Home of the World's Original Dis- Corporate Pop Group.
Back issues of:NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
BIG GREEN TOUR LOG.
(Summer 2000)
Dispatch #1 -- 5/14/2000
Greetings from the asteroid belt!
Spent the night in the Motel 6 on
Ceres after a harrowing week on the celestial road, culminating in a late-night
concert at the summit of Olympus Mons. Pretty good crowd. Martian food sucks
this time of year, though. This obsession they have with greens. And egg salad!
Someone stop the madness.
With the first leg of our interplanetary tour complete, it has become manifestly obvious to the three of us that we need to work a bit harder on our zero-gravity chops. Whenever Matt slaps his E-string, the force of the string snapping back sends his bass flying across the hall. And whenever I strike an eight-finger chord, my legs shoot up. I don't even want to talk about how many drumsticks John has gone through just counting off the songs. The only one who's got it together is our hireling guitarist sFshzenKlyrn, and he's from the planet Zenon (it helps to have a couple of extra hands to hold your axe with).
The
oxygen generator didn't work in my room last night, so I ended up sleeping on
John's floor. sFshzenKlyrn
tried to talk me into a couple of hits of
Zenite snuff (similar to terrestrial "Nembutal"), but I wasn't having
it. Somebody's got to keep it together on this trip. As it is, sFshzenKlyrn
got himself so fucked up, he couldn't even make
it to our photo-op in the Martian countryside (see photo). Greens! See what I
mean about these Martians?
Ceres is a pock-marked slag in space, unsuitable for anyone even remotely attached to mundane comforts like heat, air, gravity, etc. Still, Motel 6 has some kind of contract arrangement with Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., our sprawling distribution conglomerate, and they got a good deal on the rooms in exchange for our endorsement of this meteor defense shield venture they bought into. So, yeah...Ceres is a pretty rough place with all these craters. Pity its inhabitants didn't see the value in a truly impenetrable meteor defense shield; the kind you can get from...hey!
It's that old devil greed. Crawled in my ear and squatted down on my brain. My apologies.
Dispatch #2 -- 5/21/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary, second installment...)
Hellooooa! Is this thing on?
I thought so. How is everyone? Well, this is turning out to be an interesting tour. I can't believe the reception we've been getting, pretty much everywhere we go. Our satellite dish antenna works like a charm, even on Janus. Could see every electrifying moment of "Eyes Wide Shut" on pay-per-view...no static, no dropouts, no nothing. (And no charge! What a deal. Any idea what in-room movies cost on Janus? Don't ask.)
We did a bad, bad thing.
How have the audiences been, you ask? It's a little hard to tell, here in the outer solar system. Pretty much everywhere you go, the methane gas is so thick, you can barely see what sort of room you're playing to, let alone who the patrons are, how many legs they have, etc. This is our sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn's old stomping ground, so to speak (he doesn't have much to stomp with, you see), and he doesn't recognize a single hideously misshapen head.
Still,
even though we're not making a lot of new friends in the audiences, we have
hooked up with a few notable celebrity hangers-on. In fact, we have quite a cast of
luminaries tarrying around with us from planet to planet. You can see my
illustrious brother Matt in this photo, spending some quality time with the
renown Dr. Hump, who was kind enough to put his lecture tour on hold so that we
might benefit from a little Reichian analysis in between shows. (He even brought
along an Orgone generating device he borrowed from Trevor James Constable, and
that has helped us a great deal, though it does tend to attract invisible flying
critters.)
It
took a while, but we also convinced Presidential hopeful George W. Bush to join
us for a few stops beyond the beltway (the asteroid beltway, as it were).
Old "Dubya" thought it might be a good primer for this fall's
campaign, in case any questions come up about what order the planets fall in.
George was most particularly looking forward to visiting Mars, where (as Dan
Quayle has informed him) "if there's air, there's water...and if there's
water, life." It was my sad duty to inform the Texas governor (through his
press agents) that Mars is, at present, "inside" the asteroid belt
and, therefore, not on our itinerary in the coming weeks. To which he reportedly
replied, "Did I say Mars? I meant to say Juniper."
Invisible flying predators. There seems no other possible explanation for such phenomena.
I'm not exactly certain how the sleeping arrangements are going to work out. Matt had suggested having sFshzenKlyrn bunk in with Dubya, then I could share with John, and Matt could stay with Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. (Greg and Peter have their own rooms now, of course.) Only I don't think the secret service entourage is going to let someone from another solar system share Dubya's pre-presidential air. They may let him sit in on our next performance of "It's Time To Change," however.
What's your opinion? We'd like to know.
Send your suggested sleeping arrangements to jperry@biggreenhits.com
and they will receive due consideration.
We're closing in on the halfway mark for this unprecedented tour. Crucial days ahead. (I hear Neptune's a tough nut to crack.) Stay tuned.
Dispatch #3 -- 5/28/2000
Houston, do you copy? (BEEP!)
Greetings, earthbound souls! Well, there've been one or two bumps along the rocky interplanetary road this week. Not anything seasoned professionals such as ourselves would be unable to cope with, you understand. Just those minor annoyances that crop up when you can't find enough water, or air, or protection from meteors...that's all.
Our space barge started taking on water,
so to speak, just as we were pulling into Saturn's general 'hood. It wasn't so
big a problem for the first few days, so we didn't really pay a lot of
attention. But just as we approached Neptune, John noticed that sFshzenKlyrn's
exoskeleton was taking on a purplish hue...a sure indication that the oxygen
content of our artificial atmosphere was dropping dangerously low. That
meant an explosion was imminent, since oxygen (as every chemistry student knows)
is the only thing that will inhibit the neutronium in our fuel canisters from
igniting. Sadly, I chose that moment to accept sFshzenKlyrn's
kind offer of Zenite snuff, and when I struck a match...well, see photo.
With our engine room blown to atoms and major hull breaches fore and aft of the mess cabin, we opted for an emergency landing in one of the planet's larger liquid Methane oceans. We then abandoned ship when it became clear that Matt, in his agitated state, had finished off the last of the Necco wafers. There was nothing else we could have done.
So we are essentially without transport, some five gazillion miles from home, on a world with no oxygen, no potable water, and no Necco wafers to speak of. And the meteors! Big as Bengal Tigers! They creep into your tent at night and carry you off to where they can pummel you at their own leisure. Vicious world. Life expectancy here is less than that of an African American male driving a Mercedes on the Garden State Parkway.
With a string of
important gigs awaiting us on the other side of this vast, gaseous world, there
is little we can do but hold our breaths and wait for a lift. But there is a bright side to all of this
-- at least George dubya's getting a little extra practice identifying his
planets. We're all very proud of the progress he's made (see photo). And when he
stands across the rostrum from Al Gore this Fall (assuming they condescend to
having a public "debate") and ticks off those gas giants one by one,
your friends in Big Green can
call dubya up and say, "Now you can find Uranus with both hands, thanks to
us. Where's our cushy ambassadorship?"
Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out. If you want to reach me in the interim, email me at jperry@biggreenhits.com and it'll get to me with a bullet. (We may not have food, air, water, or life support, but at least we've got email).
We have been getting some rehearsal in, of late, for lack of anything better to do. We're working out the preliminary list for our upcoming recording project. Matt has cut our songlist into little inch-long strips and thrown it into the air. It's my job to reassemble them, so that John can call the songs. We all work together, you see. There's a lot of love here. Even sFshzenKlyrn has a role to play in all of this. He soaks up all the ambient radiation so that we can practice without losing body parts. (The stuff may be deadly to you and I, but sFshzenKlyrn eats it like peanut brittle.)
Dispatch #4 -- 6/4/2000
Hey-di-hey.
Well, we've been adrift in space for a
full month now, and it's been pretty exciting, really. Not so much from a
musical perspective, you understand. It's had more to do with the basic laws of physics. Like what makes spaceships go.
And not go.
Our unscheduled sojourn on the planet Neptune has taught us a few things. One is that you never drop a hammer on a planet with negative gravity unless you step away fairly rapidly. I learned that lesson first. (That's me -- always way out ahead.) Another thing we learned is that Methane gas is a poor replacement for oxygen. But these were minor diversions.
We had John and sFshzenKlyrn working in tandem to repair the damaged propulsion unit on our space barge, with a little kibitzing from New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman, who's been our global trade advisor on this leg of the tour. "Where's my neutron wrench?" John would shout from his pressure dinghy, and as sFshzenKlyrn proceeded to hunt the sucker down, Tom would tap his foot impatiently and declaim, "C'mon, folks...this isn't rocket science!" He was getting a little testy, the way Foreign Affairs correspondents tend to get when they've been holding their breath for days on end.
Of
course, John and sFshzenKlyrn
only caused Tom's mood to degenerate even further when they got sidetracked on
helping George Dubya identify Saturn in three guesses or less. They did this by
using some of our remaining neutronium fuel to ignite Saturn's upper atmosphere
at the poles on cue. So when Matt would say, "Okay, Governor...which one is
Saturn?," sFshzenKlyrn
would use Zenite telepathy to light the planet up as a subtle hint to George.
Anything to help. Frankly, we're all getting tired of his constant drilling. I
don't think he'd get Neptune right if it weren't for the subtle fact that he'd
been stranded on it for a week and a half.
Luckily, our erstwhile repair team was able to get the Big Green barge moving again, and we actually made a few of our scheduled appearances in blefistomprodujch, the cultural capital of Neptune and the garden spot of this enormous ball of gas. Appropriately, the first few nights were a gas. After being sidelined for so long, we felt energized and ready to rock that hideous little globe right out of the solar system. And though the dominant life forms on Neptune are ethereal wisps of acrid-smelling vapor with no sense of hearing or sight, we felt it went over quite well. The Christmas songs seemed to please them -- "Head Cheese Log" in particular seemed to increased the Neptunians' specific gravity to the point where you almost couldn't see through them. Tom Friedman tells me that's good. Over at the bar, he plied them with the joys of globalization until the methane odor almost drove us all from the room (another sign of enthusiastic acceptance on the part of the Neptunians -- their version of applause).
There
were other moments of excitement, as well. A couple of sFshzenKlyrn
former bandmates from Zenon joined us on
stage and sang a impromptu two-part harmony on a Zenite pop song while sFshzenKlyrn
smoked his telecaster in accompaniment. It was pretty amazing. The rest of us
just sort of laid back and just let them take the spotlight for the rest of the
set. Of course, the average length of a Zenite pop song is a bit longer than the
standard back on Earth, partly because the days on Zenon are 462,009 Earth years
long. So their radio songs last hundreds of years. As stunning as the
performance was, we did have to hustle them along a bit. (Worse yet, it was one
of those "one more time" sorts of crowds.)
Anyway, we're ready to break camp here on Neptune and start the final leg of our tour -- off to the icy planet Pluto, and what promises to be one of the coldest receptions we will have garnered throughout this entire enterprise. Even Dr. Hump is showing signs of concern, anxious little bubbles gurgling out of his medulla with alarming frequency. But hey -- if a disembodied brain in spirit is worried, shouldn't we be, as well? Hell no. We're troopers, right? That's the spirit.
Dispatch #5 -- 6/11/2000
Ahoy...
This is just too, too far out. As you may
recall, the Big Green entourage was planning to be within the environs of the frosty little globe known to terrans as Pluto
-- you know which one; the yellow one with the floppy ears who never says anything,
unlike all of the other animal characters, like Mickey and....
Ooops. Wrong Pluto. Whatever you do, don't tell Michael Eisner. He'll sue us for the seven cents that remains in the Big Green treasury after our somewhat less-than-profitable interplanetary venture. (Eisner's a little on the hungry side, you see, having made only $636.9 million over the last three years.)
Why has the tour been such a financial bust? There are a number of reasons. Gasoline prices, for one. (Our space barge gets lousy mileage). Also, as our resident Free Trade specialist Tom Friedman has pointed out in exasperation many times, the currency exchange rates are killing us. Our two-week involuntary stay on Neptune happened to coincide with one of the most furious episodes of currency speculation in that planet's history. By the time we left there, our Neptunian drachroniasters were worth less than Necco wafers. (And to add to our misery, when their value was the same as Necco wafers, Matt started eating them!)
But
the single most important factor in making this tour a financial bust was the
lousy driving directions we got from sFshzenKlyrn.
Don't get me wrong, he's a nice...um...guy and a good guitarist, but he
simply doesn't know his way around the solar system. (One wonders how he finds
his way across the trackless parsecs of the interstellar void to his home on
Zenon.) Take last week's debacle, for instance. sFshzenKlyrn
said he had a "fix" on Pluto, the next (and last) stop on our
performance itinerary. Well, we each took a turn with his Zenite viewing scope,
and it sure looked like Pluto, so we swung the barge around and threw the
Neutronium drive into high so we could get there in time to play at least half
of the gigs we'd booked.
I
started suspecting that we might be going in the wrong direction when I saw
something that looked remarkably like Uranus out the portside bay window. I
brought this to sFshzenKlyrn's
attention, and he shrugged it off (at least, I think he did, though it's
a little hard to tell with someone who doesn't have what you might call
shoulders). I could see his exoskeleton was turning that reddish color it gets
when he's pissed off, so I dropped it. On the next day, when John commented on
the tell-tale off-axis ring around the planet that looked suspiciously like
Uranus, sFshzenKlyrn
did venture an explanation: "optical illusion caused by mass
hysteria." Plausible enough.
A
day or so later, Trevor James Constable was complaining about those invisible
critters again -- the same ones that had attached themselves to his orgone
generating device when we were in the Saturnian system a few weeks earlier. Sure
enough, I looked out the starboard mail slot and saw something that looked
remarkably like the great ringed planet. I pulled sFshzenKlyrn
aside and confronted him with this new evidence of his incompetence, and he had
another convincing explanation all ready for me: "You're looking through a
wormhole." He gave me a pair of blue/red 3-D glasses and told me to enjoy
myself.
Then
on Friday of last week, as we were rehearsing the new grand finale of "Nothing
But Time" we were planning to debut at our closing concert on Pluto's
companion Charon, we heard shouts of joy coming from George W's cabin. I pushed
my way through the phalanx of Secret Service goons (who look strangely like Al
Gore) to see Dubya excitedly pointing through the skylight at the source of his
joy -- the planet Mars...red as an apple and twice as round. This was no worm
hole. sFshzenKlyrn
had brought us back to where this ludicrous tour had begun.
Needless to say, we're plotting our own way home. As for sFshzenKlyrn, he's sitting in the bus station at the base of Olympus Mons, looking for someone with enough of a clue to get him back to Zenon. We wish him well.
See you in Sri Lanka. "We're goin' hooooooome!!!!"
(sFshzenKlyrn's irritating group shot, taken by his cousin before they left for Zenon.)