Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

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.

Usual Rubbish

Refried show.

Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah … it doesn’t work very well without the visual. Scratch that.

Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It’s like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, “Enough!”, throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no … the show must go on.

That said, well … it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast – that’s the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month’s installment is extracted from one of last year’s THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt’s Brain. Based on the Spock’s Brain episode of classic Star Trek, it’s full of ridiculous plot departures and snarky portrayals of neocon freak bastards. Just the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from a Big Green podcast. On top of all that, there are 6 original Big Green songs in the mix, not available in Och, these cumberbunds are a wee bit tight.stores or on any album (yet). I could tell you what time code numbers they appear at in the show, but then you would just skip the whole play or simply laugh at my presumption, so I’ll forgo that.

The songs are, well, some of my favorites from the last year or so. I’d say number one in my book is “Two Lines”, a song sung by Lt. Sulu describing his artistic angst over being limited to two-line speeches throughout the entire three-year run of classic Star Trek. The chorus commandeers some of these two-line speeches to communicate Sulu’s despair:

Captain, the controls are frozen
the helm won’t respond; we’re being pulled inside
Aye, aye, my career is broken
like a giant hand has me in its hold
Captain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last

Then there’s a song about a yellow submarine. Actually not – there is one Pearle song called “Send in Some Advisers” which, well … the name pretty much says it. Anywho, the show it totally refried, so enjoy it … a second time.

Usual Rubbish

Six or seven. (Eight?)

Jesus Christ on a bike. I told you this hard drive was full. And now there’s smoke emanating from the processor. Can’t understand it. It’s a 486, isn’t it? Sure, hot damn. Fast as one of those new-fangled horseless carriages.

Oh, hello. Just grappling with some minor technical difficulties. You know, little stuff like gear that was obsolete in the last century, now over-burdened with production content, bowing deeply under the weight of yet another project, bursting at the seams. Just the kind of thing we’re likely to run into here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted squat house. Things can always be worse. We could have opted to do something else with this space, like start a church or something, but that doesn’t always turn out that well. (See Word of Life Church, Chadwicks, NY … up the road a piece.) Music it is.

Sure, I know … it’s been three years since the release of our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And while we haven’t completed a new album, we have recorded the equivalent of about three albums worth of new material over these last few years. It’s all stuff cut into our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, so you may have heard it (or not). Bunch of songs, some of them sung by a pantomime horse. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that? So there’s little doubt in my mind that at some point we will package some or all of Eight songs? Really??these into an album of sorts and toss it out on the street for passers-by to happen upon and drop into their MP3 players.

Now you may ask, what kind of an economic model is that? Well, friends – we are a creative collective, built on an anarcho-syndicalist theoretical foundation, but with neo-socialist flavor notes that put us more into the worker-owned enterprise category. At least that’s how I describe it while hopping around on one foot. (I do that when someone is shooting at me for talking like a goddamn commie. This IS upstate New York, after all.) We’re giving a whole new meaning to “dance band”: We hit the first chord, and Yosemite Sam pulls his six-gun out and shouts “Dance, varmint!”

So, yes … we will assemble a new album by and by, assuming I can find a big enough technological bucket to carry it around in. Stay tuned!