“Whatcha doing, Mudder?”

“I’m reading this new book about primitive man, Scullery. I know this may seem far-fetched, but I think the roots of the conspiracy date back centuries before Christ. Maybe even all the way back to Adam and Eve.”

“Still looking for a global, new-tour-order behind every concert, no matter if it’s by Chris Whitley or Placebo, uh? That’s what I like about you, Mudder. Mr. Dependable. Yada yada ya.”

“‘Yada yada ya,’ Scullery?”

“I can’t help it, Mudder. I watched a Seinfeld marathon on TV last night. Anyway, whassup?”

“There seems to be two schools of thought about early concert-going man. Legend has it that an early ancestor of man, often referred to as the Frederick Man, was expelled from a place known as the Madison Square Garden Of Eden for scalping tickets for the primitive forerunners of James McMurtry, matchbox twenty and Emmylou Harris.”

“I don’t see how this relates to anything we’re working on, Mudder.”

“There’s more, Scullery. During the last 50 years, a new theory arose that man had outside help. The theory proposed that a mysterious, half-shell shaped obelisk appeared in the midst of the Barnard Man tribe, a genetic offshoot of Nederlander Man, which inhabited an area somewhere in Southern California during the Concertzoic Era. Supposedly, the obelisk ejected the genetic material that would eventually evolve into fans of Pere Ubu and Eddie Money.”

“Wait a minute, Mudder. Are you saying that ancient concert goers may have been bred by space aliens thousands and thousands of years ago? That the desire to see shows like Saint Etienne or Victoria Williams may be programmed into our DNA?”

“That was the theory, but this book claims that the truth is somewhere in between Frederick Man and Barnard Man.”

“In other words, we can trace our entire concert heritage, including Beck and Fishbone, to prehistoric times and two guys named Fred and Barney?”

“I know it sounds preposterous, Scullery, but…”

“Makes sense to me, Mudder. In fact, you could say it’s the ‘bedrock’ of the theory. Get it, Mudder? Bedrock? Does it say anything about Wilma and Betty?”

“Go ahead and make fun of me, Scullery. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Yada yada ya.”

“No, Mudder, not yada yada ya.”

“No?”

“Of course not, silly. It’s yaba daba doo.”