Tag Archives: Songs in the Key of Rick

Usual Rubbish

Winging it.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 11, 2014
Planet #253 in NASA list. Out Rigel way.

Next stop on our random interplanetary tour – or if you prefer, interstellar tour 2014, sans itinerary – is planet #253 on the list NASA generated off of their recent survey. (Now, I’m Get off my planet.not an astrophysicist, but I do have some experience with market research, so I’m guessing that this was a phone survey, and that our old friend Waleed Abdulati, NASA’s head scientist, simply hired a phone bank and had them dial distant star systems at random and ask, “How many in your solar system?” “Do you have a companion star or dark matter object?” “Is s/he working?”)

Turns out, much more is known about these unknown worlds than NASA is letting on. We are slowly coming to the realization that all of the science fiction movies and T.V. shows of our youth were not fictional at all … they were fairly accurate depictions of OUTER SPAAAAACE. Old number 253 is a good example of that. Did you ever see Vampire Planet with John Carradine and what looked like a band of refugee actors from European porn movies? Hmmmm… thought not. Well, it was bad. Really bad. And it was apparently filmed here on #253. No performance venues. Just caves and dinosaurs … again.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 14, 2014
Planet #79 in NASA list. sFshzenKlyrn‘s neck of the galaxy.

Big GreenYeah, we’re over near the cluster of nebulosity which sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, calls home. He’s taken his leave for a few days to visit his mother, another etheric creature of undetermined shape and mass. Splooge off the old nebula, that’s our sFshzenKlyrn, and man, he can really smoke that telecaster. (Seriously, I’ve told him not to go through them like cheap cigars – we’re not made of money, you know.)

Planet #79 offers some attractions for a traveling band. Fairly reasonable accommodations (there’s a Motel 6 down here). There’s even a grounded electrical outlet in our room, so we can plug Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in to charge. As a cheap advertising ploy, we plugged in our portable stereo and blasted Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick from Matt’s iPod. That got us, well, arrested and fined, but it was worth the gamble. We’ll be playing in the lounge tonight.

Usual Rubbish

Pick a sphere.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 3, 2014
Planet #47 in NASA list, just south of Aldebaran

Okay, that was the planet of the dinosaurs. Check. Marvin? Be sure to put that one on the “do not visit” list. We should have known that from John Carradine’s experience back in the 1970s, but oh well.

Null set. Right, if you’re just joining us, Big Green is furiously working its way through the list of 715 new planets NASA recently put out, looking for halfway decent venues. We’re not picky, you know. It’s not like we need a proper dressing room with a row of lightbulbs arrayed above a long mirror and chilled Champagne in a bucket. Hell, we’ll settle for an unlocked fire door on one side of the stage. (I can just about hear some indie musician out there saying, “Big Green needs stages to perform on? What a bunch of prima donnas!”)

The first couple of planets on the list have been kind of a bust. Turns out, all NASA managed to do was catalog all of the seemingly habitable planets depicted in science fiction movies and television shows over the past 40 years. Not that that isn’t useful, but frankly, the Planet of the Dinosaurs has little to recommend it …. except for an outsized population of dinosaurs, and some bad-looking cave people with voices straight out of a Jay Ward cartoon. (And names like “Sookee”. Sookee? Really, space people – you can do better than that.)

Interstellar Tour Log: March 5, 2014
Planet #163 in NASA list, near Rigel

Big GreenMarvin (my personal robot assistant) volunteered (or was shoved out the door, one of the two) to go down to the surface of this rocky little world and see if there were any performance venues worth pissing in. The place looks a bit like west Texas, so songs from Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick should go over pretty well here. I know, it’s a little dicey using Marvin as an advance man, but Lincoln is kind of busy with his model ship building hobby and the man-sized tuber has his roots all tangled in something at the moment. (A couple of visits ago, Marvin was on the surface of a planet for six hours before he figured out it was Metaluna, the planet from “This Island Earth”. Talk about an oversight. How the hell many times do you have to watch that movie before you recognize the set?)

Looks like he’s encountered some kind of life form. Show him the contract, Marvin! Ask him if he needs a pen!

Usual Rubbish

New frontier.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 25, 2014
Between Neptune and Pluto, or thereabouts

Big Green“Steve Lawrence”, Matt says. My reply: “Jennifer Lawrence.” Lincoln’s turn: “Jennifer Hudson.” Everyone looks at anti-Lincoln, who scratches his temple thoughtfully. “You lost two points on that one, Abe,” he says with a smirk.

Right, well … you have to occupy your time somehow in deep space, and rather than doing something productive, we’re playing Name-Chain. Yeah, it’s really fun. You name a famous person, and the player to your right has to name another one with the same first or last name, and around it goes. Lincoln got penalized because if you name someone of the same sex, you lose two points. Then you all multiply your score by the square root of corn meal and, well … it gets complicated after that.

Did we play on Jupiter last week? Well, the less said about that the better. Not sure what happened, but whatever it was it left a big red spot. Not exactly what we had in mind for our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Hell, nobody on Jupiter had even heard of Rick Perry.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 27, 2014
Near Pluto, I think. (That’s the yellow dog with no clothes, right? Yeah … near Pluto.)

Uh, how bout Uncle Milty?Well, the good news for our Interstellar Tour is that we’ve got a whole boatload of possibilities for new venues. NASA just discovered 715 new planets, and scientists say that the law of averages dictates at least 3% of them must have indie music venues. Even better, our sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn, has been to at least half of these newbie planetoids, and has established relationships with the relevant booking agents. He’s out ahead of us now, greasing the wheels a bit. I was hoping he’d take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him, but alas … sFshzenKlyrn flies without a spaceship and Marvin gets vertigo easily. Useless bag of bolts.

Did I just say that out loud? Whoops. Let’s see…. “Al Franken” …. “Franken Beans” ….