Well, tubey’s got a few holes in him. Little holes. A dab of plastic wood ought to do the trick. Where’s my spatula?

Greetings from the mythical Cheney Hammer Mill, home of Big Green and our new de-facto d.b.a., HammerMade music. That’s the ad-hoc publishing imprint for our upcoming album, International House, due sometime in September… on somebody’s doorstep (possibly yours). More about that later. Fact is, the man-sized tuber has run into a couple of problems in his day, but getting shot by a family member (extended family member, I should say) is not the kind of thing you expect in his kind of family. After all, few root vegetables have access to fire arms. God only knows what would happen if they did! They might share them with the trees, and THEN what would happen? Vengeance would be theirs! SWEET VENGEANCE!!! HELP US, JEEBUS!

Shoo-whee. My apologies – I do get carried away from time to time. What I was trying to say was, in keeping with the theory of six degrees of separation, tubey’s extended family includes everyone in this band, from Matt, to Johnny White, to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to Mitch Macaphee, and (of course) my sorry ass. That extended family member I mentioned earlier was old Mitch, blowing off some steam with a pellet gun. He wasn’t real careful about where he did his shooting, and tubey caught a few. Nothing serious, you understand, but it did effect tubey’s morale, which had been on a decided upswing since the departure of his cousins from the potato field. Now he’s back down in the dumps… so we’ve decided to come up with a new little job for him to do. Just so he feels needed, wanted, etc.

What kind of job can an oversized sweet potato handle? You may well ask. Actually, we were thinking something along the lines of customer service. Let’s face it – it’s been nine years since our last full length commercial release. We’re a little more than rusty when it comes to glad-handing the potential buyers of our wares, if you know what I mean. (Fact is, we’re actually quite a bit nastier than last time around… the bitterness of broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations… gnaws at you like a wolverine…. rrrrrrrrr…). Yeah, so anyway… we could use someone on the other end of the phone… or the IM chat box. Someone like tubey – he’s got an open, honest face that anyone could trust. And even though he can’t talk so good, he can at least type with his root filaments. (Pretty good trick for someone who’s been out of the ground for more than a few years.)

Once we get the plastic wood into tubey’s various pellet wounds, I’m sure he’ll agree to handle our communications. Then we can pile into whatever kind of oversized tin can Mitch Macaphee devises for us and head off to Aldebaran without a care in the world (aside from the fear of perishing in the icy cold of space…. ooohhh.)

Who said an elevator has to go up? It could go down, even sideways, if the spirit moves it. Just ask any mad scientist.

Well, friends, in case you’re still curious (and I know you’re not), yes, we are still trying to work out a way to get to Aldebaran without trooping on board the same old leaky spacecraft and taking the same old petrifying risks we always take in the name of science… I mean, music. (Arts and sciences, as it were.) This is proving a major pain in the Aldebaran, quite frankly. Don’t know if I’ve ever seen Mitch Macaphee in a fouler mood. He’s really stuck on this project, and like a temperamental post-impressionist painter, he sometimes suffers through every second of the creative process. Why, he’s out in the courtyard right now with an airgun, popping holes in our wooden outbuilding. And in the man-sized tuber, I suspect, since that’s where he sleeps. (We call it the “Root Cellar.”)

His starting point in this strange endeavor has been that very edgy technology known as the “space elevator”. That’s where they throw a cable up into space, hook it to an asteroid or a passing alien star destroyer, and run a jitney between the ground and the celestial anchor. The principle is a bit like tying a cord to a rock and swinging it around your head. Try it at home, sometime… like right now. Do it for a moment or two. While you’re doing it, you’ll notice a strange phenomenon – some strange energy is smashing all of your glassware to tiny bits. That is the power of centrifugal force… a power so, well, powerful that it bowls your personal robot assistant over when he walks into the room. (Actually, it’s probably better if you don’t try this in the kitchen.)

Right, so anyway… experimentation aside, the whole idea is getting us up into the great beyond without time-consuming repairs and costly rocket fuel (now more than $573.00 a gallon… though if John McCain gets Exxon to drill just under where he’s standing, it will be A LOT CHEAPER!!). My sense is that Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and discoverer of the space warp (no, it wasn’t Zephram Cochrane, damn it), is opting for some kind of virtual cable for his space elevator – a laser or particle beam solution that he can just aim in a given direction. That means we need only confine ourselves to destinations that can be reached by following a straight-line trajectory. Piece of cake!

Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I’m not the inventor. I’ve been telling Mitch that Aldebaran is more in a sideways direction than strictly up, but he just gives me funny looks.

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.

Well, we managed to pull the Bill O’Reilly sound-alike tirade off the audio. But the logo… oh, the logo…

Glad you could make it back. (Back where?) Still hanging in there at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, just me and the fellows. And robots. And root vegetables. And mad scientists. And wayward planets. Shall I go on? Perhaps not. Anyway, when last you checked in, we were hammering out the details of our record release. Not such a difficult task, you may have supposed, inasmuch as we live in a hammer mill. Sadly, this was not the case. Our label’s law firm – Hegemonic Legal Services and Worm Farm, Inc. – is pretty well checked out on entertainment law, being as they are a subsidiary of our old corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (or “Hegephonic” as they came to be known). They know the ropes. And they know how to use them.

What went wrong? Couple of things. First of all, our legal representation was handled by two artificially recovered denizens of the 19th Century, an oversized sweet potato, and a sentient planetoid. Lincoln, Anti-Lincoln, Tuber, and Zamboola (no, I won’t play their stupid jingle!) is really just a gaggle of hangers-on who banded together at the last minute to fill the massive void left in the courtroom by our absence of competent counsel. To give you some idea of what I mean, I’ll reproduce below an excerpt of the transcripts of the proceeding:

Judge: Are there any other points of consideration?

Hegemonic Counsel: Just one, your honor. Exhibit Q.

Judge: Which is…?

Hegemonic Counsel: A signed confession from the respondent.

Anti-Lincoln: Objection!

Judge: What is your objection, counselor?

Anti-Lincoln: Missouri cannot remain half slave, half free!

Zamboola: I second that, your honor.

…And it pretty much went downhill from there. Only positive thing I can say is that, while we may have lost the right to keep Loathsome Prick’s logo off of our new CD, Missouri was a free state when we walked out of that courtroom. ‘Tis an ill wind indeed…

So, on with the program. We may raise the point that some of our testimony was coerced (Hegemonic still does business the old-fashioned way… the “Jakarta” method, you might say…) One way or the other, we’ve got some packing to do. That trip to Aldebaran is getting closer by the day… and I haven’t even ordered the liquid oxygen yet.

Where do we sign again? Here? Right…. Now, we’re done. We’re not done? Freaking hell! You’ve already got our signatures sixty-seven times. Just copy the fuckers.

Everything by the book, that’s how these legal types are. Anyway… greetings and welcome to Big Green-land. We’re finalizing the terms of our forthcoming CD release (actually, it’s our second-coming release… we’ve got two more to go before we get to our fourth) entitled International House, and it’s important to get all the details straight. Except when it comes to really shmeensy details of the sort lawyers love to dive into. (They’re like hippos who joined a flee circus and are trying to dive into the little swimming pool.) Appendix this and codicil that; refer to paragraph 97, section vii; subsection 7a; insofar as the party of the second part shall render unto the party of the first part said sums as designated in paragraph 43…. Damn! I’ll tell you, it’s all we musicians can do to keep up with the obsessions of the corporate paymasters who rule our asses. (Power to the people! Strike! Strike! Strike!)

Whoops… slipped into a Marxian trance for a moment. (Workers control the means of production…. ahem!) Okay, now I don’t think I’m a particularly unreasonable person. Certainly Marvin (my personal robot assistant) doesn’t think so, either. And I know that brother Matt is far less unreasonable than I am. John? He’s a saint among men. And yet we all seem to recognize that our label, Loathsome Prick Records, is being more than a little true to their name when it comes to getting credit on the album. They’re insisting on prominent acknowledgment, even though this is essentially a self-paid manufacturing job. (We’re mortgaging the most valuable thing we have…. Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating machine. Don’t tell Trevor James!) Now how asinine is that? And I’m not talking about a subtle plug – they want an entire panel of the CD cover…and an audio plug at the opening of the album! Here’s the copy they’ve proposed:

Big Green’s “International House” is brought to you by Loathsome Prick Records, the awesomest label in the world. Without us, these losers would suck in obscurity. Take it away! Fucking thing sucks!

I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as mildly insulting. And they want it read by some guy they know who sounds like Bill O’Reilly freaking out on Inside Edition. (It may even be O’Reilly, I don’t know…. they’ve got some connections.) Now, this wouldn’t be a problem… if we had a competent lawyer. Now when I say “competent”, I mean someone who understands the law in the 21st Century. With our limited budget, we’ve been relying on legal counsel from the law firm Lincoln, Anti-Lincoln, Zamboola, and Tuber. (I’ll spare you their T.V. jingle.) As you may have surmised, the only two “lawyers” here are honest Abe and his doppelganger (who, actually, never passed the bar… in fact, he’s never passed a bar in my experience without stopping for at least a couple of drinks). And their expertise is mostly in the context of 19th Century railway law. As for the other partners, well…. the less said the better.

So that’s where we stand… legal blackmail from our rapacious corporate label. Just one more way THE MAN keeps us down. Workers of the world UNITE! (Damn – there I go again. Pipe down, comrade!)

What do you suggest we do, Gertrude? What’s done is done, right? What? No, no… that’s not an option. Besides… he’s too old to be any good in a stew. Bound to be stringy as hell.

Oh, hi, friends (or as John McCain might say, “my friends”). Sorry… I was just on the phone with someone at our label, that vice president of marketing and coercion person. She’s all bent out of shape. So are we all, frankly. Yes, that’s a metaphor. Though in the case of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), being bent out of shape is a serious matter and one that has been plaguing him since his invention by Mitch Macaphee some few years ago. (Marvin is bent just slightly out of shape, as perhaps you can tell from his photos.) I have to say, I don’t like it when people yell at me over the phone. I kind of worry they’ll hurt their throats and have to talk like Miles Davis for the rest of their natural lives. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that….)

Okay… so what was all the yelling and shouting and rending of garments about? Well… it seems out very own man-sized tuber has been a little bit indiscreet. Okay… I’ll be honest… extremely indiscreet. Where do I begin? Well… it seems at some point he got ahold of one of those vacation guides touting the great north country. So he decided one night to wheel off with some fellow tubers and go on a little trip up along the Moose River. (You know…. Moose River! Wider than the Nile! I’ll cross you single file some daaaaay!!!) Not a big deal, right? Shouldn’t be a problem for any normal root vegetable. I mean, you’d think he could keep a lid on his little bender… but no. The very next morning, laying across my breakfast table (right on top of my day-old toast), was a big freaking headline about none other than the tuber himself.

Okay, that was bad enough – to have his name plastered across my morning paper. But the fact that he managed to get his name plastered across Gertrude Al-Kabar’s morning paper was just about intolerable. (Sure, she gets the same paper I do… but what are the chances both would have the same front page?) Now the label is all pissed off. They’re nervous about terrestrial record sales, of course. I keep telling them that any publicity is good publicity, but these fuckers are old school. They can smell a scandal fifty miles away, especially when it involves five-foot-tall root animate vegetables on motorized carts. That freaking tuber has put us in Coventry once again. (Where is Coventry? Right where we are, that’s where.)

So… it looks like our promotional tour will definitely begin in outer space. Aldebaran here we come. Thanks a load, tubey! You and your white water rafting adventure holiday!!

Give me another look at that map. No, no – not the Earth map… that outer space thingy. You know… the one Mitch gave us last week. Right, right – that’s the one. Thank you.

Hiya, folks. Glad you could stop by. Gives me a chance to ‘splain something… something kind of important. (By “important”, I mean in the relative sense. Not life-changing, not even day-changing, but perhaps momentary thought-changing.) As you know, over the last few weeks, we’ve been referring to the impending release and distribution of our second album, which we’re calling Monacalucci Summer… I mean, International House. (Sorry… I was thinking about that art house film I saw a few days ago. Monacalucci, was that weird!) And, as you might imagine, our rapacious corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, has been kibitzing a bit on the marketing. More than a bit, actually. In fact, LP has put their collective foot down… right on our necks. (This is just like the Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm days.)

Right, so… what have they done? Here’s what. They’ve insisted that we release the album to the extraterrestrial market before sending it to stores on Earth. Their reasoning is that most of our listeners are out there (in fact, most are beyond the orbit of Jupiter) and that we should appeal to our base before trying to break into what is, for us, a new and relatively untested market (Earth, or as we call it, “de Oit”). Now, we disagree with LP on this, and we said so. I don’t think I have to tell you what happened next. I do? Okay, well… I’ll just give you the part after all the guns went off. And the explosion. Right, so… after all that, we more or less… gave in. Let’s face it, friends… they’ve got us over a barrel. (No, that’s not a metaphor. They literally have us suspended over a barrel. Someone help us!)

Anywho, Gertrude Al-Kabar, LP’s Vice President of Marketing and Coercion, came up with something she calls the “Aldebaran First” plan. Here’s the skinny – we start promoting the new album on Aldebaran, and work back from there. Why Aldebaran? You mean, aside from the fact that it’s the brightest star in the constellation Taurus? According to Gertrude, the reasoning is quite simple… start with the red giants. If we do well in red giant systems, we can move on to hotter stars – yellow dwarfs, blue dwarfs, etc. Start big, end little. This is fortunate for Mitch Macaphee – he is anxious to determine whether Aldebaran’s long-period radial velocity oscillation indicates the presence of a companion of substantial mass. (Stop snickering. It could, you know.) Ah, ’tis an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere, sometime… somehow.

So w.t.f., as they say on their little phones (with their thumbs, no less). Looks like another interstellar tour for yours truly. Adelbaran here we come (right back where we started from).

Move that comma a few words to the left. Okay. Now how about a stroke around that casaba melon? Don’t think so? Why not? Hate melons… good reason. T’hell with it.

Oh, right… this is being recorded for posterity (or some approximation thereof). Hello, everyone. Glad you could stop by. Just lending a little guidance here – nothing pressing. We’re in the process of creating a CD cover (CD? What’s a CD, mommy?) for our new album and, well, it’s a slow, painstaking process… particularly when you don’t have certain basic conveniences, like… a designer, for instance. Now that would come in handy. As much as I’m against outsourcing, we did attempt to put this particular job in the hands of some extremely cheap, non-union surrogates in the subcontinent. Or so we supposed. (In the age of the Internet, who truly knows where anyone is? Why, I could be right here. Or over…. here! Or maybe even…… here!) Confused? Yes, so am I. Let me see if I can ‘splain you.

Okay, so we’ve got the master of our new recording, International House. And we showed it to our rapacious corporate label, Loathsome Prick (LP) Records. And they saw it, and knew it was good. And lo, there was heard in the land a low braying and a gnashing of teeth. And we were sore afraid. For it was the Vice President of Marketing, Gertrude Al-Kabar, and her razor sharp eye was trained on the cheap cover we had fashioned out of used newspapers and tacky glue recovered from a direct mail envelope. “This is an abomination!” she cried, and the other members of the management team nodded in grim agreement. And lo, our cheaply fashioned cover was tossed to the ground and spat upon, whilst foul curse-words were cast upon it, and it was laid low and forever damned.

Okay, so THAT didn’t go so well. Anyway, the LP team suggested we outsource. Gertrude gave us a lead on some firm she had encountered in her email inbox that very morning. So we followed it up, sent the proposal, and they went to work. Actually, the process went surprisingly fast. In fact, those subcontinental designers were quite intuitive. It seemed like they knew what we wanted before we even told them. Then one night last week, when Matt was up watching his Peregrine Falcons, he noticed the man-sized tuber working furiously on our one Web-connected computer terminal. This seemed odd, as… well… he doesn’t have hands, exactly. But his little root tendrils were clicking furiously across the keyboard, and it took no time for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to determine that tubey was, in fact, the outsourced labor we’d been corresponding with. Mystery solved.

All that money and effort, for what? To enrich one of our own? What a bloody waste! Worse, since we caught on to his ruse, the tuber has not been taking direction very well. Too much vegetation, damn it. What are we, landscapers??

Where the hell is Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Tubey? What the hell… is everyone out for a freaking curry? Right, right… I’ll just open the mail bag, then. High time too – a few more pounds and it will collapse into a black hole, and that would be the end of everything.

Okay, okay – I exaggerate. No need to worry. Got a couple of missives to open here. Let’s start with something that bears domestic franking….

Dear Big Green,

Hate to seem like a prick, but where the hell is that album you’ve been yakking about these past five years?

– Furlin McGreevey, Basinstock, Idaho

Hi, Furlin. Thanks for writing. And no worries – you’re not a prick. (If you were, you’d work for our record label.) Fact is, I sympathize with you totally. I’ve gotten so sick of waiting for Big Green to release their next album, I’ve thought about resigning as head of their fan club. (Didn’t have the heart to do it, damn it.) Fact is, we’re running out of excuses… so it looks like we’re ready to release that sucker after all.

Here’s another letter, from Amanda B. Freakowitz of Toronto…

Dear Big Green ,

Whaaaa-aaat??

Best,

Amanda

You heard right, Amanda…. that’s exactly what I said. Our long-awaited sophomore (or sophomoric) album is ready for release, bar the packaging, replicating, frisbee-tossing, etc. Tentatively titled “International House,” it contains 16 tracks of new material from yours truly and will soon be available at a pawn shop… I mean, record store near you. (And perhaps more than one pawn shop as well. It’s time I got my shoes back. These corns are killing me.)

Here’s one more letter, this from sMyrzGlorp FhZhyzllnyk of the Crab Nebula…

gyRmanTiall, Big Green….

Tuaoo dlAT,k lsdjTlbmok b-Yulandros itsat Megaphone delplehzrnyk funBanoldmental rzaphhhhuyllll.

vootie,

sMyrzGlorp

Thanks, sMyrzGlorp. Sure, the mp3s will be available online. Probably all the same places 2000 Years To Christmas can be found, but I’ll definitely keep you posted. Sounds like a bad cold you’ve got there. Better get some rest. And tell uTlksjnorbiar I said vootie.

Okay – got to run. I can hear the boys returning from the curry palace, the aroma of mutter paneer wafting up the staircase. Save a little for me, tubey – there’s a good chap.

Need a couple more of those buckets. How about some pale green in the upper left hand corner? And put that HMI light just behind the plastic fichus tree. That’s the ticket.

Ah, visitors. Welcome, welcome. Reading this, you may ask yourself, “What the fuck – do these guys do everything themselves?” (No, I’m not affecting to give you permission to ask such a question. Nay, I believe in free will, and am merely speculating on the character of your thoughts. Affected, me? Perish the thought!) And the answer to that question might be yes, if by “everything” you mean “everything that can be done in that run-down mill.” (If you mean something else, well… what can I say?) So… yes, we do… uh… do everything around these parts. Well… most of us do, anyway. (Some of us don’t do everything… or “do nothing”, as the saying goes.)

Oh, sure – we have the equivalent of domestic help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) counts as a domestic, technically speaking. (Very technically.) I suppose the man-sized tuber counts, too, sort of like a coffee table might. (Hey… it holds coffee for you, right? Defies gravity in a sense, no?) But how much help are they, really, when it comes to the important stuff, like… like bricking up an open window, or finding a lost quail egg, or whitewashing the widder-woman’s fence? How about mastering an album, damnit? How much help is Marvin, eh? Squat! And the freaking man-sized tuber – when’s the last time he twiddled a volume pot? Day before never, that’s when! So, hey… the next time you wonder why it takes us five years to make a m.f.-ing album, here’s an easy answer – we get no help from nobody, no how. (pant, pant, pant….)

Phew! I feel much, much better now. Catharsis aside, there is a grain of truth to what I’m saying, albeit an extremely minute one. Don’t think I need to mention that our rapacious corporate label is worse than useless in this regard. What the hell – who would have ever thought a company called Loathsome Prick Records would be run by scoundrels and assholes? And yet, there you have it. (Don’t tell them I said so, okay?) And then there are the closer-to-home issues, like the quarrelling Lincolns (posi and anti), and Big Zamboola, who just hangs around the courtyard confounding the local astronomy club with his mysterious gravitational light-bending trick (quite astounding). It’s not so much that they’re destructive – more that they simply don’t contribute to a harmonious living atmosphere. Neither does Mitch Macaphee, with his rapidly multiplying horde of experimental critters. (Frankenstone has discovered the rave. A couple of decades late, but what the hell… he’s made of stone.)

At least we’re back in the confines of the mill, safe from the rain (or most of it, anyway). Now if we could just get past these household projects, maybe we could … I don’t know … take a raft down the Mississippi… or the Mohawk…