Well, I wouldn’t call it a hit, exactly. Kind of more like a near hit. You know – the term George Carlin wanted to substitute for “near miss”. Let’s just say, hit-adjacent. That’s a bit more like it.
Oh, hi. Just having a little discussion with my chief discography advisor and personal robot assistant, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yes, he’s wearing two hats on his tiny brass head today, largely because we currently have no incumbent in the position of chief discography advisor. I’m told most bands have trouble filling that post. The trade schools just can’t churn them out fast enough, I guess. Oh, well …. couldn’t pay them anyway.
Right, well … we were just going over our canon. You know – our body of work. It’s kind of a decrepit body, frankly, hunched over and showing its age in a dozen different ways, but nevertheless, we’re sifting through our output, looking for hidden gems … or at least a fieldstone or two. (Lodestone, perhaps?) Why have we taken on this weighty project when there’s still so much good sleeping to be done? Glad you asked. It seems Marvin has been listening to the radio again. No just any radio …. national PUBLIC radio, as it happens (no, wait … that’s the CBC), and he heard a segment called … I don’t know …. “one hit wonders”, or something like that. Marvin doesn’t have speech, so I have to interpret his various flashing lights and rotating gears into pidgin English …. then into French, then back into English with a stopover in semaphore. So damn time-consuming!
Anyway, Marvin thinks we might qualify as one-hitters because we had a hit record on Aldebaran. Personally, I think that’s kind of a stretch. Though I suppose, because Aldebaran is a binary star, it might actually count as two hits. Perhaps the song played backwards on its companion star, where everything is a perfect mirror image of what’s on the surface of the red giant itself. Or perhaps not. In any case, we never got a dime out of that particular success story, just a bucketful of radioactive goop that Mitch Macaphee got really excited about. Funny thing, that … just a week or so after he took possession of the goop, that bank he owed money to disappeared into thin air. So in a way, you could say that goop was good for something. It’s a foul goop indeed that doesn’t glow somebody some good.
Okay, well … this is getting us nowhere. Marvin, I really don’t thing NPR is going to be interested in our Aldebaran “hit”. I somehow can’t picture them playing “The Dino Song” to a national audience. (However, if you Big Green fans out there ask nicely, we will definitely play it for you. Just tweet at me @BigGreenJoe and we’ll get it done … somehow.)