Interstellar Tour Log: April 10, 2014
On the surface of Dwarf Planet 2012 VP.
That’s it. I am officially declaring our Interstellar Tour over and done with. I’m sick of these stupid slug lines reminding people where the hell we are all the time. Also, we’ve simply run out of places to play here on Dwarf Planet 2012 VP. That’s likely because, aside from a few street-corner fried plantain vendors, there is virtually no commerce here. This planetoid is devoid of performance venues. We actually set up and jammed in a nearby crater just on the off chance that random extraterrestrials would happen upon us. Nothing. Not a sausage. This is just like back home.
Ah, home. The sainted abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s leaky roof, its moldy basement, its crumbling walls, its heaps of abandoned hammer parts and random knobs of discarded pig iron that I keep tripping over even after having squatted there for more than a decade. I miss that dump, and I’m not alone in that sentiment. Hell, even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) looked a little misty yesterday as he scrolled through photos of the mill on his laptop. Lincoln seems like a man without a rostrum. The mansized tuber, well … he’s a plant. Don’t expect a lot of overt sentiment out of him.
So, yeah, after months in space, we are ready to take the long trip home, back from the Ort Cloud, back from hastily named space rocks that are hard to classify. Before we go, though, we want to leave a stake in the ground here on Dwarf Planet 2012 VP. My thought is, well, let’s name the sucker after ourselves. Let’s claim it for Big Green, well and truly. We could be subtle about it and just shift the name to 2012 BG. Or we could go all-out and call it Big Greenland (though I was reserving that for a future theme park). We’ve got friends at NASA … I’m guessing this is do-able. (And yes, we have to ask for permission, since we need telemetric data from the space agency to find our way back to the mill.)
Homeward bound, chaps!
Well, here we are, inching closer to the release date of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, Big Green’s third and perhaps silliest album ever. Fully 21 tracks of pure, unadulterated goofiness, each one performed by what is nominally a completely different combo. We’ve got the master all set. We’ve designed the packaging for our limited run of CD-Rs and the graphics for our digital distributors. Now all we have to do is, well, complete the arcane process of acquiring ISRC codes for all of the tracks, manufacturing the discs, doing a run of wax cylinders for those listeners still enamored of that format, and so on.
Some have told us that we should have called the label Hammermaid, like Milkmaid condensed milk. We don’t listen to some people, particularly if they are Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a particular liking for condensed milk products because they remind him of motor oil. In any case, we don’t take a lot of pains over trifles like imprints and logos, because in all honesty, that’s not what we’re about. We are the original discorporate rock band. We say no to corporate hegemony. We’re off the grid, man. (Aside from all that stuff involving money, paying for things, etc.)