Tag Archives: Martin D-1

Putting the strings on your banjo

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!

Have a little nano with your Christmas Concert

2000 Years to Christmas

Have we reached a thousand plays yet? Hmmmm. How about a hundred? No? Right. Hit refresh again. There must be something wrong with that goddamn thing. Stupid YouTube!

Hello, friends. Hope you had a wonderful holiday week. Bet you’re wondering what we’ve been up to. No? Well, I’ll just tell you anyway. Nothing you didn’t already know – that’s the short answer. The long answer is I split a gut getting that nano-Christmas concert done and posted, and it looks like YOU haven’t even seen it yet!

Okay, so a lot of people (a.k.a. Anti-Lincoln) have asked me why we call this a nano-concert. Simple, my dear friend: it’s just my sorry ass on the view screen. That’s it – no bass player, no backup singers, no drums, only me and my distressed-looking Martin, which (I hasten to add) is not an instrument I ordinarily play on gigs. Until now.

A measured response to sloth

I know what you’re thinking. Who in their right mind would spend their entire holiday season break recording and posting a bogus solo concert? This dude over here, man. Sure, I could have done the same as everyone else – drink to excess, swerve my way back home and drop onto the mattress, dead until morning. But that’s not my way. I prefer a much more measured approach to unconsciousness.

Still, the simple fact is that we as a band need to put out more output. (We also need to take in more intake, but that’s another matter.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was an early advocate of the nano-Concert, and so I proceeded with it. Frankly, my expectations were pretty low regarding audience. And I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

Six of one and a quarter-dozen of the other

Now, I think the hardest part of the nano-concert was deciding which songs to do. It was a Christmas concert, so that narrowed it down a little. Then I had to restrict my list to songs I could reasonably play on guitar, which is fewer still. When it came to actually choosing the numbers, I was all worn out from the first two exercises. (See sloth, above.)

They always said I lack focus, and now I know what they meant.

In the end, I picked two songs from Matt’s 1990 Christmas tape, two songs from his 1991 tape, two songs from 1994, and two from Ned Trek. Some of these songs also appeared on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. You can also hear one of them on our live EP, Big Green Live from Neptune – namely Merry Christmas, Jane, which I played as a last-minute encore.

Take five

The fact is, Matt wrote so many damn Christmas songs, it would take me five years to play them back to back. And five years is a long time where I come from. Not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but I try not to be overly ambitious in my endeavors. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed our Nano Christmas Concert 2021, and that your holiday season has not been a total dumpster fire. (It it has, tell me all about it!)

Another week on duty at the recycling center

2000 Years to Christmas

No, man … I think it starts like this. Or maybe it’s a little slower than that. But it’s in E for sure. What? It’s in A? Are you sure? Damn ….

You know, I’ve never been very good at total recall. I don’t think my time at the Cheney Hammer Mill has improved my memory, either. So, what the hell am I talking about? Well … I’m gonna tell you. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and I have been pulling out the old numbers. No, I don’t mean numerals in Old English script. No, I don’t mean stale joints. I mean songs, damn it!

Sorry. That came out a little stronger than I meant it to be. Suffice to say that we’ve decided to take a few hours to dust off some items from our back catalog. It’s a catalogue of mostly Matt’s songs, as he is the more prolific writer, by far, but regardless of authorship, there’s a lot of shit in there. (And by “in there” I mean in a recondite side room of the hammer mill where they used to keep the machine tools.)

Invisible chestnuts

Now, of course, we have a process. Marvin finds a song in the machine room. He dusts it off, as I suggested earlier, and hands it to me. Because we don’t write songs out in standard notation (or any other kind, for that matter), it’s a little hard to get a grip on a thirty-year-old song, particularly when it only exists in the vaguest metaphysical sense.

I’ve often (or perhaps never) said that Marvin’s sole super power is his ability to carry around insubstantial things. Once I saw him pushing an invisible hand cart stacked ten high with invisible cases of Nehi cola. That makes him the ideal automaton for the job of retrieving song ideas from the dustbin of history. Lord knows, there’s likely to be a chestnut or two in there. Perhaps more.

Twang!

Entering fram-a-geddon

Okay, so once Marvin trundles in with a brass armload of decades-old songs, I get right to work. I pick up my superannuated Martin guitar and start twanging until the neighbors begin throwing things. That typically takes as long as five or six minutes. Then I close the window and start over, slapping the strings with my thumb and fingers like I just don’t effing care.

Why, you may ask, don’t I use a pick? Very simple, my friends. I don’t freaking know how, that’s why. Also, you can drop a pick, but try … just try to drop your thumb. Not so easy, is it? And before you ask, yes, my right thumb gets sore and calloused and all the rest of it. And yes, my chaotic framming sounds kind of extra twangy. But a dude has to do what a dude has to do. And dis dude does dat ding. (Yes, I said that. I’m ashamed of it, but I did, in fact, say that.)

Time for the round up

Like I said earlier, there are a few of my songs in that basket. One of them is called “Good Old Boys Round Up”, which was slated for our second album, International House, but never got off the ground. I think we started to record it, but it went all pear shaped. Not that there’s anything wrong with the shape of pears, but … anyway.

I’ve been jangling that sucker a bit and will likely do some “live” virtual recordings of that and other selections, then post them somewhere, somehow, maybe with some video, who the hell knows? Well … you’ll be the first to know.

Five strings.

I can play any instrument. Piano, bass, six string guitar, five string guitar – I broke a g-string yesterday (note that I didn’t say I could play them well) – kazoo, contra-bass kazoo … I think that’s about it. That’s all the instruments there are, right?

Actually, I’m not super good at any of those instruments. If I were, then I would be insufferable or famous or something; perhaps both. Or neither. Well, that covers all of the possibilities. I don’t like leaving things to chance. (And I don’t mean Chance the gardener.) Thing is, I like playing instruments, even if I do it, well … badly. So even though I’ve never been what I would describe as a punk musician, I do share that piece of the punk ethos – technical skill on your axe is not paramount. So if you see me strumming an acoustic guitar, don’t look for a pick; I basically use thumb and forefinger. Piano? Just thumbs. Gotta move fast to make that work.

I'm all thumbs, Abe. Honest.Many instrumentalists leave distinctive marks on their instruments – scratches in the soundboard or pickguard of a guitar, or in the keyboard cover of a piano, that sort of thing. My aging Martin D-1 doesn’t have a lot of marks, mostly because I don’t play it all that much, but also because I suck at using a plectrum. The guitar top and the strings are harder than my fingers; therefore, the instrument leaves marks on me and not the other way around. Matt, on the other hand, is a more traditionally trained guitar player, so his axes are all marked up. It’s been a few years, but when I last saw it his Les Paul Custom looked like a truck backed over it. (That’s what my hands look like.)

Why am I telling you this? Well, because no one else will listen. And it’s snowing outside. This time of year in upstate New York, we all get sealed inside our homes by a mountain of snow and ice, thanks to the relentless force of moisture rising off of the Great Lakes. (What the hell is so great about them? All I see of Lake Erie is seven feet of snow on my front porch.) So for that six months of snowbound sequester, we must amuse ourselves with random tales and tips and particles of useless advice. It’s the only way we can get to sleep in this drafty old hammer mill. Hey, did you ever hear about the time I played a New Year’s gig in Lake George, NY and …….

Zzzzzzzzz….

Here comes the sun.

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what’s new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed – it’s how I roll. That’s why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it’s true.)

I just don’t play the fucker enough, that’s my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don’t do ANYTHING enough, so it’s just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor – the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee – gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it’s kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That’s not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.)

It’s when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that’s someone else’s music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on a night like this … me framming on my broken down guitar, Matt hammering on an anvil, Marvin jumping up and down like a chimp, slapping his bongos. I won’t even get into what Anti-Lincoln does to make noise. Let’s say it doesn’t involve the harpsichord, which I think may have been his primary instrument at one time. (We don’t have a harpsichord … hell, not even a harp.)

Bzzt ... Let me tune guitarTrouble is, we spend so much time on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, that practically everything else suffers. The garden has fallen to shit. (Granted, we did plant in the dead of winter. We may be “Big Green” but none of us has enough of a green thumb to grow a freaking rock garden.) Our songwriting is becoming even more bizarre by the day. And what the hell – the harder we work, the longer it takes for us to finish a freaking episode. It’s like we’re running backwards on a train heading in the opposite direction, following a track shaped like a mobius strip. Wrapped in an enigma.

Complain, complain, complain. That’s what blogging is all about, right? Shut up and play your broken guitar!

Strumble bum.

Twang. Ouch. Twang, twang, twaaaaaangg. Ouch! God damn it. Where did Marvin go, anyway?

If there’s one thing I hate like fire (aside from fire), it’s changing guitar strings, particularly on an acoustic guitar. Whenever I do it, my hands feel like big slabs of beef, like I’m threading a needle with a sledgehammer. Ham-fisted to say the least. (Think that’s rough? You should see me PLAY guitar!) Ergo, I get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do it whenever possible. Not a bad outcome usually, unless he insists on testing it out afterwards. (Not Greensleeves again, Marvin, for chrissake! I hear it in my sleep as it is!)

The reason I’m changing the strings on my 17-year-old Martin D-1 (nearly college age!) is that we’re currently producing the next raft of songs to be included in a future episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek / Mr. Ed political parody. (Complicated enough for you? It’s a satire! It’s a polemic! It’s a musical!) I have a folk-like song in 6/8 that needs an acoustic, and I’m not going to ask Matt to learn it because, hell, he’s too busy and, hell x 2, he’s got a head full of his own songs and doesn’t need mine muddling up the works. It’s like a mixmaster blender in there right now. Crazy man.

Is that the only song you know, Marvin?So here I am, strumming the old D-1, grinding my fingers to a raw nub. I don’t use a flat pick. Nor any other kind of pick, actually. I just strum the strings with my thumb, forefinger and middle finger, mostly, and dud them out with the heel of my palm. It’s a cheap bastardization of that Joni Mitchell / Neil Young technique – pretty much the only method of playing six-string that I ever bothered to learn. Limited, yes, but when I play something in three, it’s pretty much useless, so I end up strumming like my fingers were a pick. (And by the time I’m finished, they pretty much WILL be a pick.)

Next week: Joe’s banjo tips. Find out how I pulled off banjo parts in Big Green songs such as “Box of Crackers,” “Limping Back to Texas”, and other hits. (Hint: used my fingers again.)