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.

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.