Tag Archives: Matt

Usual Rubbish

Down for the count.

Okay, I think we have this thing settled. Everyone in agreement? No? Good. We value diversity of perspective here at Big Green. Especially when LIVES HANG IN THE BALANCE….

Big GreenSorry, friends. I hate to raise my voice, but sometimes you just have to. With sketchy-looking promoters breathing down our necks (and judging by the aroma, they had limburger hoagies for lunch), we are still hashing out the details of our means of transport on our rapidly approaching interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our latest album. We have, in fact, identified a rent-a-wreck spacecraft that is within our budget. It’s being offered by a subsidiary of our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., operating on the planet Neptune. Fortunately, they deliver. (But only as far as the moon. I guess that extra 239,000 miles is a bridge too far for these goons.)

Okay, my thought was this. We program Marvin (my personal assistant) with the ability to fly the craft from the moon back to Earth. Then we, well, get him to the moon somehow. Matt suggested one of those really big rubber bands, stretched between the legs of the St. Louis Arch – just aim and shoot! Sure, that sounds good, dear brother, but how the hell are we going to get to St. Lookin' good, Marvin. Louis? We can’t even get to the moon, for chrissake. Then there’s always the option of telemetry – just flying the ship here by remote control. But with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a hammock in Madagascar for the fourth consecutive month, we haven’t the means of contriving such a device.

Damn … if that hammock were only here instead of Madagascar, we could maybe use that instead of the rubber band. Hmmmmm…

Anyhow, I saw a picture of the ship, and it looks pretty tight. Kind of like a 1979 Oldsmobile diesel station wagon, only a little less buff. (Matt doesn’t see what I’m seeing. He thinks it’s a death trap. I see only goodness and niceness.) If I can share it with you, damn it, I will.

Well … while we’re waiting for the countdown to begin, we’ve got a podcast to finish. So, down to the basement, man the mics! Stop making sense!

Usual Rubbish

Tour log: quatro livre. (Say what?)

Here’s the fourth installment of our vaunted tour diary. Anybody got a pen? How about a knife? I can just whittle the words. A pen knife? Even better!

Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to sFshzenKlyrn. I know what you’re thinking – he probably used some kind of trans-temporal presto-digitation to conjure us up a new ion drive servo chip. No such thing. He just waited until Marvin (my personal robot) was in sleep mode and plucked the chip out of his sorry hide. (Marvin lists a bit now. Not that that’s a bad thing… I have him doing our set lists. Boom-crash.)

Here’s the lowdown on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011:

10.31.2011 – Hallowe’en on Betelgeuse. Surprisingly, this is kind of a big deal up here. Not that they do the costumes or the trick or treat. In fact, it’s kind of an interstellar anti-gravity day – the Betelgeusians (unlike humanity) have mastered the science of gravity. They’ve got this big-ass switch, the size of Texas, and every October 31st (our time) they flip it and then their iridescent pseudopods leave the ground. Talk about fun. (That’s right – just talk about it.)

11.01.2011 – We start the month on the right pseudopod. Hit the stage around 10 p.m. local, played for almost three hours. Matt tried open tunings on his kazoo during “Just Five Seconds”. (We’re way ahead up here.) I’d never seen sFshzenKlyrn play his telecaster with a violin bow before, and  during our last set Anti-Lincoln seemed to have gotten his hands on a dulcimer somewhere. Leave Earth a four-piece, return home an orchestra. That’s the magic of space travel.

11.03.2011 – We are the 99 and 44/100 percent! New slogan for Ivory soap – what do you think? No, actually… it’s the current chant down here on Neptune. We’ve joined in the “Occupy Neptune” project for the few days that we’re here. Had a few celebrity drop-ins already this week. Tomorrow’s a general strike. Of course, there are only about five people on the whole planet, but frankly…. that makes organizing a snap. Don’t even need freaking Twitter.

Well, so anyway… keep the faith down there in Oakland, New York, Boston, and everywhere else. We’ll hold down the fort up here on Neptune. In fact, we’ve got the outer planets covered – no worries.

Usual Rubbish

Pod bay door.

The good news is, we’ve scored a ride to the stars. The bad news is… it’s aboard a doomed ship sent from hell. Not the kind of luxury we’re accustomed to, but hey… we’ll manage.

Big Green will be departing for Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and points east (I believe it’s east) on September 29 for our [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Not that the date is much of a concern, now that Mitch Macaphee has a tenuous hold on the time-space continuum. If we miss our launch date, what the hell, we just have Mitch send us back a few days. Depending upon what kind of a mood he’s in, that could be easy or hard, very hard. (Actually, Matt thinks that if you run backwards really fast, you will go back in time. Call me a skeptic… though I’ve noticed that when you run forward real fast, time seems to move forward. If this were an elegant universe, the converse would be true. And no, I don’t mean the sneaker.)

I should mention that, as we wait for our departure, we are in the midst of what I would call a series of “mini-sessions” in our Hammer Mill basement studio. These are related to production of our new podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, the second installment of which is now available on iTunes and directly from us peoples. This time out we’re featuring a somewhat rich discussion of the thinking (or lack of same) behind our song “Quality Lincoln”, a rough draft of which we include on the podcast. What we’re doing is laying the basic tracks for a song, playing that on the podcast, and then finishing the song later for separate release. The result may be another album, a series of EPs, or something else entirely.

I should also add that “Quality Lincoln” is not so much one song, but rather three songs, knit together with sturdy fibers of ludicrousness. I suppose there are better ways to spend one’s time as he/she waits for an accursed space vessel to pick him/her up. I just can’t think of any, and I’ll wager neither can you.  Or perhaps I am mistaken.

Well, is that the time? Was that me talking just then? Perhaps. Hey – give the podcast a listen and let us know what you think. Send an email or something. More fodder for the podcast.