Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Someone put a crimp in Lincoln’s style

2000 Years to Christmas

Ring the bell tower. We don’t have one? Well, then pull the fire alarm. What? No fire alarm? Are you telling me we’ve been squatting here for twenty years and there’s no freaking fire alarm? I am depressed.

Hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I’m afraid you find us in crisis mode this week. We’ve just received a ransom message from the former King of the Catskills (or so they claim) saying that they’ve kidnapped Anti-matter Lincoln and are demanding a considerable forfeit for his safer return.

My lack of god! Will these scoundrels stop at nothing? They abduct an obvious senior citizen – Anti Lincoln is 196 if he’s a day – and cart him off like a sack of grain in hopes of squeezing riches out of his squat-mates. He went off to take his constitutional this morning (he always takes the constitution for a little walk first thing) and when he didn’t return, we knew something was up.

Crimped like a sea dog

Now, this would be bad enough if Anti-Lincoln were just being held somewhere against his will. That, sadly, is not the case. The nefarious King of the Catskills has informed us that Anti-Lincoln has been consigned to a chain gang. They’re sending him to work the butterscotch mines outside of St. Johnsville. In other words, they crimped the bastard!

Look …. I’ve seen what butterscotch mining can do to a man. That’s hard labor. Someone of Anti-Lincoln’s age and temperament won’t last a week. We’re sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with a jug of water and a flashlight to see if he can help. Chances are good, though, that they’ll just crimp Marvin as well and put him on the automation detail.

This could work.

Go fund my ass

What can we do? Well …. the kidnappers want crypto currency, so we were thinking maybe a fundraiser – setting up crowdfunding to bail Anti-Lincoln out. Either that or busking on the corner for bit coin. Of course, we’re terrible at raising money under any circumstances, so that seems kind of like a non-starter.

We could also try to beam him out of there using Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. Of course, that would require knowing his precise location. A few feet off and we could be beaming a Lincoln-shaped column of molten butterscotch into our living room. (Something I don’t want to even contemplate.)

Wait a minute …. Anti Lincoln just walked in through the front door. And apparently he knows nothing of this kidnapping business. It’s almost as if the King of the Catskills made it all up. Sheesh …. can’t trust anyone these days.

Usual Rubbish

Maybe the best year there ever was

2000 Years to Christmas

Well, we don’ have any flour. The mice ate it. And no baking pans of any kind. I’ve got a rusty skillet and enough batter mix for one pancake. Will that do? Oh, I see … Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Hey, you can’t please everybody. (And frankly, there’s no point in trying. ) The fact is, we are ill-equipped to celebrate anything here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as we don’t have the usual set of domestic crockery, pots and pans, etc. that you expect to find in these parts. Then there’s that no-baking clause in our lease. (Yes, lease. The one some panhandler drew up for us on toilet paper.)

Here’s the rub, though – we kind of have something to celebrate. It’s our thirty-fifth anniversary as a named band. And if that isn’t worth frying up a flapjack, what the hell is?

Deep roots. Broken branches.

Of course, we didn’t spring out of the ground back in the summer of 1986. Far from it! We fell from the sky, my friends. Fortunately, there were a lot of trampolines in the 80s, so it was a soft landing. And yes, we were young. Too small even to carry our enormous guitars.

No roadies, of course. So like ants, we would carry our gear in and out of clubs, trying to conceal our tiny-ness. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t help because at that time he was about the size of a clock radio. (A clock radio is, well … a clock with a radio built into it, and you can ..,. uh … ask your mother.) Our arms were broken with all of that lugging, which made it that much harder to play. But we persisted!

There .... See how short we were back then?

Punk party in the park!

I’ve told the story many, many times about how we named the band. Gather round, kiddies …. we’ll give it to you one more time. One time in the white bread suburban town we grew up in, Matt and my sister saw a poster for a punk party in the town park. As that seemed like the most unlikely thing in the world, they went to have a look-see.

Well, when they got to the park, there was not a punk to be seen. Just a bunch of trees organized into what was known in the punk scene at that time as a “forest”. When Matt and my sister returned, he was asked, “what were those punks at the park like?” Matt replied, “Well, they had big green hair and bark suits.”

We then wanted Big Green Hair and Bark Suits as our band name, of course, but on the suggestion of Big Green co-founder Ned Danison, we shortened it to Big Green.

That was thirty-five years ago. Get a strong enough telescope and you can see it for yourself – just point the scope at where the earth was on this day in 1986 and, well ….. you will see … something.

Usual Rubbish

When all your sharps sound flat.

2000 Years to Christmas

This is not the instrument I play. Mine is over there. You know, the one in the big wooden case that has to be pushed around on dollies. No, not THAT kind of dolly … the kind that’s flat and has WHEELS, damn it. Don’t you know ANYTHING?

Oh, goodness – my apologies. I had assumed that no one was reading this. I’m afraid you’ve caught us at kind of a difficult moment. You see, an alert listener – I believe someone in rural Idaho – suggested that we sound like people who play their instruments blindfolded. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I got the guys together and we donned our cartoon-like blindfolds, then started playing the first instrument we came upon.

Needless to say, this exercise was about as unenlightening as any we’ve attempted previously in our residency at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. But we try to be responsive to the demands of our audience. That is our lot as performers, is it not? (Some would say not.)

There’s a difference, man

Nevertheless, I would have to say that I did, in fact, learn something from this experience. For one thing, not all instruments are built the same. You tend to get kind of parochial when you play the same axe over and over, right? Well, hell – put a blindfold on and play the next axe you come across. You’ll discover that there are some remarkable differences between, say, a tuba and a mandolin.

To be fair, there is one thing those instruments have in common: I can’t play either one of them. Not that I haven’t tried to play unfamiliar instruments. Long time Big Green listeners will know that I played banjo on a couple of tracks, including “Falling Behind” on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our ex-governor (cousin) Rick Perry tribute album. You can also hear me playing banjo on “Box of Crackers”, a recording we’ve played on THIS IS BIG GREEN (see our August 2019 episode).

What the hell’s the point of music, anyway?

Now, I’m not saying, on the basis of these crude recordings, that I can actually play the banjo. Far from it! But – and this is important – I can play it about as well as I play the bassoon. Which is to say, not really at all. You see, the bassoon is among the most difficult of the wind instruments to master. I was just explaining this to Prince Leopold the other day. It has a double reed and is the size of a bedpost. In fact, it looks like what you get when a bedpost fucks a clarinet (or vice versa).

Which naturally begs the question – what is the point of music, anyway? Like I do with most esoteric questions, I fed that one into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), whose patented eludian-Q9 melotronic brainalizer can work out any puzzle. (Except Rubic’s Cube. He’s still working on that one.)

Well, his lights flashed, his antennae twirled, he made whirring sounds, and then spit out a little piece of paper which read: “It is pointless.” There you have it, people! Stop wasting your lives! Put the damn bassoons away!