How the hell do I know how they found you? It was probably a mistake leaving your forwarding address. We were only going to be gone a month or two, damnit. Ah, well.

Oh, hi, friends. No, we’re not being pursued by bill collectors (at least, not out here in the constellation of Orion). I’m just fielding questions from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who apparently received a piece of financial spam from some company that identifies itself as “Direct Capital”, to wit:

Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:21 AM

Subject: Call Me – Line of Credit

Hi Marvin,

I can help you get set up with a Line of Credit (secured or unsecured) for On Time Van Trans In if you have any purchases you need to make.

It’s pretty quick and easy. Give me a call at (877) 322-9235 and I can get you started.

Kenneth

__________________________

Kenneth Karpel

Finance Manager

Yeah, I know. It’s got spam written all over it, right? Well, try telling that to Marvin. He almost never gets any email. So when this sucker came sailing into his inbox, he nearly blew a circuit board. This could be a problem out here in Orion, where electronics stores are few and far between. Why, just last night I saw our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, re-wrapping and soldering a damaged motherboard under the glow of a battery-operated flashlight. (As I mentioned before, our converted Soyuz spacecraft offers few comforts… like intermittent air supply, for instance…)

So anyway…. after our triumphant, enthusiastic reception on Rigel, we decided to point our second-hand vessel towards richer pastures on Sirius, the dog star. Our perennial sit-in guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn, has chosen to go on ahead of us rather than tag alongside the Soyuz, and frankly I can’t blame him. For one thing, he can fly circles around us, and that’s without a space ship. For another thing, with Mitch in the driver’s seat, it’s positively hazardous. (Mitch has gotten kind of erratic as a driver. I think it’s the medications he’s taking. More on that later.) I don’t want you to think that we’re not taking this seriously – god, no! In fact, we have been offered a substitute pilot for the next leg of our International House promotional tour. As it happens, his name is Urich Von Braun, and I have it on the highest authority that he is a CRACK pilot. He’s a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, for one thing…. and that’s good enough for me. Urich’s got rocketry in his blood, goddamnit. In fact, he’s got a lot of things in his blood… which is why his license got suspended for a brief time. But that was another time and another era. That’s all I’m going to say about it now. If you want to find out more, ask your mother. (Jesus, is that the time?)

So… Sirius ahead, Rigel far behind. Urich Von Braun at the wheel. Sounds like an interstellar tour.

What the hell is this, Mitch? How could we be lost again? We’re using the freaking map. We’re following all the dotted lines. Is that not Rigel? It’s not? Mother of pearl….

Oh, yeah… hi, friends. Having another little problem here with the navigation. Nothing new. We were making the passage from Aldebaran to Orion and Mitch is getting a little confused on which star is which. I keep telling him, you need to follow the arrow back from Mintaka, not forward to Sirius! (I’m like, be serious, and he’s like, Sirius? Are you saying I’m a star? And I’m like…) So, of course, we overshoot Orion’s belt by about a light-year, so we have to double back. Then Mitch gets Betelgeuse confused with Rigel, like he’s looking at the whole freaking constellation upside-down. (Actually, the map was upside-down, so it wasn’t entirely his fault.) And we’re hunting in vain for the third companion (Rigel III) when, of course, there weren’t any orbiting Betelgeuse. (I told him the freaking star was too red, but did he believe me? Huh?)

See, the problem is, our first gig was on that third Rigel companion (also known as “planet” in common parlance). We were running late, owing to our antiquated second-hand transportation, and the Betelgeuse diversion (hmmm… sounds like a blockbuster film starring, I don’t know, Doug Woodstock) cost us precious hours of bobbing pointlessly in space, listening to tuneless whistling emanating from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has taken to heart the acknowledgement we afforded him in the liner notes of our new album, International House, as recognition for the minor role he played in its creation. (Woof… what a sentence!) It seems Marvin fancies himself a jazz whistler now, on the order of Maine’s legendary Brad Terry, be-bop whistler and clarinetist (not in that order)… except that Marvin’s whistle sounds more like quitting time at the paper mill. (As I heard Taj Mahal say once in response to audience participation, “Strong… but wrong.”)

Okay, so we spent a couple of days cooped up with the interstellar version of Captain “Wrongway” Peachfuzz and a tone-deaf robot with delusions of grandeur. Kind of a morale-killer, frankly. So by the time we spotted the bleak horizon of Rigel III, we weren’t in much of a mood for performing. Still – we’re troopers, okay? Never let it be said that Big Green isn’t professional enough to overcome a little hardship and put on a good show. (Never let it be said… even if it IS true.) Lord, no… we slammed that crowd with rousing versions of cuts from the new album, as well as old favorites from 2000 Years To Christmas, such as Holiday, Pagan Christmas, and Merry Christmas, Tarzan. Damnedest thing – these folks have heard this stuff! They must get PaganFM! out here! Then we played singing saw solo, blew off some M80s, and set the atmosphere on fire. What fun.

Right, well… if we had done that last bit, we certainly wouldn’t be invited back. Even the M80s would get us in trouble on Rigel III. But it hardly matters – so long as Mitch is driving, we’ll never find our way back there anyway.

Good evening, Aldebaran! How is everybody out there? Thanks for coming out tonight! We love you, man… we love you!

Hi, folks. Thought I’d offer you a transcript of our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium – bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet – it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the “brown acid”? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock pedestal during the trip over, he had occasion to watch Woodstock: The Movie.

So what’s next – a cameo by Wavy Gravy? Not on this tour. No, sir… this was more like one of those primitive mid-sixties shows. Our speaker stacks are relatively primitive, our amps antiquated, my piano in excess of a dozen years old (i.e. relatively new). Don’t have to tell you that there was a bit of a buzz in the air that night, and I don’t mean the buzz of excitement. I’m talking bad patch cables, mostly. Still, it was fun for some of us, and the many thousands of blobs of extraterrestrial goo were nodding their pseudopods in time with “Enter the Mind” (a cut off of our new album, International House). Quite an amazing site to behold, actually. Stunning, I’d say. Or perhaps the word is, well… nauseating. Though our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, has been capturing images of this phenomenon, hoping to use it in one of his new graphic user interfaces.

Well, that was then, this is now. And right now, we’re cruising away from Aldebaran at 30% of light speed in our modified Soyuz spacecraft. Destination? Well, that’s a bit up in the air. Our corporate uber-label, Loathsome Prick Records, originally wanted to send us out to Orion’s belt to do a string of gigs. Then sometime last week they changed their minds and decided that we should head over to the Pleiades cluster (the seven sisters). Of course, our initial reaction was, “What, all seven?” There was some grumbling over the phone, some muffled oaths, some veiled threats, and ultimately we agreed just to do three of the seven. Once in transit to that cluster, however, we received word from the overlords at LP that they wanted us to divert back to Orion again. Apparently there’s a bidding war going on for our presence. (Can you say “payola”?)

I can certainly say payola. I just can’t pay payola. So I guess that means we go where they tell us to, even if that turns out to be somewhere where the sun don’t shine. And as you know, the sun don’t shine in space… except near the sun.