Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?

Usual Rubbish

Ripping yarns.

Glad we got that sorted out. Another rogue operation shut down. Try to behave yourself from now on, Marvin. Marvin? MARVIN!!!

Nice Romney dupe, dude!Right, well…. lots to keep track of. I know it may look easy, being a member of the virtual rock band Big Green, but there’s more to this than meets the eyes (or ears, for that matter).  Plenty of demands on our time; enough tasks to fill this drafty old abandoned hammer mill to the rafters, quite frankly. Sure, I know – we haven’t gone on tour in a couple of years. No impromptu trips to Neptune, for instance, to take in the annual Methane Fest or perform at one of our favorite hyper-gravity venues (The Flathouse is particularly memorable, for me at least). But there’s more to being a band than performing, you know. Much more.

I have described in previous posts our grueling production schedule for our upcoming collection, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A full album of 15 to 20 new songs in about a year’s time – that’s greased lightning in our world, my friends. Sure, I know – these are songs culled from a musical about the life, times, and presidential ambitions of our cousin Rick Perry, governor of the great state of Texas, and as such each number will be performed by a different musical ensemble (all of whom strangely resemble us). But it’s a big project nonetheless. Hands full, over here … hands full!

Then there’s our monthly podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, an extravaganza of useless gibberish, lovingly packaged and delivered to our listeners via iTunes. Each episode includes previously unreleased music as well as another installment of our continuing series, Ned Trek – the bizarre outer-space adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his First Officer/Dressage Horse Mr. Ned, on board the Starship Free Enterprise. Last month, this most derivative crew of space adventurers visited the surface of Ozark 5, an outpost run by Gov. Louie Gomert, thereby initiating a series of unfortunate events that resulted in a titanic struggle, mano a mano, between Captain Romney and a giant ear of corn. Gripping drama.

So, sure … we’re occupied. It just looks like we’re a bunch of lazy lunks squatting in an abandoned mill.

Usual Rubbish

Advance!

You did what to the whom? When was that again? Christ on a bike – I thought you agreed to stop running these freaking rogue operations out of the basement. What’s that? You ran it out of the attic? That’s not the point!

You did what, now?Ah, hello. Just caught me in the midst of yet another dressing down of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who, apparently, has some kind of crackpot entrepreneurial streak wired into him. (I need to talk to his inventor, the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, about this.) Every time I turn around … and I mean every time, like, if I were to turn around right now it would happen … he’s got some new racket going. It’s like living with an audio-animatronic P.T. Barnum. Only with slightly less calliope music.

What’s the latest? Well, Marvin has been taking advance orders on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, a collection of Norwegian carpenter songs … I mean, songs from a now-lost rock opera about the trials and tribulations of our cousin Rick Perry, Governor of Texas … an album which is now in post production and almost ready to rumble. (I understand the musical itself was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe … rumor has it, anyway.) Even before we’ve pressed the first MP3 in that painstaking way we do (note: we use a panini press to squeeze all the goodness into every compressed file), Marvin has rifled money out of our market with the promise of delivery later this year.

I see a couple of problems here. First, Marvin has only been taking orders from extraterrestrials. That raises some ethical questions, of course, but also pragmatic ones. For instance, how do we deliver on orders from Aldebaran Seven, placed by etheric entities only Marvin can see with his advanced optical scanners? Even more importantly, how do we bank “money” that is in the form of microwave transmissions from a distant galaxy. I think those are generally considered non negotiable currency here in the U.S. of A. Not on Aldebaran Seven, however.

Bottom line: We’re going to have a legion of hopping-mad Aldeberans after our sorry asses when we fail to fulfill these orders. Bloody robot! Second time this month!