Hammer Mill Days

That one? Sure, why not? It's been a few weeks. And I guess you could say that 25 years is a few weeks ... because, well ... it is. For whatever reason this week, I am reminded of one of Matt's songs from yesteryear, a number called "Don't Give Up The Ship". It's probably because the Cheney Hammer Mill is leaking like a sieve, but that's nothing new. Or maybe it's because we've finished mixing the podcast songs (all eight of them!) and I'm starting to trawl through our old tapes for lack of anything better to do. Just call me Riley. The guy with the life. As I've said here before, we've got a million of 'em (songs, that is), but unlike the late Prince, they are not all exquisitely recorded and salted away in a vault. No, friends ... they are poorly recorded on 4-track cassette, mostly, and chucked into the cramped, musty vault called my skull. "Don't Give Up The Ship" is a Quixotic riff centered on Perry's flag...

The news of this week, campaign-wise, has been the minor uprising at the Nevada Democratic party convention. The reason for this, I'm sure, is that this is the story the Clinton campaign and its supporters wanted us to be talking about. For months they have been trying to frame Bernie Sanders and his supporters as aggressive, undisciplined, even violent political loose cannons. The protest in Nevada, as it was covered on television, appeared to conform to that narrative, helped along by the strategic release of some crank calls that came in to the voicemail of a party official. So, on a week when Sanders virtually tied Clinton in Kentucky and beat her by ten points in Oregon, the take-away will be that he can't and won't control his people. This smells a lot like rat-fucking to me. The Clinton operation is pretty good at it, especially when they have the DNC and the entire party establishment in their corner. Then there's the David Brock effort, using tactics that he ...

My Martin D-1 needs strings again. So what's new? I always let stringed instruments go to seed - it's how I roll. That's why true guitarists hate me. (Dude, you KNOW it's true.) I just don't play the fucker enough, that's my problem. But then I guess you could say my problem is that I don't do ANYTHING enough, so it's just part of a larger problem. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has volunteered to act as my guitar technician. Only trouble is, his inventor - the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee - gave him prehensile claws for hands, so it's kind of a challenge to restring a guitar in his little tin world. Kind of outside his wheel house. (That's not a metaphor. He actually does have a wheel house.) It's when the sun starts shining and the leaves unfurl in this part of the country that the mind turns more to making music. Maybe that's someone else's music, sure, but music nevertheless. You can hear it wafting out of the abandoned...

I don't think it would be a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I am substantially to the left of Bernie Sanders on a whole range of issues. That said, I am overjoyed that he has done as well as he has in the contest for the Democratic nomination. It is unprecedented in my lifetime that such a progressive voice could win a string of primaries and caucuses, and that bodes well for the next generation of voters (if they make it a habit to get to the polls). What I have to say about the "Bernie or bust" tendency, however, differs from what a lot of people on the hard left are saying these days. Working to defeat Trump by, among other things, supporting Clinton if she's nominated is simply not that hard a pill to swallow for me - a person for whom a vote for Bernie was a kind of compromise. I want to take a moment to look at some of the main contentions I have heard from Bernie or Busters, none of which (spoiler alert!) I feel has any real merit. Contention #1...

Hey, you know what? I saw a car pass in front of the mill today, just a few minutes ago. Amazing, right? Wait a minute ... there goes another one! Yeah, I guess you can tell that this town is dying. No doubt about it ... since the old Cheney Hammer Mill shut down, there's no reasonable way of making a living around here. Some stragglers work at the corner CVS, a handful more at the non-name convenience market across the street. It's just plain dead. Damn good thing we don't perform any more, or we'd be starving to death for lack of paying gigs. Sure ... we're starving, but it's for an entirely different reason: inertia! You know what they say, though. (That's all I've got on that, because, after all, you know what they say, so I don't have to tell you.) There are a lot of things you can do while standing still - one of them is mixing. That's what we're doing ... or that's what I'm doing, anyway - rhythm tracks, mixes, blah blah b...

It seems like just yesterday we were staring at a line of 20 or more lunatics vying for the Republican nomination. And now, a few short months later, it's all over bar the shouting. And there will be shouting, make no mistake. Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, as per Reince Priebus, and his two last competitors, "lyin'" Ted Cruz and "non-descript" John Kasich have dropped out of the race. Poor Kasich ... he never did well enough even to get a decent Trump nickname. That's got to hurt. Kidding aside, we have a major problem - namely that one of the two people that can possibly become president of the United States is now Donald Trump. With regard to governing policy, foreign or domestic, this man is a monumental ignoramus and a congenital liar. Worse, he engages in these incendiary rants that stoke the flames of hatred and bigotry, recalling a violent past that he often invokes when urging his flock towards toughness. ...

Bloody hell ... my mirror cracked. No, I didn't smash it with a hammer ... I just looked into it, trying to freaking shave. Jesus, I'm old. Hey .. can I use your mirror? Yeah, we're cracking mirrors around here, no doubt about it. Looking back on about 30 years of making music under the same moniker, and it's a little stupefying, frankly. True fact: Big Green was founded in 1986 and it's still kind of rolling, give or take a few members. But regardless of the lineup, we still have the same DNA. The clueless core has remained intact ... it hasn't gone sub-critical yet. That's 'cause we're blood, man. Blood brothers, inseparable. (Particularly so, since Matt does most of the work.) As we continue working on the next raft of songs, I've been taking a few minutes here and there to listen to our previous releases, for context if nothing else. Actually, part of it is taking note of stuff that I hate so that I can resolve not to make the same bonehe...