Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Hold on.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Turn the key and …. nuts! Nothing again. Hey, Mitch – you’re a mad scientist. Make yourself useful. Get this freaking car to run, willya?

Oh, hi. Just working through the usual nonsense. Trying to get a car going. Working on a broken amp. Turning all the chairs in the house upside-down. (We do that to discourage visitors from staying too long.) There’s never a lack of useful things to do, and lucky for us we have a lot of help. Mitch Macaphee, for one, can be counted upon to invent some new way of dealing with minor annoyances, like invasive insects or gravity. Ooops, did I say gravity? I wasn’t supposed to mention that one. It’s going to be a surprise. A BIG surprise. HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA!

Well, THAT took a dark turn. Anyway, aside from Mitch tinkering with … uh … continental drift, we have the able services of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who can, among many other talents, life very heavy things. He picked up a whole desk set the other day … one of those three-pen jobs, all by himself! Tomorrow I’m going to have him replace the Kleenex in all of the dispensers distributed throughout the hammer mill. Yeoman work, to be sure. (I would do it myself, but I am not a Yeoman.)

Uh, Mitch ... Gravity again?I suppose you’re wondering where your podcast is. Well, I was getting to that. THIS IS BIG GREEN has been coming together slowly. We did the voices for the next episode of Ned Trek last week, then we’ll need to do some editing and dubbing, etc. We’re probably looking at another couple of weeks, during which time I will frantically try to dig up some not-too-uninteresting material from our archives. There will likely be a few more Wayback Wednesdays on tap, so stay tuned.

I am sure some of you have already said, “Y’know, if you didn’t waste so much freaking time doing useless shit, you’d have finished the podcast by now.” My response is a simple one: “Freaking” is not a word. It’s a cop-out, my friend. Say what you mean and mean what you say. That’s our motto ’round the mill. Call it a mill motto. Call it anything. I’m getting back to that dumb-ass car.

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

Inside the May podcast.

Jesus, that was slow. You know what we need? One of those vacuum tube systems with a branch that runs straight up to the freaking internet. You just stuff the podcast into a plastic capsule, cram that sucker in the tube, and up it goes to the “cloud”. Then when it rains, everybody gets your podcast. Modern technology – what a freaking miracle.

Now that the long-awaited May episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN has finally been posted, this seems like a good time to offer a quick rundown of its questionable contents:

Ned Trek 28 – Disheveled in the Dark. This longish, musical episode of our Star Trek parody is based on the classic Star Trek episode entitled “Devil in the Dark”, a standard morality play (of course – it was the 1960s) about a mining planet being terrorized by a mysterious cave dwelling creature. Look it up … got it? Okay. The creature, called the “Horta”, is represented in our version as the “Hairta”, literally the animated hair of Donald Trump, rampaging its way through Republican candidates on a hyper-polluted, free market, toxic waste dump and fracking planet run by Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus. There’s a lot of running, coughing, and (of course) a performance of the palamino mind meld.

There are also eight new Big Green songs, which include:

Say Can You Fear (timecode: 16:14). A Nixon song. Basically another plea from the Nixon android for consulting work and a path back to respectability. Dude’s got issues.

Romney and You Know It (timecode: 22:04). Captain Willard Romney muses on the now dim possibility of a brokered GOP convention. Arrangement offers a minor nod to the late great George Martin. (You can also hear the song on Soundcloud.)

Down in the Polls (timecode: 39:12). Mr. Welsh wields his folk guitar into action and renders an Irish-tinged ballad of the killer Hairta. References to some of your favorite GOP contenders in 2016.

post-itHerr Mr. Hair (timecode: 49:14). Perle’s song. Predictably, he’s trying to curry favor with the Hairta. Always another ego to be stroked (or combed in this case).

You Made That Bed (timecode: 1:05:25). Sulu, the moral center of the Ned Trek universe (aside from Ned himself), characterizes the episode as one of chickens seriously coming home to roost. Cowbell played by Marvin (my personal robot assistant).

Demigod (timecode: 1:15:16). Ned’s song. A moody Melvin slow rocker about the phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism. Listen closely for ironic callback to the Youngbloods’ “Everybody Get Together”.

Hey GOP (timecode: 1:21:49). Shuffle swing number about the predicament of the Republican party, faced with the rampaging Hairta.

Cry for the Children (timecode: 1:26:36). Another over-the-top Doc Coburn number, filled with religious imagery and agonized wailing.

Put the Phone Down. Matt and I talk about how freaking exhausted we are having just completed eight songs for a freaking podcast. We also discuss the Utica Peregrine Falcon project, as well as some archival audio and video from Big Green’s live performance period back in the early 1990s.