Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Background noises.

Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well…

Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren’t necessarily compatible, but that’s …. well, that’s just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people’s ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell … just like flowers.

Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two albums. You can hear someone eating lunch in the background of just about every song. It’s only gotten worse over the years, as more people congregate in the cultural Mecca that the Hammer Mill has become over these last twelve years. Our podcast is a good illustration of that. Last month, I think you could hear a truck backing up through most of our incoherent rambling. Unless it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) making that beep, beep, beep as he rolled backwards in terror and revulsion during a particularly noxious tirade.

Noxious tirades – not a bad name for a collection of podcast excerpts.

Then, of course, there’s all that noise in the background of our “first draft” recordings, included in each episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. That thing that sounds like a banjo in “Fallin’ Behind”? Yeah, well… that was a banjo. But it might just as well have been the hot water pipes just above our mastering deck, down in the sub-basement studio we call home. Hey, they’re first drafts. You expect a little bit of rough, don’t you? Otherwise they would be finished productions, right? THAT COMES LATER.

Not much later, admittedly. Have to get to work on that. Expect a new album sometime later this year…. assuming we haven’t been hydrofracked to kingdom come by then.

Usual Rubbish

Dig it.

Hmmm. That drill bit looks a little large. As in, larger than the entire building. Perhaps if we moved the hammer mill a little to the left. No? Hokay.

Oh, well…. hi there. Just negotiating a small issue with a representative from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., the entertainment branch of the titanic multinational that has agreed to, once again, sponsor Big Green – take us under their cold steel wing, as it were – in exchange for mineral rights to the land upon which our adopted squat-house home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now sits. What is it about these Hegemonic guys that even their A and R people wear full body armor? They seem a little, I don’t know, nervous. This guy I’m talking to has a very twitchy trigger finger. Wish to hell he’d put that Kalashnikov down.

Hegemonic, as some of you may recall, was our corporate label back in the early 2000’s. We had a little falling out…. though I guess you could almost call it a “falling in,” since they took us hostage for a few weeks during a brief stay in Indonesia, where Hegemonic does a lot of its business. Bygones be bygones, right? The rope burns have long since healed. Anywho, we’ve got an arrangement with them now that I think has the potential to make everybody happy; a real “win-win”. We want worldwide distribution; they want the natural gas locked within the stack of shale that sits between this building and the Earth’s chewy nougat center. What could go wrong?

Thing is, they want that methane, and they want it NOW. So I open my curtains this morning and see this colossal drill bit parked outside the mill. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to got out and investigate, and he comes back in with Mr. AK-47. And he’s like, “Hey!” and I’m like, “What?” and he’s like, “Face down on the floor, MOVE! MOVE!” and I’m like, “Ow! That rifle butt hurts!” And…. well, we had a little talk after that. Cleared up a lot of things. Turns out, his mother went to a completely different school than my mother. Talk about coincidences!

So where does that leave us? Well, I was going to ask his thoughts on compulsory integration, but he couldn’t hear me over the sound of the enormous, earth-crushing drill. Oops.

Usual Rubbish

What next.

Sweepin’ up after that big storm. Man, the weather these days. Good goddamn thing that global warming story turned out to be a hoax. If it’d been true, we’d be worried about all this extreme weather. But no, no…. everything’s fine. Experts agree.

No, today’s not contrary Wednesday. It’s contrary every freaking day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. I’m spouting that stuff about global warming in hopes of ingratiating ourselves to a potential corporate sponsor. Who, you may ask? Well, it’s someone Big Green worked with before – Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., king of the extractive industries. Tearing Earth a new Asshole since 1953™. From the tar sands of Alberta to the gold mines of Irian Jaya to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, the name Hegemonic has been synonymous with … well, with making big piles of money out of big piles of slag. Who better to shake down for some cash, right?

Oh, yes… I know what you’re going to say: This will lead to evil and sadness. Stop the hurting, you’ll say, and start the helping.  But fear not, my friend. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (also known as “Hegephonic”) is an enlightened actor in the extractive industries. It says right here in this May 2007 press release when they began work in Mindanao. Back when there was a Mindanao. Okay, bad example. Nonetheless, our “friends” at Hegemonic can be of great assistance to us, and as luck would have it, we have something of value to them as well. Something they want very, very badly.

Wait for it!

It’s mineral rights to the Cheney Hammer Mill. You see, by happy geological accident, the Utica Shale and the Marcellus Shale converge right below the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That means there’s an Auntie Maude’s Fortune of natural gas right below our feet. And no, this isn’t another one of those mad schemes cooked up by Mitch Macaphee. Unlike the mercantile tunnel to China (now plugged), this is a sure thing. All we have to do is let them rip down the mill and gouge their way into the Earth’s crust like a titanic bloodsucker, drawing the lifeblood from our dying planet and selling it by the cubic foot to heat the McMansions of exurban neo-yuppies. Nothing to it.

One other thing that interests them: Freakenstein. I think they see him as some kind of secret weapon against union organizers. We tried to interest them in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but he’s simply not intimidating enough.