Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Planning for launch.

I say let’s start rehearsing on Wednesdays. You can’t? Why the hell not? That’s your LUNCH day? Oh, right. Forgot about that.

Big GreenJust trying to pull together some Big Green rehearsals in advance of our anticipated interstellar tour to promote our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Of course, I’m running into the usual scheduling conflicts. I keep forgetting how people arrange their time. Anti-Lincoln (who sometimes shakes a tambourine backwards for us), for instance, has what can only be described as a singular meal schedule: Instead of the usual three meals a day, he eats breakfast all day Sunday, lunch all day Wednesday, and dinner all day Friday. Hey – I don’t judge. If it works for him, that’s great.

This does get to be like being a traffic cop, though. And what usually ends up happening is that Matt and I get together and just run through some songs, or make up new ones, or record an episode of Ned Trek for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. In other words, blow a lot of time on nothing in particular. But that’s how we roll.

What about the tour? Well … details are still in the works. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to look at the feasibility of just Stop smoking, already.doing an interplanetary tour within our own solar system as opposed to traveling into deep space and incurring some substantial logistical costs (not least of which are those damned tollbooths between here and Aldebaran – I’m almost certain they’re a scam!). He whirred and flashed and squeaked for about three hours, then emitted a slip of paper that bore a recipe for potato soup written in Mandarin. I beckoned to my translator.

Upshot of this is, we have reached out to some of the tour promoters we’ve used in previous outings. I know what you’re going to say – those tours were disastrous failures and a threat to both life and limb and intergalactic peace and security, right? Point taken. This time will be different. Because everybody knows that when you do the same thing over and over again, eventually you get a different result. Right? (Sure I heard that somewhere…)

Usual Rubbish

Freak all.

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m on the phone with Frigidaire. My dehumidifier has been recalled. Oh, the humanity! You know, if I had a pet manatee, I would consider naming him Hugh. Hugh Manatee. How’s your day going?

Got no gene for thatIt’s a little quiet around the Hammer Mill today, now that the dehumidifier has been unplugged. Dank, musty old place. Sometimes I think we’re frittering our lives away in this ruin. But then, there are worse ways to go. And I’m rather fond of fritters, myself, particularly apple fritters with a dusting of cinnamon. Mmmmm, boy.

What’s new in Big Green land? Well, sales of our new album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick are breaking all previous records. What records specifically? Well… it’s at the top of all “least popular” top ten lists. Sales are reaching nearly one unit, call it none. Could have something to do with our marketing strategy. I told Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that tossing a copy of the album out into the street and hoping patrons chance upon it was probably not the most effective approach. But hell, what do I know?

Big GreenFact is, folks … we make music and other related sounds. If we had been born to be salespeople, God would have given us briefcases and Rolex watches. And smartphones, so we would have something to do while we drive. He (and I’m sure any big boss god would have to be a dude) would also have endowed us with the irresistible drive to make hay, to spin gold, to generate wealth in immense quantities by any means necessary. Like, say, manufacturing cheap dehumidifiers with virtual slave labor in China and marketing it under hollowed-out brands like Frigidaire in the United States. Or writing, producing, and releasing mucho commercial music.

But God in his infinite wisdom put Richard Nixon on this earth …. I mean, saw fit not package us with the “batteries” of ambition included. Hey … Freak all. That’s what I say. How about you?

Usual Rubbish

Another week.

Here we are, another week ahead, one behind. I feel like a week sandwich.

Big GreenNot much time to gab. What’s new? We recorded another installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN this week, and I realize now that we never decided what the hell recordings we were going to cut into the show. We’ve got a truckload, of course. I know one that Matt had suggested is going to be included – an old ’90s recording we did on Matt’s 4-track cassette machine. Lo-fi, yes … but hey, that’s how we roll.

We’ve also got some half-finished recordings we started before turning to Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. This is a project we’ll probably pick up on again. Matt in particular has a huge backlog of songs we’ve never properly recorded, so we started hammering away at those (only natural, living in a hammer mill. Everything looks like a nail, right?) We’ve got some technical issues to work through … like a low-cost multitrack deck that is coughing up blood after producing two albums.  But we’ll make adjustments, no doubt. Anywho … another one of those recordings will probably surface on this month’s podcast.

We’ll also have another episode of Ned Trek – this is Ned Trek 12, I think, every bit as ludicrous as the previous 11. We’ve been talking about spinning this off into its own podcast, just because they’re getting so long. Or making it into an animated YouTube features. Or pounding nails through it and launching it into space. Who knows what we’ll do? We certainly don’t.

All right, sandman’s beating me to death. Time to bail. Hope all is well in Swaziland. Or Madagascar. Or wherever the hell you are.