Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

Betel-mania.

Frankly, sFshzenKlyrn, I never knew there was any such thing as reverse gravity. Had I known that, I might not have agreed to play this gig. (Said the man floating helplessly in space.)

Big GreenOh, yeah – someone’s reading this. Hi, Earth friends. Another dispatch from the road with news of Big Green‘s 2014 Interstellar Tour in support of our album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. I have to pause here to put in a brief plug for our tour sponsors, SPAPOOP petroleum snacks, a division of Koch Industries. SPAPOOP: So good, you’ll forget it’s not edible! Get some today! No, really … today! Right now!

Okay, in all honesty, we had to do the promo to ensure that we have enough fuel to get to our next engagement. That’s the way it works out here on the interstellar club circuit (particularly with these plain clothes gigs). Most of the time, there’s no cover or drink minimum – people just pass the space helmet around. Sometimes it comes back full of SPAPOOP. It’s for that reason our tour advisers at Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm procured the endorsement deal from the Kock Brothers.

Pity, too. We hit it pretty hard on Betelgeuse; if we were paid by the decibel, we would have done pretty well even without the helmet proceeds. Our audience particularly appreciated “Santiny”, “Aw, Shoot,” and “Flying Up Ricky”, waving their long, sucker-tipped fingers in the air in time with the music, emitting sparks from their sinewy antennae. sFshzenKlyrn tells us that’s applause, but it’s hard to be sure. All in all, a good night.

Interstellar Tour graphicOr it would have been, but for the fact that the gravity reversed itself halfway through the evening. I guess that happens all the time on Betelgeuse Five. (That would explain the suction cups on their hands and feet, right? Isn’t nature wonderful!) Still, who knew … and before I could say HAAALLP! I was flying off into the exosphere, a missile without a cause, along with my hapless bandmates.

Sure, that might have been it, friends, except that sFshzenKlyrn is tremendously at home in deep space. He towed us back to the relative safety of our rental craft, using his personal gravitational fields. Good fellow to have around.

Next week: Rigel.

Usual Rubbish

Floating room only.

Hand me that bottle, will you, Marvin? That’s right – the one with the brownish-green liquid in it. I think it’s spiked with marzipan or something. That’s about as hard as it gets on this miserable pimple of a planet. Jesus Christmas.

Oh, hi, friend of Big Green. Well, here we are on Aldebaran Five, soaking up the radiation, drinking gloog, making slemoth, and generally doing what living beings do on Aldebaran Five, at least when they’re in between performances. As you might have surmised from our previous posts, we were hideously late for the one-week run we had booked on A-5, so we had to shuffle things around a bit. Actually, we canceled a gig on Sirius (the star system, not the satellite radio network). Can’t think it bothers them much. They never take anything …. serious …. lee. My apologies.

Anyway, how is it going here on A-5? Not too shabby. Our current album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick has sold relatively well here. Fact is, we would be living on easy street if there were some way to convert Aldebaranian thought waves into hard currency. (That’s how they exchange goods and services around here – just thinking up some negotiable value in their oddly misshapen heads.) Still, they know the songs, they sing the lyrics, they dance like zombies … they even wear Texas-style ten-gallon hats on their, well, oddly misshapen heads. And they utter something that sounds a bit like “yee-ha” when we play “I’m Saving Myself for America”. Creepy, yes, but touching also.

So we hit it pretty hard last night, with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, taking all the solos. Lucky to have him back, though he’s a bit louder than I remember … either that or my hearing has backed off a few notches since 2007. He must have studied Chet Atkins back on Zenon, between hits of acid, judging by the way he’s playing. I guess you could say it was fun for the whole family. We had them floating upside-down in mid-air, which is actually kind of normal here – the gravity’s a little weak.

Next stop: Betelgeuse.

Holiday hack job. Big Green threw together a video to support one of our podcast numbers, a little holiday sketch called “Make that Christmas Shine,” sung by Captain Romney of the Starship Free Enterprise. Check it out:

Usual Rubbish

Slingshot.

That looks like Rigel over there. And Arcturus. And Canopus. No, wait. That’s Canoli, a most unusual deep space object. Instead of a molten nickel core, it’s filled with almond paste. And that dusting of what looks like dry ice? Powdered sugar.

Big GreenOh, hi. Just getting our bearings here out in deepest, darkest space. Kind of hard to do without a map – yes, I’m looking at you, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who left the map case under his workbench back home. Right, so … chartless, clueless, and nearly devoid of rocket propellant, Big Green is meandering its way to the first stop on our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which is charting in the Crab Nebula this month, I hear. (Yes, I read the trades.)

How did we get into this pickle, this sitch, this hot water, this plate of spinach? Well … it all started when we hitched a ride on the charred remnants of the comet ISON as it made its way out of the solar system. It’s kind of like driving in the wake of a big semi on the Thruway to save gas – doesn’t work real well, but you can pretend that you’re doing something useful. Anyway, we got a grappling hook into ISON as it passed and it yanked us into motion, headed for the hairy edge of all we know and hold dear.

Not THAT kind of slingshot!That was the good part. The bad part was when the cable snapped in the vicinity of Jupiter, a hostile world that gave Cowboy Scat a right panning (like I said, I read the freaking trades!). We were caught in the gas giant’s gravitational pull, helpless but for the fading memory of Star Trek plot devices from fifty years ago. Or was it Lost in Space? Well, whatever the source, we used the “slingshot effect”, accelerating toward the planet and using its gravity to hurl us straight out the other side of the solar system.

Gripping drama indeed. Except now we’re, well, lost, and bobbing along practically at random. So if you’ve got friends on Aldebaran, just tell them we may be a little late for the gig next Wednesday.