Tag Archives: Marvin

Even the colonel gets more mail than us

August 12, 2022 Joseph

Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel”, or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo.

Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing!

First tune, then play … the tune.

Part of what makes people cranky around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the lack of creature comforts. The furniture in this joint is literally either made of bricks or fashioned crudely from surplus hammer handles. Looking to get comfy? Just stuff an old burlap sack full of grass and you’ve got yourself a pillow, dude. And when it gets hot here in upstate New York, well, you just open up a window. Or wave a fan or two. (You see? You knew I would steer it back around to fans again, didn’t you?)

That said, we have our tasks at hand. One of them is keeping Marvin (my personal robot assistant) from setting the mill on fire with his greasy cooking. The other is rehearsing for our next album, which we are doing remotely through one of those Zoom-for-music apps. That’s right – Matt’s on one end of the hammer mill, I’m on the other, and we jam over the internets. (You gotta problem with that, huh? HUH?) It’s mostly a process of Matt showing me a half dozen more tunes that he wrote since the last time we talked. Me? I’m chipping away at one, maybe two.

Subject matter experts

The thing with Big Green, you see, is that we get onto these jags. This is particularly true of my illustrious brother, Matthew. I’ve written before about his tendency to deeply explore a topic through the medium of pop song. Hell, he wrote about eighty songs on the subject of Christmas, probably a hundred about Ned Trek, at least 25 about Rick Perry. Now he’s on to human interrelationships, so it’s relatively unbroken ground. I mean, who can you think of who has written songs about human emotions? Hell, no one I know.

I don't think that's the colonel Garcia Marquez was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve got a notebook full of handwritten chord charts that say we’ve got an album on the way. Though, as with the Ned Trek material, it may actually be more than one collection. You musicians know what we’re grappling with. Do you make three mediocre albums, or one really, really, really bad album? Such a hard creative choice to make. We probably need a focus group to help us untie this knot. Where the hell is Frank Luntz when you need him? Having a sandwich? Okay …. don’t bother him, then.

Right, but when the hell …

Okay, so if we actually DID get fan mail, one of the first questions would probably be something like, WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING YOU SO LONG WITH THIS STUPID ALBUM? Well, dear fake reader, I know it’s been nine years since our last release. And I know that release was really lame. But bear in mind – our technology is from the stone age, carving music from living rock. We’ll keep chipping away at it until we’ve knocked off everything that doesn’t look like a new album.

Usual Rubbish

There’s no business like no business (I know)

July 22, 2022 Joseph

I spy with my little eye …. a table! No, that’s a chair. No, that’s Mitch Macaphee’s experimental water bong. Yes, yes, finally …. that’s a table. It’s only the last object in the room, for crying out loud. Jesus. Do you know any OTHER games?

Here’s the problem with personal robot assistants: they don’t have deep cultural knowledge about what it’s like to be a human being. I mean, Marvin isn’t even programmed to play I Spy. What the hell was Mitch Macaphee thinking when he left that tidbit out of the poor bastard’s memory bank? Beats me how he can be expected to make his way through the world without knowing classic parlor games or learning how to square dance. (And no, Marvin doesn’t know how to doe – see – doe.)

Time on our hands

Now, the more industrious amongst you will no doubt surmise that, if we are playing parlor games, we have little better to do. As nasty and condescending as that claim obviously is, it’s also just as obviously true. Yes, damn it, aside from the odd game of chance, we’re just sitting on our hands here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, hoping for salvation to pour down us like milk onto cornflakes. And man, what I wouldn’t give for a nice bowl of cornflakes just about now! (Focus, damn it, focus!)

The trouble is, there just isn’t a lot of work out there for aging indie bands that have zero reputation, zero following, and zero sales potential. Employment opportunities abound in just about every industry save local-circuit live music, and what work exists is dominated by kids (as it should be – it’s their turn, after all). I hired anti-Lincoln to sit by the phone and wait for the offers to come rolling in, and thus far, no potato. In fact, he’s grown a beard waiting for that phone to ring. (It’s the beard he already had, of course, but …. the point is, he’s been sitting there a long time.)

Making lemons out of lemonade

What is there for a bunch of wash-outs to do? Make an album, of course. Hey, look – if we waited around for people to like us before we did anything useful, we would do nothing but wait around for people to… like … us …. Okay, that’s kind of circular. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve made albums before in the midst of unpopularity. Why not do it again?

We have the material. And I’m not talking about Big Green’s lost generation of Ned Trek songs – more than 80 recordings just begging to be finished and committed to some kind of collection. Sure, that album will happen one of these days, years, etc. I’m talking about a whole raft of new songs by Matt and a handful by yours truly. Brand new material, just plucked from the Big Green tree. We’re in preliminary rehearsals right now, via JamKazam, but I expect we’ll start tracking these pretty soon. I mean, what ELSE is there to do around this dump?

Yeah, but how do you … you know …?

There’s very likely someone out there saying, but wait a minute – Big Green no longer has a corporate label. How are you going to distribute said project, eh? WHERE YA GONNA GET THE MONEY?

Right, well … first off, don’t yell! Second, we’ve opened up a Big Green site on Band Camp. It’s got our first two albums posted on it, more on the way. Third, I don’t know … see number one. I’ve got some parlor games to finish.

Usual Rubbish

I said, Oh man, God Damn that Dream!

July 15, 2022 Joseph

I told you, I don’t have the money. You can look in my guitar case – go ahead. Here’s he key to the padlock. Rummage through the back of my amp. There’s nothing in there but decades-old cigarette butts and some tortoise shell picks I never use. Hey, get your hands off me! Where are you taking me? HALP!

What the …. ? Oh. So it was just a dream. What an em-effing relief. Thank you, Jeebus. Sorry, folks – I must have dozed off in the middle of our conversation. Dreamland is a bizarro world. Squares look like circles, time collects in puddles, and people eat potato chips with a fork. And that’s just in my normal dreams. Thing is, I almost never have bad dreams, unless I’m dreaming about our old corporate record label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. Which is what I was dreaming about a little more than five minutes ago (according to the time puddle).

Bad old days

I know most bands tend to reflect back upon their careers and celebrate their own youthful missteps and flights of folly. Yeah, well, that’s not us. We’re constantly re-litigating the past, and as a result, I’ve gotten at least one grisly visit from a knuckle-scraping denizen of our former label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. And yes, it was in dreamland, that’s true, but tell that to my dream self – to him, it’s just land, right? Does a fish know she’s underwater? Well, does she?

Dream or no, it brought me back to those bad old days when sinners were murdered for the greater good. No, wait – that’s a song lyric. What I really mean is those days when we were laboring under the watchful eye of our multinational record label, which was actually just a subsidiary of a big ass mineral extraction company that was busily grinding Papua New Guinea to a pulp. Like most capitalists, they just squeezed the juice right out of us. And when they got tired of drinking Big Green juice, they demanded pomegranate juice, I think because of its antioxidant properties. (Capitalists are nothing if not guarded about their own well-being.)

No redoubt too remote

I’m assuming I don’t need to repeat for this audience the full details of our sordid parting-of-the-ways with Hegemonic. Suffice to say that they didn’t take the announcement of our divorce with equanimity. Turned out that a contract meant a bit more to them than it did to yours truly, and so Big Green was kind of in the soup for a few weeks … or months … or maybe eight years. You lose track of time in deep space, and the further out you go in space, the further back you go in time.

What am I talking about? Good question. Here’s a mediocre answer. When confronted with the hired thugs of our deeply disappointed corporate overlords, we turned to the one man who could help us in our hour of need: our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man who closed the space warp up again (bet you didn’t know that!), and so on. With his help, we were wisked into deep, deep space where no thug would ever find us. Until now, that is …. now that NASA has uncovered the primordial star field that was our exclusive recluse. DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!

But it was just a dream

Fortunately, we won’t need the hiding place, at least not yet. Unless Hegemonic’s dream thugs break out into the waking world. Or continue to confront us in our REM sleep. No doubt those guys are back to doing what they love best – poisoning indigenous water supplies in remote areas of the world for quick profit. That’s the ticket, boys.

BIG GREEN