Tag Archives: Underground Tour

How to put on the worst concert ever

2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I don’t have time for greeting cards. Take them away, Marvin. Give them to the kids down the street. Or some monkeys in the zoo. I don’t care, man – just GET THEM OUT OF HERE!

Sorry for my all-caps utterance, friends. You know how stressful the holidays can be, particularly when your robot doesn’t follow instructions. Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m constantly reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Far from it! We get along like nothing else I can name. (Take my word for the fact that that’s a good thing.)

Like you, we are engaged in a last-minute frenzy in preparation for Christmas, New Years, and other assorted observances. And this year it has been made a bit more complicated by my plan to put on yet another nano concert, like the one I did earlier this year. Turns out concert are more fun when you (a) play an instrument you can play, and (b) involve other people in your music-making. Who knew?

Hello out there!

As luck would have it, we live in a time of burgeoning COVID. It’s like being on a plague ship, minus the pleasure of a south sea cruise. The upshot for us musicians, of course, is that we can’t stand each other’s company … I mean, we can’t BE in each other’s company. If we share the same space, the smell …. I mean, the VIRUS might kill us. (As is my custom, when reading that line, I pronounce the word “kill” as KEEEL.)

Some may accuse me of harboring resentments for other musicians. That is not the case. I don’t harbor them, I nurture them. But in the end, we must all get along, at least better than we did at the beginning. So we need the means to play together in a way that won’t leave us all dead. (Again, following my personal custom, I pronounce the word “dead” as DAY-ID.)

Hello? Do you read me?

Sophisticated technology unleashed

Right, so how do you play together without being together? Technology! There’s this thing called the internets, and I’m guessing it just might catch on. You just set up your instrument at one end, play like the devil, and the music goes round and round, woah woah woah, and it comes out there. My advisors (Mitch Macaphee) tell me that there’s room enough in the internet tube for music to go both ways, so you can jam with someone on the other end of the tube. Holy cats!

Now, I know Mitch has suggested some crazy things in the past. Shit like that gonzo underground tour he dreamed up a few years back. But this time, THIS time, he may be on to something. Or just on something. In any case, yesterday he handed me the business end of something that looked like one of those Dr. Seuss instruments, like the Zimbaphone or whatever the hell. If you hold the thing up to your ear, you can vaguely hear something that sounds like Matt playing his guit-fiddle. Damndest thing.

Let’s get ready for something … anything

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for something. And if I have anything to do with it, it will involve me playing musical instruments into the Dr. Seuss invention known as the internets. When and if that happens, you will be the first to know. Or maybe the second or third to know, but certainly in the top ten.

Down under what?

What the hell is that? Sounds like the howl of the wind in a box canyon. No, wait … I know that sound. I think it’s a distant didgeridoo. That’s it, fellows – we have dug ourselves a tunnel to Australia.

Well, barely a day goes by here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill without some kind of discovery. Last week it was a new source of precious reverb – a commodity rare as hen’s teeth up here in central New York. Now we’re looking at (or staring down into, I should say) a superhighway to down under. And when I say “down under”, I don’t mean merely down underground. Nay, sir … I mean the actual land “Down Under”, meaning the continent of Australia.

What luck, eh? Here I thought this elevator shaft to the center of the Earth would yield only another string of unsuccessful and unsatisfying performances in front of restive gaggles of Morlocks or some other troglodytic denizens of the dark. But now it seems the tunnel is a bit deeper than we thought … like maybe twice as deep. Because you can just about see some light coming though from the other end, and it looks like Aussie sunlight. There’s also a vague scent of flat beer. (Though I think that might be coming from Anti-Lincoln. He’s been hitting the cache lately, and it shows.)

Then came MarvinWe could be wrong, of course. After all, one random strain of didgeridoo music does not a continent make. The only way to be certain is to send a emissary down there. It’s a highly dangerous mission, so there’s no way in hell that’s going to be me. Matt’s no stranger to danger, of course, but only in the context of helping birds, animals, and other living things. (Snowflake!) Then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). If he’d been around in 1969, NBC might have done a show about him called “Then came Marvin.” He could have played a disillusioned android who starts riding a scooter around Minneapolis, then got canceled after two seasons.

Anywho, if we send Marvin down there and he comes up with an Aussie hat and a kangaroo’s footprint on his brass, we’ll know we hit Aussie paydirt. Sounds like a plan. Ish.

Drill down.

There’s a hole in daddy’s hammer mill where all the money goes. At least that’s what it feels like. Christ on a bike, why is it every mad science idea ends up costing a fortune? What, between the magnetos and the giant vacuum tube-driven linear amplifiers, we are completely tapped out.

I should explain. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor and inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), has plugged together a special elevator-like tram car dubbed the Giardiniera Twelve for us to ride to the center of the earth using the handy hole to the center of the earth we now have in the hammer mill basement. We’ve already sent Marvin down a few floors for a look see, and it seems promising. He came back with a hotdog and a Dodgers pennant, so my guess is that we have found a tunnel to the 1950s. Think of all the songs we can lift!

That said, there is a bit of a problem monetizing this idea. I understand there may be intelligent life down under, but what are their tastes? Do they like 50s pop music or 90s grunge? It’s even conceivable that Where's all the work at?they may not like either of those things … though that would be okay, because we don’t really play either of those things. That said, finding an audience on the surface of the Earth is hard enough. Finding one in the mantle or (God forbid!) in the chewy nougat center of the Earth will probably be next to impossible.

And then there are the logistical challenges. Yes, they are many. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were an un-amplified banjo-toting accordion-squeezing polka band, but we are not that (at least this week). I ask you – how the hell are we going to pack amps, a drum set, an electric piano, a stack of guitar cases, and PA components – along with ourselves – into what amounts to a smallish elevator? Mitch is working on a solution as we speak, but I’m not sanguine. The last time we tried to do something like this, he pulled out a shrink-ray that reduced my Martin D-1 to the size of an ashtray. Now I use it as an ashtray. Not real good.

So we’re not that close to plugging that hole. Let’s see what Mitch can do … and how much it will cost.

Words worth.

I’m still not sure this is a good idea. The memory of the last time we tried this still haunts me. And that Morlock with the sandals never answers my postcards. And yes, I’ve been dropping them down the hole. Jesus!

Okay, so someone, I won’t say who (Mitch), thought it would be a great idea to do a second subterranean tour, since we now have the equivalent of a superhighway to the chewy nougat center of the Earth. Mitch plans to fashion some kind of urban gondola (very popular in small post-industrial cities these days) that will allow us to treat the mega-hole in our floor like a kind of futuristic cargo elevator. I don’t remember where I heard this, but it seems like this mode of transportation might be problematic, to say the least, particularly when you’re dealing with magma and other natural hazards.

Mitch isn’t worried, of course. In his world, there’s a mad scientific fix for everything. That must be a nice feeling. When stuff goes wrong for the rest of us, we have little to fall back on other than playing instruments and/or writing songs, and maybe playing a few rounds of mumbly peg. (That doesn’t usually help, but it does give us something to strive for, since none of us knows how to play mumbly peg.) Everyone needs some kind of solution. For Marvin (my personal robot assistant), it’s a seven percent solution of machine oil and antifreeze.

Yeah, that looks like a maybe.Why does songwriting help? Don’t know, exactly. Ask Matt – he’s more prolific than me by a mile. As I’ve said before, he comes up with songs while walking the length and breadth of his rural domain, composing them out loud like a latter-day Ewan MacTeagle. Me, I take forever to crank out a few lines. My muse is like an old, rusty typewriter with an even older ribbon, very parsimonious and begrudging of every line. Even so, if we do undertake this underground tour, we should have plenty of material that hasn’t been heard down there before. Nothing the middle-Earth denizens hate more than old, recycled material.

So, yeah, we’ll consider it. Though God only knows why.