Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Fire away.

Where did I leave my garlic press? Marvin? Marvin! Jesus. What kind of a dung hole is this, anyway?

Oh yeah … that kind of a dung hole. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill kind. A place where garlic presses go to die, apparently. This is the third one I’ve lost this month. And I used to have a blender, seems like, though our electrical service is a bit spotty anyway, so it hardly matters that that thing disappeared. Somebody around this mill has sticky fingers. I’m looking at you, mansized tuber! Oh, right. No fingers. Still … those roots seem a little grabby.

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is helping me today with my weekly chore of straightening out the kitchen. Don’t know if any of you have ever lived with a rock band, but let me tell you – no one wrecks a kitchen more completely than wayward musicians, down on their luck. Open cans of kipper snacks strewn about like poker chips. Half-eaten bowls of cereal. Do I have to draw you a picture?

It gets worse … particularly when we’re producing an album. People tend to keep strange hours … like ninety-seven o’clock (really strange hours). There’s a lot of work that goes into putting together an album as complex and nuanced as Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. You may think it’s just another crackpot enterprise, cooked up by a bunch of ass-clowns in upstate New York. And, well … you’re right, but (and this is important) there’s still a lot of work that goes into putting it together. (Is there an echo in here?)

Right now, the song count on this sucker is at 21. I can’t guarantee it will stay there, but if it does, it will be the longest album we ever made and maybe a little too long for a standard CD. Thank god those little discs are as archaic as dinosaurs! Digital releases mean no limits! Make it 35 songs! Quick, write 14 more!

All right, back to the search.

Usual Rubbish

End game.

I’ll hold the ingots, and you swing the hammer. No, wait. We have to heat them up first. Where’s my butane lighter? Left it on the stove, I think….

Oh, hi. Just caught the core members of Big Green (and its motley entourage) in the process of preparting our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, for publication and distribution. Very complicated process. You know how bizarrely complex our creative process can get; the very task of writing and recording these albums involves no less than 14,000 individual muscle actions per song (and that’s not including all the grimacing). Christ on a bike – by the time we got our last album International House to market in 2008, my face muscles were frozen in place until well after the holidays.

So, how does the manufacturing and distribution work? Simple. We melt down the .wav files into a slurry, pour them into rectangular forms, and cut them into shards – or “ingots” – about the size of a pack of cigarettes. We get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to sand the edges off of each block of music, then carefully insert them through the mail-slot like hole in the specialized distribution mechanism our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee fashioned for us during his last vaction in Barbados. (He was bored with all of the waterskiing.) That sends the ingots deep into cyberspace and the hungry ears of listeners all across the universe.

Now, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick presents a special challenge. Let me explain. Our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, had 13 tracks. International House had 16. Cowboy Scat promises to include no less than 21 tracks! An unheard of bonanza, true, but think of the ingots! So many corners to sand down… Poor Marvin! What’s more, because Cowboy Scat is rumored to be the soundtrack to a lost musical, each track is attributed to a different music group that sounds strangely like us. That simple fact complicates its distribution in ways that I cannot describe here … for reasons … I cannot describe here.

Anyway, none of these difficulties will dissuade us. We will release this album – you have Mitch’s personal guarantee. (Just leave me out of it, okay?)

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.