Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

There is a town.

Well it’s been a while. Time to open up the old mailbag, right? Right, then, right!

Here’s a little missive from alert listener Ozymandius Lake in southern Nevada, somewhere near the Arizona border. (“No fixed address” is a strange name for a street, but anyway…)

Dear ignorant buggers,

It is manifestly obvious to me, Ozymandius Lake, that you people are a bunch of frauds. Stinking, lousy frauds! I may have no fixed address, but that doesn’t mean I’m gullible. You don’t live in the Cheney Hammer Mill! That place was knocked down decades ago. And even if it hadn’t been, it was hardly large enough to accommodate everything that you claim happens there. And that Rick Perry album you’re producing – there ain’t no such thing. I’ve been living in these bottoms for nigh onto twenty years, and I ain’t never seen no Rick Perry album.

Yours respectfully,

O.L.

Well, Ozymandius – taking your last comment first – I would have to say, “look upon my works and despair”, because there is indeed a Rick Perry album on the way, Big Green is indeed producing it, and it is called Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. If you received our podcast out there in Nevada (I think we have a repeater in Reno), you would know that’s true. As for the mill, if it doesn’t exist, I’ve been sleeping in the street for the last ten years. Could explain a lot. I’ll look into it. Thanks, Oz!

Here’s another one, this from Polly (Esther) Batson in Paolo Alto, California…

Dear Big Green,

You haven’t said anything about Big Zamboola in months. Did he return to his home solar system, or is he just lurking quietly in the the cloistered basement of the mill, keeping his titanic gravitational forces to himself?

Best,

Polly

Thanks for the letter, Polly. Didn’t know people wrote letters anymore in this age of Twitter, Facebook, blah blah blah. Anywho, no worries about Big Zamboola. He has kept quiet, true, over the past year or so, mainly because he shares with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, that transcendental quality of being an gaseous entity of no determinate shape or density. Sometimes he just pops up out of nowhere, like a jack in the box. Zamboola in the box, we call him.

Okay, back to the non-existent studio with me to work on that non-existent album. If only I had known of its insubstantial nature before I started working on it!

 

Usual Rubbish

Jupiter rising.

Great red what? Jesus christmas, I don’t have time for that. I’m trying to stay focused on the Mars mission. Then there’s Voyager, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system already… whoops. Someone’s reading this. Look busy!

Hi, friend(s). You may wonder what I’m rambling about. Though probably not, if you’ve visited this blog before. We run on and on about pretty much anything that flows into our heads. Hell, I was looking at a pizza menu the other day that featured deep-fried Oreos. But does anyone want to hear about it? God no. So we’re going to talk about something more interesting today …. like Jupiter. (The planet, not the derivative Roman god.)

The other day some massive asteroid supposedly hit Jupiter. I say “supposedly” because, to be perfectly frank, I think this incident is actually the work of our mad science advisor, Mitchington V. S. Macaphee III, M.S.D., C.M.F.  (For the curious, his honorifics are short for Doctor of Mad Science, conferred by the University of Berzerkistan, and Crazy Mother Fucker … not so much a degree as a description.) Mitch got the interplanetary exploration bug this past summer with the recent Mars probe (which he almost immediately hacked into for his own nefarious purposes). But Mars wasn’t big enough for him. Eventually he turned his attention to the king Kahoona of planets …. (wait for it!) … Jupiter.

Okay, so here’s how our household works. Those of us who are not involved in the hard sciences share the upper levels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (I myself occupy a suite just outside the old forge room, basically a storage bay where they kept the hammer handles. I sleep on hammer handles, is what I’m saying.) Down in the basement, next to our makeshift production studio, Mitch Macaphee maintains a mad science lab where he builds, I don’t know, little projects like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), time travel devices, and … crucially… interstellar space vehicles.

You have to understand the fevered mind of the mad scientist. Jupiter has a red spot, right? Mitch sees that as a challenge. Can he make a blue spot? How hard would it be? Would they call it the Great Macaphee Spot if he succeeded?

What happened next should be kind of obvious. I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask me, but sometime last week there was a loud, rocket-like sound in the early morning hours, and the next thing I know, Jupiter has two spots instead of one. Or so Mitch tells me, anyway. Sheesh. I’ve got an album to produce. And a podcast to finish. Don’t bother me with such trifles!

Usual Rubbish

Process, process.

Smallest town in the biggest state. Father Joseph, what would be my fate? So starts this month’s anthem of the Hammer Mill. Can’t get that tune out of my head, man!

This writing finds us chin deep in production for our next album. Imagine Matt and me in a roomful of 1-inch Ampex tape, all spooled out and tangled like Don Knotts had it in his space capsule in The Reluctant Astronaut. Yes, we always aspire to such heights. “Why not the best?” we ask ourselves, and the answer, of course, is obvious. (Go right to the source and ask the horse.)

Why do we do this thing over and over again? This “making an album” thing? We’re past the age of consent (well past) and not famous on our home planet. Our best-selling album is welded to the hull of Voyager as it makes its way out of our solar system. (We sold one copy to NASA. They bought it because it features a lead vocal by the late Kurt Waldheim.) The fact is, we are driven. When Big Green first rose out of the primordial soup of the mid 1980s, we had several choices. They were:

1) Go back into the soup! It was quite good, actually. Always like a little ginger in with the carrots. Mmmmm-boy.

2) Start a band, but instead of an indie rock group that has to make its own albums, something less demanding. Call it “Various Artists”. That way, on our first day of existence we would have dozens, perhaps hundreds of albums to our credit, many containing hit songs from every era. Instant popularity! Just add crack!

3) Start an indie rock group that has to make its own albums. With help, of course, from our mad science adviser, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the indefatigable mansized tuber, a couple of Lincolns, and others. (Don’t want to suggest for a moment that we do all this work alone!)

So here we are, patching the rough road that is Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, preparing for final mixes and looking for obvious holes. Hey, there’s a good name for a band: The Obvious Holes. Beats the Recognizable Hicks any day.

Keep your eyes open for more fadeout grooves. Think of them as shards left over in the manufacture of the next album. Or something.