Tag Archives: Songs in the Key of Rick

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

Geek to me.

Connect blue wire (A) to terminal (3). Check. Connect yellow wire (F) to terminal (48c). Check. Hit boot switch, but first, insert index fingers (K) and (M) into ears (7) and (8). Hmmm…. okay.

Big GreenOh, hi. Caught me in the middle of something, as usual. Always some task to perform here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house in lovely upstate New York. As you may recall from previous posts (or not), we are preparing for an upcoming interstellar tour to support extraterrestrial sales of our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Fact is, we make most of our money on units sold outside the bounds of the known solar system. (The rest we make on Neptune and some of the smaller, rockier moons of Saturn.)

Anyhow, as you might suspect, we will be needing some means of transportation for ourselves, our hangers-on, our instruments and gear, our provisions, etc. We have an old 1954 GMC City Coach (or we at least have access to it in the junk yard across the street), but it’s seen better days and probably isn’t up to a journey of 1,000 light years across the trackless void of space. (The windows haven’t been caulked in a couple of decades, so I doubt it’s space-worthy.) We used to simply “rent” spacecraft from other fictional narratives, like Lost in Space or Here Come The Brides, but that option is walled off by lack of funds. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee is still in Madagascar, enjoying the sun, so we’re left to our own devices.

The one on the leftRight, so … using Mitch’s credit card, I ordered a do-it-yourself space ship from Heathkit. (Yes, I know … they no longer exist. I had to go through Mitch’s time portal to place the order.) So here I am, perhaps the most technically challenged member of Big Green, a man without a smart phone (I still use that brick phone my dad lent me in 1989), assembling a deluxe interstellar space cruiser stick by stick, armed only with a soldering gun and a pair of superannuated pliers.

No need to back away. I haven’t gotten to the volatile rare earths part yet. Stay tuned.

Usual Rubbish

Under the hood of lost September.

Is this the new itinerary? Looks like last week’s. Which, if I recall correctly, was a hastily updated photocopy of the flight path for Voyager 2. That mission didn’t end well, my fine friend, just you remember.

Yes, yes … we are still preparing the ground for our upcoming interstellar tour to support celestial sales of Big Green’s latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. The itinerary thus far includes stops on gas giants, molten moons, and frozen asteroids hurtling into black holes. Couple of snags, that’s all. Nothing to get excited about. (Man Jack Jesus, this band has to work like an animal to find an audience.)

In the meantime, we have plucked the lost September episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN from the jaws of non-existence (if such a state of being can be said to have anything resembling jaws), and good thing, too: we needed an October episode very badly indeed. What’s it all about? Well, you could give it a listen. Or you could just ask us … and if you did, we would most likely tell you it includes:

Big GreenAnyhow, the “lost” September episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN includes:

Ned Trek XIII: Specter’s Stepchildren. Our running satire of Star Trek, Mr. Edd, and the Romney presidential campaign continues with this gripping episode. Mr. Welsh is being coaxed into serving as a sound engineer for powerful aliens who force songs out of Mr. Ned, Mr. Pearl, Rev. Doc Coburn, and Willard Mittilius himself…. with hilarious consequences. Five (or is it six?) new Big Green songs, never before heard, one sung by a horse, one sung by a robot Nixon, one sung by space aliens (accompanied by John Ashcroft), one sung by a chickenhawk neocon (guess who). Don’t miss it.

Idle conversation. As usual, Matt and I ramble on for about 20 minutes about vital issues of the day, random snippets from days past. We talk about our dad, about space probes, about god knows what. Something else, I’m sure. No spotlight songs resurrected from the past this month – we spent our song quota in the Ned Trek episode.

That’s what we’ve got. Now, back to travel plans. Where’s that sextant?