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.
Carolina? Virginia? Florida? Astounding. Pretty solid victory for a Democrat, I must say. (It bears remembering that Bill Clinton never broke 50% of the popular vote.) I will admit to a certain divided sentiment going into this election. On the one hand, it felt inevitable that Obama would win – not so much because of the polling, but because he just seemed like the person for this moment. On the other, I just found it hard to believe that this country would elect an African American guy named Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States. Up until the last couple of years, I’d always assumed that the first black president – if ever there was to be one at all – would be a Republican/conservative hawkish type, like Colin Powell…. you know, offset the “otherness” with a healthy dose of jingoistic cultural hegemony. But hey, w.t.f., so much for that. I guess it’s true until it’s not, like sitting Vice Presidents never win. Now … there’s going to be a black liberal Democrat in the White House this January.
talk to me about the Illinois Senator was a neighbor, a retired school teacher named Lynn Beaton. He lent me Obama’s most recent book, actually, which I have yet to read (and yet to return). Sadly Lynn died of a heart attack last year, but since then it has almost seemed as though he were observing the race from afar, coaxing it along. Every time I thought Obama really didn’t stand a chance, he would pull it out somehow, and I’d think about Lynn. When my wife Karen and I went into the voting booth this past Tuesday, we both thought of him as we pulled that lever. How he must be smiling right now… and I don’t mean at all that stuff about Palin’s wardrobe (though he’d probably get a kick out of that, too). For all it means to so many people, I’ll always think of this election as Lynn’s. He was out ahead of most of them.
sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe… that’s hot and a half!) Damn right.
nothing to write Moscow about. It’s cramped, leaky, and can’t get out of its own way, what with that four-cylinder ion drive Mitch cobbed together and wired up to Marvin’s internal power source (again, Marvin…. sorry… sorry…). Fact of the matter is, we had to fly through a hastily-contrived space/time warp in order to get there in less than a century or two. Luckily, our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has one or two tricks up his sleeve with respect to the space/time continuum. In as much as he is an etheric being of no fixed temporal location (or hairstyle), he can play with time like it’s a wad of Silly Putty, stretching it, flattening it, pressing it onto the Sunday comics and making Dagwood Bumsted look like he weighs 3,000 pounds. (Lots of laughs.) So, luckily for us, sFshzenKlyrn has served as our interstellar fixer, once again. (Helps to have friends in high places. Very high places.)
off of our new album,