Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Dude, where’s my mill?


This looks like it might be the place. Yes, this is most definitely the place. Kind of. Hey, Mitch…. are you SURE this is the place?

All right. We’ve been out on tour for a while, but not that bloody long. Certainly not long enough to forget where we came from. And yet here we are, trying to work out which abandoned mill belongs to us (and when I say “belong,” I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable… broad enough to encompass loose associations). Trouble is, so many mills have closed down around here even since our departure some weeks ago that it’s hard to sort it all out. Seems a lot of people are getting into the abandoned mill trade. It’s a buyers’ market, so to speak… or a squatters’ market, actually.

Yeah, so anyway… we limped back home, dropped into orbit, threw the anchor over the side, and shimmied down the rope to terra firma. Of course, our rent-a-wreck spaceship was not in stationary orbit, so the freaking anchor was dragging along the ground at about 40 miles an hour, bumping over great rocks and trees, smashing car windows, and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was called into action – we got him to clasp the anchor in his prehensile claws and wheel it along the ground as smoothly as possible while we, one by one, climbed down to safety. (if you can call life on Earth “safe”).

The ship was picked up by its owner – some obscure rental maven on a nearby alien moon. And as we tried to find our way home in the dark, they undertook to ship all of our gear, postage due, back to the mill. When we found the right joint, it had battered cardboard boxes stacked to the rafters in the front entrance. One more mountain to climb – so ends ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE.

So… now that we’re home again, I wish to hell we weren’t. Work, work, work. To hell with it… maybe I’ll just blow it off and shoot a New Year’s video…. just for all of you out there.

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.