Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Tossed together.

Not much I can add to that, brother. How about another piano? No, no … not a different individual piano instrument, I mean another piano PART! Holy Jebus!

You are genetically weird.Oh, hi. Sorry about my outburst there. No, I wasn’t having an argument with my illustrious brother Matt, I was just rehearsing for our conversation later on today. I know it may seem strange, but I have to rehearse for just about everything that occurs in my life. Which is even stranger, in fact, because I almost never rehearse for gigs. In fact, you might describe me as downright hostile to the idea. (As a friend once famously said, “Rehearsal is just a crutch for cats who can’t blow.”)

Now I should say here, no one has ever accused Big Green of not blowing. That just never has been part of our DNA. Granted, we have some errant strands in there; some stray genes that make us more susceptible to, say, living in abandoned hammer mills (which, on a rainy day like today, is kind of like living in a water treatment plant) or keeping personal robot assistants … like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yeah, we have a lot of personal and genetic history to live down, but we soldier on. Damn the torpedoes! (No, I mean, really, damn them. Those suckers smart.)

Speaking of abandoned hammer mills, we’re hammering out some new songs for the next episode of the podcast. They started out to be “first-draft” essays of the kind we did in 2012 – those rough little numbers that ended up on Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick in slightly less rough shape. But as we go, they keep getting more and more complicated. Recording is more like painting than sculpting, I have to say – you can keep slopping new paint over the old, sometimes until the canvas is inches thick with the stuff. When sculpting, you can only knock so many chunks off that rock before you’re left with … I don’t know … a smaller rock?

Hey, Matt … where’s my spatula? I’m going with the post impressionist look on this one. (Just practicing again. Love to hear the sound of my own echo in this old barn of a place.)

Usual Rubbish

Loserville.

It’s the last train to Loserville and I’ll meet you at the station. Wasn’t that a Monkees song? No? Okay … that earworm crawled away decades ago.

Big GreenWell, here we are, kicking around the mill, just me and my shadow … and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Brother and bandmate Matt Perry has taken up residence in some other abandoned structure. We get together for recordings, podcast sessions, etc., then he goes home to his shack and I to mine. The mansized tuber has planted himself firmly in the courtyard; I bring a bucket of swill out to him every couple of days. Livin’ the life, as they say.

As you can imagine, the utility costs here are fantastic. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is, as I have said many times, a drafty old barn of a place, and most of the heat goes straight out the window (the same window, incidentally, that the rain and snow comes in through). Whoever is paying the fuel bills must be ripping his/her hair out by now. And then there’s the occasional rap on the door by, I don’t know, the bailiff, perhaps? U.S. Marshalls? If I looked more like Cliven Bundy’s militia crew, I wouldn’t worry about it much. But I yam what I yam, as the sailor said.

well-maybeIn all honesty, I’m considering moving back to a lean-to type housing arrangement, like what we had back at the beginning of this current chapter in the history of the Big Green musical collective. That’s probably more appropriate accommodation for the collective as it currently stands, which is to say … big enough for me, Marvin, and anti-Lincoln. A little tight for my taste, perhaps. And then there’s the question of plugging Marvin in for the night. (We need at least one outlet for his AC power supply and a second for my electric piano.  Oh, right … and one for my amp. Shit … my Mr. Coffee! Make that four.)

See what happens when you try to simplify? That’s when things start to get really complicated. Now pardon me … I have a podcast to finish, for chrissake.

Usual Rubbish

Exodus.

Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn’t run into any dental problems while he’s back there. Whiskey and pliers, that’s what he’ll have to look forward to in that grisly century.

Big GreenWell, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud.

Let’s see … what else is in the news? Oh, yeah … the mansized tuber has decided at long last to take root in the courtyard. He’s pushing twenty now, and feels it’s high time for him to settle down and start a garden. Hard to argue with a root vegetable. We’ll see how long THAT lasts. Christ on a bike, about the only ones around here I can count on are my brother Matt and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), This looks like a good spotthough I caught the latter thumbing through the want ads the other day. It seems there are more opportunities out there for personal robot assistants than there were just a few years ago. I may have to start PAYING him, for chrissake.

The bottom line is that, with all of these departures and major life decisions going on, it’s getting pretty quiet around this big old barn of a place. We’ve talked about finding someplace smaller to squat, maybe opt for another three-room lean-to of the kind we occupied back in our Sri Lanka days. So long as it’s big enough to produce a podcast in, we’re good.