Tag Archives: music

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

Downville.

Hey, you know what? I saw a car pass in front of the mill today, just a few minutes ago. Amazing, right? Wait a minute … there goes another one!

Yeah, I guess you can tell that this town is dying. No doubt about it … since the old Cheney Hammer Mill shut down, there’s no reasonable way of making a living around here. Some stragglers work at the corner CVS, a handful more at the non-name convenience market across the street. It’s just plain dead. Damn good thing we don’t perform any more, or we’d be starving to death for lack of paying gigs. Sure … we’re starving, but it’s for an entirely different reason: inertia!

You know what they say, though. (That’s all I’ve got on that, because, after all, you know what they say, so I don’t have to tell you.) There are a lot of things you can do while standing still – one of them is mixing. That’s what we’re doing … or that’s what I’m doing, anyway – rhythm tracks, mixes, blah blah blah. A lot of standing around, pacing back and forth, cupping your hands behind your ears and furrowing your brow. Once in a while, I’ll send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out for some take out. (He wheels over to the local quick lunch stand and looks for unclaimed packages, basically – the discount method!)

Standing here.As I mentioned in previous posts, we’re finishing eight songs for the next episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek parody that’s the baloney in the cheap-ass sandwich known as the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. Even when you fly as low to the ground as we do, mixing eight songs is a heavy lift. Imagine sweat dripping from my brow as I twiddle the knob on my superannuated Lexicon effect processor, Marvin occasionally daubing it with a facecloth. More reverb? A rotary effect of some kind? Those vocals need help, damn it! These and a thousand other decisions must be made before we upload our work to literally handfuls of fans. Hard job, but somebody has to do it.

So it’s just as well that there aren’t a lot of distractions around these parts. Call it a musician’s paradise.

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.