Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
MOMENTS OF MEAT...
Brave Ear Magazine, Winter '86
by Seymour Glass
Just about eveerybody has an opinion about the Meat Puppets, and the range is pretyt wide. While some insist that they're brilliant, mention of their name can get you laughed out of a conversation. Early recorded efforts depicted a group of musicians with a collective frame of mind that one could easily lable "beyond the point of no return." One song, "Hair," appeared in the middle of side two on an LP by Monitor. By the time they recorded their first 12" for SST, "Meat Puppets", none of the frenzy had been diluted; in fact it had been intensified and extended. Their LP "Meat Puppets II" revealed serious improvement in musical ability, the energy and humor evolving into precision and wit. With the release of "Up On The Sun," the people that used to laugh at them started calling them brilliant and the people that used to call them brilliant still call them that AND laugh at them.
The night before their performance at the I-Beam in San Francisco, the Meat Puppets, (the brothers Kirkwood, Chris [sic] and Curt and Derrick Bostrom) wreaked radio mayhem during an appearance on UC Berkeley's KALX. Stopping songs 30 seconds after the disc jockey had started them, screaming into the microphones at full volume, snorting like rutting pigs, asking questions such as "the Minneapolis band Husker Du are from what Midwestern city?," and insisting that the listeners strap ears of corn to their feet all pointed to one conclusion: the Meat Puppets are fans of buffoonery.
After I decided not to ask pseudo-goofy questions like "Do you see the bulk of western civilization as a slip-knot on the jib-sheet of life, or are we just maggots crawling on a carcass?" and "Ever worn a pizza like a diaper?" Scott the photographer arrived and whispered to me, "I could never do interviews. I'd never know what to ask, or if it's pissing 'em off or not." "Thanks for pointing that out, Scott," I said. "You sure you have film in the camera?"
"The thing is that with the flash, it's kind of obtrusive. I always get the feeling that they want me to leave." In a former life, Scott was a doomsday prophet.
I attempted to talk with the Meat Puppets on two occasions. The first was just before a performance with Poison 13 at the I-Beam in San Francisco and the second occurred about a month later at the Berkeley Square, the latter being extremely brief due to their late arrival, the former being confusing and chaotic due to the presence of a gaudily-dressed "patron of the meat," who aside from providing the comments below, distracted everyone present by continually walking on the furniture. As far as I could tell, no one knew who he was but no one would ask him to leave. The following combines both conversations and starts as mention is made of Mojo Nixon, who "are pretty damn entertaining. It's amazing what they can do with a wooden box, a broomstick and a washboard."
BE: Do you see a lot of performance art at home in Arizona?
CURT: Some. There's some modern performance art, it was pretty juch born there with Alice Cooper. They moved to Detroit after a while, but the band was formed in Phoenix. The environment there is pretty strong. It's just fucked up in the desert. The bands get that sense of humor that's attached to Alice Cooper. He grew up about a mile from where we live. A real white shit neighborhood.
BE: What is it about the desert?
CURT: It's no place to live. Indians lived there for thousands of years until they disappeared when the climate got so harsh. It was a populated area a thousand years ago. Where Phoenix is there used to be Indians, but by the time white people came there wasn't anyone. I don't understand why there's a city there.
FURNITURE: Is it expensive to get water?
CURT: It's more expensive in San Francisco. Because of the slimate, you don't even go outside for a certain part of the year. People develop this perverse cabin fever.
FURNITURE: Don't you hate losing your keys?
CURT: Yes. After a while people start to hate each other. You know, it's like something you can't help.
FURNITURE: None of you have shadows. Why?
BE: Do the three of you participate in college radio on a regular basis in Arizona, like you did on KALX the other night?
DERRICK: No. Radio where we live is pretty lame. There's one good station but it's too far away for us to be involved.
BE: How is it that you got into doing stuff on KALX?
DERRICK: Every time we're in the Bay Area, we drop by and gradually they kept letting us take over. It's to the point now where we can just walk in and go nuts.
FURNITURE: Is there any truth to the rumour that Paul Simon is suing you for not doing "Mother and Child Reunion" any more?
CURT: You know what that song is about? In a Chinese restaurant its a dish with half chicken and half egg.
FURNITURE: Can I get in free tonight?
CHRIS: (picks up a clipboard with a list of names) Yes. Here's your name.
FURNITURE: You will give me my ticket now or I will kill you.
(Chris hits Furniture on the head with the clipboard. Furniture rolls his eyes, tucks his fists under his armpits, jumps up and down, falls over, and tumbles down the stairs.)
CURT: We were trying to give away tickets last night on KALX, but no one could answer the Elvis questions. I don't know how we ever got into college radio. There's so much schtick involved. You have to have the right sound at the right time. Like now it's the Byrds homogenized. That's what I like about electric guitar, because everything that I do with my mind is imitative, more or less, but the electric hguitar can do things that the mind can't concieve. It's got something all it's own going.
BE: are you going to tell me that you're not responsible for what you play?
CURT: Well, you can direct it, I guess. The voice is like that, too. But there are fantastic guitarists everywhere. Whether or not they receive any attention is just fortune.
BE: Have you studied any guitar disciplines at all? Because in some of the things you play, the speed and non-stop complexity reminds me of flamenco, but I don't know anything about it.
CURT: A little.
BE: Are there any names?
CURT: Uh, I think there's a family in Spain, the Romeros.
CHRIS: We remind you of flamenco?
BE: Just some of the newer stuff. Didn't SST just re-release an old single of yours?
CHRIS: Yeah, it originally came out in 1981 on World Imitation, and for the first 1000, we went through years of notebooks and picked out the artwork for the covers. Those first thousand are the ultimate Meat Puppets collectors item. That's what the record collectors have their dicks out for.
BE: What about that song on the Monitor album?
CHRIS: That;s where the opportunity to do the single came from. They were originally going to have Curt play guitar on it, but they realized that that wasn't going to work so they said we should do the whole song. It's one of their compositions, but we were able to do it faster and harder than they were and at the time we were playing faster and harder than jsut about anyone. So they had all the equipment set up and we did the song, called "Hair," in about ten minutes. They said go ahead and record some of yours, so in 15 minutes we whipped those off. That was our payment for doing "Hair." They're all first takes.
The set at the Berkeley Square was fertile with emotion and intoxicating energy, like a throbbing fungus. A good point of reference when recalling the performance would be Curt's comment that the Meat Puppets "play loud, real loud, when you consider the sound you get when you're taking a bit of a rat." The originals were great but cover tunes mae the biggest impression, especially "Tomorrow Never Knows" with waves of reverb and feedback. The more recent material is fantastic, and indeed loud enough to obliterate auditory disturbances caused by rodent ingestion, but more often than not, the early recordings are overlooked and the Meat Puppets fan does a disservice to him/herself by ignoring the re-issue of the 7". Frenzy that tried to chuck you out the window by your noseholes.
The address is:
SST Records,
P.O. Box 1,
Lawndale, CA 90260