of soldering guns, after all. The fact is, I never quite got the hang of it, despite my father’s best efforts at teaching my sorry ass. Suffice to say that the “machine” we built will not capture audio in any form. And the only audio it will ever emit will be the deathly moan that it will emit when the garbage collectors haul it away. (Strange hobby, garbage collecting. Can’t imagine why those folks ever took it up.)

Next stop: Debtsville

Leave us face it – the only way we’re going to make another album is by speculating, particularly if we hope to imitate the old masters. Yes, that leaves us open to investment scams and Ponzi schemes. But it’s that or start renting out the mill to vacationers, like Dr. Smith did with the Jupiter 2 when he renamed it “Happy Acres.” What could possibly go wrong?

BIG GREEN