Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Back to work.

Where do you plug this thing in again? Hmmm. That looks like a 220 outlet. Are you sure I won’t blow my amp sky high? Okay, then I’ll take your word for it. Now …. what’s that funny smell?

Oh, hi, dear readers. As you can see, I’ve decided to discontinue my internal exile to the shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill and return to our basement studio where all kinds of trouble are made. Hey, the summer’s over, right? Time to stop wasting time on pointless pursuits and get back down to the serious business that has been the bedrock of Big Green since our founding: more pointless pursuits. Like songwriting and recording. And doing funny voices. Honking on kazoos. That sort of thing. Do I need to paint a picture? Good … because I DON’T KNOW HOW.

So things are happening. The leaves are turning red and yellow, for one thing. For another, we launched a new web site. Looks a hell of a lot like the old one, only with a new home page (see www.big-green.net ) and a new free WordPress theme. Just another example of cheapskatery run amok. What a useless waste of human potential. (Hey … that could be the title of my memoir.) Sure, we COULD have gotten a new abandoned hammer mill to live in, maybe one with running water even, but NO … new web site comes first in our twisted little world. Priorities!

Now, where the hell did I put that wire?As you may have guessed, I am trying to re-acquaint myself with recording technologies after a summer of copying tapes and taping copies. A few weeks in that garden shed and it all looks like an undifferentiated tangle of wires and metal boxes to me. That’s kind of what our studios always look like, but the fact that I’m taking note of it now tells me that I’ve got some remedial learning ahead of me. Fortunately, with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I can reconstruct my keyboard workstation to a point where noise comes out of it and goes into the recorder thingy. Do that until the blue smoke comes out, and then you have a record. Or at least I think you do.

No worries – I’ll get this right before my brother walks in here with five new songs, fresh from the farm. Farm fresh production … that’s Big Green!

 

Usual Rubbish

In the shed.

I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed. Just shut the door on the way out. And turn off the lights. Oh, right … there are no lights. Never mind.

Oh man – just try to get some privacy around this place. You’d think living in a massive old abandoned mill we wouldn’t have this kind of problem, but you’d be surprised at how small this place gets when everybody is home. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, starts rattling his test tubes around and looking for things to detonate. Marvin (my personal assistant) does his exercise routines, rolling around the shop floor on his casters. Matt watches his birds on screens of various sizes. Anti-Lincoln reads the Gettysburg address backwards for the unpteenth time (I think he’s trying to make a point). Even the mansized tuber gets in the way. It’s mayhem!

So, hey, I’ve moved out to the potting shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. It was necessary to evict the mansized tuber, since the shed’s only big enough for one of us, but he’s resourceful — I’m sure wherever he lands he’ll put down roots. Some people think I’m wood shedding out here, but it’s nothing that productive. I’m just enjoying the quietude, the solitude, the … I don’t know … darkitude. It’s like taking that vacation that I never take, to that place I’ve never been, with money I’ve never earned. Call it never never land. Or call it anything you want – it’s a freaking shed!

Get lost!Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.

Right, so … if you’re looking for me, try the shed. Knock twice if I don’t owe you money.

Usual Rubbish

Clown computing.

Wow, okay. Do that again. No, not that one … I mean the hand stand. Okay, NOW the somersault. Can you do cartwheels? Not the donuts, you idiot! The circus trick! Wait … where are you going?

Well, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is off to find a Dunkin Donuts or Crispy Creme somewhere. He’s so damn suggestible. The mere mention of sugar-saturated junk food gets his wheels rolling, quite literally. Marvin was just showing me some of his acrobatic exercises from his days with P.T. Barnum. Now, I know what you’re going to say …. Marvin was just manufactured sometime around the year 2000; how could he possibly have worked for P.T. Barnum? Well, god only knows what materials our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee used in putting Marvin’s electronic brain together, but I suspect part of it may have come from a circus wagon. Robots – where would they be without other people’s memories?

Now that you’re pondering that impenetrable mystery, here’s another one. I was noodling around on our distributor sites and discovered that I can port songs from our first two albums – 2000 Years to Christmas and International House – over to our SoundCloud site. Well, for some reason it seemed like a good idea to start doing just that. The first one we posted was our 2011 single, One Small Step:

Call that a cartwheel? Sheesh.Since I’ve been in an archiving mood pretty much all summer, I will likely start posting selections from International House (our 2008 album) in the coming weeks and share them here, forthwith, etc. Not new material, of course …. just a cheap-ass retrospective on where we’ve been. Something for you to chew on while we work out where the hell we’re going. I don’t know, maybe another interstellar tour, or maybe we’ll go all in on another album, or maybe just watch Marvin try to do cheap circus tricks. So long as he doesn’t dress up like a rodeo clown and start juggling bowling pins. That’s a bridge too far.

Of course, now Marvin is giving me that “it does not compute” look. I get that a lot. Or maybe it’s just Marvin’s default expression; he’s got brass fixtures for eyes, nose, and ears, so it’s a little hard to read.