Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

Hold on.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Turn the key and …. nuts! Nothing again. Hey, Mitch – you’re a mad scientist. Make yourself useful. Get this freaking car to run, willya?

Oh, hi. Just working through the usual nonsense. Trying to get a car going. Working on a broken amp. Turning all the chairs in the house upside-down. (We do that to discourage visitors from staying too long.) There’s never a lack of useful things to do, and lucky for us we have a lot of help. Mitch Macaphee, for one, can be counted upon to invent some new way of dealing with minor annoyances, like invasive insects or gravity. Ooops, did I say gravity? I wasn’t supposed to mention that one. It’s going to be a surprise. A BIG surprise. HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA!

Well, THAT took a dark turn. Anyway, aside from Mitch tinkering with … uh … continental drift, we have the able services of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who can, among many other talents, life very heavy things. He picked up a whole desk set the other day … one of those three-pen jobs, all by himself! Tomorrow I’m going to have him replace the Kleenex in all of the dispensers distributed throughout the hammer mill. Yeoman work, to be sure. (I would do it myself, but I am not a Yeoman.)

Uh, Mitch ... Gravity again?I suppose you’re wondering where your podcast is. Well, I was getting to that. THIS IS BIG GREEN has been coming together slowly. We did the voices for the next episode of Ned Trek last week, then we’ll need to do some editing and dubbing, etc. We’re probably looking at another couple of weeks, during which time I will frantically try to dig up some not-too-uninteresting material from our archives. There will likely be a few more Wayback Wednesdays on tap, so stay tuned.

I am sure some of you have already said, “Y’know, if you didn’t waste so much freaking time doing useless shit, you’d have finished the podcast by now.” My response is a simple one: “Freaking” is not a word. It’s a cop-out, my friend. Say what you mean and mean what you say. That’s our motto ’round the mill. Call it a mill motto. Call it anything. I’m getting back to that dumb-ass car.

Usual Rubbish

Old continent, new name.

A little higher. Little more. That’s it. Right, now … slowly lower the winch. That’s got it. Okay, a little too fast. Too fast. I said TOO FAST! Oh, Jesus. Right … order another banner. No wonder I never get anything done.

Oh, hello. Forgive me if I always seem surprised when you come along. I’m inclined to forget about the blogging version of the “fourth wall” and the fact that others can see what the hell I’m doing (or not doing). Today you’ve caught me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in the midst of constructing Big Green’s new YouTube Channel, hot off the presses. You see, for the longest time we’ve been pointing our listeners/readers/browsers, whatever, to my personal YouTube channel, which has over the last few years become choked with political content, obscure linguistics and philosophy of mind lectures, comedic bullshit, and so on. It finally dawned on my dim little brain that the band needed its own space for video content, and hey presto – a summer project was born.

Why not, indeed?

The timing of our YouTube launch is not entirely an accident. As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been trawling through old tapes, discs, etc., listening to and watching recordings of performances from our terrestrial live performance days back in the 1990s. Over the past few weeks, I cut up a video demo we recorded back in March of 1993 with the guitarist we worked with at that time, the amazing Jeremy Shaw. The video is standard def, 4:3, and a little strange. We taped these performances in a practice room somewhere in Utica – as I recall it was a loft-like space within a couple of blocks of the Police Department headquarters. (Could explain why we look so polite.)

There are some cheesy visual effects inserted at the time of the recording – basically presets in the camera our videographer was using. (The videographer was a dude named Angel whom we met through a mutual friend.) They add a certain trippyness to the whole business, but no matter. Hilariously, the rehearsal space was a typical rock band man-cave environment circa 1993, with cheesecake posters on the walls and overstuffed ashtrays. (Just behind my illustrious brother you’ll notice the incongruous sight of some babe posing for the camera.)

Usual Rubbish

Shipkeeping.

That one? Sure, why not? It’s been a few weeks. And I guess you could say that 25 years is a few weeks … because, well … it is.

For whatever reason this week, I am reminded of one of Matt’s songs from yesteryear, a number called “Don’t Give Up The Ship”. It’s probably because the Cheney Hammer Mill is leaking like a sieve, but that’s nothing new. Or maybe it’s because we’ve finished mixing the podcast songs (all eight of them!) and I’m starting to trawl through our old tapes for lack of anything better to do. Just call me Riley. The guy with the life.

As I’ve said here before, we’ve got a million of ’em (songs, that is), but unlike the late Prince, they are not all exquisitely recorded and salted away in a vault. No, friends … they are poorly recorded on 4-track cassette, mostly, and chucked into the cramped, musty vault called my skull. “Don’t Give Up The Ship” is a Quixotic riff centered on Perry’s flag, and it’s always had a lot of resonance with me, frankly. Here’s a sample of the lyric:

Well it grieves me when I see you
On some moldy homemade raft
You’ve no life jacket, there’s not precautions
You’re spinning downstream and you’re laughing

Well I’m not about to stop you
I’ve not the will and I’ve not the means
Still I stand here like I’m waiting
A world without you I’ve never seen
You say, “Read it off the flag …”

Don’t give up the ship, says the flag that
flies above the turbulent waves
Don’t give up the ship, be a fool and
hold the course away from the shore

Ahoy.We’ve got a lot of back pages, and a lot of archival recordings from our various periods. I’m not talking about the Precambrian here – well, not exactly. More like the 1980s, 1990s. Our earliest incarnation of the band that became Big Green was probably 1979, about a year after I took up bass as an instrument. We’ve got studio recordings from 1981, ’82, and ’91 or so. I’ve got live recordings from 1993, mostly (Matt may have some earlier material squirreled away somewhere), most of which are pretty rough.

I also stumbled upon a video that was shot by the friend of a friend. It’s essentially a demo, kind of a videotaped rehearsal. I digitized it this past week and will set about cutting it up and posting some excerpts. It’s a pretty good representation of where we were musically around the time we were playing with the very fine guitarist Jeremy Shaw, who now works his butt off all over the country.

BTW – We dropped an advance mix of one of our podcast songs, “Romney and You Know It“, last week on Soundcloud. Check it out. (Look for the podcast episode this coming week.)