Tag Archives: mitch

Next up.

No, I’m not interested. No, really … not interested at all. And no, I’m not holding out for a better deal. I really just don’t want any part of it, okay? So just drop it. I said NO. (Jesus!)

Oh, hello out there. I was just having a little conversation with one of my esteemed colleagues. And he was getting a little uh-steamed, if you catch my meaning. Okay, full disclosure, it was our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), veteran of many deep space excursions, and the man who broke the space warp. (It was just warped before he got a hold of it, and now the damn thing is busted, thanks to his carelessness.)

What’s all the commotion? Funny you should ask. Perhaps you have some mad scientists in your life as well, or maybe a conventional scientist – someone who works in chemistry or physics, for instance. Well, if so, you know that people of science are frequently tempted by large corporations to use their great skills for some money-making venture, proffered on the promise that the professor will get his or her beak wet in a serious way. Mitch is no exception to that rule. And he’s just gotten an offer that has him seeing dollar signs everywhere.

Sounds dodgy, Mitch.

Personally, I think this is a scam. Mitch is talking about some joint Russian – Luxembourgian venture to mine minerals in outer space. He has a contact familiar with the deal who can get him in on the ground floor, particularly since he has experience with monetizing outer space through the application of advanced technologies used by extractive industry. Turns out that on all of those interstellar tours, when we thought Mitch was asleep in his cot, he was drilling for corbomite of cosmonium or some other precious earth that he would later unload on the galactic commodities market. Who knew? I always thought he traveled with us because he liked our music, or just enjoyed being a member of our posse. But no … it was filthy lucre leading him on, crawling in through his ear and squatting down on his brain.

Thing is, Mitch needs to talk others into investing in the venture. That’s what makes me think it’s a scam. That and the outer space part. Again …. not interested. But by the look on Mitch’s face, this ain’t over.

Big thanks.

Don’t suppose I ever thanked you for that, right? Well … thanks, man. Thanks a heap. Now get the hell out of my sight.

Oh, hi. Hey … no worries. Just practicing. This, as you know, is the time of year when you show gratitude to all and sundry, even your worst enemy. I was just practicing what that would look like in real life. Say, for instance, my worst enemy (whoever that may turn out to be) should pound on the hammer mill door one cold morning, maybe the day after a long, hard gig on the planet Aldebaran 12, where the bars are open until #$@ o’clock (which, for the record, is pretty late). After dragging myself out of bed, limping downstairs, and pulling the door open wide, how would I properly express my thankfulness for the many gifts of microaggression my worst enemy has bestowed upon me? Suffice to say, it takes thought and practice.

That said, I am thankful for many things. For the leaky hammer mill roof over our heads, for one. I’m thankful for the fact that vacuum tubes are still being manufactured (without those, Marvin’s metronome and inertial guidance system would cease to function). On behalf of the mansized tuber (because he can’t speak for himself), we’re all thankful for plant food. And I wouldn’t want to run through this litany without thanking Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, for not blowing us sky-high this year (third year in a row!). Thanks, also, to anti-Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Address is even more inspiring recited backwards.

Thanky, yankees.But more than anything else, we are thankful to you, our listeners and readers. (That includes all you little Russian bots – I see you!) And that’s why we have chosen to express our gratitude by posting a warmed-over installment of Ned Trek entitled “Ned Trek 29: Error of Mercy”. Check it out at NedTrek.com. This originally ran on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN back in August of 2016, in the thick of the presidential election. Highlights include the usual assortment of bad imitations, such as Matt doing James Carville and me doing Bill Clinton. Fun fact: our first read of the script was done in a hospital examination room, waiting for test results. (We were cackling so loudly I think the staff considered declaring a code red and breaking out the restraints.)

So … thanks for the laughs, and for listening to us laugh like idiots.

Project zero.

Someone’s knocking at the front gate – I can hear them. Anti Lincoln, can you see who it is? No, of course you can’t see them from down here in the basement. I meant go up stairs and take a look. Jesus …. how did you EVER serve as president? (Actually, I think I may now know the answer.)

Well, I spent this week counting the number of balls I’ve dropped since the start of the summer. And I don’t mean ping pong balls. No, I’m talking about projects started and never finished, plans laid but not implemented, sandwiches assembled but not eaten, sentences commenced but never …. what was I saying? Oh yeah. I never finish anything, and this summer is no exception, folks.

First there was the archive project. I will admit, I did get further on this one than any of the others. I’ve resurrected about 200 songs, by my rough count, all recorded in the eighties and early to mid nineties. I have the files … I haven’t done anything with them, but I HAVE them. And possession is nine tenths of the law. It’s also about ten tenths of this project. No, I haven’t abandoned it, but I did need a break from archive land, just as Matt has needed some extra time to go chasing falcons around (see the Utica Peregrine Falcon project site at http://www.big-green.net/falcon).

Think you can shake a tambourine?Then there’s the interstellar tour idea we were kicking around. What happened to that? Well, apparently someone kicked it into next week, figuratively speaking. I’m not ruling it out, but no one aside from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his inventor, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has any inclination towards doing the fucker. And frankly, neither one of them can play an instrument (though Mitch can use instruments in his work … and Marvin sometimes makes a noise like a fire whistle). That’s not the kind of band I can bring to Neptune! Those crystalline ice creatures would laugh us out of orbit, and THEN where would we be.

Okay, so archives all but abandoned, check. Tour forgotten, check. What’s left? Project zero? Let’s get to work then. But first … answer the freaking door!

Near hit.

Okay, I’m going down into the basement. Anyone care to join me? No? Right … off I go, then. If anything dramatic happens while I’m down there, be sure to let me know.

Hello, friend(s) of Big Green. Yes, I’m trying to push the envelope a little bit here. The mail carrier doesn’t like to get to close to this place (in that it’s an abandoned mill), so whenever I mail something, I have to push the envelope down the walk to the curb. Also, we’ve just recorded something like half a dozen songs and someone … someone has to mix them. Even though that means cloistering myself away in a dank and musty basement, churning out the mixes and probably missing that monumental event that’s scheduled for the coming week: namely, the asteroid fly-by or “near miss”.

I put that in scare quotes because, as George Carlin pointed out years ago, what people call a near miss should really be called a near-hit. Semantics aside, I just want to re-emphasize here that THERE’S AN ASTEROID HEADING TOWARDS THE EARTH!!! Am I panicking? Well, I wouldn’t call this state of mind “panic” – it’s not shrill enough. It’s more a kind of agitation … the kind you get when an asteroid grazes your exosphere and puts a scare into your large natural satellite. Am I scared? No more than the man in the moon.

It's close. TOO close.It had occurred to a few of us that we should take the opportunity of this asteroid fly-by to gather some important data on this mysterious visitor from deep space – data that could provide answers to vital questions like, “what color is it?” and “is there a Starbucks there yet?” How would we go about this? Well, we have Marvin (my personal robot assistant). And we have Mitch Macaphee’s model volcano. If we put one in to the other at the right moment, there’s a moderate chance that item A (Marvin) could reach escape velocity and, maybe, navigate his way to the asteroid. And when I say “moderate”, I mean a degree of probability that is, perhaps, calculable if and only if we were willing to make the effort to calculate it. And, well … we’re not. So, Marvin? GET IN THAT VOLCANO!

Okay, so … before you think less of me, remember that Marvin does not need air to survive, nor gravity, nor food or water. He is an automaton. That said, he doesn’t much care for outer space. And in light of the fact that he’s nowhere to be found, he’s not too fond of volcanoes, either.

Monetizing sloth.

Leave me alone, Charles. Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep? It’s obvious, for chrissake … I just called you Charles, and I don’t even know anyone by that name. So I must be effing sleeping, right? Charles?

Oh, hi. Fell asleep in my cozy broom closet. We are still in our highly restricted corners of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as local venture capitalists eye the joint from stem to stern to see if it has any potential to make them serious bank. (I think there are more opportunities in the stem than in the stern, but I’ll let them find that out for themselves.) It’s like they have glass heads; I can see them picturing some knitting basket of a store, maybe a Hickory Farms … if such a thing still exists. (I remember stealing samples there as a kid. Strange, because I wasn’t even hungry … still, it was a good find.)

So, yeah … they’ll probably sweep us out of here like yesterday’s floor scum in a few months. Unless, that is, we come up with some cash … or Mitch Macaphee comes up with some kind of diabolical invention that will hold them at bay. Maybe a time-warp generator. Maybe a force field. (Even a little, teensy-weensy force field would help.) Maybe a great invisible ruler we can use to whack the invisible hand of the marketplace. Just throwing out a few ideas here. Are you listening, Mitch? Mitch??

A potential buyer visits.Oh, damn … that’s right. Mitch is off to Sao Paolo to attend the bi-annual convention of the International Society for the Purveyors of Mad Science (or ISPMS). I believe they’re giving him some sort of badge this year. (Not sure what it’s for, but it suspiciously glows in the dark.) In any case, we can’t rely on Mitch to keep the capitalist wolf pack at bay here at our besieged hammer mill squat house. We could have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) go out there and try to reason with the developers, but that would just make them laugh and point. We could coax Anti-Lincoln (perhaps with the promise of bourbon) to give one of his famous presidential addresses from the mill’s parapet, but again … pointing and laughing would ensue. (He’s not good.)

Thankfully, it’s a weekend, and I have the option of staying in my broom closet, strumming my unplugged guitar, while the realtor does walk-throughs. “What’s that sound?” the punters will ask, and the realtor will say, “Just the wind in the willows.”

Hiatus be damned.

Yes, I know the phone is ringing. Just let it ring, for crying out loud. Don’t people know we’re on vacation? Jesus Christ on a bike, try to take a week off around this joint! What? Oh … okay. It’s the neighbor’s phone. Stupid neighbors!

Hey, out there. You caught us taking a brief hiatus between the nothings that we have going on. (You can tell I’m on vacation because I say “hey” when I mean “hi” … though that might also make me an NPR correspondent.) Everybody needs a little down time. We tend to have a little more than most people. In fact, you could argue that Big Green is a bit like a downtime reservoir. People come here to waste time; that’s what makes the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill such a regional treasure. (And one man’s trash, well … you know the rest.) That’s understandable – sometimes taking a hiatus can be heavy lifting. That’s how people end up with hiatal hernias. (I’m just going to leave that right there.)

Do not disturbOkay, so … when you’re on vacation, you end up doing a bunch of stuff you don’t ordinarily have time for. For me, that usually involves surfing the web, and in my idle wanderings a stumbled across another Big Green. No, I don’t mean another BAND called Big Green – lord knows, there are at least one or two of those. This is a nutrition advocacy organization that works out of Detroit. Which means they are actually doing something USEFUL with our name, which is more than I can say for us. They’re helping to feed people; we’re wasting time with stuff like this. Case closed.

I haven’t told our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee about the other Big Green because I don’t want him to start doing what he always does, which is stew on something until smoke comes out of his ears. He sees threats everywhere, including the forge room at the mill, which mostly contains broken down machines and iron filings. When he wanders through there at night, he sees silhouetted in the darkness the hunched profiles of creatures he either invented or destroyed during his long, evil career. I can see how that might be unnerving, especially when you misplace your anti-depressant tabs the morning before. (We encourage Mitch to take his Paxil regularly. It’s a kind of self-defense.)

Well, that’s what we did on OUR winter vacation. And you?

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.

Thirty (or thirty-one).

Is this one of those years with a “7” at the end? Right, I thought as much. I guess that’s another decade in the can then, right? Fuck all – I am old.

Oh, hi. I was just having a little conversation with Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He keeps a lot of useless information in his memory banks, and among those bits and bobs are statistics about the history of Big Green, the music collective we formed some thirty years ago. Yes, I believe we adopted the moniker back in 1986, in a 2nd floor apartment in Ballston Spa, NY. That was the first incarnation of Big Green, which cracked apart in – yes – 1987, leaving it in the state it remains in today. (And no, I don’t mean the state of New York.)

Some may think it’s a bit of a problem that our band historian is a robot. That’s not that unusual, actually. I hear that the historian for “Captured by Robots” is also a robot. And then there’s Kraftwerk. All German bands have robot historians, from what I understand. (Though most bands choose not to read me in on the details.) Marvin can handle this task because he has what mad scientists call an “Electronic Brain”. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, invented it himself. The sparking contacts and dusty transistors inside that whirring little box function not unlike the synapses of the brain. Marvin can think, captain. And if he thinks, it’s only one small step from there to – dare I say it? – ruling … the world. Mwa-ha-ha-ha ….

Okay, well THAT took a dark turn. Why do we have multiple start dates for Big Green history? Well, it’s complicated. In point of fact, my personal opinion is that Big Green was born when Matt wrote and recorded the song “Sweet Treason” for a tape he sent me for my birthday in Spring of 1985. I think we’ve played versions of the song on our podcast. The original is a very scratchy recording that Matt did bouncing between two cassette tape decks and using a mixing bowl for a snare drum. The lyric, personalized for the occasion, goes like this:

Joe is "happy fitness" thanks to JFKEveryone into the pool
We’re all fun at the club
All of us nasty loud
Our metal detectors are safe from ambush
Our stomachs elastic with eclairs
Master’s beer

Joe owes much to gym class
Joe is “happy fitness” thanks to JFK
All of us join him, we’re grateful, JFK
All of us upside-down
Fungus on our knees

This time, it’s gonna be
gonna be easy
Sweet treason
Strange inclination has us warm up separate TVs
Every box word echoes neatly
Then it explodes

Joe, the mayor’s systematically going through your mail
He’s sifting, but not finding
He’s searching for some west-end sandwich
ten years good and stale

And on that day, Big Green was born. (Editor’s note: the “mayor” in this song refers to a kid we knew out in the Albany area back when we were trying to make a previous incarnation of this band work. Which brings us back even further, to 1979 … damn it!

 

Punch out.

I think it’s CMD-O or CMD-SHIFT-O, something like that. No? Okay, try CMD-ALT-5. Do it again. Okay, now divide 87 into 214 and multiply the dividend by the square-root of fuck-all. Jesus!

That was a bit of a tantrum, I admit it. It’s just that I’m living in the wrong freaking century, that’s all. I’m from that period in history when people did different things for a living and those things all looked different – the doctor had a stethoscope and a mirror on her forehead, the accountant an adding machine and a legal pad, and the musician a freaking guitar. Now everybody’s sitting in front of a computer, pecking at keys randomly and hoping for some elusive result. Smarty alec kids! Get off my lawn!

Matt and I are in production on another tranche of songs, and it’s taking a while because we’re transitioning between recording systems. Now we’re using a computer-based DAW instead of a proprietary hard disk system, and well … I miss the simplicity of just pressing record and punching stop. Those were the days, right? (Well … they were days.) Our autopunch back then was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with his claw on the console and a complex series of eyebrow movements. What could possibly go wrong? (Listen to some of our albums and you’ll find out.)

Uh, dude ... Thanks, but no thanks.Right now we’re kind of winging it, I admit … though that’s a bit more considered a state than we’re usually in during recording sessions. I boot up the new system, punch a few keys, then start playing whatever instrument is called for – piano, sousaphone, kazoo, triangle, whatever – and realize a few moments later that nothing has been captured. Rinse and repeat. I need a team of scientists! And I don’t mean mad scientists – we’re all set on that score. If we were to ask Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, to reconfigure our studio, we would end up with something on the order of what Magic Alex threw together for the Beatles back in the Apple Records days, i.e., a decorative, non-functional studio full of flashing lights with a speaker for every track and other non sequitur features.

Well, we don’t want that. (No offense, Alex, wherever you are.) So if you’re looking for me, look for that guy sitting at a computer terminal.

Audio dynamite.

Yeah, turn the bass drum up a little in my headphone mix. Yeah, that’s enough. That’s good. Okay, dial it back … Too loud. STOP!! Christ on a bike. Can’t you turn a knob in a direction other than clockwise? No? Okay. Good to know.

As you may have surmised, we have resorted to using Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as a sound engineer in the makeshift studio we maintain at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Not the optimal choice, I admit, but hey, look – we only have two hands. Actually, between us, we have four, but – and this is important – WE’RE USING ALL FOUR OF THEM. I thought Marvin, being a robot, might be a bit more precise in his manipulations of various sound parameters, but it appears that Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) cut a few corners when he put Marvin together. His wrist joints only turn one way, it turns out. What the fuck.

Hey, did any of you hear something?When you are effectively a pop duo … and I think Matt and I constitute the duo part, at least … you need to rely on others sometimes to do some of the heavy lifting. Marvin can do some stuff. I’ve gotten Antimatter Lincoln to shake a tambourine more than once – that’s about his speed. The man-sized tuber is pretty good at holding things up, like a table.  These are all things we would otherwise have to do ourselves, so it’s not like I’m ungrateful. But man … a shred of musical ability would come in handy right about now.

Then there’s such a thing as too much help. Yes, I’m talking about Mitch. This one song we were working on, we wanted a colossal bass drum sound. Mitch said he could do better than our superannuated effects boxes, so we said go ahead, knock yourself out. The next morning, I’m awakened by this earth-shattering BOOM and the whole mill is shaking like a jello mold. Out in the courtyard, there’s a smoking crater where the tool shed once stood. There were about seven mics set up around the crater. I guess Mitch was thinking surround sound.

It took about a year to live that down. (We still get calls from the codes department.) So hey, now I’m careful when I ask for help.