What time is it again? Morning already? Christ on a bike. If I don’t start getting some sleep, you’ll have to take over the bailing duties.
Ooops. Sorry. Didn’t realize I was typing this into a blog post (or that anyone was looking at me from the imaginary wall-side of my three-walled room). We were in the process of working out chore assignments here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on this cold March morning in upstate New York, home of … well, abandoned factories … and crack-head shooters … and nervous deer. Come visit anytime!
The thing is, we are working diligently on the mixing of our next album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – an odd, patchy collection of songs from a forgotten musical about Cousin (Governor) Rick Perry (the score for which, legend has it, was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe back in the seventies. True story). This painstaking work can sometimes last one, maybe two hours at a stretch, over an unrelenting schedule of nearly one evening per week, pushing late into the early evening hours. It’s as much as a person can do to keep body and soul together in this pressure cooker. Stop the madness!
All right, I have pulled myself together. (Phew!) Why are we keeping such a punishing schedule? Well, blame our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (a.k.a. Hegephonic Records). They will stop at nothing. First they send the Indonesian military after us. (That’s usually last for most people.) Then they take the unprecedented step of reprogramming Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of robotic taskmaster. Every time I freaking turn around now, Marvin’s giving me the dagger eyes and running a tape loop of John Cameron Swayze saying, “Did you do it yet? Did you do it yet?” (Strangely, Marvin also offers us Camel cigarettes, as if Hegemonic implanted some Swayze DNA in his hard drive.)
How to do all this without sleep? I should ask our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, who hasn’t slept in years. (Hell, if I’d done half of what he’s done just during our relatively brief acquaintance, I’d never sleep again.)
