Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Back pages.

Looks like rain again. And forty, maybe fifty degrees. You call this winter? I call it bullshit, man. Fifty years after the blizzard of ’66, and it’s like freaking April out there in the middle of February. Freak. Ish.

Right, I know. Don’t start a blog post by talking about the weather. Very well. But I should add that, even though the weather’s been less than frightful, we’ve been sticking pretty close to home this winter. Old habits die hard, I guess. And while the sun shone over these past few days, we’ve occupied ourselves with digging through the vast Big Green archive, looking for rare nuggets of a glorious past that never was. The odd gig poster. A broken guitar string. A broken guitar. A broken guitar case. (Interestingly, I found those all together.)

Some will remember that my first instrument was the bass guitar. (And when I say “some”, I don’t mean anyone reading this.) When Matt and I started playing out in the late 70s, that was my axe, for the most part, though I started banging on my brother Mark’s Fender Rhodes piano fairly early on. Matt and I spent more than a few years in the wilderness, putting together bands and watching them fall apart. First we couldn’t hold on to a guitar player. Then it was drummers – before John White picked it up, we hopped from one player to another. After that, it was guitar players … I think we had three in the space of two years in the early nineties. Big Green was invented in 1986. It Yep. Busted. kind of came up in our alphabet soup while we were hanging out in Ballston Spa, NY, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Okay, so … if you look around my basement, you’ll find my P-Bass, still virtually unplayable (just like it was thirty years ago). If you look hard, you’ll find Mark’s Fender Rhodes. We’ve got some recording from those early days, but they’re spotty at best. I may post one at some point just for laughs. We popped into a studio in Utica back in 1981 and recorded some live tracks, including a couple of originals. It’s a pretty good snapshot of where we were musically back then – rushed, tired-sounding, no sense of parts or arrangement. We were a mess! Kids those days!

God damn, I wish it would snow so that I wouldn’t feel as thought I’m just wasting my time down here. (That’s right, friends … it’s all about me.)

Usual Rubbish

Yo mama.

Okay, so what are we inventing this week? Ten gallon sippy cups? Anti gravity yo-yos? It’s worth asking.

I hate to be the one always checking up on our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee. For one thing, the hazmat suit doesn’t fit me very well. And I can’t speak very clearly through that portable blast shield, particularly with the welder’s mask on. Suffice to say that you enter his lab at your own risk, so we only do it when absolutely necessary. Very often I will send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in with a note clutched in one of his claws.

Not that Marvin is expendable, you understand. It’s just that he has wheels and can roll backwards. If I sent Anti-Lincoln or the mansized tuber in there, they could end up on melba toast with a caper in their eye. (That’s the caper.)

Fact is, the only reason I’m venturing into Mitch’s wing of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our now-permanent squat house, is that the neighbors have been complaining. You know what I’m hearing about, right? Loud noises in the nights. Mad cackling. Subtle but noticeable shifts in gravitation. Midnight sunshine and black skies at noon. All those little things that tend to put the retired plumber next door in a bad humor. We don’t want to hear from the authorities, of course. We might get the Ammon Bundy treatment, after all. That is … they will ignore us until we pull guns on them more than twice or three times. (Since we’re white, we would probably get the Bundy mulligan, so to speak.)

You know what to do, Marvin.Mitch has been in poor humor since they found his coveted dark planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. He had been clinging to the vain hope that it would remain the undiscovered country for another generation, at least … plenty of time to convert it into a black hole or neutron star. In any case, now he’s drowning his sorrows in experimental work, and it’s got all of us on edge. Hard to work on music when the laws of physics are collapsing all around you. Last Monday morning, for instance, he temporarily suspended the third dimension within the immediate boundaries of our hammer mill. It was like being a ColorForms character for the day – very distressing!

Okay, well … I’m going in there. If you don’t hear from me soon, send Marvin in.

Usual Rubbish

Blame us.

Hmmm. I thought Mitch was looking a little depressed. Are you sure that’s the reason? Wow. Who knew?

Oh, hi. Christ on a bike, sometimes living in this abandoned hammer mill is like working in a clinic for the chronically depressed. What a bunch of moody Melvins! Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been giving us all the silent treatment for about a week. My brother keeps saying he needs a charge-up, but that’s just making apologies for the fucker. (Stop defending him!) Every time there’s a new episode of “Mercy Street”, old Anti-Lincoln goes all pear-shaped, starts drinking and cursing at us like we’re General Grant or General Sherman (with our inimitable bow-ties snapping). Insufferable.

And then there’s Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser. Though to be fair, his depression is usually rooted in mad science. Anyway, his smile turned upside-down earlier this week, and we had to start rooting around for the cause. (You don’t want to allow Mitch’s moods to fester … that’s when he starts getting really creative in the lab.) At first I thought it may have been about that North Korean A-bomb test, but that wasn’t it. Then I saw the story about the astrophysicist who claimed that there was evidence of a massive ninth planet way beyond the orbit of Neptune, and I knew I had found the cause. Busted!

Frankly, Mitch, it looks kind of ominous.Yeah, we’ve known about that planet for years. Mitch discovered it on one of our interstellar tours, and he was so thrilled at his own cleverness that he resolved to keep it secret from humanity until he could find some practical use for it. It is, in scientific terms, a big motherfucker, with enough mass to line up all the other planets in our puny solar system like billiard balls. (I think that played into Mitch’s plan for the dark world beyond Neptune. He dreamed of racking them all up like nineball and running the table, as if he was the Minnesota Fats of interplanetary collision.)

Okay, so now we need a cover story. Here goes: just call the new planet “Blameus”. Legend has it that this dark world is responsible for all of our sorrows. That should focus people’s attention a bit … at least until Mitch can work out his next shot. (Okay, so I’m an enabler. Just a little harmless fun.)