Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

Names and faces.

2000 Years to Christmas

What the hell. Was it THAT long ago? No way! Effing 1986 was … uh … oh, right. I’m leaving out a few decades. Fuck, we’re old. Where’s my porridge?

Nothing like a little trip down memory lane to lift your spirits, right? Just be sure not to take a right at the light – that road goes straight to crazy town. Spent the morning listening to recordings from our first year as a band, 1986. Actually, not the WHOLE morning, as there are only a handful of recordings. We did everything on a shoestring back then, and you don’t have to be a recording technology specialist to know that shoestrings are a very low-fidelity substitute for magnetic tape. Fact is, Big Green co-founder Ned Danison had the use of his brother’s recording studio, and we piled in there one weekend and plowed through a four-song demo that got us, well …. exactly nowhere, but it’s a nice conversation piece. (See? I’m talking about it even now, thirty three years later.)

That was a hot summer, too. Or maybe it was all of those wine coolers. Either way, we were going through what another guitar player friend of ours termed “the Brr-roke Period”, fighting the mice for scraps, sharing smokes, sleeping on people’s floors. (At one point it got so bad we were forced to sleep on somebody’s walls.) Of course, being white people, we were never REALLY REALLY poor, just poor as seen on T.V., like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck carving that bean into paper thin slices, so thin you could see through it, and squeezing the slices between similarly translucent slices of bread. I suppose in that metaphor, I played Donald, quacking madly in frustration at our made-for-television penury. Poor suburban waif! No bean for his sandwich!

Us in the 80s

Yeah, well … we didn’t have an entourage of helpers back then. No Mitch Macaphee to help with mad science solutions. No Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to tie our shoes and balance our checkbooks. No checkbooks (because, wait for it …. we were broke). We didn’t even have a drummer, for crying out loud, or at least none that would stick with us long enough to play a gig. So that summer of 1986 (or was it the fall? No matter.) when we got the use of John Danison’s 8-track garage studio, we recorded three tracks with a session drummer we knew from around Albany, NY at that time, a guy by the name of Pete Young. Two of the tracks were cover songs from our stage set at that time – “She Caught The Katy”, by Taj Mahal, which we played on THIS IS BIG GREEN back in 2012, and Little Richard’s “Slipping and Sliding”. We also did one of Ned’s songs, entitled “A Name And A Face”, which kind of amusingly chronicles a one-night stand of the drunken eighties variety – an alt-rock walk of shame, if you will.

That was our demo. It went nowhere. Pete left the group before he even joined. Ned left the group the next year. And here you have us – the remainders of a random idea for a group, 34 years ago, chronicled in that hastily produced demo …. which I will post one of these days. Stay tuned!

Postscript

One of these days came sooner than I thought. Here is that four-song cassette demo we recorded back in 1986, over in Ballston Spa, NY.

1986 Big Green Demo
Usual Rubbish

Walled-off salad.

2000 Years to Christmas

I don’t have any walnuts. Apples? Nope, none of them either. Celery? Who the hell eats CELERY? Aside from anti-Lincoln, that is. (He’ll eat anything except chicken fricassee, the real Lincoln’s favorite dish.)

Yeah, well … it was bound to happen. This sequester, social distancing business is getting pretty old. I know what you’re going to say (just call me Kreskin) – But you guys are always cooped up in that abandoned hammer mill! you’ll say, what the hell’s the difference? Such an insolent question! Actually … yeah, you have a point, but watching all these crazy people get even crazier because of home confinement is prompting us to get kind of sick of it too, if only for appearances sake. I mean, I don’t want to be that guy … you know, the one that isn’t climbing up the walls, even though he hasn’t been able to go golfing since last November. Of course, I’m genuinely not that guy, but you see where I’m going with this, right? No? Fuck. I was hoping you could tell me.

Anyway, that’s me. What about my fellow hammer mill-dwellers? Well, they are going stir crazy. Nothing to do with the quarantine. It think they’re just sick of my stir fry. You see, I’ve somehow ended up as the mill cook by default. The job originally fell to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), as that seemed well within the scope of his job description. (“Other duties as assigned,” it says in big red letters.) Anyway, when he set a tossed salad on fire last week, he was out, and because he reports to me, they handed me the apron. I let a few days pass to see if they’d forget about it, but they didn’t, and well …. they were getting kind of hungry, so I put the kettle on. I’ve had worse assignments. Like selling insulated windows over the phone. Sheesh, what a gig!

I think it needs more fire.

Ever try to make something out of nothing? Well, if you haven’t, come on down the Cheney Hammer Mill kitchen. We’ve got some ginger root that’s been lying around the pantry for about five years. There’s a half jar of mustard. Two digestive biscuits. Half a pint of club soda. Oh … our neighbors sent over some carrots. Um … that’s about it. I’m making a casserole. By that, I mean … I’m throwing a bunch of random stuff in a pot and putting it on the fire. I might stir it a couple of times, but again … they didn’t like last night’s stir fry, and I’m getting a little sensitive about the criticism. Mitch Macaphee had the gall to put a review of my cooking up on Yelp. Ripped me a new one, the bastard. Hell, he‘s the mad scientist …. why doesn’t he just invent a decent dinner? TAKE WHAT YOU CAN GET, YOU SHIFTLESS MOTHERS!

Ahh, I feel much better now. Soup’s on!

Usual Rubbish

Summer projects.

2000 Years to Christmas

Gardening? God, no. I don’t know the first thing about it. And no, I’m not going to build you another gazebo. The first one burned down, fell over, and was washed into the sewer. Not doing that again, dude.

Yeah, I know – it’s not quite summer yet. Still, we’re trying to get our summer projects all lined up … mostly because there’s very little else to do around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, particularly during this COVID-19 isolation time. Nothing happening, so we make lists of things that might happen. That makes sense, right? Anyway, I don’t think I have to tell you what Matt’s summer project is. Here’s a hint: it starts with an F and ends with an “alcon”. It flies around and lives on the side of tall buildings. It … oh, damn it, see for yourself! (Utica Falcon Project site) THAT’S my brother’s summer, people, and good on him.

The rest of us, well … mostly at loose ends. Antimatter Lincoln is dreaming of his revenge, though the dream is a bit murky, as I still don’t know who he wants revenge against. (He just says he swore he’d “keel” him, whatever that means. Some nautical reference, perhaps.) Mitch Macaphee plans to spend the summer packing up all of his experiments on Proxima B, now that it’s been discovered by non-evil Earth scientists. He was hoping to keep this big, rocky Earth-like planet under wraps, I think. Seriously, the dude would steal the Moon if he thought he could get away with it. (Actually, he claims to steal it every month, bit by bit, until it’s completely gone. Cute trick.)

Is this Proxima b or Proxima c? I always get them mixed up.

What about Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Funny you should ask. You see, Marvin is an automaton, a service cyborg. He has no agency, you see. You simply program Marvin to do a certain thing, and off he goes. Sometimes, yes, he gets it wrong. (Actually, the “sometimes” is more indicative of how often he gets things right, but that’s another story.) If we programmed him to ride in circles all summer, that’s what he would do … though he wouldn’t be at all pleased. And me? I’m trying to resist gravity, but not so hard as to fly off into space. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) I’m also recording some older songs that never got onto any of our projects. We’ll see how it goes at the end of the summer – if they don’t suck, I’ll post them. If they suck …. yeah, I’ll probably post them anyway. You guys know me better than I know myself.

So, recording, archiving, bird-watching, revenge … we’ve got it all here at the hammer mill. This is going to be some summer.