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Usual Rubbish

Tour log: five-oh

Merry Christmas, Children? Not sure I remember the parts. Besides, that’s … well … challenging. Anything easier for the season? Jit-Jaguar? That’s a Christmas song? Oh, right.

Hey, sorry. Just working out the set list for our next string of performances. We’re not one of those groups that just gets up on stage in front of 20,000 people (or 20,000 amorphous blobs of protoplasm) and wings it, playing whatever comes into our heads. No, sir … we plan out every inch of our stage show, from the song list to the dance steps to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) juggling torches. (Yes, that’s right, Marvin – it’s torches this time! Deal with it!)

Right, well … okay, we don’t have dance steps per se. Nor set lists. But we do work up a vague idea of what we’re going to play over the course of the next week. That’s called planning, my friends. How does it work out in the specific context of Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011? Here’s how…

11.8.2011 – Cranking out Jit-Jaguar in front of 20,000 Neptunians. They like the part about the tin pot politician apologizing to “Mr. Jesus” for calling out for robotic revenge on the town that rejected him. (Oh, yes… it’s titanic theme night here on Neptune.) It’s a bit of schtick, but we always bring Marvin out for this number, just so that the audience has a robot to look at while we sing of, well, robots. Never mind the cognitive dissonance of employing a peaceful robot to evoke the image of a warlike one. We give the people what they want – end of story.

11.10.2011 – Busted! Pulled over by the interplanetary highway patrol for doing 1/2C in a 1/4C zone. Anti-Lincoln was driving. Yeah, that was kind of a mistake, come to think of it. Mitch Macaphee was on break at the time, and Anti- was handy. (I call him “Auntie” sometimes because he just hates that.) The patrol hung an appearance ticket on us. We’ll probably just send the check along with our guilty plea … if the Post Office still delivers to Titan. (Cutbacks, you know. Now they send all of Pluto’s mail to Saturn for processing.)

11.11.2011 – My, but that’s a lot of elevens. And look… it’s 11:11 a.m. Time to play Wrap Up World War I.

Next stop: mystery planet opposite the sun from Earth. You know… where everything’s a mirror image of Earth, except that people eat corn on the cob on the vertical. (We learned of this from Saint Guido Sarducci.)

Usual Rubbish

Tour log (third story).

What is all the ruckus about? I told you we were bringing equipment with us. And no, we don’t need unicycles. We can get around on our own two feet, thank you very much.

That’s the problem with interstellar tours, my friends. A billion opportunities for misunderstandings. No shortage of those, particularly when you’re traveling with the two Lincolns (posi- and anti-), as we appear to be out here on Big Green’s vaunted [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011. Anyway, here’s how it went down this week:

10.25.2011 – Our first full night on Kaztropharius 137b. If anything, it’s quiet – too quiet. Keep forgetting that there’s no atmosphere here, ergo, no sound. (Or is it “air-go; no sound”? You decide.)  We strummed our way silently through about a dozen tunes. The denizens of this strange little rock appeared partial to “My Bed”, one of Matt’s dream-sequence numbers. They pick up vibrations from our instruments via the floor of the venue. (They all appear to be equipped with stethoscopes. Looks kind of odd from on stage.) sFshzenKlyrn ripped the song a third corn chute, as the Simpsons once put it. Another triumph.

10.28.2011 – Pulling away after three successful gigs on Kaztropharius. By successful, I mean survivable… but only just barely. Anti-Lincoln decided to take a stroll down by the river district, apparently. Well, he got kind of drunk and one thing led to another. I’m not precisely sure how he acquired the riding saddle, but however it happened, he seems to have won first prize. We are now band non grata on Kaztropharius 137b. Nice work, anti-Lincoln! Who’s going to eat our discs now, pray tell?

10.29.2011 – Well, now he’s done it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has trashed the hyperdrive. He has this self-preservation circuit that compels him to replace any defective parts with whatever’s available. He needed a certain kind of chip for one of his motor circuits, and… well… he found one in our rent-a-ship’s hyper drive. So now we’re chugging along at the interstellar equivalent of 25 miles an hour, garbage scows passing us like we’re standing still. Got a string of gigs waiting for us, and at this rate, we’ll get to the first of them sometime in early 3109011 A.D. My guess is that they’ll pull out on us. What’s yours?

Oh well. Do me a favor, eh? Email me a diagram for a q47 space modulator chip.  Just google it. Thanks a million.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log (part deux).

There are no filling stations out yonder. Just ask Warren Oates. If you can’t find him, seek out another character actor and ask him or her. You may be surprised by their answer. (Or not.)

Here’s what happened on the “road” this week:

10.15.2011 – Pulled into Neptune, was feeling ’bout half-past dead. Our rent-a-ship has been sputtering, so we brought it into a Neptunian garage for service. The cost? Full proceeds from our three performances on Neptune, plus 9% excise tax. (Looks like Herman Cain is having an impact up here, as well. The craters tell the tale.) sFshzenKlyrn practically melted his Telecaster on the fourth song (Why Not Call It George?), then settled down for a succulent Neptunian roast. (Roasted crater peat. This is important: Neptunian is not … repeat, not … one of the great cuisines.)

10.17.2011 – Strange how Polaris looks like downtown Rochester. Could be worse. We set up on a suspended platform – one of those anti-gravity jobs you see all over the place on Kaztropharius 137b – and went through the better part of our song list. Looks like we’ll have to work up some more numbers. The Polaroids experience time in extreme slow motion – the equivalent of about 14 hours to each of our standard Earth minutes. Kind of a difficult gap to fill, actually. Hey dudes…. how about a slow one? 

10.19.2011 – Right through the center of the Great Onion Ring. You full-time terrestrials know it as the Ring Nebula, but out here they associate it with their favorite snack. Pity, really, that more interstellar phenomena aren’t named for appropriate junk food back on Earth. After all, we invented junk food, we perfected it, we raised it to a high cultural value, and we defend it with our lives. The Greeks had their gods, sure. But we have our Ring Dings.

10.20.2011 – Closing in on the next venue; that hideous little globe named Kaztropharius 137b … the one place in god’s great universe where our CDs sell like hot cakes. I may have explained this before – the denizens of Kaztropharius 137b eat complex plastics, so to put a fine point on it, our CDs are, in fact, hot cakes to them. And we’re okay with that. Just settling in for a few night gigs.

Hey…. we’re not idle on the road. Always thinking, you know. We posted the third episode of our increasingly strange podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Check it out at http://www.big-green.net/pod and be not ashamed.