Tag Archives: One Small Step

Usual Rubbish

Practice makes … practice.

One…. two…. One-two-three-four! *SMASH* Wait, hold it. Tubey, you okay? Was that your last planter? Christmas. We’ve got to go to the garden store, damn it.

Oh, hiya. Geezus, you’d think being idle and ensconced in an abandoned hammer mill would offer endless opportunities to rehearse, jam, arrange, etc. Seems like every time we try to do it, something comes up. For instance, this week I’ve got custody of the mansized tuber. (Matt had him last week. Hey – that’s the terms of the adoption agreement, what do you want from me?) I guess I never realized what a handful he can be. He’s at a difficult age for tubers; you know, that time when they either become a full-fledged plant or get mashed up into some kind of traditional dish. I have to think that, for tubey, it’s going to be the former outcome, but he doesn’t seem convinced. Now he jumps at every noise. And as you might expect, rehearsal generates a lot of noises.

Okay, so when he jerks to one side at the sound of a crash cymbal, falls off his pedestal, and cracks his planter into a thousand pieces, is that my bad? Do I bear responsibility not only for the damages but for the psychological trauma, the pain and suffering, the fibrous bruising Tubey endures as a result of his own nervousness? I think not. And yet, having custody of him does imply a level of accountability. Man god damn, this will be the THIRD king-size pottery planter I’ve had to buy on my meager income in the last five days. How much is enough? I’d just like the president and some of those congressional leaders to walk a mile in my shoes – they think THEY have it tough….

Granted, we don’t have any jobs booked for Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start working up some numbers. Matt’s polishing up his tiny guitar (it’s about the size of a badminton racket, perhaps smaller), John’s pounding away on some soup kettles. I’ve replaced a few broken tines in the Fender Rhodes 73. The plan is to play whatever we know as many times as we can stand it. That’s called rehearsal. If no one interrupts us, life is good. Only now…

Well, now I’m going to the plant store. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will tag along to do the carrying. Then it’s back to work… I hope.

Usual Rubbish

Planageddon.

I’m not sure about that, Matt. I don’t know if I want to play that song. How about “Dinos”? No? Are you sure? Okay… you suggest one. “World of Satisfaction”? Naaaah.

Oh, hello. Didn’t notice you peering through that LCD screen. As you can see, we’re working on a set list for our first engagement on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. No, that’s not a place keeper – that’s the name Tiny Montgomery suggested last week, and none of us has come up with anything better (let alone tried to, you know, insert the name). It’s always kind of a back and forth on the set lists – that’s only natural when you have hundreds of songs. Yes, literally hundreds… all wrapped up in a little box. We take turns, reaching a hand into the box. I’ll read one song title and Matt will knock it down. Then he grabs one and reads it. I’ll say he’s an asshole. Then he throws the box at me. And I’ll yell, “MOM! HE’S DOIN’ IT AGAIN!” And then we’re BOTH in trouble.

Okay, so that’s freaking childish, I know. But not to worry – we always come up with set lists in the end. Then we freaking ignore then, nine times out of ten. No, we’re not affecting an artistic temperament. It’s just that, frankly, it gets kind of dark on the stages we play on, and those lists are just plain hard to read. So we start calling tunes. If we call the same tune twice in a single night, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) issues a loud beeping sound. Chances are we will remember what that’s supposed to mean and withdraw the selection. Hey…. everybody has their process. Ours is surely no less sound than the one used by, say, My Morning Jacket.  (I can’t say, because I don’t know what they do. I’m just picking examples at random – don’t listen to me.)

I’m just noticing how often I use the epithet “freaking”. You all know what I mean. In any case, preparing for an arduous interstellar tour is no picnic, as many of you know. There are songs to rehearse, air tanks to compress, space suits to air out, missiles to hire, maps to download – no end to the punch list. (It’s actually more like a punch and kick list.) Not getting a lot of help, either. Both Lincolns are dead to the world after a night of carousing. The mansized tuber is out in the garden, communing with his little herb-garden cousins. Mitch Macaphee has taken the next two weeks off to attend a mad science conference in Brazil. I feel like the prisoner of freaking Zenda. (There’s that epithet again!)

Not to worry. We’ve been down this bumpy road before, and it’s always come out…. well … bumpy. So be it.

Usual Rubbish

Long view.

Is that all he’s got? No, wait… there’s another page coming through. Slowly. Somebody got another quarter for the payphone? I don’t want to …. oh, man goddamn!

Oh, hi. Yeah, just grappling with our communications issues, once again. Everything in Big Green’s world is held together with duct tape and baling wire… but then you knew that. What you didn’t know is that we’ve got a mom and pop drugstore up the street from us that has what may be the world’s last coin operated pay phone. That’s right… and it’s bloody handy, now that Verizon has pulled the plug on us. (Damnable message unit charges!) So, yeah… we can call mom, talk to our label, harass our booking agent, order strings, all with a pocket full of change. It’s like freaking magic. Who needs the twenty first century? We’re harnessing the technology of yesteryear. (Or yestercentury.)

Well, as you may remember, our sometimes agent Tiny Montgomery has been trying to fax us from his six-room lean-to in northern Madagascar. We have no fax, ma’am … we are fax-free. But what we do have is a resident mad scientist (Mitch Macaphee) and a rolling pile of spare parts known as Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Mitch was able to fashion a primitive fax machine and dial-up modem out of Marvin’s printer module, an operation that, while painless, seems to have left a bit of a deficit in the automaton’s left flank. No matter – with the money we glean from this upcoming tour, we will gladly spring for some new robot stuffing.

That is, if we ever get this tour off the ground. Not going to happen without someone willing to do the hard work of booking the dates, threatening the club owners, and bribing the officials. (Did I say that? Well, someone sure as hell did.) So here I stand, pumping quarters into the maw of an abandoned payphone, its receiver parked on the modem of Mitch’s primitive fax machine. Trouble is, every time more than three inches of page peaks out from the printer, our time runs out and we have to find more change. My guess is that we would probably get Tiny’s tour proposal faster if he folded it into a paper airplane and sailed it across the African mainland towards the Atlantic. But I exaggerate.

I don’t know – I may be the only one of our number who’s truly anxious to get back on the road. Everyone else seems content to hang out in this drugstore, watching bicarbonate of soda fizz. But even that has to get old… eventually.