Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

Putting the strings on your banjo

2000 Years to Christmas

See, here’s the thing – I don’t even use a pick. I just slam the damn thing with my thumb. Yes, it’s primitive. Yes, it’s painful. But it gets the job done, sort of. So turn up the heat on that cookpot, dude. We’ve got some strings to boil!

Hiya, folks. Yeah, you guessed it – we’re boiling old strings, home style, so that we can reuse them. I snapped the top string on my Martin, framming away on some random cover song, and well … someone stole my pin money. You know … the pin money I use to buy strings. Why, you may ask, wouldn’t I just use string money? Simple – because I need that money for cooking oil. Do I have to explain EVERYTHING, for crying out loud?

The mechanical guitar tech

I would be the first person to admit that we are not a stage-ready band. It’s been a long while since we played anywhere, and we’re rusty as an old hinge. And as any working musician knows, you need to have your systems in place if you expect to sustain yourselves through a long-ish tour. I mean, it’s not like the old days, when we just packed up the broken down van and drove off … until it broke down. Then when we fixed it in the middle of the road, we got arrested, and …. well … it’s not like that now.

We always flew pretty low to the ground, frankly. Lord knows we would do things differently today. For one thing, I would press gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to be not only our roadie foreman, but my own personal guitar tech. That fucker can spin his wrists like a power drill, so it’s easy for him to do a quick string change. Mitch Macaphee even built a strobe tuner into his audio circuit. He’s like a freaking Swiss army knife (except no plastic toothpick).

Ain't you got that thing all strung up yet? Geeez ...

Line, please!

Then there’s the lyrics. It’s enough to test anyone’s memory. We could tape them to our mic stands, but that looks so damn lame. Matt could carry them around on his phone, but if he’s scrolling that infernal contraption with two hands, how’s he going to play his bass? And on top of that, he’s got about two million songs, so the lyrics would stack up to the ceiling, several times.

I guess we could get Marvin to feed us lyrics as we play, like a automatronic music stand. Too many jobs for our little brass friend? Nonsense! Why, I’ve seen him do a dozen things at the same time, though admittedly it was really just the same thing done a dozen times real fast. But sure, he could change my strings and hold up lyrics at the same time. It would hardly even begin to get in the way of his other duties.

Bootleggers and scalpers abound

I took a cursory look around the Internets this week and I ran across something I don’t see every day. It was some dude selling our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, on Ebay. Now that was strange enough, as we only pressed about three or four dozen discs at the time. What was even more astonishing was that I saw it on offer by someone else on Ebay who was selling it as a UK import! And the price point, people, the price point: $30!

Naturally, I wrote the dude and told him, hey … if he sells it for $30, we’ve got more where that came from. Place your bets, people, place your bets!

Usual Rubbish

Everything but the bathroom sink

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.

Usual Rubbish

Getting a good-ISH start on another year

2000 Years to Christmas

Oh, damn, I did it again. Can’t stop writing 2021 when I mean 2022. It’s like I’m trying to go back in time. And why the hell would ANYONE want to go back to 2021? I mean, aside from Mitch Macaphee?

Yeah, Mitch had a pretty good year last year. He made some stuff blow up real good. The rest of us, however … not so much. We made things blow up, but not intentionally. And I have to say, this drafty old abandoned hammer mill is no place to spend January. If we were as rich as … well, as pretty much any other band, we could just pick this place up, put it on a flatbed, and move it someplace warm. But no how, my friends, no freaking how.

Random ways to stay warm

Okay, so when the heat is not so hot, how do you keep from turning into a band-cicle? Well, there are ways. One is to play your damn instruments. That’s what we do typically when the iceman calleth. I start banging on my acoustic guitar, beating the living shit out of it with my pick-less paw, raising callouses and annoying the neighbors with my hollering. (If you want to know what THAT sounds like, give my recent nano concerts a listen. )

Sometimes when it gets particularly frosty, I’ll play covers, like old Neil Young songs or numbers by Elvis Costello, Stones, Jethro Tull, etc. Some of it’s a little hard to render on a solo acoustic guitar, but I don’t let THAT stop me. What I can’t do is a credible version of Matt’s song Why Not Call It George, which we used to do with the full band. Our guitar player Jeremy Shaw used to do a volcanic solo on that song – holy cats! If that doesn’t warm you up, I don’t know what will.

I'm frozen solid

Through the trackless wastes

Now, as everybody knows, January is a very quiet time for bands here in upstate New York. That’s always been the way, since grand-daddy was knee-high to a grasshopper’s grandaddy. Of course, now it’s even worse with COVID, though that doesn’t stop some people from going out and making it rain in a club somewhere. That’s fine, guys … just don’t breathe while you’re there and you’ll be fine.

We of Big Green tend to prefer our solitude. And who the hell needs the money, right? I mean, besides us? We can always ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to manufacture some cash for us. He’s got one of those inkjet printers built into his ass. (Not literally his ass, you understand – just a figure of speech.) And if he just refrains from putting Art Linkletter in the president hole of the bills, someone might actually accept them as legal tender. (Hope so – it’s a long slog to Spring.)

Extraordinary means

Now, one of the benefits of having a mad science advisor is that, when you can’t afford to run the central heat, he or she can come up with some technical solution that will keep you from freezing to death. Yesterday Mitch Macaphee somehow managed to build a fire in the forge room of the mill. Only it wasn’t something impressive, like a flame generated by a concentrated tachyon beam. He literally just pulled beams out of the mill roof and threw them in the fire.

What a freaking luddite! I expect some kind of miracle cure to our hypothermia, not burning the house down one plank at a time!