Tag Archives: sFshzenKlyrn

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

Back to ground.

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Okay, then. Is that a wrap? What? It’s already the holiday season? What happened to freaking October? Okay, then… so it’s a Christmas wrap. Satisfied?

Oh, hi. Yeah, I know. After ten weeks on the road, tempers wear a little thin. What, you got a PROBLEM with that? (Sorry. I’ll start again.) Post Thanksgiving slump. This shipboard life is not for me; nor, apparently, is it for anyone else on board. Speaking of bored … this business of bobbing around the solar system is bloody tiresome. I don’t know how sFshzenKlyrn stands it, year after year, millennium after millennium. It’s just as well that he’s a transcendental etheric life form that ignores all boundaries between space, time, and whatever. (Especially the whatever. The man simply cannot take anything seriously.)

And then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s bouncing around this tin can like… like a robot in a tin can. Of course, he always gets antsy this time of year, when the big robotics convention is taking place back on Earth. He is constantly checking the Web for updates, seeing if any big strides have been made. Always has to be in the vanguard, our Marvin. Get used to it, man – one day, time leaves all of us behind. It’s freaking inevitable. In fact, it’s the great hairy screaming inevitable that is our universe. Who cares if some table-top tractor can solve equations faster than you do? You still can…. well…. lift very heavy things…

And then there’s the marigolds, the marigolds. What? Sorry… there  are no marigolds. Oxygen is running a little thin in this rattletrap we call a spacecraft. We’re somewhere between Jupiter and five miles away from Jupiter, running low on fuel, supplies, and what-not. Ever run out of what-not on an interstellar voyage? You do NOT want to know how awful that can be.

So anyway… it’s back to Earth for us, or the Earth that will be left when we return – an Earth wracked by climate change, war, illness, poverty, and rapacious corporate greed. Home sweet freaking home, just in time to do our annual Christmas Special podcast. Stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Tour log: quatro livre. (Say what?)

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Here’s the fourth installment of our vaunted tour diary. Anybody got a pen? How about a knife? I can just whittle the words. A pen knife? Even better!

Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to sFshzenKlyrn. I know what you’re thinking – he probably used some kind of trans-temporal presto-digitation to conjure us up a new ion drive servo chip. No such thing. He just waited until Marvin (my personal robot) was in sleep mode and plucked the chip out of his sorry hide. (Marvin lists a bit now. Not that that’s a bad thing… I have him doing our set lists. Boom-crash.)

Here’s the lowdown on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011:

10.31.2011 – Hallowe’en on Betelgeuse. Surprisingly, this is kind of a big deal up here. Not that they do the costumes or the trick or treat. In fact, it’s kind of an interstellar anti-gravity day – the Betelgeusians (unlike humanity) have mastered the science of gravity. They’ve got this big-ass switch, the size of Texas, and every October 31st (our time) they flip it and then their iridescent pseudopods leave the ground. Talk about fun. (That’s right – just talk about it.)

11.01.2011 – We start the month on the right pseudopod. Hit the stage around 10 p.m. local, played for almost three hours. Matt tried open tunings on his kazoo during “Just Five Seconds”. (We’re way ahead up here.) I’d never seen sFshzenKlyrn play his telecaster with a violin bow before, and  during our last set Anti-Lincoln seemed to have gotten his hands on a dulcimer somewhere. Leave Earth a four-piece, return home an orchestra. That’s the magic of space travel.

11.03.2011 – We are the 99 and 44/100 percent! New slogan for Ivory soap – what do you think? No, actually… it’s the current chant down here on Neptune. We’ve joined in the “Occupy Neptune” project for the few days that we’re here. Had a few celebrity drop-ins already this week. Tomorrow’s a general strike. Of course, there are only about five people on the whole planet, but frankly…. that makes organizing a snap. Don’t even need freaking Twitter.

Well, so anyway… keep the faith down there in Oakland, New York, Boston, and everywhere else. We’ll hold down the fort up here on Neptune. In fact, we’ve got the outer planets covered – no worries.

Usual Rubbish

Tour log 10.11

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Good evening, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to read this blog entry from top to bottom without falling over backwards. This blog will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck, Jim!

Don’t mind that first paragraph. I sometimes rent my blog space out to sixties television shows. Has something to do with the space-time vortex through which we ordinarily travel when on these interstellar tours. Don’t ask me to explain – I’m not an actual scientist. And unlike some of my blog renters, I don’t even play one on television.

Anyway, here’s a rundown of how Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 is going so far, ripped straight from the pages of my log book.  

10.08.2011 – Negotiated our way through the asteroid belt. We needed to lighten our load somewhat, so we tossed a few things overboard, like Marvin (my personal assistant)’s Lowery organ he borrowed from our one-time promoter and second keyboard player, Tiny Montgomery. Mitch also chucked all of the foodstuffs. He hates foodstuffs. Food, he likes, but foodstuffs… not so much. Anyway… we started the search for the Olive Garden in orbit around Jupiter.  Tough sledding.

10.09.2011 – Actually started a gig on time – first instance of this since, oh, 1992. A couple of weeks. We played the big red spot on Jupiter. Weather was awful (seems like it’s always stormy when we play there), but the Jovian audience is the greatest audience in the world… if “the world” can be thought of to include Jupiter itself. Paid in Belgian waffles. Hard times have hit up here as well, it seems.

10.11.2011 – Woke up around 18:00. Missed yesterday entirely. Our hyperdrive engine soiled the bed, so to speak, so we’re creeping along at about 25 miles an hour, headed for Titan. Should be a Titanic gig if we ever get there. For now, I look out the porthole and see space turtles passing us. Note to self: when ship lands on Earth, fire Mitch.

10.12.2011 – Jammed with sFshzenKlyrn on Titan. He’s big into Lenny Breau, now. Watches him on YouTube, which apparently is available on the planet Zenon. You heard it here first. Glad to see no waffles in the pay packet this time. No nothing, actually – I guess the Titanians have discovered currency trading… and subsequently discovered they were no good at it.  Traded all their currency for Legos. Legos valueless in the outer planets (unlike back home).

More later. Isn’t it always the case?

Usual Rubbish

Long view.

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Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Vector diagrams to light board. Finger fins to the driver behind. Quarter to three in the afternoon. What am I saying?

Doesn’t matter, really. We’re getting close to the departure date on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, our hotly-anticipated romp through the musical hinterlands of outer space, with planned stops in the Jovian system (Jupiter for you space travel novices), Betelgeuse, Kaztropharius 137b, Sirius, and the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, home base of our sometime-guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn.  Yes, I know – last time we stopped there we took a few lumps, but they’ve since healed up, and hey – never let it be said that we let experience stand in the way of a good lapse in judgment. Still got it, baby.

Anyhow, we’re just running through our confusing array of pre-launch checklists. Can’t be too careful these days, particularly when your vehicle has such a spotted past as the one we’ve rented for the occasion. Some of these lists are so damn mundane, though, it hardly seems justified…. but protocol is protocol. Here’s a for instance: (1) spacecraft fuel, check! (2) spacecraft, check!  (3) passengers and crew, check! (4) desire to depart for interstellar destinations, check! Who the f**k came up with that? My guess is that it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant), due to the rote existential nature of his selections. But I digress.

Another thing that doesn’t much matter: we haven’t really worked out a set list yet. Or any of the songs that would populate a set list. That would involve rehearsal, you see, and as a very wise horn player once told me, rehearsal is just a crutch for cats who can’t blow. Normally I don’t take such vouchsafes as gospel, but THIS time…. well, I daren’t disregard such an obviously valuable insight. Anyway, Matt and I have been recording some numbers for the podcast (This Is Big Green), so we will probably remember those songs at the very least. That’s about… oh…. half a set. Then there are the songs we make up on the spot. And of course, the mansized tuber plays a little accordion. (Don’t ask how little. Just… don’t.)

Okay, so yeah…. we’ve got a lot of getting together to do before our departure next week. But no fear- Big Green is up to this challenge. In fact, we’ve got a check list for this very situation. Left it around here…. somewhere…

Usual Rubbish

Prep time.

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Is Jupiter off? It’s not? That doesn’t sound like such a good idea, Admiral. In light of recent events, you know what I mean? You don’t? Well…. I’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Hey, there. Just starting to plan out our trip to the outer limits. No, not the sixties television show – that was a piece of broadcast entertainment, not a place you can actually go to. I mean the outer limits of the space-time continuum, already – that dark pocket of nothingness where all of the demand for Big Green performances floats in a vacuum like a cork in a bathtub. We must pursue that cork, my friends, for it beckons. The cork beckons! Behold, the cork! Death to Moby Dick! Right, well…. be that as it may. (I’ve been hanging around with anti-Lincoln a bit too much lately – he sometimes doest this extended riff on Captain Ahab and, well, he’s kind of convincing with that beard of his.) We must follow the demand, whatever cliff it may lead us off of.

So, yeah… we’re going over the possibilities for our upcoming interstellar tour. I’m having to cross a few stops off of our list right at the get-go, as it happens. Jupiter is one. If you read this blog with any regularity, you’ll know why. And if you’ve been a bit irregular lately, well… it’s all because of sFshzenKlyrn. (Not your irregularity; our avoidance of planet Jupiter, for pity’s sake. Can’t blame everything on the man from Zenon.) He caused that minor explosion on the Jovian surface some weeks back. Now, when I say minor, I mean by Jupiter standards. Remember – it’s one big-ass mo-fo of a planet. “Minor” on Jupiter is the size of the entire planet Earth back where you come from. So, yeah… in light of that, perhaps even a minor infraction is enough to keep us away. (Like light-years away.)

Assisting us in this tiresome duty is our old friend, Rear Admiral Gonutz (ret.), formerly of the Naval Reserve. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) looked him up at our request when we realize that this was a job several magnitudes too subtle for the mind of the man-sized tuber, who has been filling in as our road manager. (He basically occupied roughly the same volume of space as a road manager might; other than that, not much.) As some of you might remember, Gonutz is not shy. He believes in aggressive touring – musical “shock and awe”, as it were, at least in terms of the itinerary. I personally think he is insisting on Jupiter because he’s fond of the club scene, but that’s just a suspicion. (I’m chock bloody full of suspicions.) Proud man.

Well… we shall see how this will go over, especially with sFshzenKlyrn slinging his trademark telecaster. Hey, Admiral – are we bringing those clear plastic riot shields with us this time?

Usual Rubbish

Hard feelings.

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Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)

So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung.  (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)

sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.

Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!    

Usual Rubbish

Noise on.

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Turn it on, the fan. The BIG fan. Broken? Okay, then turn it on, the smaller fan. No smaller fan? What the hell. Right. Then just turn it on, the radio.

Another hot one here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Global warming at work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, it’s sweltering in here. I spent the morning hanging my head into the primitive air shaft at the center of this unused pile of industrial masonry – it seemed strangely airless. That’s why I’m asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to break out the fans. It’s times like this when any performer turns to his/her biggest fans. (Boom-crash!) How are ya, how are ya, how are ya! Anybody from Detroit in the audience tonight? Anybody? You in the back? There you are. Gotta’ love the motor city!

Ooops. Heat prostration briefly turned me into a Borscht Belt comedian. (Shecky Green, perhaps.) Must be incoherent thinking that Marvin would help me out, considering how I failed him last week during the inaugural performance of Marvin and the Lawn Robots. What’d I do? Rather ask what I did not do. What I did not do was anything right, that’s what I did … not. I twiddled all the wrong knobs on the board. (At one point, they had no top end at all. Later on, it was “generation reverb” time.) I pointed the lights in the wrong direction. I overloaded the mains so that by the end of the night they sounded like king size kazoos. (Rented, too. Good grief.) And I assigned the door to some straggler who – surprise, surprise – walked off with Marvin’s $57 take for the evening. WHERE DID I GO RIGHT?

I have an excuse, though not a very good one. Just the night before, our beloved sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon sFshzenKlyrn dropped in on us quite unexpectedly with a rather large poke of Zenite snuff. I partook of the, ahem, aid to digestion rather liberally before collapsing into my distressed Army cot sometime before 2:00 a.m. I suppose you could say I was a little worse for wear the following night – not unexpected by any means. Disappointing for the mechanical men, however. Their little shoulders were slumped as they watched me load the van. One of them started rotating at one point, his phony machine guns a-blazing with incandescent rage. Sad scene.

So my calls to Marvin, understandably, go unanswered today. He’ll get over it, I expect. But what of the lawn robots?