Tag Archives: Trevor James Constable

Usual Rubbish

Stepping into eden, yeah, brother.

2000 Years to Christmas

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind.

The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else.

The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine.

In a distant dive, long, long ago

Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when we were still playing clubs. Back then, the indie rock club scene was not yet much of a thing here in upstate New York, so it was hard to find places that would cater to original songs. And yea, your friends in Big Green had no abandoned mill in which to shelter, and they were sore afraid. So it is written.

Our group was my illustrious brother Matt and I, plus John White on drums and Ace guitarist Tony Butera. We started running out of Big Green work, so we decided to go back to some of the same clubs under an assumed identity. Not the first time we tried this, of course, but this time around, we actually got a few gigs. (Sometimes it makes sense to go under cover.)

Who's Herbert?

Laughed out of Utica

Anyway, we decided to call ourselves “The Space Hippies.” This was after a group of ne’er-do-well intergalactic hipsters that appeared on a Star Trek episode named The Way To Eden. (Not to be confused with the motorcycle freaks that threatened to blow up the nameless planet that the Space Family Robinson had crashed on in the 3rd and final season of Lost In Space – an episode nonsensically named Collision of the Planets.) They played twangy space guitars and, well … that seemed like a good thing to us.

Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing. In fact, one of the first club owners Tony called to ask for a booking told him, “I can’t hire a band called The Space Hippies. It I did that, I’d be laughed out of Utica.” That was when I got the strong feeling that we should change the cover band’s name to Laughed Out of Utica. (I got voted down on that one, damn it!)

Tunes with psychological issues

Fact is, we did work a bit with the Space Hippies, though I think we kept changing the name so we could double dip, Jethro Tull-style. One club we got booked into was a place called Looney Tunes on NY Route 5. I’ve got a cassette tape of one of the nights we played there. The quality is pretty bad, but you can basically hear us framming away at those rock covers. I included one track from this tape on the July 2019 episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. The song was a Matt Perry number titled “How ‘Bout The War”. (Tony plays a screaming solo on this and, basically, every track on the tape. What a madman.)

What else do I remember about the Space Hippies’ premiere gig? Let’s see. There was dogshit on the stage when we were loading in. I think it was a welcome gift from the club owner. Ah, those were the days.

Usual Rubbish

Someone put a crimp in Lincoln’s style

2000 Years to Christmas

Ring the bell tower. We don’t have one? Well, then pull the fire alarm. What? No fire alarm? Are you telling me we’ve been squatting here for twenty years and there’s no freaking fire alarm? I am depressed.

Hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I’m afraid you find us in crisis mode this week. We’ve just received a ransom message from the former King of the Catskills (or so they claim) saying that they’ve kidnapped Anti-matter Lincoln and are demanding a considerable forfeit for his safer return.

My lack of god! Will these scoundrels stop at nothing? They abduct an obvious senior citizen – Anti Lincoln is 196 if he’s a day – and cart him off like a sack of grain in hopes of squeezing riches out of his squat-mates. He went off to take his constitutional this morning (he always takes the constitution for a little walk first thing) and when he didn’t return, we knew something was up.

Crimped like a sea dog

Now, this would be bad enough if Anti-Lincoln were just being held somewhere against his will. That, sadly, is not the case. The nefarious King of the Catskills has informed us that Anti-Lincoln has been consigned to a chain gang. They’re sending him to work the butterscotch mines outside of St. Johnsville. In other words, they crimped the bastard!

Look …. I’ve seen what butterscotch mining can do to a man. That’s hard labor. Someone of Anti-Lincoln’s age and temperament won’t last a week. We’re sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with a jug of water and a flashlight to see if he can help. Chances are good, though, that they’ll just crimp Marvin as well and put him on the automation detail.

This could work.

Go fund my ass

What can we do? Well …. the kidnappers want crypto currency, so we were thinking maybe a fundraiser – setting up crowdfunding to bail Anti-Lincoln out. Either that or busking on the corner for bit coin. Of course, we’re terrible at raising money under any circumstances, so that seems kind of like a non-starter.

We could also try to beam him out of there using Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. Of course, that would require knowing his precise location. A few feet off and we could be beaming a Lincoln-shaped column of molten butterscotch into our living room. (Something I don’t want to even contemplate.)

Wait a minute …. Anti Lincoln just walked in through the front door. And apparently he knows nothing of this kidnapping business. It’s almost as if the King of the Catskills made it all up. Sheesh …. can’t trust anyone these days.

Usual Rubbish

Ear candy.

2000 Years to Christmas

Turn it down, the radio! No, that’s too low. Now turn it up again. Ah, that’s perfect. What’s that you say? It’s not a radio? But it has dials and lights and noise comes out of it. This is strange.

Oh, hi. I was just contemplating a new advance in audio science called the Eight Track Cartridge Player – a bold invention that enables you to copy a two-sided, long-playing record onto a medium that’s broken into four equal parts … so inevitably, one or more of the songs on the LP will be randomly broken in half somewhere in the middle. Or there will be big unexplained periods of silence at various points on the album. Or both. That IS a step up. Now if we could just get a record album onto some kind of medium that would allow us to play the whole thing from beginning to end without any of that nonsense, skip to another track instantaneously, fast forward, etc. Wait …. WHAT??

You know, the thing about living in an abandoned hammer mill is that you’re so isolated from the outside world, you almost literally become unmoored in time. Even your mad science advisor loses track of what decade it is, and starts inventing things that have already been invented in previous times, thinking they are his or her own ideas. Not that anything like that would ever happen around here. Okay …. in fact, that HAS happened around here, truth be told. This week it was the eight track cartridge deck. Last week it was the bicycle. My guess is that, by sometime next week, he will have installed one of his new tape decks in his ramshackle bike and start riding it around the valley, cranking up the tunes, and swearing at the gaps at key points in whatever album he’s listening to. Fun times!

Wow, Mitch. Another breakthrough.

Now, if we could get Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device working once again, we could actually turn a profit on Mitch Macahpee’s retread inventions. How, you may ask? Well …. think of how we managed to bring antimatter Lincoln into our midst – through a time portal generated by Trevor James’s invention. So, Mitch could take his re-invented eight-track machine, set the Orgone Generating Device (or OGD) to 1957, and drop in at SONY to show those fuckers how it’s done. Of course, they would buy up the patent almost immediately, then he could move forward in time to a point when sales are sufficient to shower him with remuneration, which he could then haul back to the future to share with us. Or maybe he would just use the profits to buy himself a tony house in the 1960s and forget our sorry asses. Hmmmm …. maybe not such a good idea.

SCRATCH THAT, MITCH! TRY INVENTING THE BLENDER NEXT – I’D KILL FOR A SMOOTHIE RIGHT ABOUT NOW.