Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Pre-launch blues.

Gonna’ pump some liquid oxygen… and twirl my sextant dial. I said I’m gonna’ pump some liquid oxygen… and twirl my sextant dial. And when I lift you off that launch pad… baby you know you’ll ride in style. Oh, yeah!

Yeah, sounds like we need a little more chunkiness in the rhythm section. What? Oh… we have visitors. Hello, blogsters. It’s your old pal Bozo. Nothing like a little blues to take your mind of your troubles, eh? And a little country western to put it back on ’em. (Keep talkin’ like that, and more than a few Texans’ll want to treat me kinda ugly.)  Yeah, we’re just working our way down to our departure time. What will our interstellar conveyance be? Glad you asked. It’s about time someone asked. No one around the Hammer Mill has bothered inquiring. A strange disinterest has taken hold of Big Green and its entourage, apparently. It entered the room like a miasma, pulled up a chair and made itself at home.

Honestly, I don’t know how we’ll be hopping from planet to planet, star system to star system, on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Mitch Macaphee was going to arrange a short term lease arrangement of some kind. He knows a guy who knows a guy, apparently. I think the delay comes out of the fact that the guy the guy he knows knows is, in fact, him. (Is there an echo in here? Wouldn’t be surprised.) So what the hell, maybe we don’t have reliable private transportation from Betelgeuse to Kaztropharius 137b. We can always take a commercial flight. There’s always priceline or expedia or whatever the fuck.

I think the reason why Mitch dropped the ball on this is that he’s been obsessed with his latest dabbling into time travel techniques. He’s got this new one – check this out. It’s a means by which people in the past can tunnel into the future and wait until we normal, moment by moment time travelers catch up with them. Mitch made a device about the size of an iPod that anchors you in time, so that as everyone else moves forward with the passing moments, you stay in one moment. (So it it’s 4:37p.m. on Tuesday when you hit the button, for you it will remain that time while time ticks on for everybody around you.) Then you hit another switch, and the thing launches you through a wormhole into the not-so-distant future – like an hour from now – where you sit frozen in a single moment and wait for “real time” to catch up with you. Then like a mail bag being snagged by a passing train, you start moving with normal time once it arrives.

Anyhow, you can see why he gets distracted. He’s sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on a test run. We should get to his moment…. any moment now.

Usual Rubbish

Take twelve.

You hear that? That part there… yep. The honking trombone. Who was puffing on that sucker? Lincoln, was that you? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Mitch? Anybody going to own up to that heinous honking?

Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.

I guess in that respect we owe a great deal more to our old friend Trevor James Constable than we ever actually gave him credit for. He was famous for that orgone generating device he used to park in our basement (or courtyard, depending on the weather conditions). Far from a generator, that thing was more like a collector of energy, like a commercial fishing net or a big radar dish. (Yes, folks… it’s simile week at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill.) Well, when we record, the simple act of our making a record creates a virtual “collector” of random sounds loosed upon the universe by substandard musicians everywhere. Those bits of music congeal with the tracks we perform on to produce the zig-zag rococco rock arrangements Ann Powers spoke of so eloquently in her review of 2000 Years To Christmas. And hey-presto: another obscure Big Green song.

Well, that’s the creative process. For a somewhat more mentally challenged process, see Big Green’s newly launched podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, now available on iTunes. Yes, this is the stuff, folks – stories ripped straight from the front pages. (Front pages of last week’s news, actually.) The inside poop on all that is Big Green. Plus never before (and never again) heard tracks from the archives, and some new, lightly pan-fried material, unreleased and unashamed. The maiden voyage features a tour through the Hammer Mill basement, a segment called “Ask Marvin”, a remote from Matt on Betelgeuse (or what he thinks is Betelgeuse), and more.

Okay, so anyway – what is this, take twelve? STOP THAT HONKING!

Usual Rubbish

Pod dunk.

Other alternatives, anyone? What would you do, Mitch? Well…. what the hell else is there to do? When faced with adversity, start a podcast.

Yeah, you heard me right. In the midst of preparing for Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 and of being ejected from our home of nearly ten years (the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill), we’ve elected to launch a podcast. I know this sounds crazy, but … hear me out. The world is full of blowhards and know-nothings. Fact is, a lot of blowhards are know-nothings. So the harder we blow, the less we know – follow me? And if we don’t know we have problems, like impending eviction, for instance, well that’s almost like not having any problems at all. An elegant solution, and it costs next to nothing… or at least a good deal less than our legal counsel was planning on charging us. (Anti-Lincoln has some rapacious per diem rates, I’m here to tell you. Just watch your ass.)

Why do we spend so much energy on pointless pursuits such as this? Because they are there, that’s why. Would Sir Edmond Hillary climb that enormous hill-ary if it hadn’t been there? Certainly not. We create the podcast … and the other thing … not because they are easy, but because they are hard. What do I mean – not sure. But it may make its way into my first inaugural, or into Anti-Lincoln’s third inaugural (once removed). He’s always looking for new material. Not sure why he’s looking here, but… I digress.

Fact is, no, the podcast is not all we’ve been up to. Fact is, we’re recording songs again, filling the hours between forays into the outer reaches of the galaxy in search of lucrative performance opportunities. We’re patching together new takes of older songs in the Big Green catalog – songs from beyond time, as it were. Lots of ’em. My method is simple. I have Matt pull out his various guitars and play them into a microphone. I press one button when he starts and another when he’s finished. That’s what we call “collaboration”. Try it sometime, Monty.

All right, actually, I am doing parts as well, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is putting down some scratch rhythm tracks. (They sound very scratchy, actually. I think he needs a little oil.) Still, while we’re doing that, go and check out our podcast. Be sure to block your eyes – it’s an audio podcast.