Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

All the king’s robots and all the King’s pens

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We got another one of those notes, man. One of those neighbor notes about the uncut lawn. Let’s say they’re a little disappointed in us. I have to admit, I’m disappointed in us, too. We really SHOULD have mowed that lawn, but we were too damn LAZY and SHIFTLESS. (Please share this post with our neighbors so that they will feel validated.)

Anyway, here we are in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, no validation in sight … not even for our parking. You know, I think we might be the subject of yet another community effort to rid the neighborhood of ne’er do wells. Frankly, I object to being termed in such a way. I may not always do well, but I certainly sometimes do well. I can’t speak for any of the other members of our entourage, but I for one try to remain on the straight and narrow. (It’s been a bit too narrow lately, though.)

Call in the lawn robots

Now SOME people I know, and I won’t say who, hire robots to mow their lawn. I’m not super comfortable with that idea. The part I’m not comfortable with, I should add, is the “hire” part. Why buy the milk when you own the cow, right? We have our own damn robot, thank you very much. His name is Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and if you Google his full name, you’ll come up with about twenty years of posts on this very blog. Or some nonsensical artificial intelligence story. Same damn thing.

Thing is, the lawn robots descend onto your property in a swarm and cut the grass in about ten minutes – just a big flurry of activity, then they’re gone. Marvin could NEVER do that. If he tried to get a job with the lawn robots, he would never get past the first interview. They would laugh him out of Utica, for chrissake. Think of that: Laughed out of Utica. Good name for a band, I think. But I digress. I can’t ask Marvin to do our lawn. It’s a matter of principle. Marvin was created for greater purposes, like vacuuming the hall. I can’t allow him to lower himself in that way.

Sign ’em if you got ’em

What Marvin really needs is a contract. We used to have one of those, with that crazy corporate label Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., of Indonesia. It was signed in red ink, actually, though it may have been blood, now that I think of it. Those guys were kind of rough. They weren’t getting us to do shit by using Jedi mind tricks. It was more the truncheon and tire iron method. But hey, you don’t want to hear about our contract signing ceremony under duress. This is supposed to be a HAPPY occasion.

Mow the damn lawn.

Stuff it!

It’s actually a good thing we’re no longer under contract to Hegemonic. We can release our new songs into the wild like birds and let them fly on their own volition. Labels always make you do dumb shit you don’t want to do, then cut up your albums to make two or three. You call that value? Jesus Christmas. What an industry! Even our mad science advisor, exploiter of the intergalactic time warp, Mitch Macaphee thinks that’s unjust, and he’s crazy as a loon. Maybe crazier.

From green to red

Yeah, so there are drawbacks. And the first is no money to pay the damn bills. A smarter band would just let them do what they want with their music, but nobody ever accused us of being smart. At least not to our faces.

I said keep the bastards away from me!

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I told you, I didn’t want to be disturbed. And just because I have a gaping hole in my wall doesn’t mean you can just jump right through it. Get out, and take those nasty things with you. Jesus! This mill is a prison!

Okay, I admit that I was overreacting a tad just then. My deepest apologies, and the same for Marvin (my personal assistant), who was once again in the process of invading my personal space for no good reason. Still, that doesn’t justify bad feelings or harsh words. We try not to fly off the handle around here – that’s part of our credo as a band, and it’s something we’re particularly, uh … shit ….. WILL YOU TURN THAT DAMN THING DOWN!!

Quadropedal unmanned vehicles

What did Marvin want from me? Well, he made a new friend today and he wanted to show the bugger off. It’s one of those automated robot dogs – you know, the kind that chase people to death in your nightmares (or just in Black Mirror). He thinks he found the robot dog out in the street, but I happen to know that little iron fido is one of Mitch Macaphee’s latest experiment. It’s kind of his Eighth Man, if you know what I mean, though he’s clearly no Professor Genius.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust autonomous vehicles of any sort. They have a mind of their own, you know. And they’re just as liable to take your leg off as any real dog, maybe more. I mean, I could possibly get behind Mitch’s experiment if it were about supporting our next interstellar tour. But damn it, man, it’s got nothing to do with that. That’s right – Mitch is going rogue, once again!

A real Florida story

Now, I’m not a big fan of all these other states. But apparently there’s one state called Florida, and apparently there’s a place down there called Cape Canaveral. And at this Cape Canaveral is a special installation of the Space Force. And that force needs protection … the kind you get from autonomous robot dogs.

Yeah, I'm not crazy about that idea.

Okay, friends. Like I said earlier, I don’t much cotton to autonomous robot animals. And I’ve made my opinion quite well known within the domain of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Which is why it puzzles me so that Mitch Macaphee – whose hearing is excellent, I understand – would put in a bid for building those robot dogs for Cape Canaveral. Seriously, do you know what this means? It means all of his beta testing will be happening right here, in the hammer mill. That’s no fair, man. Tell Florida to get their own beta-tested robot dogs. (Not even sure you need to tell them something like that.)

My little redoubt

Like with most of Mitch’s contracts, it’s really best to just ride them out and keep your head down. I might consider investing in some knee guards – something that will protect my vulnerable shins from those vicious robots. No, they haven’t done anything mean yet. But they might decide to at any moment. What part of autonomous do you not understand?

There’s no business like no business (I know)

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I spy with my little eye …. a table! No, that’s a chair. No, that’s Mitch Macaphee’s experimental water bong. Yes, yes, finally …. that’s a table. It’s only the last object in the room, for crying out loud. Jesus. Do you know any OTHER games?

Here’s the problem with personal robot assistants: they don’t have deep cultural knowledge about what it’s like to be a human being. I mean, Marvin isn’t even programmed to play I Spy. What the hell was Mitch Macaphee thinking when he left that tidbit out of the poor bastard’s memory bank? Beats me how he can be expected to make his way through the world without knowing classic parlor games or learning how to square dance. (And no, Marvin doesn’t know how to doe – see – doe.)

Time on our hands

Now, the more industrious amongst you will no doubt surmise that, if we are playing parlor games, we have little better to do. As nasty and condescending as that claim obviously is, it’s also just as obviously true. Yes, damn it, aside from the odd game of chance, we’re just sitting on our hands here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, hoping for salvation to pour down us like milk onto cornflakes. And man, what I wouldn’t give for a nice bowl of cornflakes just about now! (Focus, damn it, focus!)

The trouble is, there just isn’t a lot of work out there for aging indie bands that have zero reputation, zero following, and zero sales potential. Employment opportunities abound in just about every industry save local-circuit live music, and what work exists is dominated by kids (as it should be – it’s their turn, after all). I hired anti-Lincoln to sit by the phone and wait for the offers to come rolling in, and thus far, no potato. In fact, he’s grown a beard waiting for that phone to ring. (It’s the beard he already had, of course, but …. the point is, he’s been sitting there a long time.)

Making lemons out of lemonade

What is there for a bunch of wash-outs to do? Make an album, of course. Hey, look – if we waited around for people to like us before we did anything useful, we would do nothing but wait around for people to… like … us …. Okay, that’s kind of circular. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve made albums before in the midst of unpopularity. Why not do it again?

We have the material. And I’m not talking about Big Green’s lost generation of Ned Trek songs – more than 80 recordings just begging to be finished and committed to some kind of collection. Sure, that album will happen one of these days, years, etc. I’m talking about a whole raft of new songs by Matt and a handful by yours truly. Brand new material, just plucked from the Big Green tree. We’re in preliminary rehearsals right now, via JamKazam, but I expect we’ll start tracking these pretty soon. I mean, what ELSE is there to do around this dump?

See what fun they're having?

Yeah, but how do you … you know …?

There’s very likely someone out there saying, but wait a minute – Big Green no longer has a corporate label. How are you going to distribute said project, eh? WHERE YA GONNA GET THE MONEY?

Right, well … first off, don’t yell! Second, we’ve opened up a Big Green site on Band Camp. It’s got our first two albums posted on it, more on the way. Third, I don’t know … see number one. I’ve got some parlor games to finish.

I said, Oh man, God Damn that Dream!

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I told you, I don’t have the money. You can look in my guitar case – go ahead. Here’s he key to the padlock. Rummage through the back of my amp. There’s nothing in there but decades-old cigarette butts and some tortoise shell picks I never use. Hey, get your hands off me! Where are you taking me? HALP!

What the …. ? Oh. So it was just a dream. What an em-effing relief. Thank you, Jeebus. Sorry, folks – I must have dozed off in the middle of our conversation. Dreamland is a bizarro world. Squares look like circles, time collects in puddles, and people eat potato chips with a fork. And that’s just in my normal dreams. Thing is, I almost never have bad dreams, unless I’m dreaming about our old corporate record label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. Which is what I was dreaming about a little more than five minutes ago (according to the time puddle).

Bad old days

I know most bands tend to reflect back upon their careers and celebrate their own youthful missteps and flights of folly. Yeah, well, that’s not us. We’re constantly re-litigating the past, and as a result, I’ve gotten at least one grisly visit from a knuckle-scraping denizen of our former label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. And yes, it was in dreamland, that’s true, but tell that to my dream self – to him, it’s just land, right? Does a fish know she’s underwater? Well, does she?

Dream or no, it brought me back to those bad old days when sinners were murdered for the greater good. No, wait – that’s a song lyric. What I really mean is those days when we were laboring under the watchful eye of our multinational record label, which was actually just a subsidiary of a big ass mineral extraction company that was busily grinding Papua New Guinea to a pulp. Like most capitalists, they just squeezed the juice right out of us. And when they got tired of drinking Big Green juice, they demanded pomegranate juice, I think because of its antioxidant properties. (Capitalists are nothing if not guarded about their own well-being.)

No redoubt too remote

I’m assuming I don’t need to repeat for this audience the full details of our sordid parting-of-the-ways with Hegemonic. Suffice to say that they didn’t take the announcement of our divorce with equanimity. Turned out that a contract meant a bit more to them than it did to yours truly, and so Big Green was kind of in the soup for a few weeks … or months … or maybe eight years. You lose track of time in deep space, and the further out you go in space, the further back you go in time.

Think it's safe to come out yet?

What am I talking about? Good question. Here’s a mediocre answer. When confronted with the hired thugs of our deeply disappointed corporate overlords, we turned to the one man who could help us in our hour of need: our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man who closed the space warp up again (bet you didn’t know that!), and so on. With his help, we were wisked into deep, deep space where no thug would ever find us. Until now, that is …. now that NASA has uncovered the primordial star field that was our exclusive recluse. DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!

But it was just a dream

Fortunately, we won’t need the hiding place, at least not yet. Unless Hegemonic’s dream thugs break out into the waking world. Or continue to confront us in our REM sleep. No doubt those guys are back to doing what they love best – poisoning indigenous water supplies in remote areas of the world for quick profit. That’s the ticket, boys.

Trying not to be anti-social on social media

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You know, there are better things you could be doing with your time. Like, I don’t know …. mowing the lawn. Oh, right – we don’t have a lawn. How about rearranging the bricks in the courtyard? That’s one task that won’t do itself. Or beating the rugs. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment, but they’ve really crossed a line with me over the past few weeks.

Oh, hello, reader(s). You just caught me in the middle of berating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being industrious enough. Yes, I know – he’s an automaton, he only responds to programming, I’m not being fair, etc., etc. The thing is, I don’t know how to program a robot, and his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, is not speaking to anyone this week. All I have left is a dressing down, robot or no.

Multi-platform clusterfuck

Marvin has a few responsibilities as my personal robot assistant. One is taking charge of Big Green’s social media presence. I should say here that Marvin is in no way an expert in this area. (You could pretty much say that about any area.) When it came to deciding who would take that job on, however, we quickly determined that none of us know anything about it. Ultimately, it came down to him being a robot. That’s a lot closer to being the internet than we humans are.

Not every band is successful online. In fact, many are not. But few are as unsuccessful online as Big Green. I hate to be boastful here, but if they gave out a trophy for being obscure, we would have walked away with it a dozen times over. We’ve been on online platforms for almost twenty years, starting with MP3.com, which isn’t even a thing anymore, then The Orchard, CDBaby, and a few others I can’t even remember. Our sales? Less than stellar. Let’s just say, we’ve got some remainders lying about.

Find us on Face-where?

Then there’s the major social media sites/apps, like Facebook, etc. Big Green has been on Facebook for, I don’t know, ten years? More? Not sure. We started a Twitter feed ages ago, but we only got onto Instagram earlier this year. Mostly, these platforms are designed so that your listeners can interact with you easily, share posts, etc. We get some of that, but not much, and don’t sell anything via any of those sites. (I blame Marvin.)

Well, get to it, man!

Actually, with the low number of visits we get, our Facebook page is probably the safest place on the internet. You can probably store your passwords, bank account and routing numbers, and social security number on there and they would all be safe as houses. Ditto with Twitter. I give Big Green a few mercy likes on Twitter posts, but not too often, because mostly their content is crap. (What am I saying??) Instagram gets a little more activity, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re a dead letter on social media. Own it, baby – own it!

New horizons

Anyone else would just give it up. But not us. We don’t know the meaning of the word quit. We think it has something to do with work, but none of us is sure. And since we have a general aversion to work, our consideration goes no farther than that.

Anyway, we just signed up for BandCamp and set up a new page at big-green.bandcamp.com. Why did we do it? Well, like Everest, it’s there … and we’re not. Except that now we are. Hey, if you’re on BandCamp, give us a mercy follow. That’s right – encourage us!

Hello, Captain Neutron – we are receiving you

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Sure, there’s probably a reasonable explanation behind it. Why wouldn’t there be? Lord knows, everything we know is firmly rooted in reality. Except, of course, for our upstairs neighbors. And Mitch Macaphee. Yes, yes … and Anti Lincoln, too, but only when he’s drunk. Which is most of the time.

Just spending a little time as a Big Green family, sitting around the hammer mill, reading the headlines to one another. Now, as you know, we can’t afford a subscription to the real newspaper. That’s way beyond our humble means! Luckily, there are the internets. All you need to do is borrow a little wi-fi, do a search or two, and voila! Instant news. Not terrestrial news, you understand – that would cost money. No, we read news from outer space. It’s fresh, it’s interesting, and there’s always a head-scratcher or two in there.

From a land beyond time

Here’s something, Bob! (Your name is Bob, right? I always assumed that was the case.) A strange radio-emitting neutron star has been discovered in a stellar graveyard. Now, I know what you’re going to say. We shouldn’t be so morbid, reading about stellar graveyards. Why not focus more on what’s happening in stellar nurseries? Hey, you know, we find news wherever we can. If it leads us into stellar graveyards, so be it. Don’t be so judgmental, Bob!

Still, you have to admit that it’s interesting. I mean, what are the chances that another race from a land beyond time would have stumbled on the same invention that Marconi did? Even more intriguing, they appear to be trying to communicate with us, via radio. It seems to me that we should be able to decipher their language relatively easily. Why? If they’re on the surface of a neutron star, whatever they’re saying must be the deep-space equivalent of GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! We just work backwards from there.

I think it's trying to tell us something, Lincoln.

Strange magnetism

At the same time, scientists are detecting a new type of magnetic wave emitting from the earth’s chewy center. Is this a coincidence? I think not! The coincidence of these two stories on the same week is certainly no coincidence. (Wait, what?) I think it’s only right that we speculate on why this is happening at this particular juncture. To my tiny mind, there is only one possibility …. mother earth is responding to the neutron radio waves with magnetic fields. It’s like neutron man is calling collect, and she’s accepting the charges. Like any good mother would.

Skeptical? Well, there’s really only one way to test this theory. We need to break out Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. The thing’s been in mothballs since we used it to bail Anti-Lincoln out with those crypto-kidnappers last year. But dramatic rescues are only one of the device’s practical uses. It can core a apple, make mounds of julienne fries, raise pole cats, and interpret interstellar communications, particularly those emanating from invisible flying predators.

Point it to the sky, Mack!

Damn, I wish we were more resourceful. If we had half the moxie of those forties guys that used to sing backup in our Ned Trek songs, we would have solved this mystery by now. As it is, it’s taking most of the week just to drag the Orgone Generating Device up from the cellar. And then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has first dibs on it. (He’s making julienne fries.)

Open the Door, Richard – It’s Mitch!

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I’ve seen that one before. That can be anything, for crying out loud. Just because a rock looks like bigfoot, doesn’t mean that there’s an actual bigfoot. And when you add Mars into the equation, all bets are off. Just call me when you find your missing clue.

Oh … hi, there. We’re just flipping through a few photographs. Typical suburban activity on a Thursday afternoon, am I right? Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that the residents of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill are as prone to random conspiracy theories as the general population. That said, conspiracy theories do have some purchase around the premises – even the ones that are easily debunked.

Vacation photos from the red planet

Take these rover images from Mars (please!). Everyone thinks they see something recognizable in the background. One object looks like a lawn ornament of some kind. Another looks like a still from that bigfoot video from way back. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is convinced that some Mars rock is his long-lost cousin Franklin. Never mind that he doesn’t have any cousins, Franklin looks nothing like that freaking space rock.

When I heard all this crap, I was about to launch into a diatribe about perception and how culturally situated all of these supposed sightings are. Easy mistake to make, right? If you’ve seen a lot of lawn ornaments in your time, then a rock that looks like a lawn ornament is going to ring a bell. Not sure how that explains the bigfoot sightings, unless some of my cohorts have been spending time amongst the local Susquatch population. (Not that such a thing exists …. or DOES it?)

Macaphee’s razor

Then there’s that shot that looks like a doorway on the surface of Mars. Immediately, people started speculating about what or who might live in there. Others suggested that it may be a Martian domicile that was recently abandoned, but I think that’s ludicrous. If something lived there and then decided to go on vacation to, say, Saturn – which is very lovely this time of year – mail would be stacked by the door at least a foot high. (That’s what’s called applying the scientific method.)

That rock looks a hell of a lot like Mitch.

It takes a scientist to bring speculation to a halt. The closest thing we have to that is Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, recently back from his conference in Buenos Aires. Turns out Mitch has a completely logical explanation for the phenomenon of the mysterious doorway on Mars. We showed him the picture, and he turned red as a beet. Apparently, that is the back door to his Martian redoubt – a spare lab on the red planet for when he really doesn’t want to be disturbed. Now that NASA knows where it is, of course, there goes the privacy.

Suggestion box

Right, so now Mitch needs a new redoubt. It needs to be 100% NASA-proof, so nothing on the inner planets. Maybe Uranus or Neptune. If you have any suggestions, please share them. You don’t want to be around Mitch when he’s out of sorts.

Imitation is the sincerest form of larceny

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First, you solder the lead onto the post. Then you fire up the tube pre-amp. Once that’s glowing nicely, you crank up your guitar to 11 and turn the big, fat, plastic knob on the console until your ears pop. And that’s why they call it pop music.

Yes, hello, there, and welcome to another post. I am your postmaster general, Big Green Joe, stranded here in the decaying abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York. We’re here just trying to make a little music the old-fashioned way. What do I mean by old fashioned? I mean in the way of the old masters. And no, I don’t mean Da Vinci or Rembrandt. I mean the bands of the 1960s, when all recording was linear and destructive.

More money, more excuses

I don’t want to suggest that money doesn’t help a recording project succeed. The thing is, when you’re broke and living in an abandoned mill, you typically can’t afford much in the way of gear. So if we’re planning on doing another album, we need to improvise. Sure, we could just record it on a computer, like most kids do these days. But where’s the challenge in that? What good is getting a good sound when all you did was activate a plug-in? I want REAL tubes, damn it, and all the noise you can muster.

Old gear may be, well … old, but that doesn’t mean it’s not expensive. Indeed, some of that stuff is in high demand. Well … we can’t afford any of that shit. Fortunately, there’s a lot of old electrical gear lying around the hammer mill that hasn’t been used in decades. We’re talking toggle switches, radial knobs, terminals, chassis, and the like. Most of it was related to the assembly line for the hammers, of course. But if you patch stuff together, who’s to say what you might end up with. A machine that might (dare I say it?) control the world? BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!

Lessons learned in short order

Hey, wasn't there a dumpster out here somewhere?

Okay, so that’s how we were thinking on Tuesday. By Thursday, we thought better of it. That was mainly because we ran out of fingers to singe. Damn it, Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) always made this stuff look so easy, but it turns out that there’s a trick to this invention routine. When he built Marvin (my personal robot assistant), for instance, he just used whatever was handy at the time. Where is he when you need him? At a conference, of course, in freaking Buenos Aires.

What were we able to build with all that junk? A pile of slightly more consolidated junk, that’s what. I’m not exactly the Liberty Valance of soldering guns, after all. The fact is, I never quite got the hang of it, despite my father’s best efforts at teaching my sorry ass. Suffice to say that the “machine” we built will not capture audio in any form. And the only audio it will ever emit will be the deathly moan that it will emit when the garbage collectors haul it away. (Strange hobby, garbage collecting. Can’t imagine why those folks ever took it up.)

Next stop: Debtsville

Leave us face it – the only way we’re going to make another album is by speculating, particularly if we hope to imitate the old masters. Yes, that leaves us open to investment scams and Ponzi schemes. But it’s that or start renting out the mill to vacationers, like Dr. Smith did with the Jupiter 2 when he renamed it “Happy Acres.” What could possibly go wrong?

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

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.)

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!