Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Old Stock.

2000 Years to Christmas

You’ve forgotten it again? Damn it, man! I hope you realize what this means. No, I mean, I really hope so … because I haven’t any idea what this means. Not a rhetorical question at all.

Oh, hey, everybody. I may be the only upstate New Yorker who says “hey” when he means “hi”. Or possibly not. In any case, hope all is well with you out there, beyond the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. The colder months are coming on up here in the great north country, and we’re still looking for things to burn for warmth. We ran out of old hammer handles years ago. Then went the stair railings. Next, we pulled up the Rochester floors in the old executive offices, just above the shop, and tossed them into the fireplace. Fuel got kind of scarce after that – I personally think it was a mistake to burn the fireplace mantel in the fireplace. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Last week we were giving capitalism just one more try. Well, it didn’t work out, my friends. In a world that demands success, all we can offer is failure. But we’re offering it on splendid terms – no money down. In fact, buy now and you pay nothing for six full weeks! Oops. Forgot myself. Yeah, we don’t have a lot of new products to offer the world, just some old stock in the form of about 800 copies of our first album, 250 copies of our second album, and maybe 20 copies of our third. (It’s like we learned something as we went along.) I’m sitting on them now as I write this, and let me tell you … they make lousy furniture.

Chuck another log in there. Or something.

Hey … we’ll get through. We always do. Last year, when things got tight, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to find a day job. He didn’t have a lot of experience, but he has that kind of honest, open face that people tend to trust, and somebody offered him an entry level position at a hot dog stand. Location? Wherever he pushed it. Three steps down from a food truck – maybe four – but food service none the less. I suppose if we find ourselves in a bind again this year, I can toss a chef’s hat on his brass noggin and see if he can’t get a job as a line cook in some space-themed eatery that doesn’t exist. (This IS upstate New York, for crying out loud.)

What’s that, Marvin? No. No, we can’t burn our CDs. The reason is simple – they’re more toxic when they’re on fire than when they’re being played on your stereo. Now, where’s that chef’s hat?

Usual Rubbish

Marvin’s Picks.

2000 Years to Christmas

Any sales this week? Huh. Didn’t think so. That album is a goddamn drug on the market. Which is a strange saying, as drugs sell pretty well, generally speaking …. much better than our albums. Damned capitalism!

Well, here we are, my friends. Your friends and comrades in Big Green, frittering away our time in this abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, dreaming of the days when we had things to eat other than fritters. (Actually, fritters are pretty economical, if you know how to make them. Two words: saw dust.) We were having our weekly planning meeting, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was delivering the quarterly sales report. How did it go? Well, the good news first – there were, indeed, sales. And yes, there was revenue. Though the amounts were so infinitesimal that they can neither be accurately calculated in natural numbers nor seen with the naked eye. (I tried clothing my eyes, but I still couldn’t see anything.)

Now, I know what you’re going to say: It’s not Marvin’s fault that sales of Big Green music have fallen through the crust of the earth. My response to that is simply … you’re letting him off too easy. We assigned Marvin the role of sales manager specifically so that he could take the blame for our continuing commercial failure. That may seem unfair, but he, being an automaton, does not grasp the concept of fairness. He is programmed for mirth and chagrin, but not that special feeling of annoyance and offense you get when someone is hurling insults at you and treating you unfairly. It just rolls off of him like … well … like insults off of a brass automaton. His primary contribution to the Big Green enterprise is to keep us from yelling at one another for our failings. That’s quite an accomplishment.

I find your numbers unconvincing. HarrUMPH!

Once in a while Marvin comes up with a suggestion worth more than a moment’s consideration. Recently he opined that we should set up a Patreon site and sell our songs and other junk to whomever. We hemmed and hawed over that for a while (Matt did most of the haw-ing), then decided to table it for the time being. What the hell are we going to sell, right? Baked goods, for crying out loud? Sure, we have songs. We have buttons. We have, uh … discs. Some of them even have music on them. I think we’ve got some guitar picks lying around. Though some of them have been claimed by Marvin – he uses them as shims when a contact goes wonky somewhere in his electronics bay. I suppose we could run a Patreon promotion – Marvin’s Picks: five for a buck. Or maybe not.

Damn. Capitalism is hard, man.

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

What the .... ?

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!