Tag Archives: mansized tuber

News

New Home (Old Band).

It’s moving day, Major West!

Okay, starting with a quote from Lost In Space is probably a little too obscure for most of you young’uns, I admit. But the message is clear: Big Green is moving to a new URL. That’s right – we’re boxing up all of our baubles, winding up all of our furniture in bubble-wrap, and backing the U-Haul up to the front stoop of big-green.net. Time to load it in and pack it off to our new digs at … well, right where you’re at right now.

Yep, Matt and I have been hashing this out for a while (see the photo – this decision has clearly been decades in the making). But sometimes you just have to pull the damn trigger, am I right? Lord knows, we have plenty of reasons for doing this, but here are the top ones:

Reason #1: Leaky roof, squeaky floorboards

Leave us face it, the old blog flat at www.big-green.net/bg is a dump. The landlord is not cool. Every time something goes wrong, he sends in his brother-in-law with a Swiss army knife or some third-rate contractor who owes him a favor. Our blog was down for well over a month, and it didn’t come back up until we paid for service on top of our rent. Not cool! Time to hit the road, Jack.

Reason #2: No pets

You wouldn’t think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would count as a pet, but he most certainly did – at least when they came in to do the census. (We had the mansized tuber just stand still for a while so they would think he was a potted plant.) Fuck all, let’s face it – if that place ain’t good enough for Marvin, it ain’t good enough for yours truly. That’s our position and we’re sticking to it.

Reason #3: Long grace period

Okay, so when you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it, it’s nice to have a span of time when you’re maintaining both the new joint and the old dump at the same time. That’s kind of what we’re doing. The blog is moving, but we will maintain the blog for a while at the old locale, at least while we settle in at biggreenband.com. Mind you, the landing page at big-green.net isn’t going anywhere; we’ll just repoint the links to the new blog when it’s ready.

Those are the best reasons. Want the rest? Of course you don’t! Trick question.

What’s next

Coming up this Spring, we’ll be releasing a single, name yet to be announced, so stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Want to hear a song? That makes four of us.

2000 Years to Christmas

What man can stand the stress of being torn asunder then thrust back together? Who amongst us can quarter him/herself like a piece of fruit for the sake of a single song? What fool would throw his lot in with a madman who finds joy only in the fulfillment of his twisted vision? This guy, folks. This guy right here.

Yeah, I think it’s fair to say I’ve gotten the itch to perform. What can you expect after years of being cooped up in this abandoned hammer mill, miles from civilization? Not a living hell, I will admit, but clearly a living heck. It’s been years since we struck out on tour. (I blame all that striking out.) But we live in an age of miracles, my friends. Musicians now perform from the comfort of their own homes, thanks to the advent of the internet machine.

Labor action at the abandoned mill

Trouble is, when I raised the question of Big Green virtual performances, the response was less than encouraging. Yes, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was game. Antimatter Lincoln offered to play gut bucket (though frankly very few of our songs call for that rustic instrument). The mansized tuber volunteered a few of his smaller shoots to the enterprise. As for the actual band members, well …. not so much.

Can’t blame them, really. This is the busy time of year. Matt is taken up with his Peregrine Falcon project. (He’s gone big this time around, watching them from the deck of the star ship U.S.S. Enterprise.) John is doing his thing (if he didn’t have that, he’d have to get another thing). So that leaves me in kind of a spot. I mean, I can’t play four parts at once …. or CAN I?

Hell, this band looks damned familiar.

Crypto cloning to the rescue

It seems that our mad science advisor has been working on a little experiment of late. I thought I heard some strange noises coming from the north end of the mill. (That was just before it exploded, too. Coincidence, that.) Anyway, Mitch developed something he calls “crypto cloning.” The “crypto” piece is strictly about marketing – Mitch is keen to monetize this new technology.

Here’s how it works: A subject steps into the cloning device, and s/he is cloned four ways. That’s a big step up from making two of the same thing, Mitch tells me. (Twice as good.) The thing is, the cloning only lasts a couple of hours. At that point, your quadruplegangers hustle back into the protoplasmic host from which they sprang. It’s a kind of reverse-amoeba effect, if you know what I mean.

The quadruplegangers ride again

Before you ask, yes, I did let him test it on me. But only just long enough for the four of me to record one of Matt’s songs – a classic number called Going To Andromeda. Check it out on our YouTube channel or our new Instagram account. (Note: one of my clones came out with a mustache. Strange mutation.)

Usual Rubbish

Everything but the bathroom sink

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.