Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

The fate of Ned Trek: A Mystery

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Get Music Here

Where is it? Well, I can’t tell you. I was looking at it. I was looking right at it, and then it just wasn’t there! Stupid Internets!

Ever have one of those days when you keep losing track of things? Yeah, well I’m having one of those weeks. First I couldn’t find my shoes. Then my bag of marbles went missing. (That’s right – I lost my marbles.) Next it was my reading glasses. I couldn’t even look for those because my distance glasses were missing too, and I can’t see my reading glasses without my distance glasses. And then there was the bank deposit, but never mind – you can read about that in the papers.

These are all trifles when you come down to it. The big thing that’s missing is a web site. The Ned Trek web site, that is – it disappeared without a trace last week. Of course, so did last week. I mean, last week is gone for good, right? And sadly, it has taken Ned Trek with it.

Home for wayward clowns

Some of you may know Ned Trek as an occasional segment on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. We would gab a bit, maybe play a stupid song or two, then play an episode of Ned Trek and call it a night. Of course, the show was buried in a lot of even more inane nonsense, and we felt that people needed an easier path to the oasis that is Ned Trek. After all, some might only want to hear bad imitations of vaguely famous people and a seasoned naturalist imitating a sit-com horse from the nineteen sixties. (There ARE people like that, you know.)

With that in mind, we built a separate site for Ned Trek. (Here’s the cached version of the site on the Wayback Machine.) There we just posted the shows, gave a little explainer about the premise, etc., and put up some ridiculous pictures that drove people mad. Every other episode of Ned Trek was a musical, so we had a separate WordPress post category for those. It was a whole thing, and it got tens and tens of visitors until …. well, until earlier this year.

Who the hell would ever hack THIS masterpiece?

Things that go boom

You’ve heard the not-so-old saying, “boom goes the dynamite”, right? Well, this is a case of boom goes the web site. I went there one day, nothing better to do, and I got the white screen of death. I tried all the patented WordPress hacks to resurrect it, but it was no good. But I think the real issue is …. what the hell happened? Did we get hacked by Captured by Robots or someone?

Maybe it was Desilu, in retaliation for lifting their show concept. Or maybe it was Desilu in retaliation for murdering their show concept. Fortunately, the show files are still there, so we set up a temporary page until we can figure out what the hell is going on. (Did I hear Trump just now?) Then there was that one-armed man spotted leaving the scene. We’ve got to find him before Richards does! (Damn it. Now I’m mixing up my bad sixties television shows.)

Calling all engineers

Hey … if you’re an engineer (i.e. not someone who drives a train) and you know something about WordPress, do me a favor. Call up WordPress central and tell them that their bloody platform just dumped years worth of pointless activity … I mean, backbreaking work. We demand restitution!

Usual Rubbish

Stages in the ascent (or descent) of Big Green

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You know, when I was a boy, my pappy said to me …. what’s that? How the hell did you know that? Oh, right. He’s your pappy, too. Easy to forget little details like that when you get to be MY age. Get off my lawn!

Yikes, well … welcome to geezerville … I mean, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat house. It is, after all, just a rest stop in the long journey that is our story. Not exactly the best appointed rest stop on the Thruway, mind you – there’s no Cinnabon, no Chick Fillet. There’s no 1960s style automat where you can grab a soggy hours-old tuna sandwich if you’re in a hurry. But I digress.

Phase one: the first phase

Sure, we go way back. Big Green’s founding was a scattershot affair, spread over several decades. We count our age in geologic time, as our official story will attest, but as far as start dates are concerned, we’re probably talking 1979. That’s the first year Matt and I played in a band together. Sure, we sucked, but give us a chance! We had only just grown our guitar hands, our pump organ feet, our harmonica teeth. (Ever seen harmonica teeth? Trick question – most harp players don’t have teeth.)

I mean, if you want a more compelling genesis story, look elsewhere. (Genesis, perhaps.) The fact is, we picked up our cheap guitars, went to some cheap venues, and started playing our cheap repertoire. Matt and I did some duo gigs, but we mostly played as a four-piece, with our first drummer Mark K (no last name – YOU know who you are!) and our first lead guitarist, Tim Walsh. So there was pounding and there was twanging, but no screeching quite yet. Big Green was still in the protozoan stage.

Phase two: the one that came after one

As was my habit, I took a year off, this time in New Paltz, NY, living in the worst dorm on campus at the SUNY college there. Across the hall from me lived our soon-to-be second drummer, Phil Ross, who’s still playing gigs, last I heard. Phil and I used to sit in his room and listen to his truly impressive LP collection – lots of old Dylan sides, Phil Ochs, etc., and some new stuff by this Elvis Costello dude. Phil and I shared an apartment for a semester, then a house outside of Albany, NY, along with my other bandmates, Matt and Tim, and my partner at the time, Ellen.

Phases of Big Green
Phases two, three, and three and a half of Big Green

So, the nameless band that one might call proto-Big Green went under a variety of monikers, from Slapstick to Mearth to Duck and Cover. We played some gigs around Albany, did some recording, then kind of ran out of gas as a band. That’s when Matt dug into writing in a big way. (Fun fact: his song Sweet Treason is partly about our year in Castleton-On-Hudson. See if you can guess which part!)

Phase three: a name and a phase

What came after that? Well, Tim and Phil went off to do other stuff, and Matt and I teamed up with Ned Danison (author of A Name and A Face) and a bunch of random drummers – and eventually John White, our forever drummer – to put together the band that would be called Big Green. So it was musical drummers for a while, then musical guitarists for a longer while, but ultimately we landed in an abandoned hammer mill and started telling you this long, shaggy-dog story of failure and hardship.

You know the rest. Five or six more phases, and we’re here. Any questions?

Usual Rubbish

Eric the Half a Song. Sing it with me!

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Should we do another Big Green album? I don’t know … why not? Have you got any songs? Oh, good. I’ve got some, too. How many do you have? Sixty? That’s pretty good. I’ve got half. No, not half of sixty …. half of one. Song.

Well, one of us came prepared. In the past, that was what made the difference – that one person who was ready for anything. Every great band has someone who’s ready to lead, even when the going gets tough. Even shit-bum bands like us have their point person. You know – that guy who gets you up in the morning for rehearsal on a Saturday after a three-day bender. Yeah, we got rid of that jerk-ass. Who needs him?

Holding up standards

Now, I know Big Green has what may be termed a reputation. Some say we hold ourselves to a very low standard of behavior. Others say that we’re a bunch of lazy vagabonds whose only virtue is that of anonymity and ignominious failure. To this last criticism I can only say, that is not one virtue … it is clearly two. Before you condemn, my friend, learn to count. It is not hard, and it will pay you dividends long into the future.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that we don’t do stuff right. It’s hard to maintain a standard when you even maintain your abandoned hammer mill. If our standard as a band is to put out an album every five, ten, sometimes thirteen years, we should be able to meet it. That at least gives us a little time to compose, to rehearse, to record, to take five years off for an extended nature walk, and so on. But even this is becoming too high a bar to clear.

Birdman strikes again

We have about as many strikes against us as any band ever thought of having. For one thing, we’re old. I’m pushing a thousand, I’m pretty sure. We also have broken down equipment and a total lack of recording skills beyond just the basics. (“Record” button is red. Got it!) And our personnel is constantly changing. Sometimes antimatter Lincoln has to sit in on guitar, and we occasionally rope Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into banging on those drums.

How many songs you got, Joe? Hey, back off, man.

The one strike we don’t have against us is material. Got lots of tunes, thanks to my illustrious brother Matt, a.k.a. bird man, a.k.a. the songwriting machine of the great north country. Since the last recordings we did for Ned Trek (mostly Matt’s songs) three years ago, he has written by his own count about fifty or sixty more. I think that might be enough for an album. The man is prolific. I’m pretty sure he wrote three or four songs in the time it took me to type that.

Some people think the hardest part of making an album is thinking of the name. Common misconception. The hardest part for us is deciding which of Matt’s 47 songs we should leave off the album. And THEN having to name it.

Holding up my end

But what the hell am I doing, standing here and yakking? I should be writing songs, damn it. If I start now, I might have thirty or forty in the hopper by … I don’t know … the year 2525. Hey … that’s an idea for a song! In the year 2525 …

Usual Rubbish

Jamming along with the little screen box

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Well now, I can’t hear you. Can you hear me? Say again. Once more. Nope, no … bad luck. Plunk your guitar a couple of times. I said … oh, damn it, just pick up your phone and call me. Cheese and crackers!

Now, I know there are a lot of musicians out there who are more conversant with technology than we are here in Big Green. True, we were relatively early adopters of the internets and mp3 music files. But frankly we’ve been standing still since, oh, I don’t know … the early 2000s or so. And while our friends in other bands have been connecting from across the continent using all manner of web-based gizmo, we’ve been sitting in adjacent rooms with two paper cups and a string.

Well, my friends, that’s about to change. I don’t know whether the change will be better or worse, but whatever happens, no more cups, no more strings.

Serious upgrade … seriously

Now, before you use a new technology to perform or record, you want to make sure it works, right? Sure you do. Think of all the times we ran off half cocked with some new piece of gear, only to learn much later how foolish we had been. You know how it is. The gizmo arrives in a big cardboard box hauled in by the UPS guy. You pull the box open, plug it in, and watch the pretty lights flash on and off. All is well until you try to insert some sounds into it. That’s when the wheels come off. (Did I mention there were wheels?)

I’m thinking of back when we bought that Roland VS-2480 deck with the landau roof and a belt in the back. We plugged a bunch of wires into it and spun it around a couple of times, but it was no good. The batter had only barely begun to set, and the top didn’t look nearly brown enough. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had already whipped up the icing, and here we were, cake still in the oven, not even close to …. Oh, wait. I’ve mixed up that Roland deck with our new convection oven. My apologies.

Dude, I can't hear anything.

Matt on the horn (or Matt-o-horn)

Anyhow, we decided that in this time of social distancing it would be a good idea to try out one of these remote jamming platforms. Matt and I installed JamKazam on our computer things, hooked up some mics, and went to town. (I mean, we literally went to town to pick up some stuff.) He was in one building, I in another, and yet somehow we magically linked up so that we could hear each other swearing at our crappy internet connections.

It wasn’t all bad. Matt taught me a couple of his new songs, which I promptly forgot. We couldn’t record anything, because we’re using the free account, but when we stop being cheapskates at some point, we might just be able to do that as well. Live performances? Perhaps. Stranger things have happened, certainly. Oh the possibilities.

There’s a place …

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Something like: “Why the hell don’t we just play in the same room?” Good question, disembodied or even non-existent reader. You know what Alexander Graham Bell said: Never do something simple when you can invent something complicated. (Okay, he never said anything remotely like that. I’m just trying to add a little gravitas here – let it pass, let it pass!)

Usual Rubbish

We’re number none with a rocket!

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It’s the damnedest thing, man. I can’t explain it. I mean, there must be a lot of that stuff floating around out there. Who would have thought the internet was that big? After all, the whole effing thing fits inside my smartphone. I’ll have to remember to ask Antman about that phenomenon – he might have some insights.

Yeah, here we are again, folks. Where is that? Well, we’re sitting around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, trying to figure out how our recorded music has ended up in so many weird places. (1,880 results? That’s nuts.) After all, we are not exactly experts at distribution and marketing – far from it. In fact, I suspect you would be hard pressed to find a band that’s less commercially successful than us. (WE’RE NUMBER NONE!)

Scattered like snowflakes

Thing is, we sent out a boatload of copies of 2000 Years To Christmas back in 1999/2000 when we first released it. Like any band in those days, we sent them to college radio stations, publications, reviewers, relatives, tax collectors (in lieu of payment), civil engineers (for landfill), and so on. Next thing you know, they’re showing up in remainder bins, CD listings, and random shops from here to Madagascar. (That’s 8,698 miles, by the way.)

Okay, that would be weird enough in itself. What’s even weirder is that we get mixed up with other bands named Big Green. The shuffle up our albums with ones made by these doppelgangers, and it seriously muddies the waters. Frankly, I feel a little guilty about it. We’re bringing their overall popularity down by yards every time our work is associated with them. I’m looking at you, other Big Green.

Putting a stake in the ground

Clearly, we need to make a choice. We can either stand around and do nothing, or take matters into our own hands. Actually, come to think of it, there is a third option: have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) deal with it. I’m looking around and seeing a lot of shaking heads. Not a good idea? Right. Looks like we’re back to doing nothing. Or the other thing. (You see, THIS is why we’re NUMBER NONE.)

Okay, so we’ve been putting music out there pretty consistently for the last twenty years. A couple of years ago, we affiliated with a dude on Discogs to offer the CD of 2000 Years to Christmas. That said, others have been running rings around us. Like this dude on Ebay who’s selling a Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick disc as a British import for $30! Man god damn, if he can get that price for them, I’d be glad to identify as British.

Flogging it to death

All right, so look – we’re working on new material. Thing is, we’ve got old material to shift. So if you’ve got someone with a birthday coming up, or just know someone who loves phenomenally unpopular music, this is the place to go. You heard it here first.

Usual Rubbish

Want to hear a song? That makes four of us.

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2000 Years to Christmas

What man can stand the stress of being torn asunder then thrust back together? Who amongst us can quarter him/herself like a piece of fruit for the sake of a single song? What fool would throw his lot in with a madman who finds joy only in the fulfillment of his twisted vision? This guy, folks. This guy right here.

Yeah, I think it’s fair to say I’ve gotten the itch to perform. What can you expect after years of being cooped up in this abandoned hammer mill, miles from civilization? Not a living hell, I will admit, but clearly a living heck. It’s been years since we struck out on tour. (I blame all that striking out.) But we live in an age of miracles, my friends. Musicians now perform from the comfort of their own homes, thanks to the advent of the internet machine.

Labor action at the abandoned mill

Trouble is, when I raised the question of Big Green virtual performances, the response was less than encouraging. Yes, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was game. Antimatter Lincoln offered to play gut bucket (though frankly very few of our songs call for that rustic instrument). The mansized tuber volunteered a few of his smaller shoots to the enterprise. As for the actual band members, well …. not so much.

Can’t blame them, really. This is the busy time of year. Matt is taken up with his Peregrine Falcon project. (He’s gone big this time around, watching them from the deck of the star ship U.S.S. Enterprise.) John is doing his thing (if he didn’t have that, he’d have to get another thing). So that leaves me in kind of a spot. I mean, I can’t play four parts at once …. or CAN I?

Hell, this band looks damned familiar.

Crypto cloning to the rescue

It seems that our mad science advisor has been working on a little experiment of late. I thought I heard some strange noises coming from the north end of the mill. (That was just before it exploded, too. Coincidence, that.) Anyway, Mitch developed something he calls “crypto cloning.” The “crypto” piece is strictly about marketing – Mitch is keen to monetize this new technology.

Here’s how it works: A subject steps into the cloning device, and s/he is cloned four ways. That’s a big step up from making two of the same thing, Mitch tells me. (Twice as good.) The thing is, the cloning only lasts a couple of hours. At that point, your quadruplegangers hustle back into the protoplasmic host from which they sprang. It’s a kind of reverse-amoeba effect, if you know what I mean.

The quadruplegangers ride again

Before you ask, yes, I did let him test it on me. But only just long enough for the four of me to record one of Matt’s songs – a classic number called Going To Andromeda. Check it out on our YouTube channel or our new Instagram account. (Note: one of my clones came out with a mustache. Strange mutation.)

Usual Rubbish

Put it all in the basket, if it fits

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, now, I’m not sure we need that. At least, not in that quantity. And for god’s sake, none of those. What are we, made of money? Budget, my little friend, budget!

Oh … hi, everybody. Allow me to pretend that I didn’t know you were there. (Thank you for that indulgence.) You just caught us in the midst of a semi-monthly shopping trip. We go to the big market in the middle of this very humble little town and wheel a cart around. Then, once we’ve realized that we don’t have enough money to fill the cart, we push that aside and pick up a shopping basket.

No trouble like money trouble

You know what they say. There’s no reek that beats ass, and there’s no trouble that beats broke. (Is that really what they say? Well …. someone says it somewhere, I’ll wager.) Shopping trips always remind us of how little capital we have to work with. And before you crypto currency freaks start jumping all over my shit with investment opportunities and NFTs, let me emphasize that NO, WE DO NOT HAVE ANY MONEY. WE CAN’T EVEN FILL A SHOPPING CART.

Now that I’ve said that, let me contradict myself. We can afford small things. Not small diamonds, mind you, or little bits of gold. No, things like leeks, individual walnuts, an apple or two. (If we keep going with this, we could end up with a waldorf salad.) In any case, I don’t want to paint too grim a picture. We don’t want any pity – no pity, no thank you. No THANK you. (For more about the significance of this phrase, see Rod Steiger in In The Heat Of The Night.)

Just forget it, Abe. We ain't got the scratch.

Shameless plea for help

Okay, now I’m going to contradict myself again. The thing is, with prices on the rise (and I know you’re heard all about it), we’re getting less and less into that little shopping basket. For instance, instead of five leeks, we’re down to three. We even have to ask the nut monger to cut a walnut in half for us. Can’t imagine the dirty looks we get when we make these requests. It’s humiliating …. JUST HUMILIATING.

The thing is, you can help … and it won’t cost you a dime. Let me ‘splain. There’s a little thing out there called the internets. Turns out, you can listen to music over the internets through a variety of means. Maybe you have Spotify, or Apple Music, or Amazon Music, or whatever the fuck. Okay, so go to one of these services and look up Big Green – particularly our albums, 2000 Years To Christmas or International House – and play any one (or several) of the tracks. In fact, just build a playlist of both albums and run them on a loop while you cook dinner (and perhaps listen to something else on another device).

Mother lode of sorts

Now, if you’re subscribed to one of these services, the fee for playing our songs is zilch. But we get valuable revenue. It’s an astronomical return. By that I mean, like with a distant star, you need a telescope to see it. I think we get $0.000978 per play on our tracks, but I may be exaggerating. That’s the miracle of the digital marketplace at work, my friends.

Of course, that adds up over the centuries. Who knows – there may come a time in the distant future when we can afford maybe six or seven leeks in out shopping basket.

Usual Rubbish

What the hell is next – a boat ride?

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, we tried that. Nobody makes money doing that shit any more. Think of something else. What? Oh, god no. That’s not even a thing, dude. Where have you been for the last forty years? Right here? Oh, that’s right. Never mind.

Well, here we are, friends, facing the onset of another spring in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. This may be our twentieth, but I’m not entirely certain. Somebody page back through the blog posts. Don’t stop until you see Trevor James Constable and some dude who looks like a nebula. (If you run across Big Zamboola, you’re getting closer.)

Nickel’s worth of difference

Times being what they are, we’ve been scraping around for new ways to make a few bucks. So far, no luck. I’ve been polling everyone in our little entourage for new ideas. Even old ideas are welcome, so long as they come with a 90 day warranty. Trouble is, the members of our entourage pretty much don’t have lives, so they’ve got nothing new to say that we haven’t all heard fifteen times. It’s somewhat discouraging, I will allow.

Today antimatter Lincoln was piping up with a few tarnished gems. He suggested doing something called matching pennies, which apparently is a game for two people who have nothing better to do than to slap pennies on a wooden table in hopes of filling their pockets with loose change. Back in the day, he used to raise fifty, maybe a hundred pennies in a single day playing this game. When I slapped that idea down, he suggested something called matching nickels.

Hey, that penny matches your face.

New ideas in old bottles

I suppose when all else fails, we could just play music and ask people to pay us, like we used to do when we were younger. But where’s the challenge in that? It just sounds too easy. Aside from that, we live in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s more like the outskirts of nowhere. There aren’t a lot of good venues in this burg, my friend. Not that any good venues would hire us, but … well, you know what I mean.

Of course, back in the day, I would play practically any gig to keep the lights on. I played in clubs, in fields, in hotels, on boats, at casinos – you name it. One time I did a gig with a Dixieland band on a cheesy cruise ship. It’s the kind of thing you flog your way through, mostly fail at, then slink away with your pockets full of ill-gotten gains. Did I care, really? Nah. It was a job, man, just a job. But I was twenty-something then, and a bit short on brains.

Hey, check this out

All this week I’ve been posting songs from that April 1987 Factory Village gig on our YouTube Channel. Take a look and check out Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and me backing up our late friend, songwriter Dale Haskell, on stage at QE2 in Albany, NY – Eleven tracks in all, opening for Love Tractor.

Usual Rubbish

Putting the pieces back together

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I checked that drawer. And the one below it. Jesus, I checked all of them, okay? It’s simply not there. And no, the lizard people didn’t steal it during the night. We would have heard them, Abe, and incidentally …. THERE ARE NO LIZARD PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET.

Hoo, man. You have to talk until you’re green in the face before people get the idea around here. Especially with someone like anti-matter Lincoln, who believes every conspiracy theory he hears on YouTube or Instagram or whatever the fuck. I mean, the guy’s positronic doppelganger was assassinated, so he sees plots everywhere. I suppose it’s hard to trust in times like these … especially when you’re Lincoln.

As anniversaries go …

Well, it should surprise no one that Big Green has reached its coral anniversary. That’s right – the traditional gift on your thirty-fifth is not the Electric Light Orchestra box set, it’s some ossified sea exoskeletons. Hope you enjoy! No question but that 35 years is a long effing time to be together, whatever the hell you’re doing or even trying to do. No wonder people are throwing sea-floor rocks at each other.

So, what does the coral anniversary mean? That your marriage is hung up on the reef? Could explain a lot about Big Green, am I right? We haven’t put out an album since 2013’s Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Not that anyone is counting (aside from me), but that’s the second longest time we’ve gone between albums. Of course, the irony is that we’ve actually already recorded several albums worth of material yet to be released.

The reason for the ceasin’

So, what is our excuse for this behavior? I’m going to go with laziness. We’re a bunch of useless layabouts, no good to anyone. Ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – he does most of the heavy lifting around here. The only break he gets from heavy lifting is when he’s doing all of the light lifting. Some might think this arrangement leaves us with more time to create content, but we seldom take the opportunity to do so.

Turns out you're right. We're just a bunch of lazy mothers.

I suppose it’s fair to point out that this isn’t the first fallow period we’ve gone through as a group. Even at our inception, when most bands are hopping around like jackrabbits, looking for the next venue, we were kind of … um …. meh. We did rehearsals. We recorded. We wrote. But gigs? Not so many that first year. In fact, I was playing in other bands just to keep the lights on.

Up from the archives

Speaking of other bands, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I found an old tape of a gig Big Green co-founder Ned Danison and I played back in 1987, when we were just getting the band started. The video is grainy and the sound is pretty bad, but I digitized it anyway and started throwing it up on YouTube. The gig was in support of the release of our friend Dale Haskell’s album Factory Village, and it was captured on video by another friend, crack photographer Leif Zurmuhlen.

Check out the playlist if you want to see Ned and me framming away on stage at Albany’s famed QE2 club. And while you’re there on YouTube, try to avoid those rabbit holes anti-Lincoln is always falling into.

Usual Rubbish

Putting the strings on your banjo

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2000 Years to Christmas

See, here’s the thing – I don’t even use a pick. I just slam the damn thing with my thumb. Yes, it’s primitive. Yes, it’s painful. But it gets the job done, sort of. So turn up the heat on that cookpot, dude. We’ve got some strings to boil!

Hiya, folks. Yeah, you guessed it – we’re boiling old strings, home style, so that we can reuse them. I snapped the top string on my Martin, framming away on some random cover song, and well … someone stole my pin money. You know … the pin money I use to buy strings. Why, you may ask, wouldn’t I just use string money? Simple – because I need that money for cooking oil. Do I have to explain EVERYTHING, for crying out loud?

The mechanical guitar tech

I would be the first person to admit that we are not a stage-ready band. It’s been a long while since we played anywhere, and we’re rusty as an old hinge. And as any working musician knows, you need to have your systems in place if you expect to sustain yourselves through a long-ish tour. I mean, it’s not like the old days, when we just packed up the broken down van and drove off … until it broke down. Then when we fixed it in the middle of the road, we got arrested, and …. well … it’s not like that now.

We always flew pretty low to the ground, frankly. Lord knows we would do things differently today. For one thing, I would press gang Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to be not only our roadie foreman, but my own personal guitar tech. That fucker can spin his wrists like a power drill, so it’s easy for him to do a quick string change. Mitch Macaphee even built a strobe tuner into his audio circuit. He’s like a freaking Swiss army knife (except no plastic toothpick).

Ain't you got that thing all strung up yet? Geeez ...

Line, please!

Then there’s the lyrics. It’s enough to test anyone’s memory. We could tape them to our mic stands, but that looks so damn lame. Matt could carry them around on his phone, but if he’s scrolling that infernal contraption with two hands, how’s he going to play his bass? And on top of that, he’s got about two million songs, so the lyrics would stack up to the ceiling, several times.

I guess we could get Marvin to feed us lyrics as we play, like a automatronic music stand. Too many jobs for our little brass friend? Nonsense! Why, I’ve seen him do a dozen things at the same time, though admittedly it was really just the same thing done a dozen times real fast. But sure, he could change my strings and hold up lyrics at the same time. It would hardly even begin to get in the way of his other duties.

Bootleggers and scalpers abound

I took a cursory look around the Internets this week and I ran across something I don’t see every day. It was some dude selling our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, on Ebay. Now that was strange enough, as we only pressed about three or four dozen discs at the time. What was even more astonishing was that I saw it on offer by someone else on Ebay who was selling it as a UK import! And the price point, people, the price point: $30!

Naturally, I wrote the dude and told him, hey … if he sells it for $30, we’ve got more where that came from. Place your bets, people, place your bets!