Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Six or seven. (Eight?)

Jesus Christ on a bike. I told you this hard drive was full. And now there’s smoke emanating from the processor. Can’t understand it. It’s a 486, isn’t it? Sure, hot damn. Fast as one of those new-fangled horseless carriages.

Oh, hello. Just grappling with some minor technical difficulties. You know, little stuff like gear that was obsolete in the last century, now over-burdened with production content, bowing deeply under the weight of yet another project, bursting at the seams. Just the kind of thing we’re likely to run into here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted squat house. Things can always be worse. We could have opted to do something else with this space, like start a church or something, but that doesn’t always turn out that well. (See Word of Life Church, Chadwicks, NY … up the road a piece.) Music it is.

Sure, I know … it’s been three years since the release of our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And while we haven’t completed a new album, we have recorded the equivalent of about three albums worth of new material over these last few years. It’s all stuff cut into our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so you may have heard it (or not). Bunch of songs, some of them sung by a pantomime horse. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that? So there’s little doubt in my mind that at some point we will package some or all of Eight songs? Really??these into an album of sorts and toss it out on the street for passers-by to happen upon and drop into their MP3 players.

Now you may ask, what kind of an economic model is that? Well, friends – we are a creative collective, built on an anarcho-syndicalist theoretical foundation, but with neo-socialist flavor notes that put us more into the worker-owned enterprise category. At least that’s how I describe it while hopping around on one foot. (I do that when someone is shooting at me for talking like a goddamn commie. This IS upstate New York, after all.) We’re giving a whole new meaning to “dance band”: We hit the first chord, and Yosemite Sam pulls his six-gun out and shouts “Dance, varmint!”

So, yes … we will assemble a new album by and by, assuming I can find a big enough technological bucket to carry it around in. Stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Magnetists.

Right, so there ARE gravitational waves after all, disturbing the peace of the space-time continuum. Uh … I knew that. No news to me. Next question?

See, here’s the advantage of having a mad science adviser. (Every band should have at least one. Wilco, I believe, retains an entire gaggle of them.) Just casual hallway conversations yield amazing benefits. Turns out there are planets with negative gravity. True story. In fact, our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee claims that he was born on one. The negative gravity of his home planet was so strong that it immediately shot him like a cannon ball straight to Earth. Fortunately, he was wearing a heat shield poncho at the time (his first invention, innovated straight out of his mother’s womb).

Mitch has an idea about how to manipulate gravity waves for casual amusement – kind of like playing with a galactic yo-yo. Only now he’s back in one of his funks, with the announcement of the gravity wave discovery by prominent physicists. “Everybody’s going to want a piece of this!” Mitch shouted upon receiving the news, and stormed off to his quarters. He’s been brooding ever since. Hard to keep a man like that happy. We gave him the best quarters available in this abandoned hammer mill, and at considerable personal sacrifice. (I myself have been forced to make do with dimes.)

That's some yo-yo, Mitch.Not much we can do except continue working on our music. Yes, music comes first around here – ask anybody. We’re currently producing a few more songs for the podcast, a couple of which may make it on to a collection at some point. It’s kind of the same process we’ve been going through for the past few years – write and track about a half dozen songs, throw them up onto the Web, then do it again. That’s how Cowboy Scat got done, for better or for worse. That’s likely how the next album will go, though at some point we’re going to knuckle down and record some of our older songs (at least one album of those), preferably before we punch our one-way ticket to geezerville.

Hold on … I think my applesauce may be warm enough to gum.

Usual Rubbish

Inside October.

The morning came up like thunder today. That was something. It poured so hard it felt like it was raining in my bedroom. Which, in fact, it was – the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill roof has some issues, as you’ve probably heard. Hey – over a century old, abandoned by its owners, neglected for decades … you’d have a leaky roof too.

So I’m sitting here at my superannuated mixing console, laptop open and running, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) holding an umbrella over me as I type. What better time is there to give a rundown of the recently posted October installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast. Here’s what’s on deck for October:

Ned Trek 25: Not the Children One, Please! – Based on the original Star Trek episode, “And the Children Shall Lead” (one of the most annoying episodes ever), the Ned Trek version features the current crop of demon spawn circling the drain that is the modern presidency. Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz appear as the children, all poorly impersonated along with the voices of their fathers, Ron, George, and … uh … Ted’s dad, respectively. The evil angel ringleader is played by Judge Robert Bork. Lots of singing, chanting, dancing, and fist pumping. You know … kid stuff.

Song: Johnny Got His Gun – A selection from our 2008 album International House. We included this one as a nod to the Oregon shooting. Our version of Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, in a sense, written around a subject that seemingly never goes away.

Put The Phone Down – Matt and I wheel through a variety of topics, from a discussion of the ridiculousness of the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, to one about my brief childhood excursion through the Catholic religious instruction process (a.k.a. Voyage to the Bottom of the Holy See), to random talk about Matt’s primitive diet and the ongoing atrocities in Syria. Basically, our mouths move and sound comes out – that’s all I know.

That's great, Marvin. Thanks.Song: It Should’ve Been Me – The closer on our 2013 album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Something in the way of a tribute to cousin Rick Perry, who ended his 2016 presidential bid this past month. (NOW what will we do?)

Song: Enter The Mind – Another selection from International House, this one about enhanced interrogations and the mindset that promotes them.

Song: Why Not Call It George – This is an unreleased recording of a song Matt wrote decades ago, recorded on 4-track cassette, I believe, with Johnny White on drums and a positively volcanic guitar solo by the amazing Jeremy Shaw, who played with us in the early 1990s. One of Matt’s songs about geoscience (I think there were others) and plate tectonics, with a dash of mad science. It’s a particular favorite of our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee, who would name a reconstituted Pangea “Mitch,” I suspect.