No, I can’t hang upside down. Not for three hours, for chrissake… from a helicopter. Why don’t you just turn the camera upside down? Never thought of THAT, did you? (You did… ?)
Oh, hi. Just walked in on another acrimonious production meeting here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We keep a tight production schedule around here, let me tell you, averaging as many as one music video a year (sometimes more). Yes, breakneck speed rivaling our audio production schedule. Punishing! Matt is our director, though he sometimes puts Mitch Macaphee in charge of the second unit. Video production does not come naturally to our mad science advisor, I’m the first to say. He tends to confuse special effects with reality. (I can’t quite bring myself to ask him how he faked that exploding building in our last video…. too afraid of the truth.)
Okay, so… we’re releasing a single. A goofy little number called “One Small Step”. All I can say about it is that it attempts to explain the unexplainable, namely the moon landing, Armstrong’s flubbed first words from the cratered surface of Luna, and the severe mental and metaphysical consequences of that flubbing. The video? Well…. it features cameos by two ex presidents (both deceased) – one puts in a screaming sax solo. It features spectacular (or spectacularly dumb) depictions of interplanetary travel. And… well, what else can I say but watch it and judge for 
yourself.
“One Small Step” is one of those songs that has been sitting around for a time, waiting to be finished, begging to be released. They’re like errant children, you know? You make them, they start to grow, and next thing you know – before they even think about striking out on their own – they’re giving you a massive pain in the ass. “One Small Step” hung around for a while; we redid it, remixed it, changed it up…. then just threw our hands in the air. It was never going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or even a tailor or dry cleaner. So it’s just a song; Matt gave it a fittingly bizarre video, and the rest is history. (Or will be history, once it’s past.)
Here’s hoping you enjoy this modest little number. Now if you’ll excuse me, my helicopter awaits.
Oh, hi. Just spitballing here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Nothing to get excited about. Between Big Green tours, as you may already know, we tend to blow a lot of time in contemplation and various other pointless activities. Not because we are perennial time-wasters, you understand. No, no – it’s the ascetic lifestyle we aspire to. I know most bands drown themselves in drink, cloud their minds with illicit drugs, and indulge in multifarious pleasures of the flesh. Not this crew, my little friend – not a bit of it. We are like monks. (Did I say monks? I meant monkeys. Or Monkees. You take your pick.) We sit about, scratch, toss things at one another… until somebody says, get up there and play.
That’s just one example. And yeah, we’re aiming that at both an Earthbound audience and those folks out there in spaceland. Got to name-check a few communities they’re likely to recognize – kind of like those pop songs that have place names in them (like Huey Lewis naming cities at the end of “Heart of Rock and Roll”, for instance). When we’re up in the Crab Nebula, they wait for this song. They start waving their tentacles and nodding their oddly misshapen heads. It’s a gas.
Ah, got it. Scratched into my computer monitor, right about where the password field appears on the screen. Pretty clever, huh? No one would think of looking for it there! Let’s see… what is up at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill that might be of interest to you. Little inventory here. I think Mitch Macaphee is working on an experiment (either that or Qaddafi’s bombers are getting closer). Matt is either changing strings on a guitar, feeding animals, or transposing our heads with those of lunar astronauts. (A specialty of his.) Johnny White is catching up on his technical manuals, I believe. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has shut himself down for the weekend, taking a little break from his newly founded religious cult. I won’t get into what the Lincolns are up to.
“…most of the big green groups are loath to talk about economics and often don’t want to see themselves as being part of a left at all, see climate change as an issue that transcends politics entirely…. a lot of the big green groups, are also in a kind of denial.”