Tag Archives: Songs in the Key of Rick

Usual Rubbish

New frontier.

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Interstellar Tour Log: February 25, 2014
Between Neptune and Pluto, or thereabouts

Big Green“Steve Lawrence”, Matt says. My reply: “Jennifer Lawrence.” Lincoln’s turn: “Jennifer Hudson.” Everyone looks at anti-Lincoln, who scratches his temple thoughtfully. “You lost two points on that one, Abe,” he says with a smirk.

Right, well … you have to occupy your time somehow in deep space, and rather than doing something productive, we’re playing Name-Chain. Yeah, it’s really fun. You name a famous person, and the player to your right has to name another one with the same first or last name, and around it goes. Lincoln got penalized because if you name someone of the same sex, you lose two points. Then you all multiply your score by the square root of corn meal and, well … it gets complicated after that.

Did we play on Jupiter last week? Well, the less said about that the better. Not sure what happened, but whatever it was it left a big red spot. Not exactly what we had in mind for our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Hell, nobody on Jupiter had even heard of Rick Perry.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 27, 2014
Near Pluto, I think. (That’s the yellow dog with no clothes, right? Yeah … near Pluto.)

Uh, how bout Uncle Milty?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.

Did I just say that out loud? Whoops. Let’s see…. “Al Franken” …. “Franken Beans” ….

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Next stop: who knows?

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Interstellar Tour Log: February 19, 2014
An unnamed rock garden in deep space, somewhere east of Jupiter

Big GreenWell, once again, we were sold a bill of goods. I think we’ve got some canned peas in there, maybe a little hard tack, some burlap sacking material (in case we have sack races), a jar of peppermints for the children, and an oil lamp. Who knew there was a general store on Ceres?

Aside from that, though, we were given bad advice. That Mr. Nerim character wasn’t telling us the truth at all. Apparently, hydrofracking is not utterly harmless. My evidence? Ceres, the alpha asteroid – the big brass buckle in the asteroid belt – is now a little smaller than it was when we arrived. Fact is, part of the asteroid was blown to bits and hurled into deep space. And as luck would have it, it was the part that we were camping out on.

So when old Nerim pushed the plunger on his cartoon-TNT detonator rig, it sent that side of Ceres (and our sorry asses) on a journey of undetermined length and destination, our battered rent-a-spaceship floating in a swarm of asteroid fragments, some the size of a house. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is beginning to regret having accompanied us on our Interstellar Tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. His rationality processor must be working properly.

Oh yes, one more thing …  YAAAAHH!

Interstellar Tour Log: February 21, 2014
Orbit of Jupiter, gas giant

Let's check it out, man. (You first.)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.)

Usual Rubbish

What the frack?

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Interstellar Tour Log: February 12, 2014
The still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Greetings from camp slag! As you can see from the subject line of this dispatch, Big Green and entourage are still stranded here on alpha asteroid Ceres, here in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a veritable no man’s land of broken planets and random shards of rock, careering through an airless void in an endless race to hell. (Sounds like my morning commute, actually.)

Readers of this asinine blog will know that Big Green, in the third leg of its Interstellar Tour 2014 to support galactic sales of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, had performances booked in the system of Sirius, the dog star. Trouble was, our GPS navigation system – Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – got the names mixed up in his tiny 1978 Texas Instruments calculator of a brain, and ended up sending us to this lifeless slag in space. It’s a bit like camping out, except without the fun (if you think camping’s fun). The weird thing is, not only is there no where to play on this rock, but there’s no one freaking here, period! I was expecting a hard rock cafe or something, at the very least.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 14, 2014
The still, still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Hmmm. It seems I spoke too soon a couple of days ago. There is somebody else here. Anti Lincoln was taking his morning constitutional the other day (he has this thing about the Constitution … he takes it everywhere!) and he ran across a little mining operation on the other side of the asteroid. Looks like Halliburton / Brown and Root has somehow secured mining rights up here, as well. (They say it’s part of Obama’s See? Solid as a rock.“all of the above” approach to energy production and development … so I guess that means everything above the Earth’s surface is up for grabs.) They’re apparently fracking the place. I know, because Anti-Lincoln got a job working the bilge pumps. (They also let him handle burning off the gas leaks. He has a lot of practice with that.)

That puts us in an awkward position. Broken spacecraft, under repair, and intensive fracking operations going on. But it’s okay: the project supervisor, a Mr. Nerim, tells us that this asteroid is made of layer upon layer of solid rock soooo thick you could lay a burning sun on its surface, and the sun would just burn itself out and leave the asteroid untouched. So I guess we’ve got some time.

Plug: Hey, if you haven’t heard the February podcast yet, give it a listen. Cheap laughs, and plenty of ’em. Check it out.

Usual Rubbish

Remote podcast rundown.

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We return to the ongoing saga of Big Green’s Interstellar Tour 2013-14: Cowboy Scat goes galactic.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 5, 2014
Unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

After a solid week on the surface of this, well, remarkably solid asteroid (a crust of solid titanium! … or so my geologically impoverished mind/brain tells me) we’re coming to the realization that this is not so brief a layover in our Interstellar Tour 2013-14. Given this reality … and the fact that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is insisting that I do so, I will take a few moments to share my usual dissection of our recently distributed podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN – now with more Green!

Anyway, here’s what we have for the February podcast,* posted only days ago:

Ned Trek XVI: A Mock Time
Yes, believe it or not, we are on the 16th episode of this ludicrous audio remake of several failed sixties television shows, starring Willard Mittilius Romney as Captain Romney of the Starship Free Enterprise, and his first officer, Mr. Ned the dressage horse (loosely based on Mr. Ed). This month parodies the classic Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” when Spock gets the seven year vulcan itch in the worst way imaginable. Our take involves dancing, insults, and an enormous pile of dung … so it’s not so different from the original. Enjoy! That’s an order!

Put The Phone Down
Matt and I engage in our usual random conversation about changing Matt’s name to “Oliver Remote Control”, why Andy Williams never did a special with us, and how many times worse than Neil Sedaka we truly are. We also remember Pete Seeger, friend of the planet, and discuss our plans for the Super Bowl (which Matt was planning to flush this year).

I'm being played by a talking horse, Jim!Song: Paradise
We’ve played this one on the podcast before. This is a remake of a song Matt wrote in the 90s, part of a larger, kind of slow-mo effort on our part to reclaim at least a portion of the hundreds of songs we recorded for cassette distribution back in the day.

Song: Kublai Khan
Another retread of an older number; this one with shades of Reverend Moon. Written around the same time as Paradise, actually.

That’s the show, in essence. Now … if someone could ship about a dozen box lunches to Ceres, and maybe a cylinder of fireplace matches. Just follow the gas cloud rising from the asteroid’s surface. It’s freaking cold out here.

(*Editor’s Note: those of you hunting for evidence of a January podcast, your hunt is in vain. The February TIBG installment is actually a resuscitation of our January podcast, which got lost in all that discarded wrapping paper. January’s a chaotic month for us, too!)

Usual Rubbish

Learning Capellini.

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I’m sure I’m not the first to make this observation, but I’ll say it anyway. There’s something compelling about Capella (the Goat star). What it compels us to do is another thing entirely.

Big GreenBooked into another series of club dates on the fourth stone out from Capella, my Big Green colleagues and I have tried to make the best of it. It hasn’t been easy. For one thing, the locals here are not very fond of country music, and since our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, is largely made up of mock-country numbers,  that puts a damper on things. We’ve had to reach deep down into the song bag to keep these rock-like creatures happy. (And by that crack I don’t simply mean that they like rock music. I mean, they are themselves animate rocks, with stony arms and legs and eyes like geodes. But yes, unsurprisingly, they prefer rock music.)

We asked sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, to remove his cowboy hat for the duration (he tries his best to look the part when we go all Rick Perry) and light into some of our heavier numbers from days past, like Why Not Call It George?, one of Matt’s more rocking ruminations on the scientific method. Here’s an excerpt of the lyric, last verse:

Continental drift can be reversed
great tumblers shift
and Pangaea can be reclaimed
After me it can be renamed
Why not call it George? Call it George, after me

Do you speak Capellini?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.

Well, sFshzenKlyrn turned in a searing solo that sent the rock-like denizens of Capella 4 into fits of geological ecstasy. There was waving and shouting, and if I spoke Capellini, I could tell you what they were saying. Their wallets speak louder than words, however, and they were grateful enough to drop some serious stone on us before the end of our week-long engagement. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a built-in assay lab, and he tells me that the currency rocks on Capella four are mostly feldspar, with traces of iron. Not exactly a fortune, but we’ll leave that to be made elsewhere.

Next stop: Earth-Mass Gassy Planet KOI-314c

Usual Rubbish

Rigelian casaba fever.

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Which star is this again? I get them mixed up sometimes. We did Betelgeuse. We did Aldebaran. One big red, the other little yellow. Now it’s time for a blue star … Rigel. Perfect place to play the blues.

Big GreenBig Green playing the blues … on our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? Well … sure, why not. That’s some of what we started out by playing many, many moons (and many suns) ago, before we started writing a lot of our own music. We played Taj Mahal numbers, real standards like Statesboro Blues, and similar stuff, along with songs by The Beatles, The Band, Neil Young, etc. In our early days as Big Green, we had an alter ego cover band that performed under a series of ridiculous names, including “The Space Hippies”, “I-19”, and others. (One club owner, I recall, refused to hire The Space Hippies, claiming that, if he did, he would be “laughed out of Utica.” That’s when we founded the band, “Laughed out of Utica”.)

Right, so … our first night on Rigel, we started out with our old club date rendition of Corrina, Corrina. The non-corporeal beings of Rigel 3 went wild, as far as we can tell. The only way we can register any type of response is through highly sophisticated scanning equipment we borrowed from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (they use it to track labor organizers in their mines and on their plantations). According to thRigel looks invitinge sensodyne magenetometer, the charged particles that make up most of the mass of Rigelian “bodies” were vibrating at a particularly high frequency during Corrina, Corrina. I call that success.

Of course, we are having some mechanical problems with our spacecraft. Nothing new there. Just a matter of thrust, or lack of same. Too many Rigelian casabas in the fuel mix, I suspect. We’re likely to stay on Rigel 3 for a couple more days, since we can’t seem to escape its orbit.  sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, has gone on to the next engagement ahead of us, since he does not require a space craft to travel between worlds. Handy, that. One day, perhaps he’ll show me how it’s done. Then I’ll make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do it.

Next stop: Capella.

Usual Rubbish

Betel-mania.

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Frankly, sFshzenKlyrn, I never knew there was any such thing as reverse gravity. Had I known that, I might not have agreed to play this gig. (Said the man floating helplessly in space.)

Big GreenOh, yeah – someone’s reading this. Hi, Earth friends. Another dispatch from the road with news of Big Green‘s 2014 Interstellar Tour in support of our album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. I have to pause here to put in a brief plug for our tour sponsors, SPAPOOP petroleum snacks, a division of Koch Industries. SPAPOOP: So good, you’ll forget it’s not edible! Get some today! No, really … today! Right now!

Okay, in all honesty, we had to do the promo to ensure that we have enough fuel to get to our next engagement. That’s the way it works out here on the interstellar club circuit (particularly with these plain clothes gigs). Most of the time, there’s no cover or drink minimum – people just pass the space helmet around. Sometimes it comes back full of SPAPOOP. It’s for that reason our tour advisers at Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm procured the endorsement deal from the Kock Brothers.

Pity, too. We hit it pretty hard on Betelgeuse; if we were paid by the decibel, we would have done pretty well even without the helmet proceeds. Our audience particularly appreciated “Santiny”, “Aw, Shoot,” and “Flying Up Ricky”, waving their long, sucker-tipped fingers in the air in time with the music, emitting sparks from their sinewy antennae. sFshzenKlyrn tells us that’s applause, but it’s hard to be sure. All in all, a good night.

Interstellar Tour graphicOr it would have been, but for the fact that the gravity reversed itself halfway through the evening. I guess that happens all the time on Betelgeuse Five. (That would explain the suction cups on their hands and feet, right? Isn’t nature wonderful!) Still, who knew … and before I could say HAAALLP! I was flying off into the exosphere, a missile without a cause, along with my hapless bandmates.

Sure, that might have been it, friends, except that sFshzenKlyrn is tremendously at home in deep space. He towed us back to the relative safety of our rental craft, using his personal gravitational fields. Good fellow to have around.

Next week: Rigel.

Usual Rubbish

Floating room only.

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Hand me that bottle, will you, Marvin? That’s right – the one with the brownish-green liquid in it. I think it’s spiked with marzipan or something. That’s about as hard as it gets on this miserable pimple of a planet. Jesus Christmas.

Oh, hi, friend of Big Green. Well, here we are on Aldebaran Five, soaking up the radiation, drinking gloog, making slemoth, and generally doing what living beings do on Aldebaran Five, at least when they’re in between performances. As you might have surmised from our previous posts, we were hideously late for the one-week run we had booked on A-5, so we had to shuffle things around a bit. Actually, we canceled a gig on Sirius (the star system, not the satellite radio network). Can’t think it bothers them much. They never take anything …. serious …. lee. My apologies.

Anyway, how is it going here on A-5? Not too shabby. Our current album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick has sold relatively well here. Fact is, we would be living on easy street if there were some way to convert Aldebaranian thought waves into hard currency. (That’s how they exchange goods and services around here – just thinking up some negotiable value in their oddly misshapen heads.) Still, they know the songs, they sing the lyrics, they dance like zombies … they even wear Texas-style ten-gallon hats on their, well, oddly misshapen heads. And they utter something that sounds a bit like “yee-ha” when we play “I’m Saving Myself for America”. Creepy, yes, but touching also.

So we hit it pretty hard last night, with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, taking all the solos. Lucky to have him back, though he’s a bit louder than I remember … either that or my hearing has backed off a few notches since 2007. He must have studied Chet Atkins back on Zenon, between hits of acid, judging by the way he’s playing. I guess you could say it was fun for the whole family. We had them floating upside-down in mid-air, which is actually kind of normal here – the gravity’s a little weak.

Next stop: Betelgeuse.

Holiday hack job. Big Green threw together a video to support one of our podcast numbers, a little holiday sketch called “Make that Christmas Shine,” sung by Captain Romney of the Starship Free Enterprise. Check it out:

Usual Rubbish

Slingshot.

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That looks like Rigel over there. And Arcturus. And Canopus. No, wait. That’s Canoli, a most unusual deep space object. Instead of a molten nickel core, it’s filled with almond paste. And that dusting of what looks like dry ice? Powdered sugar.

Big GreenOh, hi. Just getting our bearings here out in deepest, darkest space. Kind of hard to do without a map – yes, I’m looking at you, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who left the map case under his workbench back home. Right, so … chartless, clueless, and nearly devoid of rocket propellant, Big Green is meandering its way to the first stop on our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which is charting in the Crab Nebula this month, I hear. (Yes, I read the trades.)

How did we get into this pickle, this sitch, this hot water, this plate of spinach? Well … it all started when we hitched a ride on the charred remnants of the comet ISON as it made its way out of the solar system. It’s kind of like driving in the wake of a big semi on the Thruway to save gas – doesn’t work real well, but you can pretend that you’re doing something useful. Anyway, we got a grappling hook into ISON as it passed and it yanked us into motion, headed for the hairy edge of all we know and hold dear.

Not THAT kind of slingshot!That was the good part. The bad part was when the cable snapped in the vicinity of Jupiter, a hostile world that gave Cowboy Scat a right panning (like I said, I read the freaking trades!). We were caught in the gas giant’s gravitational pull, helpless but for the fading memory of Star Trek plot devices from fifty years ago. Or was it Lost in Space? Well, whatever the source, we used the “slingshot effect”, accelerating toward the planet and using its gravity to hurl us straight out the other side of the solar system.

Gripping drama indeed. Except now we’re, well, lost, and bobbing along practically at random. So if you’ve got friends on Aldebaran, just tell them we may be a little late for the gig next Wednesday.

Usual Rubbish

Ison the prize.

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Okay, well, THAT didn’t go so well, did it? Right. Don’t panic. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three … arrrrrgghhh.

Is Smith frying yet?It’s been a couple of weeks, so I don’t know if you recall our harebrained plan to get to the various extraterrestrial venues in our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (selling quite briskly on Aldebaran, I hear). Right, well… we have that rent-a-wreck rocket (or “wreck-it”) that will get us part of the way to Aldebaran and points west-southwest, but it doesn’t quite have the horsepower to escape our solar system. If we tried, at this time of year, we would get caught in the gravitational pull of the sun. Then the only pleasure we’d get out of this trip would be to watch Smith fry…

Okay, I’ve wandered a bit. Fact is, the only solution we could think up in the absence of our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is to launch ourselves into extended orbit around the Earth and hitch a ride on the comet ISON when it emerged from its close encounter with the sun. We would, I don’t know, throw a grappling hook onto it as it passed and it would pull us clear of the solar system, at which time the low-rent engines in the rent-a-wreck-it could handle getting us to the next star system. Simple, right?

Big GreenNot so right. Only trouble with this plan was … it could never work. Aside from that, it was sound. So we took off last week, using the Cheney Hammer Mill courtyard as a makeshift launch pad, and spent a good bit of fuel climbing up into extended orbit around the Earth ( or the “Oyt”, if you’re from East Chootica ), Marvin (my personal robot assistant) at the controls. Steady hand, indeed.

Now, 3 out of 5 astrophysicists supposed that ISON would make it around the sun in one piece. Wouldn’t you know that the other two had it right? So we’re hovering at the rendezvous point, and around the left side of the sun comes this charred looking ice chunk, tumbling along, no bigger than the average medicine ball. Try getting a grappling hook into THAT sucker.

Okay, so… NOW what do we do? Any astrophysicists out there? Methods for counteracting the sun’s gravity? Email them to us ASAP. Like, I don’t know, yesterday, perhaps.