Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

Getting all the flashing lights straight

2000 Years to Christmas

There, that’s got it. Perfect execution. Couldn’t do another one like that if I tried. Okay, Marvin, you can hit the stop button. Wait, what? YOU DIDN’T HIT RECORD?

Hi, everybody. While this seems like the very next moment in my blog post, it’s actually several hours after wrote that intro. It takes me that long to disassemble Marvin (my personal robot assistant) piece by piece and then put him back together. And as I am not particularly mechanically inclined, I usually get something wrong on the assembly side. (Last week I somehow incorporated our toaster into his torso unit.)

Okay, so those of you who are musicians (and I know there are a few of you out there) can appreciate what we’re going through these days. Performance venues are flagging, people are afraid of going out, money is scarce – situation normal, right? Our response to this crisis is exactly what you would expect from Big Green – we pull the shades down and get back into bed. Then, first thing the next morning, we sleep until noon. Then, THEN, we go down and look for snacks. That’s how we roll.

We’ll do it live!

I was the first to suggest that we start recording live performances right here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. My bandmates met that suggestion with a resounding silence. Anti Lincoln thought it was a good idea, but he was drunk on the news that his positive-polarity counterpart had been named #1 President of all time once again by the C-SPAN Historian poll. (How that would be a positive reflection on him is another question.)

Well, when it came time to record some live takes, uh … I was the only one who showed up. Now, maybe I forgot to distribute the memo. And maybe I forgot to write the memo. And maybe it never occurred to me to send a memo around in the first place. But for whatever reason, it became clear to me that I would be the only one doing this shit. Just me and my tape opp Marvin.

Choosy mothers

Of course, the question always comes down to which songs I should try to do. It’s actually and easier question than you might think. Since I am equally unpracticed on all of our songs, it really doesn’t matter what the playlist turns out to be. So I pulled some from International House, one or two from Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and a handful of numbers we haven’t included on any of our albums.

Next step, I put the songs in a blender and ran it on Frappe for 45 seconds. That gave them a smooth consistency they never had before, frankly …. maybe a bit too smooth. So I poured that bilge down the drain and limped back into the studio, guitar in hand, looking for trouble. Then trouble found me.

Uh, Marvin ... shouldn't you be minding the board?

Know-how? No how!

Now, as some of you know, I attempt to play many instruments. When I say many, I really just mean three – piano, bass, guitar. I am probably most technically inept at the guitar, so naturally, I chose to record most of my live numbers on six string, without accompaniment.

Why? It’s the challenge, my friend. We cannot make things too easy on ourselves. How far would mankind have gotten if we had taken that attitude. Do you think for one moment that we would be anywhere near the brink of total destruction if we had chosen to be content with the way things are? Not a chance.

Anyway, my lame attempts at covering our own damn songs should be dropping sometime soon. Stay tuned.

Usual Rubbish

Passing the hat on the internets

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, let me play a few more notes. Yes, I will choose them carefully. Here we go. All right, that’s got it. Did the donation meter move up at all? No? Mother of pearl.

Hey, out there. Another week in the life of Big Green, possibly the most obscure rock band in the history of the genre. I’m always looking for superlatives when I write about this group, and frankly that’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe, just maybe the Chefs of the Future (friends of ours) approach our level of obscurity, but I doubt it. (After all, if I’ve heard of them, how obscure could they be?)

I don’t need to remind you about how hard it is to keep the lights on around here. Important historical context: the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house, was originally a gaslit factory, later wired for electric lights. Those lights feed on electricity from our local utility, which we … ahem …. borrow from the corner telephone poll (for crying out loud, don’t tell anybody!). Of course, they keep cutting our line, so yeah, it’s hard to keep the damn lights on. And, uh …. what was I talking about?

Return to cyber busking

Oh, yeah. Generating income. Well, as I began to describe in last week’s column, we have been turning dustbins upside-down in this place looking for material to build a show out of. Not that we’re likely to venture into local clubs or auditoriums any time soon, but the virtual space is another question. Lord knows plenty of musicians are out there framming away – why the hell not us, right?

Hence we have opened the door on cyber busking once again. I know, I know, we had a lot of problems last time, not least of which Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his shaky camera hand. Then there were the copyright strikes – damned intellectual property! YOU CALL YOURSELF AN INTELLECTUAL? HOW … DARE … YOU?

Another Big Green original

Well, fortunately, we have a lot of original material. I mean, a boatload of the stuff. Sure, it’s a boat from some unknown country where music is completely weird and unfamiliar to American ears, but that’s okay. We can fill whole nights with our own tunes, honest. I’m sitting on a stack of original songs right now. The sharps are kind of pointy, frankly. (When it comes to converting music to furniture, I prefer the flat keys.)

Okay, so you may ask (and well you may), why haven’t you done so? Why haven’t we pulled out our western guitars (or space guitars, for that matter) and started twanging on Facebook, like all of our singer-songwriter pals? Good question. I think the main reason is that it takes us nine years to do the simplest thing. We have whole albums worth of material recorded, for instance, and we can’t seem to knit those recordings into actual albums. I’ve got a stack of magazines chin high in the kitchen, and …. well …. they’ve needed to be thrown out for about five years. (Four more to go.)

Well, damn it, this time we’re determined. And we’ll flag you when we’re ready to go live. Make some tea and sit tight – we’ll be right with you.

Usual Rubbish

Old home week arrives at the hammer mill.

2 Comments
2000 Years to Christmas

Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell!

Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill.

Reaching back dimly

Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The sky was darkened by flocks of pterodactyls. And I was groping around the ancient city of Albany, looking for a steady gig so that I could keep the light bulb burning (the one dangling from the hairy cord just below the ceiling).

There were a bunch of clubs around Albany back in the 80s, and when I got there in January of 1981, they were all hurting. New York had just raised the drinking age to 21 that very month, which meant most of the college students who crowded into bars on the weekend were now prohibited from doing so. In other words, the perfect time to start gigging in the Capital District.

It's old home week!

Friend of a friend of a friend

The only band I played with in Albany back in 1980-81 was the pre-Big Green group I started with my brother Matt, my SUNY New Paltz drummer friend Phil, and our guitarist friend Tim Walsh, who died some years back. After failing miserably, I went back to Albany in 1984 to play with a commercial club band. Let’s call that group PROMISE MARGARINE, or PROMISE for short.

A couple of years later, the drummer from PROMISE got his bandleader to hire me for another commercial gig in a band I’ll call CANDYASS. The keyboard player in that band was Big Green co-founder Ned Danison (I was playing bass). We started working on songs, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening, Big Green emerged from the pastel colored ether of the eighties club scene around Albany, NY.

Love-in spoonful

As it happens, I heard from Ned this past week, and he shared a relatively recent song of his that sounds more than a bit like Big Green. It’s called Houston, We Have A Love-In. Give it a listen and shake your fist at us for being so damn awesome.

You can also hear our four-song Big Green demo, featuring Ned, on this very web site here.