Tag Archives: tour

Usual Rubbish

August down.

Hey, let's go to outer spaceMan, it’s so hot in here. Marvin, can you turn up the air conditioning? Oh, right … our air conditioning is a broken skylight. Sigh. Okay … break another skylight, then. Use my forty-foot pole … the one I use to keep my distance from things (and people) I don’t like.

Yes, friends … it is the end of summer, past the dog days. August is coughing up blood, writhing in the blistering sun. (Look on the bright side, brother.) Not much going on around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as you might have suspected. I laid down a piano part on perhaps one of the most ludicrous recordings I’ve ever played on. I saw some bluejays in the courtyard. What else happened? Not mucho.

Whoever said being a musician is tantamount to perpetual unemployment was on to something. (Hey … I think that was me.) You can see why we often opt for these less-than-optimal interstellar tours, in lieu of the more profitable terrestrial variety. Pretty simple, really … crappy work is better than no work at all. We are always open to seeking a new audience, even if that means holding our breath for weeks at a time. (There must be a better way to travel through space. Where’s Gene Roddenberry when you need him?)

Once we get finished with the current set of recordings, Big Green will likely take a romp around the known solar system; maybe a 2-week Autumn tour to promote … I don’t know, whatever we have to toss out there. Trouble is, on most alien worlds, the music fans have six or seven arm-like appendages, so you have to have a lot of product to keep them satisfied. Hell, they can absorb our entire canon and still have several arms free. We’ve got to get busy!

My hope is that, this time, wherever it is we’re traveling to, we have the assistance of Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser. His absence was sorely felt on our last, disastrous foray into the galactic hinterlands. Which proves that having a crazy driver is better than no driver at all. (At least out where there’s very little to crash into.)

Usual Rubbish

That’s strange.

I think that’s the last of it. Packed tight, top to bottom. Nice job, lads. Okay … pop the nose cone back on. Time to light this candle!

Nothing to see here, right, Marvin?Oh, howdy. Yup, we’re getting ready to embark on our upcoming interstellar tour in support of our album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which as been a absolute drug on the market down here on earth, but is selling much more briskly in outer spaaaaaaaaaace. Seems like extraterrestrials are totally ready for satirical country-western, mock-pop, found sound records like ours. Who knew?

Now if they only adopted some kind of currency that is convertible into our own. Right now they’re paying us in photons. No, really. Every month, we get a box full of light in lieu of a royalty check. Try taking that to Chase Bank. I can’t even get mortgage backed securities in exchange for that stuff. Still, it’s worth something on Aldebaran, and that’s all that counts … if you live on Aldebaran. (We usually resort to doing all our shopping out there, as it happens.)

Big GreenSome of you are probably wondering whether it’s safe for us to venture beyond the protective atmosphere of mother earth in such a ramshackle looking spacecraft. I totally get that. The thing is, we have assurances from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that if anything goes badly wrong in the icy vacuum of space, he will be responsible for the consequences. Knowing how risk-averse Marvin has always been, that fills me with confidence. My bandmates look a little nervous, sure, particularly after hearing about the comet ISON, which is in the process of rounding the sun as we speak.

Will we escape ISON’s enormous coma of deadly gasses? Are they indeed deadly as I just claimed just a few key strokes ago? Answers to these and other questions await our liftoff in FIVE …. FOUR … THREE … TWO … days.

Usual Rubbish

Time wasting.

Ever see that episode of Lost In Space when they’re rushing to get the piece-of-shit Jupiter 2 spaceworthy before the planet they’ve been living on for an entire television season explodes beneath them? Yeah, well … that’s sort of where Big Green is right now.

Big GreenNo, a stereotypical t.v. gold miner named Mister Nerim is not fracking the Cosmonium out of the living rock beneath us (at least, not yet), but it’s nearly as bad. Our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (also known as Hegephonic) has arranged for an interstellar tour to support the release of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which – while it hasn’t done squat down here on earth – is selling briskly on Aldebaran, I hear.  (Great music always finds its audience. And, well, ours does, too, if it travels far enough.)

Of course, Hegemonic subcontracted the tour arrangements to some underworld figures, as they typically do. That has its upsides, like … I don’t know …. valet parking on Aldebaran? Free breakfast for gamblers? No, it’s the downsides I’m more concerned with. Like the fact that the contractors just handle the booking; the transportation is completely up to us. So as you saw last week, we’ve been scrambling to pull together some kind of interstellar space vessel – quite a challenge in the continued absence of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who is sunning himself in beautiful Madagascar right now.

Well ... a little ambitious, perhaps. Don’t know if you know this, but underworld booking agents take breach of contract kind of seriously. That’s why we’re resorting to just about any means of getting from one planet to the other. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helpfully suggested a design for a new space craft, but it seems a little ambitious, to be perfectly frank. I’m not certain that we need anything with forty-story legs and a cavernous exercise room. I was thinking something more on the modest size. Maybe a step up from the 1954 GMC city coach, but not a large step.

Hey, however we do it, we’ll need to have it done in a few weeks. Got suggestions? Put them behind the hot water pipes. I’ll find them.