Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Weighty stuff.

Matt… can you talk to him this time? He’s freaking ignoring me. Give it a try, damnit. I need to get some sleep. We’ve got the governor coming in the morning and…. well, you know.

Oh, hi. As per my usual affectation, I will act surprised at my discovery of your presence. What-WHAT? Okay, now that that’s out of the way. Just trying to get Matt to speak to Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad science advisor, about keeping the noise down a little bit, just for one night. One night, Mitch! That’s all I’m asking! Man does not live by tofu alone! He needs socks, too, and occasionally a couple of ounces of baby oil … so, my point is that it’s more complicated than you think! Oh, what’s the use?

What’s he doing that makes so much noise (i.e. more noise than a rock band)? Well, I made the mistake of leaving last Wednesday’s paper lying about. Mitch picked it up and zeroed in on an article about the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland … you know, the high-tech gizmo that smashes atoms to PULP. (Gulp.) Yeah, well … apparently that’s one of Mitch’s hobbies, too, and he got this bug in his head about finding something he calls the Higgs boson particle, which is the theoretically predicted thingy that gives all matter its mass. (Apparently, we Americans are just chock full of the stuff.) And now he’s obsessed with finding the bastard before those scientists in Switzerland do.

Now, when I use the term “obsessed” with reference to Mitch, I am not using hyperbole. He’s plugged together his own hadron collider (which he calls the “reasonably large hadron collider” or RLHC) using discarded PVC tubing the plumber left behind, as well as other odds and ends. He’s press-ganged Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the effort as well, making him eyeball the gauges and man the meters, day and night. And the freaking noise! I can’t even hear myself type. I mean, how the hell are we supposed to finish our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? How are we supposed to record our July episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN? If those smock-wearing eggheads in Switzerland could just … just…

What? They found it? Oh, Mitch…. The paper’s here. Read all about it.

Usual Rubbish

Preppin’ for Tex.

Got your cowboy hat yet? Oh. Okay, why the hell not? Just go downtown, walk into the cowboy supply store, and pull a ten-gallon hat off the rack. What’s so hard about that?

Oh… hey, man. Caught me, once again, in the midst of lecturing the help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) refers to it derisively as “reprogramming”, but you know better. All I asked him to do was to purchase his own cowboy gear – that’s all. Is that so unreasonable? Am I expected to pay for everything around here? What the hell – I’m the “job creator”, right? I’m the one using “air quotes” left and right. Haven’t I done my part in this employer-robot assistant relationship? Huh?

Okay, so why am I asking Marvin to dress up like Tex? So that he’ll match the rest of us, of course, when we start shooting videos to support our upcoming album of Cousin Rick Perry songs. What the hell, we can’t release an album of songs nominally by the governor of Texas without donning ten-gallon (or, at least, 5-liter) headgear. That would be tantamount to malpractice. And what is malpractice but a crutch for cats who can’t blow? (Okay… I murdered that quote, but it had it coming.)

Admittedly, there is more to making a new album than getting matching cowboy suits. Much more. Like shoes. And pizza boxes. Bubble-stuff in a plastic jar. What else? Hmmmm. Corn husks. Put them all in a cement mixer and flip the switch, baby. Round and round they go, and after a few hours, pour it out into a six-up mold and start stamping out those CD’s. Nothing to it.

What about the music part of it? Details, details. We’re working on it, that’s all I can say. All of those first-draft podcast songs? We’re polishing them to a sparkling luster. We’re patching them up like ten miles of bad road. We’re turning knobs, flipping switches, and cranking …. cranks. We’re making the little lights flash like glow-bugs. That’s a bit of doing.

So, yes… we will have an album. Big Green will crawl again across the shattered landscape of American music anyhow. In cowboy hats. Yee-haw.

Usual Rubbish

Background noises.

Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well…

Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren’t necessarily compatible, but that’s …. well, that’s just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people’s ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell … just like flowers.

Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two albums. You can hear someone eating lunch in the background of just about every song. It’s only gotten worse over the years, as more people congregate in the cultural Mecca that the Hammer Mill has become over these last twelve years. Our podcast is a good illustration of that. Last month, I think you could hear a truck backing up through most of our incoherent rambling. Unless it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) making that beep, beep, beep as he rolled backwards in terror and revulsion during a particularly noxious tirade.

Noxious tirades – not a bad name for a collection of podcast excerpts.

Then, of course, there’s all that noise in the background of our “first draft” recordings, included in each episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That thing that sounds like a banjo in “Fallin’ Behind”? Yeah, well… that was a banjo. But it might just as well have been the hot water pipes just above our mastering deck, down in the sub-basement studio we call home. Hey, they’re first drafts. You expect a little bit of rough, don’t you? Otherwise they would be finished productions, right? THAT COMES LATER.

Not much later, admittedly. Have to get to work on that. Expect a new album sometime later this year…. assuming we haven’t been hydrofracked to kingdom come by then.