Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Capital!


That thing you just said five minutes ago. Say it again. No, not that – the OTHER thing you said. The thing that wasn’t some dumb-ass comment. Whoa… calm down, Hemingway!

Sensitive artists, these rock musicians. Well, let me qualify that. I’m actually referring to the individuals, human and non-human, who hang around with rock musicians. I’m talking about your man-sized tuber, your Marvin (my personal robot assistant), your Mitch Macaphee, your Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, etc. We of Big Green proper (brother Matt, brother-in-law John, and I) have asked these hangers-on for suggestions on where we should take the next interstellar tour. Of course, this is a bit like placing 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters and hoping for Hamlet to pop out of one of the carriages. Still, you do get lucky from time to time, and just today – I swear – one of them made a suggestion that made sense. Actual sense, in a wholly non-ironic way.

What am I babbling about? I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. (Ahem…) Mitch Macaphee spouted something that sounded like a reasonable suggestion – let’s begin the next tour on Betelgeuse, he said. (Not the exact words, but close enough. In fact, he may have been coughing up a stuffed grape leaf.) The logic behind this is obvious. Betelgeuse is enormous – many times the size of our own sun. Why not start big, right? Am I right? Okay… so maybe the logic isn’t so obvious. In any case, we’ve played in the Betelgeuse system before, and as I remember, those shapeless globs of protoplasm we found there listened better than most of our terrestrial audiences. (At least they appeared to; they were all bubbly by the end of the show.)

I’m sure you think we should find better things to do with our time than idly ponder the finer points of our tour itinerary when, in fact, it is totally out of our hands… and into the calloused paws of our promoter, Admiral Gonutz (ret.). Well, if you want to know the sad truth…. we don’t. This is the stuff that music biz is made of, friends. A little bit of playing and a whole lot of waiting around to play, as Keith Richards put it many long years ago. I personally prefer John Lennon’s response when someone asked him how he liked France, and he said something like, it was a car and a plane and a car and a room and a car and a plane. With us, it’s more like a skateboard and a rocket and an airless void and a volcano and an ocean and a steamboat and an ambulance and a mental ward.

Okay, anybody else got suggestions? Big Zamboola, perhaps? Marvin? C’mon, let’s have it, chaps!

Usual Rubbish

Plan it.


Okay, I’ve got the case open. Sixteen screws and what do you get? The bottom of your keyboard falling out, that’s what. What’s next, Mitch? Mitch?? MITCH!!

Great. I’m working on this freaking Roland A-90 of mine – the one with the broken key(s) – and my technical advisor just wanders off. Probably getting a drink somewhere, even as I type this excoriation of him. (Trouble is, he’s even less reliable when he drinks.) Just trying to get our shit together in time for the next interstellar tour, which should begin sometime around Stardate 3425.6 … which, for those of you still on the Gregorian calendar, is approximately August 27th. Give or take. (Probably a bit more take than give.) Not sure why I chose to drop this sucker down a flight of stairs, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Note: On the advice of my analyst, I’ve been treating all of my accidents as intentional lately, just so that I feel more in control of my life. And damn it, it works.)

Where are those pliers? Probably in Mitch’s hip pocket. Walking toolbox, that man (in more ways than one). It will likely surprise few of you that Big Green’s performance infrastructure is in such poor repair. After all, we only book interplanetary and interstellar engagements. That means very few opportunities to travel first class. Trust me, between here and Betelgeuse, it’s coach all the way. And if there happens to be an overstuffed sofa in the freighter we stow away on, it’s couch all the way. We’re talking 247 parsecs of space travel between stops, dodging asteroids all the way. That can be kind of a bumpy ride. Hence the broken gear, the distressed travel cases, the bad hair days. (Actually, I’m having a bad hair life.)

Just look at Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and you’ll see what I mean. He may be the most sophisticated piece of equipment we take on tour with us. (I of course mean technologically sophisticated, not intellectually.) And yet close inspection will reveal an automaton held together with glue and bailing wire – a rolling, talking, gesticulating patch-job of tarnished brass and repurposed circuit boards, wanting for everything from new fasteners to replaced CAT 6 cable to the proper grade of machine oil. One would think the presence of his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, would contribute to a better state of being for old Marvin, but alas, Mitch quickly loses interest in his inventions. Look at that planet killer death ray he built last year. Back then, it was the poison apple of his eye. Now it sits in the courtyard like a motherless puppy. (Maybe some nice neighborhood mad scientist will adopt it…)

Ah, the depredations of life on the road! Well…. when no pliers are available, tweezers will do. Back to it, then.

Usual Rubbish

Keyed off.


Going to have to transpose that one as well. Try it in B-flat. That’s right, B-flat. No, no… not THAT B-flat, the one that’s between A and B. Jesus.

Oh, hi, reader. (I think you’re out there, somewhere). Just reharmonizing a thing or two before Big Green gets underway with their upcoming interstellar tour 2010 (theme not yet announced). Matter of no small necessity, actually, as I just blew out a key on my Roland A-90ex – the A below middle C, as it happens. I think it died of overuse. (We seem to play a lot in A and A minor.) But, frugal as we are, rather than replace the sucker, I’ve been working around it. Hey… we’ve got to keep our tinder dry for this tour, man. Wouldn’t want to be halfway out to Aldebaran without a spare dime in our pockets, now would we? (Would we? Could be a question for Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who is an unaffiliated expert on interstellar economics. I myself cannot be certain. A dime COULD be worth a FORTUNE in space…)

Okay, so this is becoming kind of an annoying workaround, to tell the god’s honest truth. For instance, we might usually play “Johnny’s Gun” in A. That’s a non-starter. Key doesn’t exist, damn it, unless I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) stand by and make the appropriate A-440 tone every time I hit the broken key. Seems less than a practical use of his time, quite frankly. Not that there is a truly appropriate use for his time. He’s a freaking robot, for chrissake. Built to serve man… and I don’t mean that in the sense of some contrived semantic turn of phrase meant to conceal the fact that he, in fact, cooks people for lunch (or perhaps supper). Not a bit of it. Marvin eats tofu and light machine oil, that’s it. Just like the rest of us.

You may wonder why it is that we take such a large complement of hangers-on along with us on these extraterrestrial tours. Well, you know the old saying, there’s safety in numbers, right? Well, that’s got nothing to do with us – we’ve never been particularly good with numbers. What I was about to say was that we need help, and lots of it. We’re not teenagers anymore, and we’ve long since lost track of our unicycles and pogo sticks. If we’re going to face multiple G’s, interplanetary turbulence, meteor showers, unexplained magnetic phenomena, irritable and unreasonable extraterrestrials with death-ray eyeballs, extremes of heat and cold, and so on, we’re bloody well not going to do it alone. That’s the bottom line, friends. We need human (and some non-human) shields and plenty of ’em.

And the first step in our self-defense strategy is learning everything in the right key. What? Oh, damn. sFshzenKlyrn broke a guitar string.  Now we can’t play in E either!