Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

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I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on …  BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.

Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.

Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )

In the studio? Uh ... okay.

Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)

I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Usual Rubbish

Cloud nein.

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Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don‘t have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question!

For crying out loud, why … why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM – everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we’re bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business?

Right, so … now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody … but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200,000 light years out yonder. Now, necessarily, such a journey would require the development of technologies previously unthought of by humankind. Recall the challenges NASA faced when JFK charged them with putting a white dude on the moon within the course of a single decade. Christ on a bike, they had to invent miniaturized computing, develop advanced rocketry, perfect the concept of staged spacecrafts, and the only help they got was untold billions of dollars in public funds and the advice of retired Nazi ballistic scientists.

At this rate, we should get there by the end of time.

They did it, though. And what have we got? Well …. one mad scientist. (Actually, right now I would describe him as just a little grumpy.) One supercomputer – Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a Pentium processor from 1995 humming away in his little brass noggin. And a second-hand flying saucer, salvaged from some boneyard on the outskirts of Roswell, NM. Pull all of those resources together, and nothing can stop you … from getting about three feet off the ground. We’re still working on that first light-year, so we’ve signaled ahead to the promoter on the Small Magellanic Cloud that we may be a little late. Unfortunately, our message is traveling a bit more slowly than us – I can just about see it through the rear window.

Did NASA say uncle when things went wrong? Hell no. But then … maybe they should have. UNCLE!

Usual Rubbish

Are you Sirius?

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Homeward bound, I wish I was … Hoo boy, I hope Paul Simon isn’t super litigious, like those folks who own the rights to Happy Birthday. Who the hell are they again? And for chrissake, DON’T SING THE BIRTHDAY SONG!

Thing is, we will be heading in the general direction of home over the coming week, that is, after our gig on Sirius tomorrow … depending on how THAT goes. Like most of our interstellar tours, the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is presenting certain challenges and unexpected turns of events. Our concert on Procyon was overshadowed somewhat by a large, dry alien moon. (Fun fact: “dry alien moon” is an anagram of the name Leonard Nimoy.) When I say overshadowed, I mean cast in darkness … which is problematic when you’re playing outdoors. No lights in the venue, because the denizen of Procyon 3 can see in the dark. Interesting evolutionary trick, as it’s a binary system, so when Procyon A goes down, Procyon B is over your shoulder …. until the dry alien moon intervenes.

I ask you – does any other band have to put up with this shit? We need freaking night vision goggles to get through a night. I was playing organ parts on my piano, string parts on my organ. Matt picked up a 12-string guitar to play six string ( of course …. that’s just the way he strings his Ovation Balladeer … nothing to do with the darkness, you understand). The lunar eclipse was still in progress when the gig ended and the promoter handed us our pay packet. We were well out of the planet’s atmosphere before I realized they had paid us in Betelgeusian quatloos, which are virtually worthless back on Earth! Well … you can spend them at Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Blockbuster Video, but that’s about it.

Which Procyon?

Of course, that means when we get to Sirius we have to make some hay. I’m talking Sirius money, people. Their currency is more ethereal, I understand …. most of their transactions take place via thought transference. So if you’re playing a song that someone likes, they think a few shekels into your membrane. It makes busking a whole hell of a lot easier – none of that passing the hat bullshit. So Marvin (my personal robot assistant), you’re off the hook this week.

Anyway, we’ll see how well we go over on the dog star. Hope they don’t request Werewolves of London. My Zevon is a little rusty.

Usual Rubbish

Cold comfort star.

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Oh, Jesus … turn that thing up, Mitch. I’m just starting to get the feeling back into my fingers. No, I don’t want to burn them off, but geez … there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

Well, hello, friends of Big Green. Time for another dispatch from our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, an interstellar romp across the indie club circuit from Neptune to … well … Epsilon Indie. Except we may not make it quite that far, given the limitations of our transport. Mitch Macaphee’s used saucer lot vehicle has very little living space and can’t carry a lot of fuel, so we’re doing short hops across the void of interstellar space, hoping to bring some down-home joy to the lonely denizens of the forgotten worlds scattered across our modest galactic neighborhood. We take turns watching the planets pass by through the one viewport our ship affords. This is plain clothes, my friends … nothing but the best.

Our gig on Barnard’s Star b (that’s not a typo … the planet is named “b”, for crying out loud) was okay, I guess. Kind of a chilly reception. The surface temperature on “b” is -238 degrees Fahrenheit, and the inhabitants of “b” …. the B-ings, if you will … are a bit like our Neptunian fans. Picture ice crystals with arms and legs. You might call them pseudopods instead of appendages, but that would make you a microbiologist. When we played Jesus Has A Known Mind, they swayed a bit. A few of them held lighters over their head-like projections. There was something that could be called dancing, but the B-ings movements are so subtle you probably need special instrumentation to detect it.

Looks inviting?

One thing I’ll say for the inhabitants of Barnard b …. they need to get themselves a new star. Barnard’s star is meek, man, really meek. I mean, I’ve had space heaters that radiated more warmth than that little beacon. It emits only 0.4 percent of our own sun’s radiant energy, it says here, so if you’re waiting for summer to get there, stop waiting … it ain’t coming. Anyway, we played our tunes, collected our quatloos, chipped our spacecraft out of an ice sheet, and got the hell out of there before they asked for an encore.

Next stop is Procyon, in Canis Minor. That’s a bit of a hike, especially in this dumb-ass heap. What’s more, our navigational computer failed two days out from Barnard, so we had to hook Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to the control panel so that his 486 processor can tell our various rockets when to fire and when to stand ready. Ahem …. may be problematic. We’ll just see where we end up.

Usual Rubbish

Saint Barnard.

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Captain’s log, star date May 17, 2019 … which just happens to be the same as today’s “Earth” date. Strange that those two calendars would coincide on this of all days! But no matter.

Yes, Big Green is currently en route to Barnard’s star, coming off a successful string of performances on Neptune (5/12) and on the third planetoid in the Proxima system (5/15). Tickets were pretty hard to get, so if you’re reading this you probably didn’t see either of those shows. Our performances were live-streamed, but given the vast distances from Earth, the stream won’t get to terrestrial devices until sometime in late 2027. (That’s what passes for “live” on an interstellar tour.)

So … the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is off to a barn burner of a start, at least according to our publicist. Frankly, between the two of us, I consider any Neptune show I can walk away from a success. When your audience is submerged in a lake of frozen methane, it’s a little hard to tell how you’re going over. I thought I saw some movement when we played “Two Lines”, but it may have been a trick of the light. There’s a strange electromagnetic pulse that zaps through the methane, causing a greenish shimmer. I like to think of it as applause, but …. critics may differ.

Next came the Proxima system. We played on Proxima Centauri b, popularly known as Alpha Centauri (AC), the fabled destination of the Space Family Robinson, who took a wrong turn at Pluto and ended up in the worst kind of trouble television has ever seen. It’s a consensus among the Big Green crew that the Robinsons weren’t missing much when they gave AC a miss. Sure, it’s a rocky world, 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, and sure, it is inhabited by little blue space creatures who snap their finger-like appendages in time with the music. Okay, and the accommodations were better than expected. So … maybe the Robinsons SHOULD have gone there before going back to Switzerland. Who am I to judge?

Proxima? That's close.

Right about now I’m sure someone’s asking, “How’s the ship?” Well …. it’s adequate. Mitch Macaphee is somehow keeping it all together, which is a good thing, because Barnard’s Star is six light years away and we need to be there on the 20th or we forfeit about 4,000 quatloos. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks the place is inhabited by St. Bernard dogs. He doesn’t spell so good. Or think so good.

Spaceward, my friends! Into the breach!

Usual Rubbish

Practice makes more practice.

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All right, then. Ready? One, two, three, four ….  wait, whaaat? That’s not how that song starts. The bagpipes come in on the third verse, not right at the beginning. Where’s that screaming guitar, Mitch? You promised me a screaming guitar!

Oh, man. It’s really been too long since we got out on the star-dusty trail and played a few remote venues. Pulling together a live show is hard when you’re this rusty. In fact, it’s starting to make interstellar space travel seem trivial by comparison. But what the hell, we’re doing it – Big Green is going on another galactic tour, assuming we can find a spaceship worthy of such a journey. No matter what the difficulties may be, the daunting challenges … we will not be daunted. Forward! Forward into the breech, me lads!

So much for the motivational speech. Actually, I think the toughest problem we have on this project is, well, personnel. We’re a little thin on the ground here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, Matt and I are the only humans in this band. The rest of it is made up of robots and possibly space aliens. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be sitting in on drums this time out. I say “sitting”, but it’s really more like standing. He doesn’t actually play the drums – he just emits the sounds of drums in a vaguely rhythmic fashion. I’m starting to think he may have been fashioned out of some old machine parts recycled from the Caribbean.  Or maybe he was a Victor Borge imitator in a previous life – I don’t know.

One, two, three, GO!

What about the guitar? The lead guitar? No worries – Mitch Macaphee isn’t sitting in with us. But he DID promise to build us a self-playing guitar programmed with all of our recent Ned Trek era songs. That would be a tremendous time-saver, but as always, Mitch overpromises and underdelivers. He did go so far as set up a guitar on a stand with a transistor radio taped to it, tuned to the local classic rock station. I suspect he thought we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and a REAL automaton guitar player, since we typically ask guitarists to just play like some guy on the radio. (He’s got us all figured out.)

Okay, so we’ve gotten through two songs. A few more to go, right? Right.

Usual Rubbish

There it goes.

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That was firecrackers, right? It’s getting closer to fourth of July, I guess. Or maybe it’s someone’s birthday. Please tell me that was firecrackers, because if it wasn’t … ugh … there goes the neighborhood.

Yeah, well … we went to bed to the sound of gunfire last night. Some knucklehead pulling a Yosemite Sam imitation right out in front of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Could be they thought the place was empty – it is, after all, abandoned. Anyway, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out there to have a look. He’s kind of like one of those tactical bomb-sniffing robots, except that he doesn’t have a tactical bone in his body and he hates the smell of explosives.

Anyway, he tottered out there and took a look around, then came back in with a couple of bottle caps. Not 100% sure that was related to what we sent him out there for, but there you have it. We may be looking for a gunman who enjoys drinking soda while he/she is shooting up the place. Hey, look … we have to go with the robot we have, not the one we wish we had. He’s not a tactical robot; he’s more of a strategic robot in that he helps us map out our plans for interstellar tours. (Trouble is, he does it in a language I don’t understand … a language shared by maybe a half-dozen robot assistants worldwide, all built by Mitch Macaphee.)

Oooh! Let's go to Gallactic Centre! That sounds like FUN!

Needless to say, the recent degradation of our little neighborhood is hastening our decision to go out on the road again. And when I say “road”, I mean deep space pathways … imaginary lines through the trackless void. We’re working on an itinerary for a Spring Tour 2019, starting off in the outer reaches of our own solar system, then moving on to some of the more distant locales where the gravity is unpredictable and the audiences more profoundly diverse. It’s all still on the drawing board, but we’re thinking it looks something like this:

  • May 12, Neptune
  • May 15, Proxima system
  • May 20, Barnard’s Star system
  • May 27, Procyon system
  • May 30, Epsilon Indi
  • June 5, Jupiter, red spot

Naturally, we’ve got some gaps to fill. And then there’s the question of transportation. Details, details! Don’t bother me with trifles. We gotta get on the road before some of these local Yosemite Sams start using us for target practice. Tour for your life! (Hey … there’s a theme.)

Usual Rubbish

In the hole he goes.

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Let us pray. In the name of the father, the son … and in the hole he goes. That’s all I’ve got. You want some more? Some hail Marys or something? Try dial-a-prayer.

Even agnostics can find reasons to pray. Mine was on the occasion of examining the space craft that will take us on our next interstellar tour, yet to be named, tentatively slated for early this summer. To call this vehicle ramshackle is to curse it with false praise; I’m guessing this thing never got to the top of the troposphere before taking a Boeing-style nose dive. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, says he can spruce it up a bit, but it’s going to take more than a little spruce to make that shitwagon spaceworthy. Try again, Mitch.

This enterprise has taken on a bit more urgency since the publication of that image of the Black Hole at the center of galaxy M-87. Our first thought, of course, was that this might be another stop on our tour, another venue. Forget the light-devouring, soul-crushing gravitation … it’s a black hole named Powehi, for chrissake. How could we not play there? I’m leaving it to Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to handle the booking arrangements, but whatever the paycheck may end up being, just picture the live album: The Main Event Horizon: Big Green Live from Powehi.

Hmmm... Looks promising.

Okay, now … talk me out of it. I hate, hate, hate space travel. The food is terrible. The gravity is highly inconsistent. You get stiffed by every manner of space creature, most of whom think humans are some kind of mannerless androids. (I typically make an effort to explain to them that Marvin is the only one who actually approaches that description, but often to no avail.) And yet … we keep doing it, right? What drives us on, to gig where no man has gigged before? Ambition? No, it can’t be that. I don’t think we have enough ambition between us to bend over and pick up a twenty someone dropped on the sidewalk. Wealth? Don’t even. The thrill of performance? Please!

Come to think of it, I have no idea why we tour. And maybe that’s the best reason to do it.

Usual Rubbish

Money tree.

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I don’t know, man. My pressure suit is a little frayed around the elbows. I don’t even know where I left my magnetic boots. We’re probably not ready for that, but … if you insist. Jesus.

Ah, hello. Band meeting. Joe’s here, that’s all I can confirm. No one else wants to go on the record, including Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though he has appeared on at least one of our records, truth be told. (Forgive the double-entendre.) We’ve been tossing around ideas for generating a little cash, as the Big Green collective has been struggling a bit of late. The obvious remedy would be another tour, probably of the interstellar variety, but as I was saying earlier, our gear is threadbare as hell and we don’t even have a line on a spaceship rental. God knows what we would cross that trackless void in this time around.

Well, to be sure, the lure of money drives humankind to desperate means. We could probably wrangle a string of marginal gigs between Neptune and Aldebaran, though I’m not clear on how lucrative the exercise would turn out to be. The exchange rate on Quatloos is in the toilet these days. And between the two of us, I’m getting a little long in the tooth for space travel – not sure I could hold my breath long enough to get to Neptune, to say nothing of destinations beyond the Kuiper Belt. Also … we’re short a guitar player. Just saying.

Sounds like a tour

Not that playing gigs is the only way to shake the money tree. Every musician runs into this situation at various points in her/his career. What’s it going to be? Washing dishes? Done it. Carrying boxes and stocking shelves? Done that, too. Driving a cab? Well … I haven’t done that, but I came close once or twice. Then there’s Mitch’s idea. You might recall how he’s been experimenting with gravity. Well, he was musing on how to monetize his new technology, and it struck him that people pay for water, they pay for electricity, they pay for heating fuel … maybe he could get them to pay for gravity. He’s thinking about doing a market test – namely, sending gravity bills to our neighbors. If they don’t pay, he would train his anti-grav ray on their houses and claim that their service had been discontinued. That’s when the simoleons start rolling in.

Okay, well … there may be nicer ways to make a living.  Like … I don’t know … playing music, perhaps.

 

Usual Rubbish

Mailbag redux.

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Well, it’s been a while since we’ve done this, but I think it’s about time we open up the old mail bag and respond to some of the cards, letters, emails, messages in bottles, skywriting, notes tied to bricks thrown through windows, etc. we’ve received over the past, what, ten years?

Full disclosure: Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was tasked some years back with screening our fan mail. I’m not sure he fully understood the parameters of that assignment. Our intention was for him to use the kind of screen that would allow some of the messages to pass through. I guess we should have been more explicit. He appears to have tossed most of them out. Robots!

The thing is dusty as hell, but (cough!) here goes . First, here’s a little message from someone with the code name “Ask” in the United Kingdom:

Aw, this was a really nice post. Spending some time and actual effort to make a superb article… but what can I say… I hesitate a lot and don’t seem to get anything done.

– Ask.

Hey, thanks for your message, “Ask”. I’m not an expert on personal efficiency, but you should get that hesitation thing looked at. You might need a new set of spark plug wires. Luckily, you have the National Health Service over in England, so that shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish.

Here’s another one, from this side of the pond:

Hey Big Green,

When the hell are you going to get up off your sorry asses and perform somewhere? It’s been years since you had a decent gig. Why are you wasting your time, posting shit on the internet and making up fan letters? It’s just disgraceful.

– Francis McDonald, Keokuk, IA

Well, Francis, I’m glad you asked this question. I’ve been trying to think of a way to raise this issue with my bandmates, and you have helpfully teed it up for me. I’ll tell you, if you hadn’t asked about this, I might have had to invent a fan letter like yours out of thin air. Thanks for saving me the trouble. I hate work!

Okay, Marvin. You can open it up now.

I think top two reasons we never play live is that we are (a) lazy and (b) old, in that order. That said, I personally do play with other groups on occasion. After the last time I performed, late last year, I spent about two months in physical therapy. As soon as I can save up the credit for more PT visits, I’ll take another gig.

For those of you who missed Big Green’s handful of live performances back in the day, you can hear some recordings of us playing live on either our Soundcloud channel or our YouTube channel. If you hear this and want more, let us know.