Bone free music magazine, January 1996
NOBODY'S MEAT PUPPETS
by Russell Hall
Conceivably, a future episode of Jeopardy could contain the following segment:
Pigeon-holed rock bands for two hundred.
The answer is: They're stoners, and they were Kurt Cobain's favorite group.
Ping! Who are the Meat Puppets?
There. For those emerging from comas, that's how the Meat Puppets--Curt Kirkwood, Cris Kirkwood and Derrick Bostrom -- are best known. And anyone hungry for more manna on those topics should go ahead and look elsewhere. Cobain's name came up only a couple of times during this talk with Cris, who plays bass for the band and sometimes shares vocal duties with his brother. One exchange went as follows: "Is there a question no one has asked about Cobain which you think should be asked?" Cris's reply: "Yeah: 'How big was his dick?'"
Subject closed.
As for the marijuana fog in which the Kirkwood brothers allegedly exist, there was but one cryptic reference. Or rather, it might have been a reference. "When you're harmonizing," Cris was told, "I can't tell which is you and which is Curt." Cris's response: "I'm usually the higher one. Unless it's real high. Then it might be Curt."
The Puppets' new album, No Joke! is a critical smash, and should put to rest all speculation that commercial success might spoil the band. If anything, the group's newfound wealth--largely the result of three original songs covered on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged, on which the Puppets also played--seems to have ushered in broader creative vistas. With No Joke! guitarist Curt Kirkwood has blossomed into one of rock's finest songwriters, and he and Cris continue to weave their Everly-Brothers-on-acid harmonies into new hallucinogenic zeniths.
This evening, Cris has just finished taping a segment for MTV's 120 Minutes. He sounds tired, or stoned, or both, and it's with some reluctance that he agrees that now's a good time to tackle an interview. Nonetheless, he's articulate, and his lazy demeanor leads to a discussion about the lethargic, but effective, vocals on No Joke! Some people say the Kirkwoods can't sing, an assertion that Cris quickly brushes aside.
"Anyone who says 'you can't sing' is coming from a perspective of, 'All right, this is singing, and this isn't,'" Cris says. "And music has never been that, to me. Music is whatever I say it is. That's what I like about it. It's not surgery. A surgeon can't say, 'Well, I was going to do heart surgery, but I don't feel like it today, so I'm gonna take out this guy's liver.' But with music, you can do whatever you want. I don't bother with singing the way everybody expects me to. It's more like, 'This is my record, so fuck 'em.' We've always been fuck-everybody-else oriented, anyway."
That attitude likely had its genesis in the Kirkwoods' childhood, a less-than-idyllic time spent in Phoenix with a loving, supportive mother whose most serious flaw was a predilection for unstable husbands. The brothers' parents divorced when Curt was four and Cris was two; subsequently, the boys endured two stepfathers who could've stepped right out of Grimm's Fairy tales. The first beat them; the second deliberately tried to burn down the family home. Cris and Curt sought refuge in racing dirt bikes, and in music. They also developed a renegade spirit which might have its basis in their genetic code. Their maternal grandfather, after all, was an eccentric inventor who eventually became a multimillionaire.
"First he managed to get a couple of patents, "Cris says. "Then he became an industrialist. He got some good war contracts, and then he turned to women's care products. One company he owned was TipTop, which he eventually sold to Faberg�. He rode the lucrative post-war boom years, then took that money and became one of the men who turned Acapulco into a resort town."
Although Cris and Curt weren't direct beneficiaries of their grandfather's wealth--"My mom was a Realtor," Cris says flatly--their mother made sure her sons had opportunities for a good education. Perhaps unwittingly, she also nurtured their increasingly strange creative sides. Once, she took her sons to see A Clockwork Orange. By chance, Deliverance was the opening feature, and Cris was smitten with the banjo scene.
"I got into bluegrass banjo after that. I've always liked country music singers. I love George Jones. He's one of my favorite musicians."
Still, the Kirkwoods didn't pursue music in any serious way until Curt left for college. While Curt was away, Cris got more and more into music on his own. Meanwhile, Curt was "not really succeeding" in school, but spending lots of time playing guitar in various pick-up bands. After a couple of years, he chucked the textbooks and returned to Phoenix, where he and Cris finally began playing music together. That was 1977.
The late '70s was a transitional period for rock & roll. Bands such as the Replacements, Black Flag, and H�sker D� were trapped in a no-man's-land between punk nihilism and commercial ambition. The Meat Puppets, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to such concerns. They were casual, indifferent, and in a sense, anti-philosophical. Perhaps that approach is what's kept the Puppets going for nearly twenty years, while those other bands are long gone.
"Those guys were about as far away from New York as we were from L.A.," Cris says. "So we had some things in common. But the Replacements and the H�skers were both a little more commercially-oriented than we were. H�sker D� has those umlauts, those dots over the vowels. And the Replacements were more pop-oriented. Both of them seemed aimed more at something specific. We weren't punk, and we weren't post-punk. We weren't anything."
Throughout the 80's, the Puppet's albums were characterized by a steady, if twisted, climb toward accessibility. Meat Puppets II, the band's 1983 watershed release, might just be the only album in history to blend the white-hot ferocity of the early Clash with the aw-shucks homeliness of Cris's country music heroes. Equally strange is Huevos, a homage to ZZ Top that Billy Gibbons probably regarded with equal parts honor, consternation, and amusement.
But for the most part, the Puppets simply kept improving. Curt's songwriting progressed in more melodic directions, the arrangements became more textured, and time eroded the punk-inspired shoddiness. With 1994's Too High to Die, the Puppets surprised themselves by scoring the hit single "Backwater." And now, with No Joke! they're at the height of their powers. Cris seems particularly proud of the vocals, which tend to color Curt's kaleidoscopic imagery with a velvet dreaminess that sounds less drug-addled than quietly confident.
"We don't go out of our way to 'emote,'" says Cris. "Or rather, we are emoting, but not in a typical fashion. One thing I don't like about a lot of rock & roll is people being presumptuous with an 'emotional quotient,' or something. I don't need any of this pissed-off urban macho-man chest-pounding, nor do I need the fuckin' soft and sensitive sentiments of the sadly sweet."
Kurt Cobain aside, another thing the Puppets seemingly "don't need" is the endorsement of their peers, or of anyone else, for that matter. Lou Reed once said, "I don't need anybody to tell me I'm good," and Cris shares that perspective. It took Courtney Love a while to understand what her husband saw in the band, and her belated grasp of their music neither annoys nor surprises Cris. "One thing we're really good at is having people not get us," he says. "In that respect, she's part of a big club."
Moreover, to the Puppets, embracing financial success doesn't mean "sell out"; it simply translates to such things as better equipment, easier travel, and more studio time. The Puppets will take the amenities, but they won't pander to those who provide them. As Cris says, "We've always just been the wretched little who-gives-a-shit Puppets." Don't expect that to change.