Tag Archives: Christmas

Joy to it.

2000 Years to Christmas

No, we’re not doing that this year. Why? Because I said so, damn it. Last year it was a freaking disaster, and I’m not going through THAT again. Right, now … where were we?

Oh, right … penning another blog post. Yes, friends, our longtime companion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, antimatter Lincoln, was making a crazy suggestion, and I just had to shut it down. Yes, we live with a mad scientist. Yes, he does turn the gravity on an off occasionally just for fun. Yes, I do have permanent injuries that resulted from that kind of horseplay, and rightfully so. But there’s a point at which even people as tolerant as the members of Big Green have to draw a line, and this is it. NO SECRET SANTA. PERIOD.

I mean, I don’t know why people do stuff like that, let alone why someone who is the anti-matter doppelganger of perhaps our greatest president would want to indulge in such a bankrupt and troubling holiday tradition. Now if Anti-Lincoln were Anti-Buchanan or Anti-Johnson (the first), I could understand. But jumping Christ, does the man not remember even one thin year ago? We drew names out of a hat one frigid afternoon … and it was all downhill from there. Our mad scientist Mitch Macaphee drew my name, as luck would have it, and so he gave me the gift for the man who has everything and doesn’t mind losing it all – weightlessness! (He’s had this thing about gravity over the last few months. It’s a little troubling.)

Time for a song!

Who did I draw? Anti-Lincoln. I found an old fashioned two-man saw and gave it to him. He proceeded to use it on our best shade tree. I guess I should have saw that coming. It’s a bit like buying beer for your neighbor without giving a thought as to whether he or she might have a drinking problem. (He does.) Then of course, all of our names were drawn by the city elders, who sought to evict us from this drafty old mill. We outsmarted them by coincidentally being out of town on the day they came to get us. But then came the nasty upstairs neighbors, and well … from there you know what came next. I won’t draw you a picture. (Unless that’s what you want for Christmas.)

Hey, suckers … our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, is celebrating its 20th birthday this year. Great time to check it out, particularly if you’ve been cased in aspic since 1999. Give it a listen right now. Or not. Totally up to you, man.

T’is the seizin’.

2000 Years To Christmas

No, you’re not on my list, and for one very good reason: I don’t have a freaking list. I can see about getting you on Anti-Lincoln’s list, but I don’t think that’s the kind of list you want to be included on, if you know what I mean. A word to the wise.

Yes, I’m afraid it’s that time of year again, friends. And once again I have to explain to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) how the world of humans works. You’d think after twenty years he would have some of this stuff encoded into his memory banks, but no … every holiday season it’s human nature 101 and elements of capitalism. What the hell am I, anyway, a freaking community college for robots? Hey …. not a bad idea, really. We’ve got the space, and at least a couple of spare power strips they can plug into. We could call it Robotech, order some jerseys and pennants and …. WHAT AM I SAYING?

Christmas is always confusing, right? For one thing, it’s a consumer frenzy, at least for half of the population. For the rest of us, it’s mostly about blocking our ears when we go to the grocery store so that we don’t hear the holiday loop, playing over and over … something we of Big Green find particularly irritating, as they almost never include any selections from 2000 Years To Christmas, our now-classic holiday album, only this year celebrating its 20th anniversary. And while millions are charging their way into credit oblivion, we remain cloistered in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, crazy neighbors right upstairs, and the bailiffs at the door. “The law is an ass,” I keep shouting at them, and they just keep pounding.

Are they still pounding on the door? Sounds like it.

Well, you know what they say about the law. First comes the pounding, then comes the impounding. And while I’m explaining capitalism to Marvin for the nineteenth time, I may as well share this small lesson with you, namely the part about what happens when you pay neither rent nor property taxes for years on end. As dyed in the wool collectivists, we are merely seeking shelter where shelter is available (such as it is), but that carries little weight with the local constabulary, whose minions are apparently under orders to evict us in time for the Christmas pageant. They want to see us shivering in our second-hand galoshes on the side of the road as the yuletide procession trudges past the hammer mill entrance. How festive these men in blue can be!

Right, well … in any case, if you want to help with our legal defense fund, celebrate this Christmas with a 20th anniversary edition of 2000 Years To Christmas, available now from us or from online streaming/download services. We’ve got a few signed copies, so if you want one, let me know. Just don’t tell the bailiff … he’ll want one, too.

Secret Satan. (I mean, Santa.)

Hmmm, let me see. Nicely wrapped. Let’s see what’s inside. Okay … huh. An empty bubble pack that used to contain a ballpoint pen. Nice. So …. who amongst you could have known that that’s something I’ve always wanted?

Oh, hi, everyone. Yeah, it’s that time of year again, and Big Green is celebrating the holidays in the usual way. We put on a bunch of cheesy records. We make a little extra rice and mustard greens. And then there’s the Secret Santa exchange of gifts, which we do in the traditional way … one gift at a time, and the recipient tries to guess who the giver is. How exciting. Someone bring me my sodium bicarbonate. This could be a long night!

That’s not to say that the holidays are any less problematic in our makeshift home than they are in everyone else’s. There’s a lot to look out for here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – a lot going on beneath that cool, clammy exterior.  For instance, if you’re stringing the lights on the parapet, watch the icicle lamp string …. it’s got a short in it. And we try not to put a tree out in the courtyard, because the mansized tuber tends to get attached to it. (No, I mean literally attached. Those roots are always growing.)

No clues!But really the greatest danger is having Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, pick your name out of the hat for Secret Santa. Christmas is his time to offload all of the failed experiments from the past year, and there are usually quite a few of them. You may end up unwrapping a package that contains a beaker of radioactive sludge or something that’s ticking like a bomb. (“Hey, Mack …” you’d say in your 1940s New York accent, “What the heck is this thing? It’s ticking like a bomb!”)

I don’t like to mention this in mixed company, but the fact is that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was a Secret Santa gift from Mitch. He was trying to build some form of pleasure vehicle, but something went badly wrong, so he put a makeshift head on it and called it “Marvin”. Don’t ask me how he got Marvin into that flat box. It’s a bit like the Casper Mattress package – open it up and FLOP! Out comes Marvin.

Well, if I don’t see you, have a great Christmas, tremendous holiday break, whatever floats your boat.

 

Unwrapping.

I got socks this year. Lots of socks. And a few discarded ties. Plus some bricks from the courtyard. No, they weren’t loose – the mansized tuber just pulled them out of the courtyard and gave them to me. Yeah, I put them back. Now that’s a holiday to remember.

Well, I don’t know what kind of a Christmas YOU had, but here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, we had a rousing celebration that quite nearly woke the dead. No, it wasn’t well attended, but Marvin (my personal robot assistant) cranked up the stereo and started playing random sides from Sun Ra to Fountains of Wayne. It was Christmas in crazytown, and it didn’t go unnoticed by our neighbors, who (I feel compelled to say) were … ahem … a bit LACKING this year in the HOLIDAY SPIRIT. (You heard!)

Then there were random fireworks. Now, I hate to be a spoil sport, but I don’t like hearing explosions late at night. It makes me jump, and my mind goes straight to some imagined mishap in Mitch Macaphee’s lab. It took a moment to recall that he’s out of town this week, but the downside risk of having a mad science laboratory in your basement does tend to put you on alert. He was Keep it DOWN!muttering something about a “planet buster” last week. Sometimes that’s just idle rambling, but you can never be too sure. Look at what happened to the planet Zorchon. (Yeah, that’s right – there IS no planet Zorchon, sure …. not NOW.)

So, hey … there’s a lot to unwrap with the kind of holidays we have around here. People tend to save up their resentments and hard feelings all year, then let them loose on their relatives around the yuletide dinner table. That’s not what happens at the Cheney Hammer Mill, but only because we don’t have a dinner table. We typically sit around this old cable spool we found in the middle of the road one time when we were driving back from a gig at Middlebury College in the 1990s. It makes a fair table … not a HOLIDAY table, per se, but a fair platform for dishes, cutlery, etc. Then there are the boxes we sit on – can’t remember where we found those. Talk about festive!

Anyway, we survived it. Hope you survived yours.

Social obscurity.

Yeah, I’m back. Did you miss me? Didn’t notice I was gone? Okay, then. (Sigh…) Not for nothing that Big Green was once described as one of the most obscure bands out there. We are freaking invisible – just ask the people standing behind us, all of whom you can see clearly, because … again … we’re freaking invisible.

But just because we’re invisible, that doesn’t mean we’re inaudible. That old adage about children being “best seen and not heard” doesn’t apply here, as we are not children, and we are not quiet. Nay, we are LOUD. Well, loud-ISH, and occasionally louder than that. Exhibit A: our song Jesus Has A Known Mind, which we’ve featured a couple of times on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. That’s loud, if you turn up the volume. Try it next time you play the podcast. Or put your iPod bluetooth speaker in the middle of a cavernous room, then crank it up to 11. That should be the advisory on all of our albums. That and “avoid using heavy machinery”. (Not because it’s dangerous, but because it is hard.)

Get out! We’re not only musically obscure, Big Green is also socially obscure, I’m proud-ish to say. We’re the only band I can think of who, when moving into an abandoned hammer mill, draws pointed comments of “there goes the neighborhood” from across the brickyard. Fact is, we’re not even good enough to live in a condemned building. But we don’t let THAT stop us. No, sir … and thanks to the ingenuity of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee (just back from MonsterCom, an annual gathering of like-minded crazy doctors in Madagascar), none of those local hostiles can get within thirty feet of our front door without being stopped by an impenetrable force field. (At least I’m told that it’s there. Either that, or no one wants anything to do with us. Which is more likely? You decide, my friends.)

The happy by-product of our unpopularity is that we are able to work without fear of interruption on whatever it is we’re producing at any given time. (Currently, it’s the Ned Trek Christmas Pageant.) And with the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who’s helping us with the editing, we have a shot at finishing this sucker before the holiday … so that we can share it with … well … whoever listens to us. (Note: the podcast is invisible as well.)

 

Write hand.

I’m kind of busy right now, Marvin. Just tell them that I can’t talk. And in any case, I don’t want to go on a Caribbean Cruise, even if it IS free. Cheese and crackers. (Hey, that sounds kind of good right about now.)

Writing is a hungry business. Just ask Hemingway, the guy with the moveable feast. I’m a little sensitive about interruptions today, so I beg your pardon … Marvin (my personal robot assistant) keeps coming into my study (a.k.a. the old forge room in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill) with nonsensical requests. Stuff like,  “You’ve got a phone call from Missouri” or “There’s a brush salesman at the door” or “Leave the building – it’s on fire”. Be honest – would you listen?

What am I working on so feverishly? Ah, nothing. Just the script to this year’s Ned Trek Christmas Special. Last year we did an “It’s A Wonderful Life” parody. The year before I believe it was “A Christmas Carol”. And of course we began this annual comedic atrocity with a take-off on “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”, though I think our first Ned Trek holiday extravaganza was the Santorum’s Christmas Planet episode, based loosely on the classic Star Trek “Return of the Archons” script. I mean, how do you top THAT? I am sorely tempted to cop out and do a clip show, but I happen to know that there are some new songs in the works (again), so that won’t wash.

Forget the stupid tree, Willard.Actually, we’re recording a handful of songs, including some older numbers we’ve never properly tracked before using modern technology. There are a couple of new ones in the works. I am trying to write around this eclectic mishmash of musical material. As you know, we are sticklers for continuity and comprehensibility. And quality. And irony. Massive irony. Heh heh.

It is hard to concentrate in a hammer mill, no matter what state it’s in. (This one happens to be in New York.) But even with all the distractions, the diversions, the cold November wind blowing through chinks in the mortar, I SHOULD be able to write this freaking script. Hell, it should write itself. Shouldn’t it? Of course, last year’s Christmas show came in February … of THIS year.

There goes the phone again. Tell them I don’t want a higher limit on my credit card!

Why Christmas?

Okay, subject matter experts – let’s get down to it. We’ve written about fascists on the rise. We’ve written about space diseases. What’s left to write about? What? Christmas again? Oh, Jesus Christ on a re-gifted bike. Very well.

I’ll tell you, you ask a question around this place and you come away with six more questions. At least that’s an even number. That said, we’re still making music over here in Big Green-land (and no, I don’t mean big Greenland …. everyone makes that mistake), and well, Christmas is coming, so … that means more Christmas themed songs, right? Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly will be overjoyed to hear that there’s music that uses the word “Christmas” occasionally, even if it is mostly for humor and ironic purposes. (Or porpoises. Like hipster porpoises who do shark-like shit just to be ironic. You’ve seen that, right?)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are planning a holiday podcast extravaganza, with newly recorded Big Green classics never before heard by the likes of you, as well as some brand new material. (I don’t mean fabric, either – I mean music, music.) We’re in production, or Come again?pre-production, or something like that. This will be the first group of songs we’ve recorded entirely on Cubase 9, with no help from our trusty old Roland 2480 deck, which served us so well for the last 16 years. So we’ll just see how that goes, my friends.

Okay, so … we started working on the Roland deck a year or two after the release of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and I have to say, this group of songs we’re doing are pretty closely related to the songs on that disc. Why Christmas? Because Jesus. Or because it starts with a C. I don’t know – that’s just what we hang the song on, much like a shirt cardboard. (We kind of used former Texas governor Rick Perry as a shirt cardboard for one of our albums, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick.) It makes it easier to develop a theme and … oh, who cares?

We’ll just keep making the songs, Christmas themed or not. You expect no less. And no more.

Old stock.

I think it’s over there, in that cardboard box. No, no – not that one! The one under that one. Or the one under that. I don’t know, just start opening boxes – I’ll tell you when to stop.

Oh, yes, that’s right … I have a fourth wall. Hello, then. What are we doing? Thanks for asking. We are digging through the Big Green archives again. And when I say “archives”, I’m talking about something that’s really much more rudimentary than that term suggests. Call it a series of boxes, some of which have the Kellogg rooster emblazoned on their side. Then there’s those round Quaker Oats boxes …. I used to make pretend ham radios out of those.

What we’re searching for is, well, some ideas for this year’s Christmas pageant extravaganza. Amazingly, there’s a lot of holiday material that hasn’t been released or even heard for the last ten years. Matt did, what, ten years of Christmas tapes, between 1986 and 1995, with one added on after that for good luck. We’ve got an enormous backlog of 4-track cassette recordings from that period, essentially demos, which we can harvest and repurpose like, I don’t know, sorting through a junk yard for something useful. Don’t ask me for metaphors this early in the morning!

So whatcha got, Lincoln?Now, I don’t want to leave you with the false impression that we are constantly recycling music from days of old. Not a bit of it! In fact, the songs on our last THIS IS BIG GREEN – Ned Trek extravaganza are all brand spanking new (and probably in need of that spanking). Not that we haven’t reached into the old grab back in past episodes. Usually around the holidays we start rummaging around for something that will fill a hole in the production. I’m thinking maybe we should just patch in some video of a local 2nd grade school orchestra playing Jingle Bells. Now THAT’S entertainment, people. (Literally every one of those cute little critters playing the same note, all together.)

Okay, so … yes, we’ll be working on a Christmas show. Because that’s how we roll here at Big Green. Next podcast will be another non-musical Ned Trek, then who knows … an actual album? Yikes!

Six days.

No, it’s not the fifth day, Marvin. It’s the sixth. Doesn’t that processor between your ears do simple sums, for crying out loud? Six, man, six!

Yes, I am correcting Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on his math. Or his calendar skills. Not sure which, actually. I put him in charge of counting down our “Six Days of Christmas” celebration. Why six? Well, turns out we couldn’t afford twelve. And since we were too sick to finish our Holiday extravaganza on time, we all thought it only appropriate to provide a small … even half-assed compensation. You’re welcome, America!

For those of you who missed it, this is what our lame celebration consisted of:

Day One: Post of “A Very Neddy Christmas” on NedTrek.com. This is a rerun, yes, of our Ned Trek parody of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, featuring four songs, some bad celebrity imitations, and all the rest of it.

Day Two: Soundcloud post of Vital Signs, a song off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. This is one of my personal favorites from that collection. But who the hell cares what I think, right? Damn straight.

Day Three: Soundcloud post of Merry Christmas, Jane, a song off of our EP Live From Neptune. This was recorded live to stereo DAT back in 1994, I think, with Jeremy Shaw on guitar. (We’ve played this on the podcast a couple of times.)

SIX days! Are you MAD?Day Four: Photo album of Matt and Joe, posted on Facebook. These are promo shots taken in, I don’t know, 1987, by our niece Mona. I think we were trying to mock a U2 photo spread in Rolling Stone for Joshua Tree, but it’s hard to tell.

Day Five: Soundcloud post of Jit Jaguar’s Christmas. This is a ridiculous Christmas song Matt wrote quite a few years ago that we recorded I think in 2013 as part of our ongoing project to record our back catalog. Pretty pared down, but I like this recording. Rough and ready.

Day Six: This shit. Hey … it’s like getting a load of wooden balls. We’ve got a pageant under construction, so … think of it as some delayed holiday joy. Keep your eyes open, people, and happy new year.

Wrap it up.

Where did those scissors go? Right … I’ll just use my teeth then, shall I? What the hell. I hate the freaking holidays! Especially when they get this close. Christmas looks a lot better from a distance.

Yes, my friends, you caught us in the middle of another Cheney Hammer Mill meltdown. They’re becoming more frequent in this new era, I must admit. Still, I have cause – trying to wrap up another holiday extravaganza, and it’s not going all that well, frankly. I’ve got a em-effin’ cold, for one thing. What’s the other thing? Huh … Don’t remember. I always forget shit like that when I have a cold.

One thing I’m having trouble wrapping is this year’s Christmas show. It’s a little hard to voice these things without a voice. It’s like playing sousaphone parts on a tambourine. So the choice is either, croak everyone a merry Christmas, or …. we’ll have to cancel Christmas. There’s nothing I can do – it’s this weather. (Okay, now I’m randomly quoting dialog from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Another symptom of my illness.) We’ll be a little late in posting this year, let me put it that way. But there are consolations.

Hey, uh ... that's a really creepy get-up, Marvin.We’re thinking we might post last year’s extravaganza as a Ned Trek episode at NedTrek.com. And if I can get my voice working again, I might try to do more of a straight music podcast, playing selections from our holiday music catalog of the last 20 years. There are a couple of outtakes from 2000 Years To Christmas that have never seen the light of day. We’ve got some more recent recordings composed around a holiday theme. I might pack that together like a mincemeat pie and toss it out to the hungry masses as we continue to work on our current marathon-like production. Part-timers!

Anyhow, if you can tear yourself away from your holiday table in the coming days, look for additional posts between now and the new year. I’ll be holed up here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering away at some piece of junk. Stick a bow on it and send it off! Feliz navidad.