Hammer Mill Days

You hear that? That part there... yep. The honking trombone. Who was puffing on that sucker? Lincoln, was that you? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Mitch? Anybody going to own up to that heinous honking? Oh, hi. You're getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present...) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green's music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn't even know was there when we were tracking them. That's part of the Big Green method, man. It's a bit like found sound; it's basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment. I guess in that respect we owe a great deal more to our old fri...

Consider this an open letter to the Congressional "Super Committee," or gang of twelve - whatever you may wish to call them. (Keep it clean out there!) While you are considering how best to shaft poor, elderly, and working people (employed and unemployed) to bring greater benefits to our nation's rich, I ask - nay, demand - that you consider these items: How we got here. I've heard a lot of people in Congress, as well as various talking heads, putting their spin on the orgy of ignorance that led us to the creation of your Committee, as well as the series of missteps that led us to Standard and Poor's decision to downgrade the nation's debt rating. The factual answer to those questions is simple - the Republican party, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, was driven by its most radical faction (the so-called "tea party") to manipulate the once mundane process of raising the debt ceiling for political gain. S&P's judgment that o...