Tag Archives: podcast

Usual Rubbish

April comes late.

Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right … not the red button. Never hit the red button.

Mr. Ned and crew on the bridgeOh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It’s like a series of tubes, I’m told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself – like the internets – a machine.

As you may already know, we’ve just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month’s show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here’s a little rundown:

Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager. In this thrilling episode of the adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned on board the starship Free Enterprise, Willard and his crew of severe conservatives (and George Takei) are faced with their greatest challenge yet: making small talk with an audio-animatronic Richard Nixon. Oh, and there’s Edward Teller’s all-consuming Emergency Manager 9000, an ultimate computer bent on taking over the universe. That, too.

Music: We revisit the “live” duet version of our song “You’re Edward Teller”, in honor of the physicist’s appearance on Ned Trek. We dredge up another demo from the International House project – a scratch version of the song “Do It (Every Time)”. A bit later on, you’ll hear our more recent (still unreleased) recording of Matt’s song “Jit Jaguar”, one of my favorite Big Green recordings ever, owing to its primitive simplicity. (Easy to please, what can I say?). We close out with an adhoc rendering of “Special Kind of Blood”.

Gab fest: In our “Put The Phone Down” segment we engage in a wide ranging discussion of the late Ritchie Havens’ amazing thumb, Margaret Thatcher’s departure, the press response to the Boston Marathon bombing, our old-school recording methods, and other pointless drivel.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments always welcome. We’ll read anything on the podcast, anything. Be our guest, for chrissake. More later.

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: April Breakout 2013

Audio

Big Green puts the ape in April with another episode of Ned Trek, three unreleased Big Green songs, some odd muttering, and more. Dress appropriately.

This is Big Green – April Breakout 2013. Features: 1) Ned Trek IX: The Ultimate Emergency Manager; 2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe bring up the news like a cheap hotdog; 3) The rejected theme song; 4) Song: You’re Edward Teller, by Big Green; 5) How we used to record: the ugly truth; 6) Song: Do it every time (demo version), by Big Green; 7) On John King and other great journalists; 8) Remembering Margaret Thatcher, for real; 9) Song: Jit Jaguar, by Big Green; 10) Richie Havens and his thumb; 11) Ending with the immortal

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Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?