Tag Archives: Songs in the Key of Rick

Space invaders.

He’s screaming about “the probe” again. It’s like he’s the Six Million Dollar man or something. Does anyone have smelling salts? Maybe we should just hit him with one of the leftover hammers. Any other good ideas?

Mitch ... not another monster.Well, as you can see, we have had a house invasion. The perpetrator? None other than our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft started orbiting his adopted home world of Ceres, he became extremely agitated. Smoke began to pour out of his ears and mouth, like VOL, from Star Trek. He simply could not live with the idea of being spied upon by the space agency. What if they stole his ideas? he thought…. then his plan to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD would be scuttled. Shot down by a measly little, tin-pot space robot. THAT MAKES ME SO MAD …. !

Ahem. Sorry – I was channeling Mitch for a moment. Anyway, he denounced the NASA probe as a space invader and started bombarding it with deadly baritold rays. Deadly, that is, for vegetation on Gamma Hydra 4, but completely ineffective against ion-powered orbiter spacecrafts. Frustrated, he packed up his portable lab and lifted off. That’s the good news. The BAD news is that he landed here, at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, mad as a badger and ready to take his quarters back from Anti-Lincoln, who had scattered all of his junk over the floor of Mitch’s lab. (Anti-Lincoln’s gotten into origami in a big way, so the whole room is full of paper shards and scissors.)

Now Mitch talks (or shouts) in his sleep, and by day he’s formulating theorems to destroy his imaginary enemies. I think he’s been on that asteroid way too long, as a matter of personal opinion. But please – keep that to yourself! I may be subjected to a withering barrage of baritold rays!

Projects. Matt and I are working on some new songs for Ned Trek. I will also be posting some songs from Cowboy Scat on our YouTube channel very soon, for those of you who like listening to music on YouTube. I’ll post, tweet, whatever when they’re up.

 

When the hell?

I know what you’re all saying out there. You’re saying, “Where’s my socks?” and “The paper’s late again this morning. Stupid paper carrier!” and “You’ll eat it and like it!” Stuff like that. Am I right?

Squx.Well, right or wrong, I like to think that you’ve been wondering about a couple of things with regard to the band Big Green, denizens of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and the alien intelligence behind this skimpy little blog. One is, well, when the hell are we going to release another album? I mean, it’s been nearly 18 months since we put out Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. What the hell are we playing at, anyway? Or maybe you’re uttering that same thought in Swahili. It could be anything!

Then there’s the performance question. I know, I know … we’ve been extremely remiss in this area. Big Green hasn’t performed in front of a terrestrial audience in uncounted thousands of years. Sure, we’ve played in the solar system, which is practically in your neighborhood. You could easily see our performances with the Hubble Space Telescope, and perhaps hear them with a radio telescope. That has been the best we’ve been able to do up to now. Squint hard and you can see us.

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) took it into his little tin head to do some advertising for us, hiring some firm to do smoke signals on Mars. All he managed to do was confuse NASA royally, and make a bunch of astrophysicists scratch their heads like monkeys and throw bones in the air, hoping they’ll turn into futuristic space shuttles. If that’s brand advertising, I’m an astrophysicist’s uncle. And I’m not. So just pretend you didn’t see that puff of smoke on the red planet, friends. Nothing to see here.

The fact is, we will get around to putting out some more music sometime soon. I’m working on posting some of our existing catalog on YouTube. And we’ve got new music, so ultimately it will be out there. Way out there.

Genericville.

Do we have 1.5 children? Only if you double-count the man-sized tuber. Let’s ask anti-Lincoln to do the counting – ever since the war, he sees everything twice.

Stupid comet!Oh, hello. Just working up our census form. Don’t mind me. Didn’t know there was going to be a 2014 census, but I guess that’s understandable, since we don’t get a lot of news flowing into the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squathouse. Just yesterday some dude in a Fedora knocked on the front gate and handed me a questionnaire. He said I had to finish it by Saturday or his friend might set the mill on fire. (I think the friend’s name was Giancarlo.) How old is Mitch Macaphee? No … I mean before the youth serum?

Questions, questions. Way too much on Big Green’s plate lately, I can tell you. We’ve got the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast, of course – always time-consuming. Our next episode of Ned Trek, for instance, will feature as many as 6 or 7 new songs, never before heard (and probably never again), all apropos of the ridiculous story line. This is part of the biggest crop of new material to come out of Big Green in, I don’t know, twenty years or so. Over the past year or so, we’ve written and began recording something like 30 new songs; that’s since we finished Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick last year.

Then there’s the pressure to get out and play in front of an audience, for chrissake. We considered doing a gig or two on Mars this month, but given the fact that the red planet is going to be buzzed by comet Siding Spring this weekend, we thought better of it. We have had run-ins with comets before; can’t say that we ever got the better of those confrontations. Chilly little hunks of ice, those comets. No pity. Who can blame them? They’re billions of years old, and only get a little sun once every million years or so, then it’s back to the Ort cloud. But I digress.

Hmmm…. Should I account for multiple personalities on this census form? Yes, I’m back on anti-Lincoln again (and his alter ego, anti-Edgar Allan Poe).