Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Frankensong.

February 12, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

I thought you said it was organic. What do you mean “all natural” – that’s a vacuous term. Everything’s natural, goddamn it. Yellow cake uranium is natural, but that doesn’t mean you should serve it at a birthday party.

Cheese and crackers, I don’t know what’s the matter with my squat-mates. They think anything that’s not on fire is good for you, even if it was recently on fire. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of twenty years loitering in an abandoned hammer mill, staying three steps ahead of the property owning capitalists, two steps ahead of the bourgeois lawyers that represent them, and one step ahead of the police that guard their wealth with clubs and guns. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome, except that we’ve been taken hostage by our general lack of resources, and my associates are now trying to squeeze every molecule out of the toothpaste tube. (I don’t mean metaphorically – they literally want that last molecule!)

Anyway, they’ve taken to eating GMO rice and GMO corn and whatever else because that’s what’s lying about. Not the best reason to eat something. There are a lot of old hammer heads strewn throughout this mill in various states of corrosive decay – they wouldn’t eat those, would they? (Or WOULD they?) Actually, Anti-Lincoln might sample the hammer heads for some extra iron, but I digress. If I can’t discourage my flop-mates from eating franken-food, then so be it. The trouble is, when you share you place with a mad scientist, the wheels can come off of the lunch cart very easily. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be making muffins out of yellowcake and feeding them to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t have the tools for digesting actual food but seldom refuses a handout from his creator, Mitch Macaphee.

There’s a lot of scavenging going on in this mill. It’s a sign of desperation setting in after months of lockdown, economic hardship, and bad weather. We’ve even taken to plugging together fragments of songs in an effort to make new music out of something that was abandoned months, years, even eons ago. (Well … perhaps not eons. Ages, maybe.) Ah, ’tis an impoverished soul indeed that cannot pull even a slap-dash song out of his or her ass, but such are the times we live in. I’ve got idea tapes lying all over the place. Some of them are incoherent, the product of leaving a cassette machine next to my bed so that if a song comes to me in my sleep I can sing it into the condenser mic and drop back off to dreamland without missing a beat. That almost invariably results in a tape full of drowsy mumbling followed by a respectable snore. Still …. even that can be useful in a mashup, dance mix, whatever. Hey … a frankensong is better than no song at all … or maybe not. IT’S ALIVE!

Usual Rubbish

So it is written.

February 5, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, maybe we should use one of those ram horns … you know, just to let people know we’re coming. Or we could wave a herder’s staff about like some kind of crazy goon. THAT would be impressive. So many good ideas.

Yeah, you’ve found your way back to Big Green land. Here in the mostly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home only to our sorry selves and the nasty neighbors upstairs, we’ve been hashing out the particulars of our eventual return to the public stage. Oh, yes … make no mistake about it. We will be back, and we will be bad. Really bad. Possibly unlistenable, partly due to advance age. Older people playing rock and roll is a bit like the Three Stooges in their dotage – somehow slapstick comedy being played out by geezers is something other than funny. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly …. but I will allow that music is a bit more forgiving, as long as we don’t try to jump up and down and climb up into the rafters of a civic center like we’re apes. (We may be apes … but not the climbing kind.)

We’ve been told that our gigs back in the day were the stuff of legend. I can believe it, because legends – like our performances – are entirely unsubstantial. You would search in vain to find video of even a single one of our gigs. (Lord knows I can’t find a single one. Rare as hen’s teeth! In fact, even rarer – I found at least a dozen hen’s teeth while looking for our videos. So it is written.) Still, you’d think even in the absence of digital video cameras in every cell phone there would be a handful of VHS tapes lying about. All we have, for crying out loud, is us on that crazy demo that some dude named Angel shot, and getting THAT away from him involved a whole lot of crying out loud.

I know, man, I know. Just pretend he's not there.

Now, there are some advantages to having an in-house mad scientist, at least when he’s not out on some mad science junket with the rest of his clan. Mitch Macaphee has postulated that we can use some of his hyper-sensitive instruments to reach back into the space-time continuum and pull audio signals out back from decades long dead. It takes a little fine-tuning, of course, but he thinks it’s possible. Apparently it’s a little easier to get images back than it is to retrieve sound, though Mitch says the images tend to get muddled with random items from the present day, like social media memes and the like. He showed us a couple of examples, one of which I’ve included in this post for your edification. Mitch thinks we can even enlist Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to follow the signals back to yesteryear … or at least, yestermonth … and drag some of our lost performances back with him. Just full of ideas, that Mitch. Wish to hell he could make a decent pot of coffee. (It always tastes like he brewed it in his boot.)

Usual Rubbish

Space friends.

January 22, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Yeah, not many people gave Nixon the credit he deserved as a singer of songs. Not President Nixon, of course – he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I mean the Nixon android from Ned Trek. Now THERE’S a chanteuse if ever I heard one.

Oh, hey … what’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. Space, that’s what …. waaaay up. We were just thinking about potential markets for our music. One could be the local Firemen’s Field Days – those rustic events always cry out for entertainers. We might pick up maybe four, even five new listeners. Then there’s the people across the street, up on the third floor. They seem weird enough to like us. We could ask. I suppose if I put Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out on the street with sandwich boards and a bell, we might be able to drive up some interest. Then there’s the overseas market and what we call the over-skies market – outer space. Lots of untapped potential there.

Sure, there are logistical issues, right? I mean … we could send Marvin to Mars with the sandwich boards and bell, and see if anybody on that dusty little world bites. That may be a bit too retail for the extraterrestrial market. We need to do broad-spectrum outreach – the kind of marketing that blankets entire solar systems with positive messaging. Even if we get one one-hundredth of one percent of the punters on, say, Aldebaran three, that’s enough paying customers to keep us in pub cheese for the rest of the year. And it’s only January! This could be like those automated robocalls, always fishing for a live one. We may have to piss off whole civilizations with our annoying spam calls in order to reap a few hundred listeners, but hey …. interplanetary harmony is greatly overrated. When’s the last time Earth had a serious dispute with its nearest celestial neighbors? Not recently, that’s when.

The next question is, do we have the kind of music that the public wants on, say, Aldebaran three? Well, there’s no way to be sure. We can make an educated guess, though. Or we could ask our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee whether he has any ideas. (That could be dangerous, however.) We do have some idea of space alien music tastes just from recent media reports. The Guardian, for instance, did a story on a signal from Proxima Centauri that was detected by radio telescopes. The signal contained a single pure tone at around 982 MHz. That sounds like one of those Cage compositions, right? So maybe we need to go in more for the longhair stuff to get the Centauri crowd rocking. Matt and I are talking about doing some one-note songs …. and I DON’T mean One-Note Samba (which actually has more than one note in it).

That’s where Mitch Macaphee comes in – we need a big-ass antenna to broadcast our one-note tunes into deep space. Get to work on it, Mitch! We’ll work on the songs, you build the radio telescope. From each according to his/her talents.

Usual Rubbish

Holism.

January 15, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first? Spinach, then cake, or vice-versa? Right, then … let’s start with the bad news. Astronomers have discovered a super massive black hole 1.6 billion times more massive than our sun. It subsists on a diet equivalent of 25 suns a year, so it’s the deep space equivalent of the proverbial hungry hungry hippo. And it’s HEADED THIS WAY. Or not. That’s the bad news.

The good news? Well … it’s 13 billion light years away. So we’ve got some time. That said, I’ve already talked to our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, about this terrifying celestial object. That may have been a mistake, because he appears to be obsessing over the thing. He has already proposed some kind of top secret space mission to learn more about J0313-1806 (the code name for the black hole inside a quasar). Mitch is proposing to send a volunteer – namely Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – in a specially designed space craft straight into the dark heart of the object, then bring him back so that he can report on what he saw there. How would he do that, given the irresistible power of the black hole? Well, there’s this rope, you see? And he’s planning on tying it to the marble statue of Grover Cleveland that stands in the nearby town square. (I think he was just spitballing at that point.)

Well, when Marvin heard about this, his lights started blinking frantically. At first I thought it might be Morse code, but it was probably the fight or flight circuitry Mitch built into him using spare parts scavenged from his central HVAC system back in Vienna. I kind of think Marvin doesn’t want to do this mission. Frankly, I can’t blame him. The stories I’ve read about flying into the center of black holes are not very encouraging. I mean, best case – he could be sent into some kind of time-space worm hole that would lead him to a previous era on Earth when dinosaurs ruled …. or perhaps when men with six-shooters ruled, depending on where he hops off. It might also, I don’t know, send him into the future, or drop him into a weird cave-like nether world inhabited by one-eyed freaks and Michael J. Pollard. Or (somewhat more likely) it might crush his atoms into a singularity long before he gets within light years of it. Either way, not a day in the park.

Not sure you want to go there, old chap.

Fortunately for Marvin, Mitch hasn’t even started work on the spacecraft yet. Frankly, I don’t think he has much to worry about. Mitch gets these bugs sometimes, and they usually pass. Like when scientists were receiving radio signals from the Jovian moon Ganymede. Next thing I knew he had a radio telescope in the backyard, vacuuming up every microwave that dared float in his direction. A couple of days later, it was on to the next thing. Still, I’ve locked the rope in a trunk in the basement, just in case. (Sometimes you have to do the right thing, even if it’s not the simplest thing. This is not one of those times.)

Usual Rubbish

Inside Christmas.

January 1, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Wait, what? It’s over? That was fast. How about Michaelmas? Is that over too? Okay, well … I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Was it fun? Did everybody have a good time? No? Ah … okay.

Yeah, I know – 2020 sucked, all the way to the end, right? That appears to be the consensus. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green has been known to keep Christmas in an unusual – perhaps singular – way. Like last year, when we built a big plaster volcano and set it off at midnight. Or three years ago, when we all got really, really high, then ended up trampling all over our neighbor’s chocolate pterodactyl farm (though the next day they denied ever even having one in the first place – strange). This year, on the other hand, was a low-key affair, given the COVID restrictions that even we observe … with the exception of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who eschews masks in favor of an ultraviolet force field device he wears around his neck. (It glows when it’s running – very impressive, particularly after lights out … which in the Hammer mill, comes around sunset.)

Well, at least ONE of us is safe from COVID.

Anywho, you may have noticed that we dropped an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, lately on a kind of hiatus, but still just about kicking. Yes, like everything else about this year, it’s kind of lame, but at least it hearkens back to a simpler time …. such as the year 2017. In any case, here’s what’s in the show:

Ned Trek 35: The Romney Christmas Special / Ned Trek Reunion Special. Originally broadcast on Christmas 2017, this non-episode of Ned Trek is patterned after cast reunion specials they used to run for, I don’t know, the Brady Bunch, or …. some other tripe. Pearl is played by a different annoying actor. The Nixon Android is present, but only the guy inside the Nixon Android suit, not the voice actor who read his lines. (Note: Ned Trek is an audio podcast.) The show includes a bunch of Big Green Christmas songs, including an early mix of Bobby Sweet, remakes of Plastic Head, Christmas To End, and He Does It For Spite, and others thrown together to round out the farce. (Don’t miss the cheesy T.V. pop version of Away in a Manger at the start.)

Older Ned Trek Songs. We included a few numbers from Ned Trek 15: Santorum’s Christmas Planet, as we haven’t spun these in a good long time. They include Christmas Green (a Romney song), Horrible People (a Ned song), Neocon Christmas (a Pearl song), and Make That Christmas Shine (another Romney song, a version of which is posted on our YouTube channel).

Song: Pagan Christmas. Once again this year, we included this track from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. For a variety of reasons, this track gets a lot of play around Christmas. Our main streaming platform has us down for more than 300 plays this month, which for us is a lot. Kind of a minor hit with the pagan / wiccan crowd, particularly over the last ten years. Glad to have them as listeners.

Yep, it was a clip show. I know, man. Like everyone else, we’ll try to do better in 2021. Happy new year, campers!

Usual Rubbish

Nano Christmas.

December 25, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Okay, let’s do your presents. Start with the big one. No, not that one – the bigger one. How can you not see that? It’s almost 3 centimeters across!

Oh, hi. Just caught us in the middle of our annual Christmas ritual – gathering around the abandoned drill press in the Cheney Hammer Mill and taking turns opening our gifts from Satan …. I mean, Santa! (Unfortunate typo, though one that may find a receptive audience among the fans of Pagan Christmas). It’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s turn, actually, but of course the order of the present-opening makes no difference. It’s the thought that counts, right? And well … a certain amount of thought went into this year’s pile of sugar plums. (Just to be clear – there are no actual sugar plums in the offing. That’s just a metaphor.) Not in the sense that they were well thought-out, but due to the fact that … well … we had very little cash to work with.

Times being what they are, we haven’t been playing any gigs – along with the rest of the musician world – due to COVID club closures and the simple fact that we’re too shiftless to find club work in the first place. (Usually the first place we play is an unspeakable dump. Now, the second place … that‘s worth the booking right there.) For that reason, this year we were forced to resort to nano-gifts – gifts that would be totally awesome at normal size, but which are shrunk down to near-microscopic dimensions, just to keep the costs down. For instance, our gift to Marvin is a 3 centimeter long bicycle that Anti-Lincoln lifted off of somebody’s charm bracelet. Now before you start in on me, let me just say that I don’t condone that sort of behavior – Anti-Lincoln acted on his own initiative, as he often does, and well … times being what they are.

Actually, we did see a couple of practical gifts. For instance, Mitch Macaphee gave me a guitar string, full-size – a G string. It was a little hard to wrap, without the envelope it originally came in, but he managed – longest, skinniest Christmas present I ever saw, frankly. I think he pulled it out of one of Matt’s sets, but I didn’t want to say anything – when Mitch is in a good mood, best not upset the apple cart, so to speak … because the apple cart may contain a few hand grenades. Matt, for his part, received an aluminum thimble, which can be used for sewing, or drinking small drinks, or as a bottleneck on a very tiny guitar, which itself would have been a totally appropriate gift for Nano Christmas. After all of the exchanges, we all sat around the fire (i.e. the part of the mill that happens to be on fire today) and had a cup of what passes for eggnog, but what is probably some soy milk that was left out of the fridge for a few too many days. (Hey … a little nutmeg and who could tell the difference?)

However you celebrate, whatever you celebrate, I speak for all of Big Green when I say happy holidays and be well. (And may your Christmas be more macro than nano.

Uncategorized

Ascent of Band.

November 6, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Hmmmm, that’s weird. Is that really us? Are you sure? Sounds a bit more like Captured By Robots. Of course, we might have recorded during that period when we were captured by robots. Could explain a lot.

Yeah, here we are, folks. Big Green has survived yet another national election here in the United States. You’d hardly know it was happening up here in the sheltering hollow of the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York. Just pull down the shades, pull up the drawbridge, stick a cork in the chimney, and poke your fingers in your ears. That’s how we deal with lots of stuff here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – bill collectors, building inspectors, the people who actually own this property, the local constabulary … just pretend you’re not here. Couldn’t be simpler. (Though more than once, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has given away the game by detonating one of his experimental substances just as the coppers are walking away.)

Holing up in the mill gives us a little extra time to roll back through some old tape. (We’ve got wire recordings as well, but nothing to play them on … so we leave them in the wire-house.) Listening to all of this shit is like looking at a chart representing the “ascent” of man. There’s some folk sounding music that could be the chimp at the start of the line. Our primitive rock combos are like Australopithecus, the earliest “certain hominid” in our long line of musical train wrecks. (Though the first band we tried to do was more like Oreopithecus, largely because we subsisted mainly on a diet of Oreos that whole time.) Our Big Green demos from the 1980s are something like Peking Man, in that we include a raft of covers as well as originals, some of which begin to border on Neanderthal territory.

Where this tortured analogy breaks down is my contention that our current state of development is certainly no farther along than Cro Magnon. That’s not a musical comment exactly – it’s just that the traditional depiction of Cro Magnon in ascent of man illustrations looks just like a modern white dude, except with long locks, more facial hair and a spear over his shoulder. (It might just as easily have been a guitar.) Now I don’t know about you, but that dude looks a hell of a lot more like us than the Modern Man guy at the front of the line, who looks like somebody’s 1950s dad, stepping into the shower. (Though I will say that he looks like the only one of those primates that might have his own personal robot assistant.) When I listen to Ned Trek songs, I can totally picture Cro Magnon belting them out, particularly the Nixon numbers.

One day we will do an anthology like collection, I suspect. We’ll need another step or two in evolution to manage it, but be patient.

Usual Rubbish

Virtual signalling.

October 30, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Is this thing on? What? I think you’re muted, man. Yeah …. the little audio symbol has a cross-out graphic superimposed on it. Huh. Funny how that works.

Oh, hi. Yeah, the century is finally catching up with us … or we’re catching up with it. It’s no secret that we of Big Green tend towards the Luddite side of the ledger. When a visitor asks us to turn the heat up a bit in the Cheney Hammer Mill, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. When a neighbor asks us for a cup of sugar or a pint of milk, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. (That’s just something we do when people ask us stuff. Don’t ask me why … or, well, you know what we’ll do.)

So, while as a band we were relatively early to the internet and early adopters of MP3 files (as well as early arrivals in the blogosphere), a lot of this newfangled technology is way over our heads. I would ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to explain it to me, but he is literally made out of old plumbing fixtures and doesn’t know the first thing about interactive stuff. Sure, he interacts with the rest of us, but not in any sophisticated way – mostly just flashing lights and beeps, meted out in various coded combinations. (Fun fact: seven flashes and eleven beeps translates to “George Washington, our first president”.) So when our business associates asked to meet with us, and then told us we needed to do it through Zoom or some other thingy, we were a little confused. I mean, I know what a computer is. Does that get me anywhere?

I guess you could blame our ignorance on an over reliance on expert advisors, like our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. Not every band has a mad science advisor, you know … or a personal robot assistant. After a while, they do become like a crutch. We’re so used to just calling Mitch over every time we have a little problem, like, I don’t know … booking a gig on Aldebaran Five. That presents a logistical issue that we, as artists, are not particularly comfortable with attempting to solve on our own. So we get Mitch to invent some kind of ion propulsion system that could either blow us to kingdom come or propel us to Aldebaran Five. Or strand us on Aldebaran Four, just short of the mark. That’s a possibility, too. Trouble is …. Mitch never uses Zoom, so he can’t help our sorry asses on this one.

Hey … if we manage to conquer conference call technology, I guess we won’t be able to claim that 2020 was a total loss.

Usual Rubbish

String theory.

October 23, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Hmmm, yeah. We’re getting close to the expiration date on THAT little scam. Hard to sustain that 20th anniversary narrative for more than a year, right? And hell, we missed the International House tenth anniversary. And people are beginning to figure out that our Volcano Man recording is not the famous one from the comedy movie. What’s the next grift, Lincoln? And how do we keep it secret? Thank god almighty Marvin isn’t typing this conversation into the blog … right …. Marvin …. ?

Oh, damn! Uh …. we were just working on the … um … lines for a play we’re writing about corrupt musicians. Fictional corrupt musicians. Pretty convincing, huh? Sure, like most writers, we draw on life experience. I mean, your first play is bound to be a veiled autobiography, right? It’s hard to imagine a band getting by on grift alone. It’s simply not remunerative enough, for one thing. Then before you know it you’re squatting in abandoned buildings, like maybe an old mill somewhere in upstate New York. Fighting the cockroaches for crumbs. One of these days we’re going to win one of those fights, after which we will all dine sumptuously. Or at least anti-Lincoln will – his favorite snack is stray crumbs, which, if you think about it, is the antimatter equivalent of chicken fricassee, the posi-matter Lincoln’s favorite snack. It all adds up, doesn’t it?

Okay, well … you’ve got us dead to rights. Whatever we may be as musicians and songwriters, we are utter failures at making money in any legitimate way. The closest thing we’ve come to steady day-labor was probably that two or three weeks when we rented the man-sized tuber out as an ornamental plant for a local bank lobby. (We convinced them he was a ficus. They may know all about money over there, but they’re no ornamental plant experts.) Then there was that brief period when we lent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to the Police Department as a traffic direction automaton, though that was only useful when the town had blackouts. (Marvin’s inventor Mitch Macaphee went so far as to contrive a couple of power failures just to increase demand on his robot creation.)

These revenue streams have dried up, unfortunately. Man-sized tuber and Marvin are practically in open revolt. Who can blame them, right? It’s not like we take it upon ourselves to rent our aging bodies out as manikins, substandard as they might be. We can scrape just about enough money together each month to buy guitar strings. God help us if we ever need bass or piano strings! Once in a while we get a residuals check from interstellar MP3 sales, but it’s not enough to keep the lights on. What’s the solution? Another …. interstellar …. tour? No, that would be madness! After that last disaster a couple of years ago? Forget it! I’m not piling into another one of those slapped together space barges so that I can be piloted by a madman to some remote asteroid venue where there’s nothing to breathe but radioactive methane. That’s final.

Okay, Marvin – stop typing. Now …. when do we ship out for Aldebaran?

Usual Rubbish

Throwback Anyday.

October 2, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Damn, my voice sounds so weird. What the hell year was this? Really? They had microphones back then? Damn!

Oh, hi, out there. Just winding back the years here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house in upstate New York – a drafty decrepit old shelter for the moldering bones of Big Green, the planet’s most obscure indie band. There’s one distinct advantage to squatting in a big barn of a place like this – plenty of storage room, even with the crazy neighbors who moved in upstairs. Lord knows, we have a lot of baggage, collected over decades of uninterrupted failure. Let’s be clear: It’s not easy to do what Big Green has done – completely avoid even so much as accidental notoriety or remuneration for the music we’ve made since the mid 1980s. We’ve never collected the prize, but what we HAVE collected is a mountain of junk that does not include a trophy of any kind. And one man’s junkyard is another man’s archive.

Sometimes we methodically work through the collection of junk like archeologists, logging our findings and preserving artifacts for later examination. Other times, we just send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the storage rooms to grab stuff at random and haul it back in for us to gape at. A few times, we’ve even clipped a web cam to Marvin’s head so that we can tell him which way to turn, what object to grab , and so on. It’s a bit like those coin-op crane machines they used to have in arcades and dime stores, except … well … Marvin complains a lot more than a crane.

One of the strange objects Marvin brought back last week was a cassette tape of us appearing on a Band Spotlight segment on a local college radio station. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless banter …. a little bit like our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, only there appears to be some effort on the part of the presenters to produce something listenable. The interviewer / host was Mike Cusanelli, who later worked at an indie label and who was an early booster of Big Green. I’ll probably excerpt it to play on the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, whenever the hell that will be. (Soonish.) The tape is from 1992, I think, judging by some of the comments. Fuck all, that’s getting to be a long time ago, isnt it? We need a time portal!

Hey, MITCH MACAPHEE! Got a JOB for you!

Official site of the band Big Green