Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Shipboard tales.


Bit of turbulence. Nothing to worry about. Just large hunks of jagged rock hurtling through space at blinding speed, missing our paper-thin titanium hull by feet (if not inches). So pull up a bamboo mat and relax.

Yes, we’re still bobbing our way home at sub-standard speed in our partially-disabled rent-a-spacewreck. Our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour now shrinking in the rearview mirror, we have managed to limp as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where we are now dodging larger than average planetoids, popcorn-like fragments, and other assorted celestial debris (including some familiar looking stuff I last saw in the crawlspace above my old garage from seventeen rentals ago…. always wondered what became of that).

Since there’s precious little for any of us to do out here, and since Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has taken it upon himself to do all the cooking for our merry little band of wanderers (frozen waffles again??), I will take this opportunity to regale you with some tidbits of Big Green back story. Way more than you want to know about us…. here it comes.

Why Hammermill Days? Well, when we started this blog back in 1999, it was actually called “Notes from Sri Lanka” – check our deep archive and you’ll see. We changed it to Hammermill Days a few years ago. As you know, every band needs a back story. You know the deal – raised by wolves, dropped by martians, etc. Frankly, we didn’t have an actual personal history, so we invented one, using the old (and now long-since demolished) Cheney Hammer Mill (in Little Falls, NY) as our mythical home. (Because all bands live together, right?) The rest is obvious (or is that oblivious?).

Who is “The Mayor” in “Sweet Treason”? Okay, well… none of you would ask this question, but the man-sized tuber just asked me, so here’s the answer. There’s this stanza in Matt’s song “Sweet Treason” that goes like this:

Joe, the mayor’s systematically going through your mail
He’s sifting, but not finding
He’s searching for some west end sandwich
Ten years good and stale

Well, this was a song written as a birthday present to me (best ever!), which explains my being addressed several times. When Matt and I lived in Castleton-On-Hudson, NY for a couple of non-contiguous years (1981, 1984-5), there was this tall, fuzzy-headed kid that used to hang around town, apparently eating out of dumpsters. We referred to him as “the mayor” of Castleton. They could have done worse.

Whoops – need to take drastic evasive action to avoid an asteroid. Got to go. Happy new year, earthlings.

Usual Rubbish

Home for the helladays.


We’ll be home for Christmas? Only in your dreams.

Yes, I know… we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I’d ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them… strange…). The upshot is, we’re chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt – last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour.

So… like my cat Macky, we’re making the best of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has fashioned a Christmas tree out of whatever was available. The mansized tuber has been coaxed out of his terrarium to serve as the aforementioned  “whatever was available”. John’s playing “Oh, Holy Night” on his four-string banjo. (I keep singing “Oh, Holy Shit!” to annoy him, but still he is not annoyed.) Lincoln and Anti-Lincoln are dec’ing the halls with clumps of Neptunian seaweed, considered a delicacy on Titan and a form of currency in the Kuiper Belt. (If you’re wondering how we were paid for all those performances on those tiny asteroids, wonder no more.) Yes, it’s quite festive out here in deep space.

Me? I’m telling holiday stories to anyone who will listen. Thing is, no one will listen. Actually, as rock bands go, we’ve got a lot of holiday related material. There’s our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, of course, featuring 13 songs that use Christmas as raw material for songs that are about other things entirely. Few people know that that is the tip of the iceberg. During his salad days (i.e. back when he was rich enough to afford salad), Matt wrote and recorded about 60 or 70 songs themed on Christmas as cassette gifts for friends, relatives, etc. 2000 Years To Christmas is a sampler from that body of songs. Trust me, there are a lot more where that came from.

Fact is, we finished 16 songs for that project, so there are 3 unreleased numbers. One day … maybe next Christmas … you may find them under your tree. (Or under indictment.) In any case… have a happy.

Usual Rubbish

Lost in found.


That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there’s that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar.

Oh, hi, friends of Big Green. Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt… all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole “Papa Bear”). The advice we’d been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it’s just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that.

So, yeah… we’re here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? No climax… Why else? We’ve gone something like 60 gazillion miles in the last seven weeks and what the hell do we have to show, eh? No cash, no kudos, no nothing. Bloody flop.  Still, we’re indefatigable (except for the man-sized tuber, who hasn’t been out of his terrarium since three stops ago). So we’ve already spent a couple of days on Pluto, the big brass buckle of the Kuiper Belt, jamming out to a frozen house, making the icicles shake, rattle, and crack. (No rolling on Pluto. They have a code, you know.)

There are three things you need to know about this Kuiper Belt place. The first is that it’s bloody cold. I think you might have guessed. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has tanked out his battery half a dozen times since we got here. The second is that this place is like the solar system’s lost and found. Apparently everything that gets lost on Earth (and everywhere else in Sol’s neighborhood) ends up here. For instance, there are literally billions of odd socks floating around and between the asteroids. Explains a lot. That stuff they call “dark matter”? Socks. Just socks. I think it’s just centrifugal force, spinning everything out to the rim. Now you know.

The third thing is that… some of these venues are so small, it’s almost impossible to perform. Right now, I’m straddling two of these Kuiper Belt objects, my keys parked on a third, playing to an audience perched on dozens more within earshot. Keee-razy.