That thing you just said five minutes ago. Say it again. No, not that – the OTHER thing you said. The thing that wasn’t some dumb-ass comment. Whoa… calm down, Hemingway!
Sensitive artists, these rock musicians. Well, let me qualify that. I’m actually referring to the individuals, human and non-human, who hang around with rock musicians. I’m talking about your man-sized tuber, your Marvin (my personal robot assistant), your Mitch Macaphee, your Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, etc. We of Big Green proper (brother Matt, brother-in-law John, and I) have asked these hangers-on for suggestions on where we should take the next interstellar tour. Of course, this is a bit like placing 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters and hoping for Hamlet to pop out of one of the carriages. Still, you do get lucky from time to time, and just today – I swear – one of them made a suggestion that made sense. Actual sense, in a wholly non-ironic way.
What am I babbling about? I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. (Ahem…) Mitch Macaphee spouted something that sounded like a reasonable suggestion – let’s begin the next tour on Betelgeuse, he said. (Not the exact words, but close enough. In fact, he may have been coughing up a stuffed grape leaf.) The logic behind this is obvious. Betelgeuse is enormous – many times the size of our own sun. Why not start big, right? Am I right? Okay… so maybe the logic isn’t so obvious. In any case, we’ve played in the Betelgeuse system before, and as I remember, those shapeless globs of protoplasm we found there listened better than most of our terrestrial audiences. (At least they appeared to; they were all bubbly by the end of the show.)
I’m sure you think we should find better things to do with our time than idly ponder the finer points of our tour itinerary when, in fact, it is totally out of our hands… and into the calloused paws of our promoter, Admiral Gonutz (ret.). Well, if you want to know the sad truth…. we don’t. This is the stuff that music biz is made of, friends. A little bit of playing and a whole lot of waiting around to play, as Keith Richards put it many long years ago. I personally prefer John Lennon’s response when someone asked him how he liked France, and he said something like, it was a car and a plane and a car and a room and a car and a plane. With us, it’s more like a skateboard and a rocket and an airless void and a volcano and an ocean and a steamboat and an ambulance and a mental ward.
Okay, anybody else got suggestions? Big Zamboola, perhaps? Marvin? C’mon, let’s have it, chaps!