Are you sure that happened in 2007? I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, but if you say so, I guess I’m wrong. The years all fold into one another, don’t they? I was just saying that last year, and … well … there you have it,
Oh, hi. Just playing a little game of total recall here with Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Now, of course, he can’t say much aside from a few metallic squeaking sounds, but he can give me tickertape readouts like any good electronic brain from the middle of the last century. We’re trying to recall when our first subterranean tour happened. Hell, I don’t know why I don’t just look at our old blog pages instead of relying on Marvin’s Commodore-era processor. (Except that when I wrote those blog posts back in the day, it was on a computer almost as primitive as him.)
I suppose more than a few of you have noticed that we don’t do a lot of tours anymore. Maybe the occasional day trip to a distant asteroid once in a blue moon (not to mention the gig we did on that blue moon once), that sort of thing. We have become more sedentary over the passing years, and one glance at those old blog posts confirm it. God knows, back in THOSE days we were sailing off to distant solar systems at the drop of a hat, teaming up with extraterrestrial guitarists (like sFshzenKlyrn of the planet Zenon, a real shredder), braving all manner of threat and hostile conditions. Heady times indeed!
Well, that was then. Now we hang around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, wandering our way into our makeshift studio a few times a week to record songs or podcasts or what have you. Some would say we have given up. Others would say we’re a bunch of useless assholes who don’t deserve the time of day. Still others might argue that our dietary preferences are an abomination and run counter to the laws of god and man. Who am I to say that any of them are wrong? Busted!
We’re about looking forward, not backward. That’s the only way I can keep myself from walking into walls. I’m a practical man, some might say.
That of course puts us back into the spacecraft rental market. Never a good place to be, especially in this economy and with the election coming up. It’s just hard to get a low parsec ion-drive ship that can hold more than a couple of vertically challenged astronauts. We not only have our own asses, but an entourage and a whole load of equipment. (If the mansized tuber accompanies us, as he has threatened to do, we will need a greenhouse on board as well.) We’re considering a kickstarter campaign, frankly. Either that or hiring a grant writer. (Isn’t that just a fancy term for counterfeiting? If so, why the hell doesn’t Mitch just invent some freaking money for a change.)
Here’s the thing about Big Green. We are not a “normal” band. We are a musical collective, a band of brothers, a loose association of critters, a gaggle of organisms, a … I don’t know, something else that implies more than one of us. And weird. The very suggestion of a “summer tour” brings to mind something quite different from what most people picture. We’re not rolling into Akron or Missoula, playing in a urine-soaked noise cave, and sleeping on someone’s floor. No, sir – typically, we’re sleeping in the urine-soaked cave. That cave? It’s called the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home.
Then there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.
The fact that most of these strange worlds have been featured in American movies and television shows from the 1950s and 60s is little help when you’re trying to determine the precise composition (and toxicity level) of a greenish atmosphere. Sure, you can have that kind of trouble back home, in South Carolina or West Virginia … but at least down there you have your pick of mad scientists. Up here, we’ve got Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his converted wall barometer.
not an astrophysicist, but I do have some experience with market research, so I’m guessing that this was a phone survey, and that our old friend Waleed Abdulati, NASA’s head scientist, simply hired a phone bank and had them dial distant star systems at random and ask, “How many in your solar system?” “Do you have a companion star or dark matter object?” “Is s/he working?”)
Well, the good news for our Interstellar Tour is that we’ve got a whole boatload of possibilities for new venues. NASA just discovered 715 new planets, and scientists say that the law of averages dictates at least 3% of them must have indie music venues. Even better, our sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn, has been to at least half of these newbie planetoids, and has established relationships with the relevant booking agents. He’s out ahead of us now, greasing the wheels a bit. I was hoping he’d take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him, but alas … sFshzenKlyrn flies without a spaceship and Marvin gets vertigo easily. Useless bag of bolts.
Well, after several days of drifting aimlessly, we appear to have settled into orbit around Jupiter, the bull moose of the outer solar system. Our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFhzenKlyrn, has volunteered to visit the surface of the gas giant to see if there are any performance opportunities, since we’re in the neighborhood. I’d go myself, but alas, I require oxygen and Earthlike temperatures, to say nothing of solid ground. Sure, we’ve played the Great Red Spot before, but that was back in the day. (It’s probably a gas station now, like most of the clubs we played back then.)
I wouldn’t say this news was received with a total lack of enthusiasm. Anti-Lincoln was just dying to get out there and take a dip in one of the nearby liquid methane pools. And for sFshzenKlyrn, the guitarist from Zenon, this sounds like a tropical paradise. There are some issues, however, should we be asked to do an outdoor concert. First, my Kork SV-1 would probably melt at 104C. Second, the helium in the atmosphere would make us all sing like those munchkin dudes from the lollipop gym. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And if we are contracted to play again next year, that’s just 23 days from now.
Always a favorite of Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who would very much like to name a continent after himself, particularly if said continent was the result of an experiment gone horribly right.