Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Eatmag, February 4, 2001
"Meat Puppets" by Scott Harrell
“I feel like my career is totally over, as I know it, unless they decide to get behind this record.”
Principal Meat Puppet Curt Kirkwood sounds neither stressed nor resigned when he baldly states his current mindset. He simply knows the score. Six years have passed since Kirkwood’s then-trio of cult/critical legends registered as a blip on mainstream America’s pop-culture radar with the one-off hit ‘Backwater’, an eternity in terms of the average radio listener’s attention span. And more than enough time for a poorly-promoted or inactive outfit to acquire the aura of entertainment-history footnote.
“We got somewhat into the pop vernacular, and that’s where my real shot lies, and on the fact that this band really is good. They don’t have to tell me it’s over, or however they want to view it, that there’s not enough hip-hop or tattoos or piercings or dreadlocks or whatever. I get it. It’s old. It has to be proven [again] on it’s own,” he concedes, adding with a laugh, “but it never really was; it’s not like, here’s the Talking Heads again.”
That Kirkwood even gets a shot at rejuvenating his stalled career seems like something of a minor miracle, given the industry’s contemporary disinclination toward both iconoclastic talent and shelf life. That he’s up to the challenge becomes something altogether greater, when it’s taken into account that the past five-plus years have been the most tragic and demoralizing of his life.
Following the successes of appearing on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged broadcast and CD release, ‘Backwater’, and the gold-selling album Too High To Die, Curt Kirkwood’s younger brother, bassist, and lifelong musical partner Cris cultivated a heroin addiction. His problem quickly worsened to the point that sessions for their triumphant follow-up were disrupted and the band’s label, London, were prompted to begin cutting their losses. As a result, the brilliant, psychedelic desert-pop gem No Joke was released in late 1995 with little fanfare, promotion, or airplay. Cris’ habit played hell with various touring schedules, so the threesome (including original drummer Derrick Bostrom) settled into a holding pattern, ostensibly waiting things out, only to watch his condition deteriorate. In 1997, the Kirkwoods’ mother passed away, and Curt, frustrated and unwilling to watch his brother kill himself, relocated from the Meat Puppets’ hometown of Phoenix to Austin. Distance may not have yielded perspective, but it did provide distraction and productive direction in the form of the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra; while waiting for something, anything, to happen, Kirkwood the elder began jamming with guitarist Kyle Ellison and drummer Shandon Sahm, both of underground metal favorite Pariah, and former Bob Mould bassist Andrew Duplantis.
“It’s not like we were trying to get somewhere, we just didn’t have anything going on except playing together,” he remembers. “I just really didn’t know what was up.”
Cris’ wife, Michelle Tardif, fatally overdosed in August of 1998. Curt made a final attempt at intervention shortly afterward, flying his brother to Los Angeles and checking him into a rehab clinic, which Cris left three days later. He has been seen only sporadically, by friends and law enforcement officials, since.
“I was at the mercy of Cris, in my mind. We were such a partnership, Cris and Derek and I. I was too inexperienced at making calls like that on my own. Derek, I think, knew it was over. He’s pretty practical. We never even really talked about it,” says Kirkwood of the band’s erosion. “Then when Cris’ wife passed away, I just realized that, wow, this is way outside of my control, but I can petition the powers that be to have what I want back. I just went, fuck this, I’m not gonna be on my knees to somebody else’s drug addiction. But it took quite a bit of time, and bludgeoning, to realize that. I’m a pretty upbeat person about this whole Meat Puppets thing. It’s like Disneyland to me. So I was like, what? It’s going away? You’re kidding me. Just when it’s the best?”
Through playing with Ellison, Sahm, and Duplantis, Kirkwood had worked up more than enough material for a new album. The question was, what would become of it? Meat Puppets were still under contract to London Records, now a subsidiary of Universal, and no one within the conglomerate seemed to be salivating at the opportunity to launch the big comeback. The new lineup could conceivably move ahead under the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra moniker, be the Meat Puppets in all but name, endure the ‘Featuring Former Members Of’ stickers on everything they produced, or they could wait out the contract’s option, hoping another major would step in and buy it.
“That was the choice, too. The Meat Puppets were big enough for that, at least inside the business. That’s what I found out. Not big enough to fuckin’ pull any weight, or to carry me, but in terms of being a monkey on my back, it’s big enough to be that,” Kirkwood laughs ruefully.
“It’s always going to beg a comparison. I got RNO a nice offer from Sony, but I’ve known the guy that did it since college, and I know that he figured on that. He told his people he was getting The Meat Puppets, and I wasn’t out of my Meat Puppets deal with Polygram yet. I would have had to dissolve The Meat Puppets. I got put in one of those positions that sinks people. It’s a big deal trying to figure out what to do when you’re stuck with a corporate thing like that. They’ve got a contract on what you’ve done with your whole life, and here I need to move on, but I’ll have to break this up, because it’s under contract.”
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Kirkwood stuck to his guns, Atlantic Records’ imprint Breaking showed some moxie, and unto the world was given Golden Lies, a stellar amalgam of smart pop songcraft, energetic boogie, and aural peyote space-out. While more countrifried dynamics and crafty but frugal electronic experimentation find their way into the mix, Golden Lies is from start to finish a Meat Puppets effort, full of thick, lush guitar tones and those trademark harmonies. It’s so cohesively the next step from Kirkwood’s organic, hallucinogenic origins through the group’s latter-day pop leanings that one might be led to believe it was canned before all the shit hit the fan.
But Kirkwood knows, after years of wrangling with major labels, that producing great work is only half of the battle. The other half is out of his hands.
“I don’t really think about it, because I can’t make people go out and buy the record either, but when you do a deal with the big company, you set your sights pretty high.
“It takes a lot of money. It doesn’t just happen. If the Creed story is true, or if the Elvis story is true, not all of us can be that lucky. And even there, somebody is turning a wheel. I don’t give a shit what anybody says, it ain’t monkey one going to monkey two, to three, all the way across the beautiful nation, Johnny Appleseed-style,” he contends. “It takes a big running start, and a huge commitment. And we’ve made the commitment, all of us, once again here, and we need to have the power behind it – the power of their publicity machine. I think the band can live up to it, but that’s where the pressure is now.”
It remains to be seen whether or not a tune from Golden Lies will find its way between Papa Roach and 3 Doors Down in regular rotation, selling Japanese coupes, or playing in the background while Dawson kisses whoever he’s got it bad for this season, but those things are largely a more accurate measurement of marketing expenditures than of an album’s creative merit. And either way, Kirkwood is aware that getting back to the point where those things seem possible again is, in itself, more than most people get.
“It wasn’t my doing, to be out of the picture for so long. That’s just how rough this business is, and the fact that I’m back in…I’m in that one out of ten shot, that I get to try again. I’m not looking down my nose at that. I get another shot to go around.”
THE END