Shout out.

Good evening, Aldebaran! How is everybody out there? Thanks for coming out tonight! We love you, man... we love you!

Hi, folks. Thought I'd offer you a transcript of our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium - bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet - it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the "brown acid"? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock pedestal during the trip over, he had occasion to watch Woodstock: The Movie.

So what's next - a cameo by Wavy Gravy? Not on this tour. No, sir... this was more like one of those primitive mid-sixties shows. Our speaker stacks are relatively primitive, our amps antiquated, my piano in excess of a dozen years old (i.e. relatively new). Don't have to tell you that there was a bit of a buzz in the air that night, and I don't mean the buzz of excitement. I'm talking bad patch cables, mostly. Still, it was fun for some of us, and the many thousands of blobs of extraterrestrial goo were nodding their pseudopods in time with "Enter the Mind" (a cut off of our new album, International House). Quite an amazing site to behold, actually. Stunning, I'd say. Or perhaps the word is, well... nauseating. Though our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, has been capturing images of this phenomenon, hoping to use it in one of his new graphic user interfaces.

Well, that was then, this is now. And right now, we're cruising away from Aldebaran at 30% of light speed in our modified Soyuz spacecraft. Destination? Well, that's a bit up in the air. Our corporate uber-label, Loathsome Prick Records, originally wanted to send us out to Orion's belt to do a string of gigs. Then sometime last week they changed their minds and decided that we should head over to the Pleiades cluster (the seven sisters). Of course, our initial reaction was, "What, all seven?" There was some grumbling over the phone, some muffled oaths, some veiled threats, and ultimately we agreed just to do three of the seven. Once in transit to that cluster, however, we received word from the overlords at LP that they wanted us to divert back to Orion again. Apparently there's a bidding war going on for our presence. (Can you say "payola"?)

I can certainly say payola. I just can't pay payola. So I guess that means we go where they tell us to, even if that turns out to be somewhere where the sun don't shine. And as you know, the sun don't shine in space... except near the sun.