Well, tubey’s got a few holes in him. Little holes. A dab of plastic wood ought to do the trick. Where’s my spatula?

Greetings from the mythical Cheney Hammer Mill, home of Big Green and our new de-facto d.b.a., HammerMade music. That’s the ad-hoc publishing imprint for our upcoming album, International House, due sometime in September… on somebody’s doorstep (possibly yours). More about that later. Fact is, the man-sized tuber has run into a couple of problems in his day, but getting shot by a family member (extended family member, I should say) is not the kind of thing you expect in his kind of family. After all, few root vegetables have access to fire arms. God only knows what would happen if they did! They might share them with the trees, and THEN what would happen? Vengeance would be theirs! SWEET VENGEANCE!!! HELP US, JEEBUS!

Shoo-whee. My apologies – I do get carried away from time to time. What I was trying to say was, in keeping with the theory of six degrees of separation, tubey’s extended family includes everyone in this band, from Matt, to Johnny White, to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to Mitch Macaphee, and (of course) my sorry ass. That extended family member I mentioned earlier was old Mitch, blowing off some steam with a pellet gun. He wasn’t real careful about where he did his shooting, and tubey caught a few. Nothing serious, you understand, but it did effect tubey’s morale, which had been on a decided upswing since the departure of his cousins from the potato field. Now he’s back down in the dumps… so we’ve decided to come up with a new little job for him to do. Just so he feels needed, wanted, etc.

What kind of job can an oversized sweet potato handle? You may well ask. Actually, we were thinking something along the lines of customer service. Let’s face it – it’s been nine years since our last full length commercial release. We’re a little more than rusty when it comes to glad-handing the potential buyers of our wares, if you know what I mean. (Fact is, we’re actually quite a bit nastier than last time around… the bitterness of broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations… gnaws at you like a wolverine…. rrrrrrrrr…). Yeah, so anyway… we could use someone on the other end of the phone… or the IM chat box. Someone like tubey – he’s got an open, honest face that anyone could trust. And even though he can’t talk so good, he can at least type with his root filaments. (Pretty good trick for someone who’s been out of the ground for more than a few years.)

Once we get the plastic wood into tubey’s various pellet wounds, I’m sure he’ll agree to handle our communications. Then we can pile into whatever kind of oversized tin can Mitch Macaphee devises for us and head off to Aldebaran without a care in the world (aside from the fear of perishing in the icy cold of space…. ooohhh.)

Who said an elevator has to go up? It could go down, even sideways, if the spirit moves it. Just ask any mad scientist.

Well, friends, in case you’re still curious (and I know you’re not), yes, we are still trying to work out a way to get to Aldebaran without trooping on board the same old leaky spacecraft and taking the same old petrifying risks we always take in the name of science… I mean, music. (Arts and sciences, as it were.) This is proving a major pain in the Aldebaran, quite frankly. Don’t know if I’ve ever seen Mitch Macaphee in a fouler mood. He’s really stuck on this project, and like a temperamental post-impressionist painter, he sometimes suffers through every second of the creative process. Why, he’s out in the courtyard right now with an airgun, popping holes in our wooden outbuilding. And in the man-sized tuber, I suspect, since that’s where he sleeps. (We call it the “Root Cellar.”)

His starting point in this strange endeavor has been that very edgy technology known as the “space elevator”. That’s where they throw a cable up into space, hook it to an asteroid or a passing alien star destroyer, and run a jitney between the ground and the celestial anchor. The principle is a bit like tying a cord to a rock and swinging it around your head. Try it at home, sometime… like right now. Do it for a moment or two. While you’re doing it, you’ll notice a strange phenomenon – some strange energy is smashing all of your glassware to tiny bits. That is the power of centrifugal force… a power so, well, powerful that it bowls your personal robot assistant over when he walks into the room. (Actually, it’s probably better if you don’t try this in the kitchen.)

Right, so anyway… experimentation aside, the whole idea is getting us up into the great beyond without time-consuming repairs and costly rocket fuel (now more than $573.00 a gallon… though if John McCain gets Exxon to drill just under where he’s standing, it will be A LOT CHEAPER!!). My sense is that Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and discoverer of the space warp (no, it wasn’t Zephram Cochrane, damn it), is opting for some kind of virtual cable for his space elevator – a laser or particle beam solution that he can just aim in a given direction. That means we need only confine ourselves to destinations that can be reached by following a straight-line trajectory. Piece of cake!

Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I’m not the inventor. I’ve been telling Mitch that Aldebaran is more in a sideways direction than strictly up, but he just gives me funny looks.

No, I haven’t seen your bass drum case. What do I look like, some kind of servant? By the way, where’s my line mixer? What? No… actually, you don’t look like a servant. Why do you ask?

Oh, sorry, friends. Just trying to get ahead of things here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We’ve got that Aldebaran gig moving up on us fast – sure, sure, the date hasn’t been set yet, but we’ve still got to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. What the hell, it’s 65 light years away for chrissake, plus or minus. So if our friends over at Loathsome Prick Records call us tomorrow and say the gig is next Thursday, we’re going to need every minute. (Every single minute. No doubles, just singles.) And that’s just the travel time. We’re also going to need to give our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, a brief interval to invent some means of getting us up there.

What about our various space crafts, you ask? The ones that have carried so far and so faithfully over the course of previous tours? Well…. therein lies a tale. I’ll spare you the painful details… suffice to say that they have fallen into a woeful state of disrepair. I wouldn’t drive either of them to our favorite convenience store, let alone out to Aldebaran. (Of course, to be fair, my favorite convenience store is on the planet Zenon, home of our sit-in guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn.) Guess I’ll have to come up with a different spot to buy my “smokes”, eh? (Don’t smoke… just buy ’em. It’s a shopping addiction. Long story.)

What kind of transportation device is Mitch working on? Well, well… You ever heard of anti-gravity panels? You have? Good… because it has nothing to do with those. No, what Mitch is looking at right now is something called the “space elevator”. From what I understand, that’s where you throw some kind of line up into the great beyond, attach it to… I don’t know, an asteroid or something… then slide upstairs in some kind of pressurized cable car conveyance. Anyway, that’s the theory. What Mitch wants to do is to apply laser or particle beam technology to this principle (as others have attempted to do), so that we can eliminate the step of securing the other end of this mythical cable. Because after all – if we can get up there to anchor the thing… why the hell do we need the “thing” in the first place? (Logic…. an irresistible force, to be sure. )

Anyway, that’s where we’re at. And thanks to the efforts of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and our erstwhile law firm, Lincoln, Anti-Lincoln, Tuber, and Zamboola (still no jingle), we’ve gotten Loathsome Prick’s logo off of our goddamned album, in favor of our own “HammerMade” imprint. Progress, Mr. Greer.