Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Woodshedding.

Wait … where the hell are my lyric sheets? I had a big stack under my piano bench since we occupied the mill. Marvin – did we go digital at some point without my noticing it?

Yeah, so I’m just going over some old material, as I mentioned last week. Old videos, old audio tapes, old records, old robots. (Yes, robots – we have a roomful of toy robots in boxes, all acquired during our “Captured by Robots” obsession during the 1990s and 2000s. Evidence of misspent youth, except that we weren’t young then. Misspent oldth.) Just reminding myself of all the songwriting Matt (especially Matt!) and I did back during decades past – a full canon of material. Wait … that’s where I put those lyric sheets! In that old cannon Mitch bought at a mad science garage sale!

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is lending me a hand (or a claw) as I sift through a mountain of discarded bullshit. Amazing how a band full of anti-materialistic, anarcho-syndicalist hammer mill squatters can accumulate such a bewildering array of random possessions. Sure, there are pockets of useful items, like the robots (we can, for instance, plan some kind of robot invasion of the convenience store across the street), but mostly nameless junk. We found some things that were acquired on our various interstellar tours, but much of that is either invisible or too radioactive to handle. (You’d think invisible junk would take up less room, but noooooo.)

He's behind me, isn't he ...?Anyway, I’ve been taking this opportunity to relearn the keyboard and vocal parts to some of our older songs. There are literally hundreds of them, so I suppose if I wanted to, I could play a different one every day for the next nine months, then start again. (I only have time to play one song a day, and usually it ends up being “Summertime” or something like that.) Yesterday’s song was Matt’s “Promised Land”, which is one of those Dylanesque songs Dylan never wrote. We’ll record these at some point, though we have scratchy demos of all of them, recorded on cassette portastudios back in the stone age. (We’ve played some of these on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.)

So if you’re looking for me, I’m down here in the catacombs, pounding on the keys and warbling. Just knock loudly and beware of the robots.

Usual Rubbish

Here comes the sun.

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what’s new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed – it’s how I roll. That’s why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it’s true.)

I just don’t play the fucker enough, that’s my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don’t do ANYTHING enough, so it’s just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor – the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee – gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it’s kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That’s not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.)

It’s when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that’s someone else’s music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on a night like this … me framming on my broken down guitar, Matt hammering on an anvil, Marvin jumping up and down like a chimp, slapping his bongos. I won’t even get into what Anti-Lincoln does to make noise. Let’s say it doesn’t involve the harpsichord, which I think may have been his primary instrument at one time. (We don’t have a harpsichord … hell, not even a harp.)

Bzzt ... Let me tune guitarTrouble is, we spend so much time on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, that practically everything else suffers. The garden has fallen to shit. (Granted, we did plant in the dead of winter. We may be “Big Green” but none of us has enough of a green thumb to grow a freaking rock garden.) Our songwriting is becoming even more bizarre by the day. And what the hell – the harder we work, the longer it takes for us to finish a freaking episode. It’s like we’re running backwards on a train heading in the opposite direction, following a track shaped like a mobius strip. Wrapped in an enigma.

Complain, complain, complain. That’s what blogging is all about, right? Shut up and play your broken guitar!

Usual Rubbish

Freak week.

I told you yesterday about the roof. Now the internet is down. No, not the WHOLE internet … OUR internet, dumbass! And that electricity you tapped from the house next door? Well … that’s run dry as well. Damned squathouses!

Okay, so these are not the easiest days around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and we of the Big Green collective are having to think our way through some truly daunting problems. This is pretty basic stuff, right? Keeping the rain out when it rains. (Right now, our roof only keeps the rain out when it’s sunny.) Surfing the internet in your socks. Plugging the electric can opener in and having it do what it’s made to do, not sit there like a paperweight. Stuff that any band should expect to be able to do, even when they’re squatting in an abandoned hammer factory. But noooooo … not us.

No, Marvin! For chrissake. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) heard what I just told you and took it into his little tin head that he should try to open a can with a paperweight. That’s just so wrong. It’s emblematic of the type of help we get around here. Sure, we have our own robot, but he doesn’t know how to do anything useful. Sure, we have a mad science advisor, but he spends all of his time in a makeshift lab in the basement, burning isotopes into larger … I don’t know …. isotopes? (Or does burning them make them smaller?) Why the hell couldn’t we have made friends with either a carpenter or a handyman? Why wasn’t I born a carpenter?

Looks like another bad roof day.Speaking of the Carpenters, Matt and I have been tracking some backing vocals for the next crop of songs – about eight of them, to appear in the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, embedded within the new Ned Trek episode. When will that be ready? Well, it depends on when it stops raining in the studio. It’s a little difficult recording vocals under a painter’s tarp. Ends up sounding muffled, like someone threw a blanket over you. Which, of course, they did. There’s a reason for everything in music.

So … we soldier on. Now if we only had some soldiers. Or some solderers. They could fix our broken patch cords.