Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

Usual Rubbish

Tour log: quatro livre. (Say what?)

Here’s the fourth installment of our vaunted tour diary. Anybody got a pen? How about a knife? I can just whittle the words. A pen knife? Even better!

Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to sFshzenKlyrn. I know what you’re thinking – he probably used some kind of trans-temporal presto-digitation to conjure us up a new ion drive servo chip. No such thing. He just waited until Marvin (my personal robot) was in sleep mode and plucked the chip out of his sorry hide. (Marvin lists a bit now. Not that that’s a bad thing… I have him doing our set lists. Boom-crash.)

Here’s the lowdown on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011:

10.31.2011 – Hallowe’en on Betelgeuse. Surprisingly, this is kind of a big deal up here. Not that they do the costumes or the trick or treat. In fact, it’s kind of an interstellar anti-gravity day – the Betelgeusians (unlike humanity) have mastered the science of gravity. They’ve got this big-ass switch, the size of Texas, and every October 31st (our time) they flip it and then their iridescent pseudopods leave the ground. Talk about fun. (That’s right – just talk about it.)

11.01.2011 – We start the month on the right pseudopod. Hit the stage around 10 p.m. local, played for almost three hours. Matt tried open tunings on his kazoo during “Just Five Seconds”. (We’re way ahead up here.) I’d never seen sFshzenKlyrn play his telecaster with a violin bow before, and  during our last set Anti-Lincoln seemed to have gotten his hands on a dulcimer somewhere. Leave Earth a four-piece, return home an orchestra. That’s the magic of space travel.

11.03.2011 – We are the 99 and 44/100 percent! New slogan for Ivory soap – what do you think? No, actually… it’s the current chant down here on Neptune. We’ve joined in the “Occupy Neptune” project for the few days that we’re here. Had a few celebrity drop-ins already this week. Tomorrow’s a general strike. Of course, there are only about five people on the whole planet, but frankly…. that makes organizing a snap. Don’t even need freaking Twitter.

Well, so anyway… keep the faith down there in Oakland, New York, Boston, and everywhere else. We’ll hold down the fort up here on Neptune. In fact, we’ve got the outer planets covered – no worries.

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.