Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Genericville.

Do we have 1.5 children? Only if you double-count the man-sized tuber. Let’s ask anti-Lincoln to do the counting – ever since the war, he sees everything twice.

Stupid comet!Oh, hello. Just working up our census form. Don’t mind me. Didn’t know there was going to be a 2014 census, but I guess that’s understandable, since we don’t get a lot of news flowing into the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squathouse. Just yesterday some dude in a Fedora knocked on the front gate and handed me a questionnaire. He said I had to finish it by Saturday or his friend might set the mill on fire. (I think the friend’s name was Giancarlo.) How old is Mitch Macaphee? No … I mean before the youth serum?

Questions, questions. Way too much on Big Green’s plate lately, I can tell you. We’ve got the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast, of course – always time-consuming. Our next episode of Ned Trek, for instance, will feature as many as 6 or 7 new songs, never before heard (and probably never again), all apropos of the ridiculous story line. This is part of the biggest crop of new material to come out of Big Green in, I don’t know, twenty years or so. Over the past year or so, we’ve written and began recording something like 30 new songs; that’s since we finished Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick last year.

Then there’s the pressure to get out and play in front of an audience, for chrissake. We considered doing a gig or two on Mars this month, but given the fact that the red planet is going to be buzzed by comet Siding Spring this weekend, we thought better of it. We have had run-ins with comets before; can’t say that we ever got the better of those confrontations. Chilly little hunks of ice, those comets. No pity. Who can blame them? They’re billions of years old, and only get a little sun once every million years or so, then it’s back to the Ort cloud. But I digress.

Hmmm…. Should I account for multiple personalities on this census form? Yes, I’m back on anti-Lincoln again (and his alter ego, anti-Edgar Allan Poe).

Usual Rubbish

Inside October.

I think time may be stretching, or rather, elongating. I don’t know the correct term – get a physicist on the phone. Or call our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee – he may have the answer. All I know is that July turned into August, September turned into October, and so on. I can feel the holidays crawling up my ass.

How did I end up on this crapfest?In any case, you may have noticed that the October installment of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast has been posted, sent out to ipods and other devices, RSS’ed around the globe, and played on somebody’s smartphone somewhere. Better late than never, I always say … but then, I am one of the people producing the podcast, so from another perspective, late may not be better than never. Be that as it may, here is a look under the hood of this latest audio crapfest:

Ned Trek 20: The Shamesters of Quadzillion. In this, the lastest episode of our ongoing bizarre-ass Star Trek parody, Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his senior officers are captured and held prisoner on the planet Quadzillion, where they are compelled by the resident oligarchs to compete in the political media arena with other mindless also-rans. Guest stars include Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Chief Justice John Roberts, Sheldon Adelson, Charles Koch, and Foster Friess. (Classic Star Trek fan reference: Gamesters of Triskelion)

Song: The Bishop. This is a selection from our 2008 album International House. Matt wrote, arranged, and I believe even mixed this track. A mostly acoustic number with some nice-ish choral parts.

Put the Phone Down. Our conversation this month has a number of minor themes, probably the most prominent of which is a virtual visit from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is apparently hawking his new book so broadly it even got onto our lousy podcast. Matt excoriates me for my technical ineptitude, then talks about his encounter with Egbert Bagg. Kissinger joins us for a song.

Song: North Camp Pasture. One of my songs from our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. This one is about Rick’s hunting camp, which used to bear a remarkably offensive racist name before that became politically inconvenient for the ambitious Rick and his kin. More broadly about the legacy of racism, Jim Crow, in modern American life.

Usual Rubbish

Crackpot diary.

Twelfth day before the mast. I see a ship on the horizon. The Dutchman? Nay. ‘Tis nothing but a garbage scow. Or perhaps a pleasure craft that’s lost it’s way. Avast.

That sounds odd.Oh, hello, there. I was just engaging in a little imagineering, to borrow a term. It gets kind of quiet around this big old barn of a hammer mill, so you have to think of other things and more exotic places. I am certainly not alone in that. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) went on a flight of fancy this past week. I think he imagined himself a paper shredder in a busy office. Hard to tell, really, except that he kept muttering “stapling machine” to himself, as if he were talking to a neighbor. Then he would make this grinding noise, and confetti would blast out the equivalent of his blowhole. Not my choice of fantasy, but hey … whatever floats it, right?

I’ve taken a few moments between sessions to scroll back through some of the music we’ve made over the last year or so, under the name of Big Green but in support of the Ned Trek program segment of This Is Big Green. In the aggregate, it definitely constitutes a crackpot diary of sorts, kind of like Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, only even more bizarre, in a way. I think it’s the horse voice, and the fact that all of Mr. Ned’s songs have a kind of dressage horse dance meter to them. Then there’s those forties guys. Not sure what to make of them.

Is there an album in this? Glad you asked. I wouldn’t rule it out, but that goes into the project hopper alongside our long-planned “resurrection of songs past” album. We’re halfway between recording systems right now, still using our distressed old Roland VS2480 system with enhancements; hopefully moving to a standard open Mac-based system, perhaps Cubase. Whatever we can get to work for us. We’re semi-primitive, you know, so we have to try things for a while before we make a change.

More on that later. I’ve got to listen to some of those crackpot songs again and see if maybe there’s grounds for having one or more of us committed. They don’t do that so much anymore? Right. Just as well.