Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Summer reverie.

Say, do you remember when we took that bicycle trip up the side of Mt. McKinley?  Nope, neither do I. Well, now I’m guessing it never happened. Another false flag operation in brainville.

Oh, hello, reader. I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the midst of an early summer reverie. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m going to spend the entire season looking backward, but I will admit that I put my tee-shirt on backwards this morning. Harbinger of things to come? Of course not. Nevertheless, when you’ve got an abandoned hammer mill full of accumulated junk from more than a decade of habitation, every day is a bit like an archival bin dive.

Does that sound like a summer project to you? Well, it does to me … sort of. I told you about the demo video from 1993 that I’ve been resuscitating these last couple of weeks. Last weekend I remastered the audio and I’ll do some editing over the next few days. My summer report will be about resurrecting our YouTube channel, which is, essentially, my personal YouTube channel rather than an official Big Green video hub. Right now it kind of resembles the Cheney Hammer Mill – a big pile of unrelated videos about music, politics, linguistics, philosophy of mind …. whatever the hell I spend my free time watching and (mostly) listening to. Hey … my phone is my entertainment center, okay? That’s how you know I’m American. (Want a candy bar? Cigarettes? There’s a bodego across the street.)

This could take a while.Just the other day (don’t ask me which day) I stumbled upon some old promo shots of Matt and me back in our Big Green duo days, in the late 80s. (I can tell when it was because I was wearing a sports jacket with the arms rolled up. Hey … it was comfortable, like the fuzzy slippers.) I think it was right after Ned Danison left the group and I moved back to the Utica area. In a couple of shots we were consciously trying to lampoon a Rolling Stone magazine spread about U2’s current album at the time, Joshua Tree. (They had a shot of U2’s drummer looking admiringly at Bono from about five paces away. I think there was a cactus in the photo somewhere.)

What’s next … the handlebars of my first tricycle? Never fear … we will get back to making new things rather than digging up old ones. Just give us a little interval. Ah yes.

Usual Rubbish

Hammer day.

What, raining again? Huh. Very well. Looks like it’s rainy day schedule, kids. Coloring books and tunafish sandwiches. Except that we don’t have tunafish. So … I’ll have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) make crayon sandwiches. Gotta make do as best we can, boys.

Hey, what would you do if you were stuck in an abandoned hammer mill and the weather went all pear-shaped? Probably something similar. They say that musicians do their best work behind closed doors, removed from all distractions. They also say that more songs are written on rainy days than on sunny ones – the theory being that crappy weather makes songwriters want to stay home more, and home with nothing to do means picking up the guitar or banging on the piano. Wanna know what else “they” say? What the fuck, I don’t know. Ask them.

This might be a good time to write some songs. As I’ve pointed out in these pages before, Matt and I have different approaches to songwriting, so the time may be right for one of us; likely not both of us. Matt writes songs on the hoof, tromping about the hills, streams, and woods, singing verses into his smart phone while he’s feeding the beavers, then harmonizing the song later when he gets within grabbing distance of a guitar.

Big Green in 1988My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.

Turns out, we were, as I mentioned last week. I reviewed some more of those old recordings with Jeremy Shaw, who played guitar with us for a while, and some of his parts were amazing. Then I started cutting up the video program, and as an experiment I exported a soundcheck we did using fragments of Sensory Man. I’ll post that when I’ve got the song to post as well. (The audio needs a little help. The video looks like us in somebody’s garage, which is pretty close to the truth.)

This may turn out to be a total YouTube summer … if it keeps raining.

Usual Rubbish

Here comes the sun.

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what’s new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed – it’s how I roll. That’s why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it’s true.)

I just don’t play the fucker enough, that’s my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don’t do ANYTHING enough, so it’s just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor – the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee – gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it’s kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That’s not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.)

It’s when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that’s someone else’s music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on a night like this … me framming on my broken down guitar, Matt hammering on an anvil, Marvin jumping up and down like a chimp, slapping his bongos. I won’t even get into what Anti-Lincoln does to make noise. Let’s say it doesn’t involve the harpsichord, which I think may have been his primary instrument at one time. (We don’t have a harpsichord … hell, not even a harp.)

Bzzt ... Let me tune guitarTrouble is, we spend so much time on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, that practically everything else suffers. The garden has fallen to shit. (Granted, we did plant in the dead of winter. We may be “Big Green” but none of us has enough of a green thumb to grow a freaking rock garden.) Our songwriting is becoming even more bizarre by the day. And what the hell – the harder we work, the longer it takes for us to finish a freaking episode. It’s like we’re running backwards on a train heading in the opposite direction, following a track shaped like a mobius strip. Wrapped in an enigma.

Complain, complain, complain. That’s what blogging is all about, right? Shut up and play your broken guitar!