Hammer Mill Days

Well, that was strange. It was just the end of July, and now look at us. Summer evaporated - must have been all that sun. It took a few weeks, but Matt and I finally got around to thinking that we should post an August episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. I'm sure some of you may have thought we were taking an August break, much like our political class and most people of means in Europe do every year about this time, but no soap. Let's get this clear: Big Green is a WORKING band. They'll be no slackers around this abandoned hammer mill, my friends. Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). It's up every morning at 5 a.m. and sweat! Phew, that was exhausting. Anywho, what do we have on the podcast this month? Well, let's have a look-see. First off, we've got a special episode of Ned Trek, entitled Ned Trek XII: The Manassery. Introduced by Lee Majors, as always, this ludicrous extravaganza features a peerless pantheon of figur...

By the time you read this, we may already be at war with Syria. That's how bad this is getting. On Friday, John Kerry laid out the administration's case for intervention. It's basically one of credibility - has a strange sound coming from the mouth of John Kerry, I must say, for a couple of reasons. First: that the Vietnam War, which he fought in and ultimately became a vocal opponent of, was often justified on the same grounds. Second: that we have no credibility in any meaningful sense. Whatever chimera of that was lost with the invasion of Iraq. Obama drew a red line. That is what we are defending. Our action will do nothing to protect civilians in Syria. It will do nothing to tamp down the flames of civil war. Far from it, in fact ... it will pour gasoline on the conflict, quite probably enabling it to spread dramatically beyond that sorry nation's borders. All across the media, there's this tiresome meme about how we have to do something, something to punish ...

Here we are, another week ahead, one behind. I feel like a week sandwich. Not much time to gab. What's new? We recorded another installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN this week, and I realize now that we never decided what the hell recordings we were going to cut into the show. We've got a truckload, of course. I know one that Matt had suggested is going to be included - an old '90s recording we did on Matt's 4-track cassette machine. Lo-fi, yes ... but hey, that's how we roll. We've also got some half-finished recordings we started before turning to Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . This is a project we'll probably pick up on again. Matt in particular has a huge backlog of songs we've never properly recorded, so we started hammering away at those (only natural, living in a hammer mill. Everything looks like a nail, right?) We've got some technical issues to work through ... like a low-cost multitrack deck that is coughing up blood after producin...