Tag Archives: winter

Getting a good-ISH start on another year

January 21, 2022 Joseph

Oh, damn, I did it again. Can’t stop writing 2021 when I mean 2022. It’s like I’m trying to go back in time. And why the hell would ANYONE want to go back to 2021? I mean, aside from Mitch Macaphee?

Yeah, Mitch had a pretty good year last year. He made some stuff blow up real good. The rest of us, however … not so much. We made things blow up, but not intentionally. And I have to say, this drafty old abandoned hammer mill is no place to spend January. If we were as rich as … well, as pretty much any other band, we could just pick this place up, put it on a flatbed, and move it someplace warm. But no how, my friends, no freaking how.

Random ways to stay warm

Okay, so when the heat is not so hot, how do you keep from turning into a band-cicle? Well, there are ways. One is to play your damn instruments. That’s what we do typically when the iceman calleth. I start banging on my acoustic guitar, beating the living shit out of it with my pick-less paw, raising callouses and annoying the neighbors with my hollering. (If you want to know what THAT sounds like, give my recent nano concerts a listen. )

Sometimes when it gets particularly frosty, I’ll play covers, like old Neil Young songs or numbers by Elvis Costello, Stones, Jethro Tull, etc. Some of it’s a little hard to render on a solo acoustic guitar, but I don’t let THAT stop me. What I can’t do is a credible version of Matt’s song Why Not Call It George, which we used to do with the full band. Our guitar player Jeremy Shaw used to do a volcanic solo on that song – holy cats! If that doesn’t warm you up, I don’t know what will.

Through the trackless wastes

Now, as everybody knows, January is a very quiet time for bands here in upstate New York. That’s always been the way, since grand-daddy was knee-high to a grasshopper’s grandaddy. Of course, now it’s even worse with COVID, though that doesn’t stop some people from going out and making it rain in a club somewhere. That’s fine, guys … just don’t breathe while you’re there and you’ll be fine.

We of Big Green tend to prefer our solitude. And who the hell needs the money, right? I mean, besides us? We can always ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to manufacture some cash for us. He’s got one of those inkjet printers built into his ass. (Not literally his ass, you understand – just a figure of speech.) And if he just refrains from putting Art Linkletter in the president hole of the bills, someone might actually accept them as legal tender. (Hope so – it’s a long slog to Spring.)

Extraordinary means

Now, one of the benefits of having a mad science advisor is that, when you can’t afford to run the central heat, he or she can come up with some technical solution that will keep you from freezing to death. Yesterday Mitch Macaphee somehow managed to build a fire in the forge room of the mill. Only it wasn’t something impressive, like a flame generated by a concentrated tachyon beam. He literally just pulled beams out of the mill roof and threw them in the fire.

What a freaking luddite! I expect some kind of miracle cure to our hypothermia, not burning the house down one plank at a time!

Usual Rubbish

Spring Chills.

March 5, 2021 Joseph

Throw another log on the fire. What’s that? No more logs? What the hell. Then break up one of those lobster traps. We haven’t caught a single lobster in twenty years of squatting in this mill – can’t understand it. Stupid trap!

Oh, hi. Yeah, you caught us looking for alternative sources of fuel again. It’s pretty much a full time job for the likes of us here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It takes a lot of fuel to heat a big old barn of a place like this, even with the entire west wing collapsed and the north wing taken over by lunatic neighbors. In this current cold snap, we’ve resorted to burning whatever wood we can get both hands on. Brother anti-Lincoln has even started pulling up the floorboards in his personal apartment. Inasmuch as it’s on the third floor, this is making navigating around his living space more and more of a challenge. (He’s devised a system of ropes, but I believe he’s thinking of throwing those into the fire as well.)

Now, plenty of people have asked us, “Hey, Big Green …. since your name is Big Green, why don’t you install some solar panels on the roof of the Cheney Hammer Mill?” To that I respond, good question, plenty of people. We resort to something like passive solar energy – opening the blinds on sunny days and rubbing our hands together furiously. And sure, we could ask our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to fashion some kind of perpetual energy machine, but our Mitch is a temperamental artist – if he invents a perpetual energy machine, it’s because he saw a hole in the world shaped like such a machine, then carved something out to plug that hole. Selfish human concerns, like avoiding hypothermia, are of no interest to him. He’s looking at the BIG picture … and that picture is big enough to block his view of yours truly.

We tried to get in touch with our cousin, Rick Perry, former Energy Secretary and Governor of Texas, as well as subject of our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, but he hasn’t taken any of our calls. So much for pulling strings. (Hey …. maybe we can pull strings to generate electricity … ) There is another option besides resorting to the assistance of celebrity relatives – getting one of those energy generating recumbent bike thingies. Just hook that thing up and go. We could get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pedal the thing, and that would produce enough juice to power a block of space heaters as long as your arm and thick as your ass. For the record, Marvin’s not crazy about the idea, and suggested I might consider doing it myself as a way of shedding some of the COVID pounds I’ve put on over the past year. Still, it’s one way of getting through March without ending up having to be picked up with a pair of ice tongs.

This will be easy. Just set up the bike, plug it into the wall, and pedal backwards. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Usual Rubbish

My back pages.

February 28, 2020 Joseph

Hmmm, let’s see …. here’s a fragment. I think I wrote this in 1987. Or maybe a couple of years before that. Yeah, more like ’85. It’s got tahini stains on it, and I swore off tahini in ’86.

Yes, here we are, doing what upstate New Yorkers typically do during the colder months, when we’re all frozen in place, afraid to leave our homes, waiting for the waxing sun to favor us once again – digging through the archives! Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve got lots of room for old cardboard boxes and file folders, hundreds of which have somehow found their way here from wherever we came from previously. I don’t know about you, but all of my possessions follow me around like a lost dog. I just don’t have the heart to turn them away. Poor little motherless stand mixer! You’ll always have a home with me!

Right, well … I don’t want to trouble you with some shabby inventory of my personal possessions. I’m mostly interested in old compositions from the early days of Big Green, when we were all knee-high to a locust. Ah yes, I remember those days well, piled into our spartan garret, scribbling away into repurposed notepads leftover from school, crossing out drafts of expository writing essays and replacing them with angry verse, channeling the angst of a then-young generation choking on its collective anger over … uh … having to do expository writing essays. And a couple of other things. Hey, those were the immediate post-punk years. We all started on Dylan and the Beatles as pre-teens, then moved on to the harder stuff when we were 20. Those 60s hipsters were our gateway drug.

So, what are we finding? Old songs, pieces of songs, idea tapes, etc. I’m guessing there’s an album in this somewhere, though it’s going to look a lot like that Mousetrap board game by the time it’s finished. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to help me evaluate what to do with all of this old material. That’s a fairly simple process. I find some lyrics, I insert them into Marvin’s scanner, and the music goes round and round, whoa, whoa, whoa, and it comes out as a series of numbers. I then look up the numbers on the decoder ring Mitch Macaphee built for me (coincidentally, it looks just like the ones I used to get in my Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes) which renders a “yes” or a “no”. If it’s yes, then we consider turning it into something. If it’s no, well, into the bin it goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of nos, frankly. Either there’s something wrong with this ring, or I really sucked my way through the eighties. It’s one of the other, folks.

BIG GREEN