Cherished Joel Newton Earth-tet fans. How are you?

We’re in the air right now (heading South, somewhere not too far from Hawaii). We’re in an airplane: becoming big rockstars, but still haven’t learned how to fly on our own.

Wanted to update you briefly on our goings-on:

MAJOR RECAP #1: Our Jones-ish Beach concert of last Tuesday (less than a quarter-mile from the official JB concert site) was amazing. We got 23 legible signatures on our mailing list, and I made meaningful eye-contact with many more an adoring fan. As has been discussed, the audience was naked, probably drunk, and almost definitely overstuffed on complimentary ham sandwiches.

So we feel good. Except for our guest, Billy Joel. He got stung in the testicles by one of Dr. Ivana Vakov’s giant carbon-sucking jellyfish while being theatrically ballooned off our floating stage. One of its tentacles had surreptitiously slithered up through an electrical conduit onto the stage and wrapped around Billy’s mic stand. When he did his signature bawdy move with the microphone, it zapped him where it counts. Poor Billy was still grabbing his noticeably swollen nuts in the air and grimacing while paparazzi gathered around our limo to catch the landing. All press is good press.

MAJOR RECAP #2: Our Dayton dairy farm gig with the Dolores J. Stangaroni Elementary School Orchestra was also a big success. Our first gig without a superstar guest, I held my own in the vocal department, and we slayed the audience with a mix of sizzling jazz-rock-fusion originals and choice pop hits from the last few decades, with sophisticated musical restylings. The only problem is that the Satan’s-horns-evoking double cutaway of my Gibson SG electric guitar apparently didn’t sit well with some of the more God-fearing in the crowd, many of whom had driven to the gig in tractors. Mistaking me for Diablo himself, 30 or 40 of them grabbed pitchforks from their wagons and decided to end the concert early, by chasing the band to the city limits on foot. Thankfully, local hero, Dr. Ivana Vakov, whose Nobel prize (for proving that the Earth is hard and crunchy on its surface but much more chewy at its center) and whose warm reception by the Nathan McFliggle Institute for Earth Sciences was the reason we came to Dayton in the first place – Dr. Vakov talked the angry mob down by synopsizing her scientific work and promising each one of them $100 cash (from her NASA grant).

The rude zealots still didn’t sign our mailing list or buy our JNET mugs and pencil erasers, but they did refrain from killing us, which was nice.

So….

We are off on the next leg of our quest to become global superstars by melding exquisitely refined jazz-funk music with catchy and pulsing pop genres, often with the help of big name stars (we’ve already been through Billy Joel and Taylor Swift, and almost Ted Nugent – see early posts). This has all happened in about a month, so we’re feeling good about ourselves. Cedric and Janice are feeling so good about themselves that they had not one but two lunches at Denny’s today.

In a few hours we will arrive in Tahiti, and then Island hop to the luxury, peace and simple, often naked lifestyle of Bora Bora.

Our goals here are four-fold:

1) Procure voodoo dolls and punish the silly people from Dayton.

2) Find sultry naked women for Cedric to engage with. Ever since a travel agent showed him some of Gauguin’s paintings from his Tahiti period, Cedric, making up lost time from forgetting to have sex for 30 years, has been under the impression (as Gauguin too may have been) that sex in French Polynesia is like saying, “Hey, how ya doin?” in other parts of the world. I hope he’s right.

3) Find a local musical hero with whom to do a sensational concert, which in turn will help us:

4) Prove to the world that we can win over not only sophisticated audiences (Nyack, Long Island’s beach set, etc), ordinary folk (Dayton), eventually evil and demented barbarians (Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region), but also relaxed, primitive, and typically naked people (Tahiti and Islands).

We realize our earth-circumnavigating aspirations and desire to surpass all other bands in history is slow in bearing fruit (it’s been over a month, and we’re only half-way around the world, and we haven’t even booked our gig there yet), but we are relaxed, proud, and confident. Apple wasn’t built in a day. The Rolling Stones are still touring, so I guess they still think they have something to prove. Menudo is pretty much washed up and, apparently, has no Dayton following.

So, please, dear fans, please raise a glass to us, as we rocket onwards. We couldn’t do it without you. Mostly us. We couldn’t do it without us.

xo,
Joel