Tag Archives: Holidays

Scare tactics.

What are you talking about? I was very careful in my deliberations about this get up. If someone’s feathers get ruffled, well … it’s not on me, man. Folks got to just calm down.

Yeah, it’s Halloween again, everyone. Kind of a big holiday around these parts. Why, I’ve known these quiet suburban moms and dads to take their kids out in gale force winds, forcing them against the elements to have a good time, damn it.  That’s how memories are made, my friends. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we try to make this old barn of a place seem inviting. We can’t afford pumpkins or corn stalks, of course, so we just slip the mansized tuber a fiver and ask him to stand by the front door with a citronella torch. He looks, uh, kind of autumnal … if you squint.

Now, I’m not a big one for dress-up, as you know. Never liked it, never. That said, I did put on some old jeans and borrowed one of those blue denim shirts, then combed my hair forward and put on a fake beard so that I would look like George Harrison on the cover of Abbey Road. Set aside the gray hair, it almost works. Anti-Lincoln, however, accuses me of being culturally insensitive. I keep telling him, none of our neighbors are from the north of England. Who will care?

You know, you could pass for Lincooln.

Hah. Anti-Lincoln should talk. HE chose to dress in a seasonally inappropriate costume. Whoever heard of going out on Halloween dressed as Santa Claus? You can’t muddle the major hyper consumer holidays in that way. You’ll make people’s heads explode! Then they’ll expect presents from you. I told him he should go as Lincoln, but he didn’t want to offend our crazy upstairs neighbors, who I believe are from south of the Mason Dixon line somewhere.  No one thinks much of my suggestions on this topic, and with good reason.

Look at Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s going as a hot water heater again this year.  No matter what I say, that’s what he’s dong, even when those people up the street mistook him for an actual hot water tank and installed him in their basement next to the furnace. (It took weeks to get the smell of natural gas out of him.)

Try to help and what happens – am I right?

Holiday table.

It can’t be morning yet, right? It’s still freaking dark outside. What? Oh, right. My night mask. I’ll just pull it off and … OH MY GOD … IT’S MORNING!

Well, that’s my revelation for today. What have you got? Hope you’re having a great holiday season, whether or not you celebrate any of the various commemorative feast-days that fall sometime around now. Like Trump in the White House, we’ve been staked out here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York (a.k.a. that farm upstate that every alt band goes to eventually) waiting for someone to tell us it’s safe to venture outside without proper shoes. That’s right – our shoes are a disgrace, my friends. No bones about it. And when you’ve got substandard shoes, Spring can’t come soon enough.

And while we’ve been cooped up in this drafty old barn, we’ve tried to busy ourselves with some low-budget Kringle-ing, sending out some old recordings via social media to our gaggle of patient friends, attempting to make up for the fact that we have nothing new finished … our latest batch is still in the oven, barely even browning at this point. Slow going, to be sure. Fortunately, we have an archive to keep us warm – the fruit of more than 30 years’ effort in the vineyards of no-budget songwriting, gigging, and music production. We’ve got everything from 1/4 inch reel to cassette to DAT tape to hard drives packed with ramblings, false starts, and even some complete songs. You never know what we’ll toss up next.

Okay, Marvin ... What have we got?Or maybe you will. Either way, that’s what we’re dropping on the holiday table under the tree. For a sampling, check our Twitter feed or visit our Soundcloud page and click play on any random upload. It is a mixed bag, I will admit, curated by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a tin ear … actually, two tin ears and an aluminum voicebox.  Our posts thus far have been mostly Christmas themed selections, including outtakes from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and some live takes previously featured on our YouTube page or on our Live from Neptune EP.  These are all full-rez .wav files, and a couple of the live tracks have been remastered, so give it a listen and let me know how much they suck … I mean, what you think.

Whoa, is that the time? Back to bed with me!

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.

Prepping for the big one.

Remind me to tell Marvin (my personal robot assistant) not to leave the lights on all night. We’ve got the environment to consider. If we don’t care about mother earth, who the hell will? Besides … they freaking keep me up.

No, not THAT strange ... Oh, yes, my friends. Even here at the Cheney Hammer Mill we are preparing for the impending holiday season. Not without some trepidation, of course. Lord knows this time of year puts people into a kind of feeding frenzy, hyperactive shopping fever, whatever. They lose their reason. They get impatient and even nasty. It’s a rough world out there, man. So why would we add our madness to the pile? No reason. Just looking for a way to keep busy.

So, what are we planning? Nothing much. Another podcast episode. Couple of new recordings. A bag of crisps. Some flashing lights. I don’t know, what do YOU think we should do? We only know how to do one (or two) things. One of them is, well, play strange music. Not Anthony Braxton strange, but strange none the less. Okay, well … as you know, we did a Christmas album once, like …. fifteen years ago. It was called 2000 Years To Christmas. And we’ve written, recorded, and released other Christmas themed songs since then, including a few last year.

This year, we’ve got a few more. All we have to do is get off of our sorry asses and record them. Then write, record, and post a holiday pageant of sorts. Can’t say what the dimensions of said pageant would be, but it should probably be a big one. Should be song and dance numbers. Special guests should drop by unexpectedly, then perform carefully prepared duets with us. Perhaps wearing ridiculous getups and other worldly charm bracelets. They might even bring choruses of singers with them to join in! And presents!

Or maybe not. This is beginning to sound expensive. Which reminds me … did Marvin leave the water on in the mud room? We’re not made of money, you know!