No coins? Hmmm… check my other pants. I was sure I had some silver in there. Valuable, precious silver. No? Oh well. There’s always the jar on my nightstand. What do you mean you knocked it over?!

Yes, yes, my friends – it’s just as it sounds. Broke again, fighting the mice for scraps of cheese. Matt just had a smack-down with a praying mantis that was making off with a fragment of stale halvah. (Did Matt prevail? Let us pray.) I’ve asked Big Green’s mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to put his considerable skills to good effect and invent us some money (or maybe a pizza), but he can’t be bothered with such trifles…. not when he’s preoccupied with his unified field theory. (Not going so well, I perceive.) And now we’re rifling through drawers (not with real rifles, you understand), rummaging through garments, and shaking the hell out of every cup and jar in the joint looking for loose change with which to keep our lights on for another week. What? What do you mean you hocked the lights? You moron!

Sorry for the unpleasantness… I hope you didn’t find it too unpleasant. Sometimes it’s hard to impress upon Marvin (my personal robot assistant) just how much of a problem lack of money can be for us humans. Marvin, of course, has no need of crass commodities such as food, water, heat, clothing, etc. I’m certain he thinks we’re just obsessive and addicted to our well-entrenched consumer behaviors. Of course, he’s partly true – our fondness for Zenite snuff has proven a little difficult to shake. (I blame sFshzenKlyrn, who is always arriving from the Small Magellanic Cloud with a fresh poke.) But that exception aside, we’re really just talking about basic necessities here. Marvin – whose batteries are self-regenerating, drawing energy from gravity and the relative proximity of matzoh bakeries – fails to grasp our predicament. I swear, I thought I heard him grumbling as he fished around in the bottom of a storage crate, looking for stray quarters. (Sometimes the metallic squeaks his joints make sound like a gruff voice saying, “loser, loser“. Or maybe it’s me.)

The Lincolns have been of some assistance in this regard. As you know, their shared visage appears on certain denominations of U.S. currency. Now, we have quite enough of the coin that bears their likeness – virtually worthless, as you know. But the bill still has some value, and the fact that we have not one but two Great Emancipators in our entourage means that both can be put into service attracting $5 bills. Actually, John had the best idea – set up booths on opposite sides of town offering patrons the opportunity to have their portrait taken with Honest (or Dishonest, depending on which one you get) Abe for… well, for $5. So in a way, it’s like trading one portrait of Lincoln for another, but hey… it’s the best idea we’ve got, okay? And aside from the occasional meltdown by Anti-Lincoln (who rails against the very notion of being put to work like a beast of burden), it might actually help us make back all that credit default swap cash Loathsome Prick Records lost on our behalf.

Wasn’t that thoughtful of them? Anyway, back to the scavenger hunt. Seems like I kept a shitload of dimes around here somewhere.

Casting Pod. Yours truly (Joe) appears on the next (I believe) installment of the Bloodthirsty Vegetarians podcast, now in its fifth mad year. Check it out at http://www.bloodyveg.com/ and let me know if I sound stupid (’cause I’m hoping so).

Okay, it goes like this. Boom…. crack…. boom-boom crack…. Boom…. crack…. boom-boom… crack… crack! Got that? What…. you need to hear it again? What the hell am I, a beat box?

Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be band leaders! Not that this band has any leaders, per se – we kind of pass the talking stick around, and who ever happens to be holding it has the floor. (In truth, we don’t really have a stick here in Big Green. We just take turns in non-stick holding ways.) However you cut it, it’s hard to make music in this abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill environment, particularly with patience running thin in the midst of such a serious economic downturn. Oh yes, my friends – it affects us, as well. Big Green is not immune, no sir. We put our pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else. Except the man-sized tuber, who doesn’t have legs. Or Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t wear pants. (He’s made of metal, you see.) Or sFshzenKlyrn, who is a transcendental being of no fixed mass, location, or temporal displacement, and therefore does not need pants, not in the least. So that thing I said earlier about pants… well… just forget it.

Anyway… we recently discovered, to our great dismay, that the corporate label that claims our allegiance at present has fallen upon some hard financial times. Yes, Loathsome Prick, who currently handles our intergalactic CD sales, ran into a little trouble with a small business unit they established some years back down here on terra firma. It’s called LP Financial Products and it specializes in something called, um…. let’s see…. credit…. credit default swaps. Yeah, that’s it. Whatever the hell they are. Anyhow, they ended up owing a whole lot of cash to somebody, and I’m not quite sure how or why. Interesting side note: I went over to their office the other day and saw our A&R rep leaving by the freight elevator with a large suitcase. Must have been in a hurry – he apparently closed the suitcase on some $100 bills he was packing. (Damned untidy, I thought. Curious thing.)

Here’s the rub – I’m told that most of what we’ve earned through intergalactic CD sales (an emerging market, to be sure) was invested for us by Loathsome Prick in what they called a “growth fund”. Fortunately, financial products division of LP guaranteed those investments with these here credit default swap thingies. Unfortunately, when those investments went bad (I believe they sunk most of it into a doomed asteroid – seemed like a good bet at the time) and LP Financial Products was asked to pay up, they… well… defaulted. Now they’ve applied for an AIG style government bailout. My guess is that, with a name like Loathsome Prick, they should have no worries. In the meantime, our reps have apparently decided to go on a hastily planned vacation to …. well, they didn’t say where, exactly. All I know is that they must have been running a little late. (Never seen a car take a turn on one wheel before….)

Anywho, our personal financial advisor – Geet O’Reilly – now tells us that they’re having some financial trouble. And that all of our earnings from the last three tours are down the toilet. Easy come… easy go, right?

More where that came from – For those of you who enjoyed our listener-penned reviews last week, you can read more at our little outpost on garageband.com – Our page is at http://www.garageband.com/artist/big_green/songs. Check it out. Some are even kind of… I don’t know… positive.

Turn it down a little more. Little more. Okay. Good. Can’t hear that at all. Yeah, that’s right – nothing. Much better. And… hey! Don’t throw things at me!

Sensitive artists, these cohorts of ours. Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant)…. please. He’s been playing the pipe organ on our latest recordings, and, well… a little goes a long way, let’s put it that way. Ouch! Stop chucking stuff, man! Very sensitive. We’ve been asking him to go a little easy on the organ, and he treats that like an insult. (It does sound vaguely obscene, come to think of it.) So it looks like our patented arranging method of starting with every imaginable instrument and subtracting them one by one… that’s not working so good. Thus far, we’ve only managed to eject the glockenspiel, the tin drum, the specially-tuned half-sticks of dynamite, the kazoo, and hell, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we get down to what’s typically needed for a Big Green album. Even sFshzenKlyrn is losing patience with these sessions, and he has a life-span (or half-life) of 57 million Earth years.

We’ll get it done, never fear. In the mean time, how are our current releases doing? Well, let’s check in on a few listener responses to our last single, “High Horse“. Here’s one from a guy who calls himself “UncleOutrage”:

I Hate To Be The Villian, But…..

I can’t quite tell if this song is supposed to be funny or not, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t like it in either case. Honestly much of it has to do with the genre, I’m really not a fan of honky-tonk country music in the least. But even as song writing goes, this was VERY repetitive and I might go as far to say annoying. I’m REALLY sorry, I hate to be negative as far as judging someone else’s work, but I just have to be honest. There was nothing I liked in this track at all.

 

Well, “Uncle” – glad you enjoyed that. If you want to hear it again (and again and again), just drop by our Web site at www.big-green.net/highhorse. There’s even a ludicrous video. Go wild, son!

Here’s a Garageband review from someone who calls him/herself “SkelingtonBoot”:

ugh

I’m sorry this is just not for me. I don’t think this is indie rock, this is one of those red warning label genres like Country Rock or Comedy. Singer has a sturdy voice and given a willing spirit I reckon he could get you singing along to your granny’s armpits and the melody – very country – is very compelling in a very cheesy way. The lyrics are … ? I can’t talk about the lyrics. Overall the song sounds very proficiently performed and I do believe that humour belongs in music … but, that’s not a carte blanche!

 

Gosh, “Skelington”, not sure where to begin! Thanks for the kudos on the “willing spirit”, though you should know we eliminated all the “granny’s armpit” sounds kind of early on in the production process. We’ll definitely take your “humour… not a carte blanche” comment to heart, though. From now on, we’ll start editing ourselves more judiciously. We’re going to get all serious, now. Totally. No, seriously.

Well, that’s probably enough fun for this week, kids. We’ve got to interrupt the man-sized tuber’s monologue before people start getting too happy in the studio. Music is a serious business, you know. No time for all this hee-hee and yuk-yuk.