Tag Archives: music

Usual Rubbish

Grappling with hooks.

Hmmm. I like that one you had the other night. How did it go? Strum through that number once again, will you? There’s a good chap.

Ensconced once again within the crumbling walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, I can report that we of Big Green are back to doing what we do best: inventing snacks out of items collected from the goodwill box. If it weren’t for all this music stuff we might be good at it by now. Oh, the burden of servings such a demanding muse! Nothing is good enough, nothing! We work our fingers to the bone – nay, to the marrow – hammering out songs in the clammy basement of this condemned factory, then tossing them skyward… only to see them knocked back in anger. “Send me hooks!” demands the disembodied voice. “We are not amused!”

It appears that somewhere in the metaphysical accounting department some faceless paper-pusher assigned us a pop music muse. Let’s get one thing clear – we do not make pop music. We make crackle music – there’s a difference. It’s a whole ‘nother Rice Krispie. We don’t write choruses like, Keep the ball rollin, keep the ball rollin…! or We could have had it all-uh-hall…! Nah, nah, nah – our choruses go like this:

I’m not Kublai Khan, no no no!
I’m not Kublai Khan, no no no!

… or …

Lincoln! It shouldn’t happen to our quality Lincoln!

No wonder that muse hates our guts (or at least our hooks). Though I think all of us agree – this is the kind of criticism we have received in the past from our various labels. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (now Hegephonic); Loathsome Prick; all of them had their concerns with the material. They also had some concerns about our various retainers – Mitch Macaphee, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and our official spokesvegetable the mansized tuber (now tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/mansizedtuber ). Before putting any resources behind a terrestrial tour of any kind, they would insist that we cut them loose, shave off our long yokel beards, and start playing banjo versions of the Monkees’ greatest hits. For my money, I prefer to confine our performances to deep space… for the nonce, at least.

Well, is that the time? Got to get back to work on that album. Oh, yes… there will be another…. all in due time.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log: five-oh

Merry Christmas, Children? Not sure I remember the parts. Besides, that’s … well … challenging. Anything easier for the season? Jit-Jaguar? That’s a Christmas song? Oh, right.

Hey, sorry. Just working out the set list for our next string of performances. We’re not one of those groups that just gets up on stage in front of 20,000 people (or 20,000 amorphous blobs of protoplasm) and wings it, playing whatever comes into our heads. No, sir … we plan out every inch of our stage show, from the song list to the dance steps to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) juggling torches. (Yes, that’s right, Marvin – it’s torches this time! Deal with it!)

Right, well … okay, we don’t have dance steps per se. Nor set lists. But we do work up a vague idea of what we’re going to play over the course of the next week. That’s called planning, my friends. How does it work out in the specific context of Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011? Here’s how…

11.8.2011 – Cranking out Jit-Jaguar in front of 20,000 Neptunians. They like the part about the tin pot politician apologizing to “Mr. Jesus” for calling out for robotic revenge on the town that rejected him. (Oh, yes… it’s titanic theme night here on Neptune.) It’s a bit of schtick, but we always bring Marvin out for this number, just so that the audience has a robot to look at while we sing of, well, robots. Never mind the cognitive dissonance of employing a peaceful robot to evoke the image of a warlike one. We give the people what they want – end of story.

11.10.2011 – Busted! Pulled over by the interplanetary highway patrol for doing 1/2C in a 1/4C zone. Anti-Lincoln was driving. Yeah, that was kind of a mistake, come to think of it. Mitch Macaphee was on break at the time, and Anti- was handy. (I call him “Auntie” sometimes because he just hates that.) The patrol hung an appearance ticket on us. We’ll probably just send the check along with our guilty plea … if the Post Office still delivers to Titan. (Cutbacks, you know. Now they send all of Pluto’s mail to Saturn for processing.)

11.11.2011 – My, but that’s a lot of elevens. And look… it’s 11:11 a.m. Time to play Wrap Up World War I.

Next stop: mystery planet opposite the sun from Earth. You know… where everything’s a mirror image of Earth, except that people eat corn on the cob on the vertical. (We learned of this from Saint Guido Sarducci.)

Usual Rubbish

Tin can alley.

Better take this slow, Mitch. Those suckers look sharp, real sharp. Sharp as a … a very sharp thing. Got a thesaurus? No, it’s not a creature from the Cretaceous. It’s a book with…. oh never mind.

Well here we are, on the first leg (or arm, perhaps) of Big Green’s much anticipated (by us) [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 – an aimless romp through the chewy center of the galaxy and from one end of our voluminous songbook to the other. Oh yes, we’re going from A to Z on this one. That was something we settled on in the rehearsal cellar, mainly because we couldn’t decide what the hell to play. So Matt pulls out this massive loose-leaf tome of songs from hell, arranged alphabetically, and we started paging through. From All Saints Come to You’re Dripping… it’s a veritable cornucopian magnum opus of Big Green numbers from back in the day. Our set lists are the stuff of nightmares, frankly. (And who’s this Frank Lee you keep speaking of?)

Okay, so… we lifted off rightly enough. At least that’s what I’m told. I was unconscious… or so I’m told. (How would I know I was unconscious when I was unconscious?) No, I bit down on a cough drop and fell over backwards, I’m told, then was strapped into my couch on the rented spacecraft of doom Mitch procured for us. Actually, that was probably the best way to get me on board the sucker – feet first. I was all for getting some other type of transport. Perhaps a long elevator or some ultra-lift shoes – something, anything that would get us closer to Betelgeuse.

Well, now, I may have been overreacting to the spacecraft. It’s actually not that bad once you’ve gone a couple of million miles in it. By the time I woke up, we had gone that and then some. Of course, now we’re making our way through the asteroid belt – perhaps the pointiest part of the solar system – on our way to an engagement in the Jovian system. Which, incidentally, we may be a little late for, as this is taking longer than I’d thought likely. In truth, I’d rather our pilot, Mitch Macaphee, err on the side of caution rather than treat us like one of his lame experiments. (Did I say that? Let it pass, let it pass….)

For now, I’m just strumming on Matt’s guitar, waiting, waiting to be told to start performing, sharing this tin can with a dyspeptic crew of oddball mofos. Oh, the solitude of space travel! How I miss it.