I’m sure I’m not the first to make this observation, but I’ll say it anyway. There’s something compelling about Capella (the Goat star). What it compels us to do is another thing entirely.
Booked into another series of club dates on the fourth stone out from Capella, my Big Green colleagues and I have tried to make the best of it. It hasn’t been easy. For one thing, the locals here are not very fond of country music, and since our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, is largely made up of mock-country numbers, that puts a damper on things. We’ve had to reach deep down into the song bag to keep these rock-like creatures happy. (And by that crack I don’t simply mean that they like rock music. I mean, they are themselves animate rocks, with stony arms and legs and eyes like geodes. But yes, unsurprisingly, they prefer rock music.)
We asked sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, to remove his cowboy hat for the duration (he tries his best to look the part when we go all Rick Perry) and light into some of our heavier numbers from days past, like Why Not Call It George?, one of Matt’s more rocking ruminations on the scientific method. Here’s an excerpt of the lyric, last verse:
Continental drift can be reversed
great tumblers shift
and Pangaea can be reclaimed
After me it can be renamed
Why not call it George? Call it George, after me
Always a favorite of Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who would very much like to name a continent after himself, particularly if said continent was the result of an experiment gone horribly right.
Well, sFshzenKlyrn turned in a searing solo that sent the rock-like denizens of Capella 4 into fits of geological ecstasy. There was waving and shouting, and if I spoke Capellini, I could tell you what they were saying. Their wallets speak louder than words, however, and they were grateful enough to drop some serious stone on us before the end of our week-long engagement. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a built-in assay lab, and he tells me that the currency rocks on Capella four are mostly feldspar, with traces of iron. Not exactly a fortune, but we’ll leave that to be made elsewhere.
Next stop: Earth-Mass Gassy Planet KOI-314c
Or it would have been, but for the fact that the gravity reversed itself halfway through the evening. I guess that happens all the time on Betelgeuse Five. (That would explain the suction cups on their hands and feet, right? Isn’t nature wonderful!) Still, who knew … and before I could say HAAALLP! I was flying off into the exosphere, a missile without a cause, along with my hapless bandmates.
So we hit it pretty hard last night, with 
That was the good part. The bad part was when the cable snapped in the vicinity of Jupiter, a hostile world that gave Cowboy Scat a right panning (like I said, I read the freaking trades!). We were caught in the gas giant’s gravitational pull, helpless but for the fading memory of Star Trek plot devices from fifty years ago. Or was it Lost in Space? Well, whatever the source, we used the “slingshot effect”, accelerating toward the planet and using its gravity to hurl us straight out the other side of the solar system.
It’s been a couple of weeks, so I don’t know if you recall our harebrained plan to get to the various extraterrestrial venues in our interstellar tour to support 
Oh, howdy. Yup, we’re getting ready to embark on our upcoming interstellar tour in support of our album, 
what that does. I wonder … if you switch it back and forth, does something, somewhere, cease to exist and then come back to life again? Important question.
Louis? We can’t even get to the moon, for chrissake. Then there’s always the option of telemetry – just flying the ship here by remote control. But with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a hammock in Madagascar for the fourth consecutive month, we haven’t the means of contriving such a device.