No, I haven’t seen your bass drum case. What do I look like, some kind of servant? By the way, where’s my line mixer? What? No… actually, you don’t look like a servant. Why do you ask?
Oh, sorry, friends. Just trying to get ahead of things here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We’ve got that Aldebaran gig moving up on us fast – sure, sure, the date hasn’t been set yet, but we’ve still got to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. What the hell, it’s 65 light years away for chrissake, plus or minus. So if our friends over at Loathsome Prick Records call us tomorrow and say the gig is next Thursday, we’re going to need every minute. (Every single minute. No doubles, just singles.) And that’s just the travel time. We’re also going to need to give our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, a brief interval to invent some means of getting us up there.
What about our various space crafts, you ask? The 
ones that have carried so far and so faithfully over the course of previous tours? Well…. therein lies a tale. I’ll spare you the painful details… suffice to say that they have fallen into a woeful state of disrepair. I wouldn’t drive either of them to our favorite convenience store, let alone out to Aldebaran. (Of course, to be fair, my favorite convenience store is on the planet Zenon, home of our sit-in guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn.) Guess I’ll have to come up with a different spot to buy my “smokes”, eh? (Don’t smoke… just buy ’em. It’s a shopping addiction. Long story.)
What kind of transportation device is Mitch working on? Well, well… You ever heard of anti-gravity panels? You have? Good… because it has nothing to do with those. No, what Mitch is looking at right now is something called the “space elevator”. From what I understand, that’s where you throw some kind of line up into the great beyond, attach it to… I don’t know, an asteroid or something… then slide upstairs in some kind of pressurized cable car conveyance. Anyway, that’s the 
theory. What Mitch wants to do is to apply laser or particle beam technology to this principle (as others have attempted to do), so that we can eliminate the step of securing the other end of this mythical cable. Because after all – if we can get up there to anchor the thing… why the hell do we need the “thing” in the first place? (Logic…. an irresistible force, to be sure. )
Anyway, that’s where we’re at. And thanks to the efforts of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and our erstwhile law firm, Lincoln, Anti-Lincoln, Tuber, and Zamboola (still no jingle), we’ve gotten Loathsome Prick’s logo off of our goddamned album, in favor of our own “HammerMade” imprint. Progress, Mr. Greer.
