Wait, I didn’t hear that last bit. Are you saying that we can’t even get in the front door let alone the living quarters? What the fuck. Where is that Goldilocks Planet again? Cygnus?
Oh, hi. Well, we have made our triumphant return to planet Earth, our somewhat disapproving mother, having completed Interstellar Tour 2014 in support of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. And as any of you who travel in interstellar space know all too well, when you get back from a long journey, typically you find that everything has gone to hell in your absence. It’s a severe disincentive to traveling, I can tell you. But what’s the alternative? Hole up in a leaky hammer mill all winter? Not a chance.
Big Green’s loaner rocket touched down in Central New York around 1:00 a.m local time on Thursday, only to find that someone had changed the padlock on the gate to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where we have made our home for the past decade or two (because, as Frank Zappa said, all of the bands live together). Different lock, for sure – unlike the old one, this one works, and none of us had the key, so we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to the local constabulary and asked for assistance. (Marvin was promptly arrested for impersonating a robot, which seems unjust and vaguely insulting.)
Okay, turns out, someone moved into the Hammer Mill during our absence, and they don’t seem eager to relinquish their squatter’s rights in deference to our own. What’s worse is that they appear to be affiliated with that rancher out in Nevada – what’s his name again? You know – that dude that has been grazing his cattle for free on federal land, owes about a million dollars in back grazing fees, and got together a posse of sorts to take up arms and fight off the Bureau of Land Management. The folks in the mill, well … they’re kind of like the Led Zeppelin tribute band version of those Nevada militia dudes. They got the hats, they got the pickup trucks, and … crucially … they got the guns.
Just trying to negotiate entry right now without getting my hair parted by a 30-30 rifle round. That Goldilocks Planet is looking better all the time. I wonder if they have the extraterrestrial equivalent of QE2 up there.
Rocky landing. We weren’t here five minutes before someone got the idea of sending Marvin out there to plant the Big Green flag – the one friend of the band Leif Zurmuhlen made for us back in the day. Hey, well … it’s a little icy out there, so Marvin took a couple of tumbles before finding a spot flat enough to accommodate a flag on a stick. There’s no atmosphere to speak of, so we asked him to hold the free end of the flag while we snapped a picture or two. When we get those back from the pharmacy on Neptune, we’ll share them with you? (Yes, another episode of Luddites in space.)
The fact that most of these strange worlds have been featured in American movies and television shows from the 1950s and 60s is little help when you’re trying to determine the precise composition (and toxicity level) of a greenish atmosphere. Sure, you can have that kind of trouble back home, in South Carolina or West Virginia … but at least down there you have your pick of mad scientists. Up here, we’ve got Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his converted wall barometer.
not an astrophysicist, but I do have some experience with market research, so I’m guessing that this was a phone survey, and that our old friend Waleed Abdulati, NASA’s head scientist, simply hired a phone bank and had them dial distant star systems at random and ask, “How many in your solar system?” “Do you have a companion star or dark matter object?” “Is s/he working?”)
Right, if you’re just joining us, Big Green is furiously working its way through the list of 715 new planets NASA recently put out, looking for halfway decent venues. We’re not picky, you know. It’s not like we need a proper dressing room with a row of lightbulbs arrayed above a long mirror and chilled Champagne in a bucket. Hell, we’ll settle for an unlocked fire door on one side of the stage. (I can just about hear some indie musician out there saying, “Big Green needs stages to perform on? What a bunch of prima donnas!”)
Well, the good news for our Interstellar Tour is that we’ve got a whole boatload of possibilities for new venues. NASA just discovered 715 new planets, and scientists say that the law of averages dictates at least 3% of them must have indie music venues. Even better, our sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn, has been to at least half of these newbie planetoids, and has established relationships with the relevant booking agents. He’s out ahead of us now, greasing the wheels a bit. I was hoping he’d take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him, but alas … sFshzenKlyrn flies without a spaceship and Marvin gets vertigo easily. Useless bag of bolts.
Well, after several days of drifting aimlessly, we appear to have settled into orbit around Jupiter, the bull moose of the outer solar system. Our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFhzenKlyrn, has volunteered to visit the surface of the gas giant to see if there are any performance opportunities, since we’re in the neighborhood. I’d go myself, but alas, I require oxygen and Earthlike temperatures, to say nothing of solid ground. Sure, we’ve played the Great Red Spot before, but that was back in the day. (It’s probably a gas station now, like most of the clubs we played back then.)
“all of the above” approach to energy production and development … so I guess that means everything above the Earth’s surface is up for grabs.) They’re apparently fracking the place. I know, because Anti-Lincoln got a job working the bilge pumps. (They also let him handle burning off the gas leaks. He has a lot of practice with that.)
Song: Paradise
Yes, you read that right. We got a bull’s eye on Ceres, the big brass buckle of the asteroid belt. I’m beginning to understand what’s happening here. Our rented space vehicle has a very primitive voice-activated computer guidance system, a bit like the blue tooth set in my car. When I tell my blue tooth, “call Oscar,” it starts dialing the number of someone in Madagascar. Well, we told our guidance system to take us to Sirius, and it took us to freaking Ceres. Christ on a bike!