I’m not sure about that, Matt. I don’t know if I want to play that song. How about “Dinos”? No? Are you sure? Okay… you suggest one. “World of Satisfaction”? Naaaah.
Oh, hello. Didn’t notice you peering through that LCD screen. As you can see, we’re working on a set list for our first engagement on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. No, that’s not a place keeper – that’s the name Tiny Montgomery suggested last week, and none of us has come up with anything better (let alone tried to, you know, insert the name). It’s always kind of a back and forth on the set lists – that’s only natural when you have hundreds of songs. Yes, literally hundreds… all wrapped up in a little box. We take turns, reaching a hand into the box. I’ll read one song title and Matt will knock it down. Then he grabs one and reads it. I’ll say he’s an asshole. Then he throws the box at me. And I’ll yell, “MOM! HE’S DOIN’ IT AGAIN!” And then we’re BOTH in trouble.
Okay, so that’s freaking childish, I know. But not to worry – we always come up with set lists in the end. 
Then we freaking ignore then, nine times out of ten. No, we’re not affecting an artistic temperament. It’s just that, frankly, it gets kind of dark on the stages we play on, and those lists are just plain hard to read. So we start calling tunes. If we call the same tune twice in a single night, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) issues a loud beeping sound. Chances are we will remember what that’s supposed to mean and withdraw the selection. Hey…. everybody has their process. Ours is surely no less sound than the one used by, say, My Morning Jacket. (I can’t say, because I don’t know what they do. I’m just picking examples at random – don’t listen to me.)
I’m just noticing how often I use the epithet “freaking”. You all know what I mean. In any case, preparing for an arduous interstellar tour is no picnic, as many of you know. There are songs to rehearse, air tanks to compress, space suits to air out, missiles to hire, maps to download – no end to the punch list. (It’s actually more like a punch and kick list.) Not getting a lot of help, either. Both Lincolns are dead to the world after a night of carousing. The mansized tuber is out in the garden, communing with his little herb-garden cousins. Mitch Macaphee has taken the next two weeks off to attend a mad science conference in Brazil. I feel like the prisoner of freaking Zenda. (There’s that epithet again!)
Not to worry. We’ve been down this bumpy road before, and it’s always come out…. well … bumpy. So be it.
Oh, hi. Yeah, just grappling with our communications issues, once again. Everything in Big Green’s world is held together with duct tape and baling wire… but then you knew that. What you didn’t know is that we’ve got a mom and pop drugstore up the street from us that has what may be the world’s last coin operated pay phone. That’s right… and it’s bloody handy, now that Verizon has pulled the plug on us. (Damnable message unit charges!) So, yeah… we can call mom, talk to our label, harass our booking agent, order strings, all with a pocket full of change. It’s like freaking magic. Who needs the twenty first century? We’re harnessing the technology of yesteryear. (Or yestercentury.)
Oh, hi. Just trying to recall some ancient lyrics from The Band, off the Cahoots album. Not their best work, but still worthy of a listen. I don’t know what brought that to mind aside from this nagging desire to, I don’t know, go out into the park across from my house and take a few swigs of red eye. Why? Just because it’s time for something completely different. Though something completely different might be standing out there with a tray full of cocktail sized vegetable samosas and a big vat of apricot chutney. Hang the whiskey. (Never sat very well with me anyway. That’s more a drummer kind of thing. Fits very nicely just under the drum throne.)
Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as “North America”, just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months – a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won’t.) It doesn’t take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It’s like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain.
I’m sorry you had to hear that (or read the transcript of it, rather). Yes, tempers are running a little thin around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill these days. Some see it as a variation on seasonal affective disorder – you know, it starts getting warm, we can’t afford air conditioning, and this clammy mill gets kind of toasty. But it goes deeper than that, I’m afraid. An erosion of trust, you might say. It’s the kind of thing that tends to happen with Big Green between interstellar tours. In fact, that’s what keeps driving us into space. I think that’s what, anyway.
This is not good, folks. Marvin is doing the renegade robot from Mars bit again. It must be an errant line of code somewhere in his reams of programming. Every once in a while he gets ornery… I mean SUPER ornery. Starts breaking things, running things over, insulting people (including anti-Lincoln, who’s sensitive, you know) and otherwise causing mayhem. I suppose I should count myself lucky that we’re not on some interstellar tour with this happening. Living with a mechanical nutjob is one thing; sharing a cramped spacecraft with one is quite another. I don’t have to tell you that…. HEY! PUT THAT DOWN! THAT’S THE ONLY ONE OF THOSE WE’VE GOT LEFT, YOU DOLT!
Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.
There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 
Okay, I’m struggling with my status as official Luddite of Big Green. (Originally that post belonged to my illustrious brother Matt, but now he’s the dude with the smart phone.) I don’t claim to be the most inept person ever to sit in front of a keyboard, but good goddamn – I’m making a doorstop out of this thing. If they just equipped PC’s with drawbars and foot pedals, I could drive the suckers, no problem.
in that every time you make a call, your signal is drowned out by pirates yaaarrr-ing at one another.)