Tag Archives: original songs

Usual Rubbish

Mixology.

Why does it rattle so much? Is that the low end putting out all that noise? Hmmmm … well, there’s only one thing for it. Grease. Lots of grease.

Oh, hi. As is so often my affectation, I will behave as if you just came upon me in a coffee shop or squatting down on the curbside, changing a flat tire. Of course, neither of those things is true in this particular universe, but sometimes we like to act as though we’re interacting on a more personal level and not merely connecting via that series of tubes known as the internet. Okay … that’s a long way of saying, welcome, once again, to Hammer Mill Days, the Big Green blog, where we’re liable to burn half a column just saying hi.  Uh … hi.

We’re at the mixing stage of our current project. What project is that, you may ask? (And well you may.) It’s the next musical episode of Ned Trek, of course, and we’ve been working on a raft of eight songs designed to keep the plot moving forward. Matt and I have been hacking away at these songs for better than six months now, and we’re finally getting to the mixing stage. High time, too. We learned long ago that slow doesn’t necessarily mean good. So if we’re moving slowly, it’s not for goodness’s sake.

Let's get a little more guitar in there.

Mixing a Big Green project is different from most other mixing jobs. We have a peculiar approach to the process, as you might imagine. First we find a stand mixer, like one of those Kitchen Aide thingys you see in yupster kitchens of the 1990s. Then we drop the instruments in one by one, keeping the rotors going at one-quarter speed. Once everything has been dropped in, you add a pint of black coffee and switch the mixer on high. Fair warning – your music is going to slosh out of the bowl and splatter all over your kitchen … I mean, recording studio. Pay it no mind!  Think of the sacrifices made so willingly by those artists who came before you. They didn’t even HAVE electric mixers … they had to do it all by hand, with a FORK. Think about THAT for a minute or two.

Anyway. when you’re done mixing, you pour the album into cordial glasses and serve while it’s still foamy. Then you wait for the accolades to come drifting in. We’re ready, people … are you ready for some rock and roll?

Usual Rubbish

Smash flops.

I don’t know – what do you think? It’s been a few weeks. Actually longer. Starting to lose track. When you’ve been at sea as long as we have, you forget what the shore looks like. Though if memory serves, it sure looks like shit.

Ah, forgive me. You caught me in the midst of my musings. My mind tends to wander as I squat here in the humble potting shed that sits in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our erstwhile squat-house now under occupation by hostile neighbors. (See what I mean? I can’t even write short sentences anymore.) Living here offers an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Where we’ve been is nowhere. Where we’re going is, who the hell knows. And the midpoint between nowhere and who the hell knows is … I don’t know, fuck-all? Something nicer?

For some reason, this week we were talking about whether or not Big Green would do another album. After all, our last release was in 2013, when we dropped Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And we haven’t forgotten what happened then … we dropped it and it broke into a million pieces. Then we dropped another one; that one broke into a million pieces. So we tried carrying the third copy around more carefully. That’s when one of those Texas rangers shot the thing so full of holes that now every copy has bullet holes in it. See for yourself!

SEe? Shot full of holes.

Anyhow, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that we would put out another collection, particularly since we have tracked somewhere between 80 and 100 songs under the rubric of Ned Trek since we released our last album. (Sure, some of those numbers are meant for laughs, but what the hell …. Cowboy Scat wasn’t?) In fact, I myself can discern as many as three distinct albums in that big bag o’ songs, but given the amount of effort involved in preparing and releasing a collection, my guess is that we will start with one, albeit kind of a long one. (Again, Cowboy Scat was 21 songs. Yes … 21.)

I still haven’t given up on my notion of having an online jukebox. Everyone else has, of course. So maybe an album is the thing. Probably the best we can manage, living in a potting shed.

Usual Rubbish

Carbon trail.

Where the hell is that thing. It looks like, I don’t know … a futuristic space gun, or someone’s concept of what a 1980s weapon would look like back in 1953. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Oh, hi. Just digging out the old technology here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, which (oddly enough) appears to contain every object I have ever owned and then some. It’s like that house you keep returning to in your dreams – you know … the one that looks kind of like the house you grew up in but that has a whole extra wing built onto one side that you never knew existed. You’ve been there, right? Or is that just me? I think it must be me. (I’ve been answering that very same question for decades now.)

Okay, so today, I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to dig up my old demagnetizer. It’s a plastic thing that looks like a cross between an electric iron and a glue gun, and it’s used to service the heads on analog tape recorders, which tend to get magnetized after scraping against that magnetic tape for hours upon hours. Why is that a bad thing? I haven’t any idea. All I can say is that, when Marvin gets magnetized, it can be extremely problematic … especially if he’s outside when the street cleaning machine comes along. (We had to pry him off that thing with a snow shovel once. It wasn’t pretty.)

Go easy, Marvin.Small wonder the heads on my antiquated cassette tape machine have picked up a charge; I’ve been running hours of tape through that thing as part of my summer project to archive and restore Big Green’s early recordings (1984-96) as well as some even more primordial stuff from the early 80s. Since practically all of the songs were recorded on analog audio cassette, which doesn’t hold up all that well over the decades, it’s just as well that I’m getting to this now. By the end of the process, I hope to have remastered early mixes of 150 to 200 songs, the vast majority written by my illustrious brother, Matt. That shiny tape makes for a bewildering trail (which is, in fact, pretty close to the title of one of those 200 songs).

You folks have heard a few examples from our early work. After this project is done, I expect you’ll hear more, but don’t quote me. I may get demagnetized before that happens.