Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
East Coast Rocker
August 10, 1988
"Talking With Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets"
by Tom Sinclair
Rock 'n' roll is full of improbable success stories. Take the Meat Puppets, for instance. Who would've thought that an unassuming trio from Phoenix, Ariz., whose influences include the Grateful Dead, ZZ Top, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Gentle Giant, would become the underground band most-likely-to-be-snatched-up-by-a-major-label-any-minute-now?
Not that the Meat Puppets are anxious to leave SST, the independent label they've recorded for over the past seven years. Head Puppet Curt Kirkwood, who sings, plays guitar and writes most of the group's material, is plenty happy with the way things now stand. The Meat Puppets tour rigorously, record quickly and cheaply and have total artistic control over their albums. On top of that, there's a growing legion of Meat Puppets devotees who have helped make the group the most popular underground act in America.
"The terms under which (our success) is happening are just fantastic," says Curt, sitting shirtless in a CBGB dressing room minutes after playing to a full house of New Music Seminar attendees and rabid Meat Puppets fans. "It's such a rare thing. I'm stupefied by it, I'm not eager to change our situation that much in any way. The record label itself doesn't matter to me as much as the control I have over the band. It's mine--all mine," he laughs.
The Meat Puppets got together eight years ago in Phoenix when Curt and his bass-laying younger brother, Cris, teamed up with drummer Derrick Bostrom, a high school buddy, to play some rock 'n' roll. After signing to SST, they released a debut album of largely generic hard-core head banging tunes.
By 1983, when they released Meat Puppets II, they had altered their approach, introducing melodies and a countryish twang that remains a hallmark of their sound to this day. Rolling Stone gave the album a rave review and the group continued to refine its sound. Their next album, 1985's Up On The Sun, was a tuneful collection of songs with vaguely surrealistic lyrics that managed to sound wistful without being wimpy. More critical acclaim greeted its release, and suddenly Meat Puppets was a very hot name to drop in underground circles, despite the fact that they were compared to the grateful Dead far more often than [to] the Velvet Underground.
An ep, Out My Way, came out in 1986, and in 1987 two albums, Mirage and Huevos, were released in rapid succession and the meat Puppets' legend continued to grow. Mirage was carefully crafted and dreamy while Huevos, rocked out a little more. Both albums showed up on plenty of critics' "best of the year" lists.
The Grateful Dead comparison may be odious, but it's unavoidable, though the Puppets' live sound is closer to Poco-Meets-the-Ramones on the MC 5's Shakin' Street. Curt is apparently unfazed by the Dead analogy after all this time.
"We've been compared to so many people," he says. "The big ones are the Dead, Neil Young, ZZ Top, Zeppelin and on down to Steve Miller, Hank Williams, the Eagles, the Replacements--I've even seen them compare us to Blue Cheer!"
Though Phoenix isn't exactly the first place you think of when you think of burgeoning rock scenes, Curt points out that several noteworthy musicians hailed from his hometown. "Alice Cooper was from our neighborhood, he went to high school there, and his first band, the Spiders, everybody in it was from Phoenix. Alice was the first concert my brother Cris ever saw. Marty Robbins was from Phoenix, and Duane Eddy. The Tubes were from there, via San Francisco, though. We're probably the only band out of Phoenix that's lived in Phoenix the whole time. So in some ways we're like the first wave of actual Phoenix rock, although rock's been happening there throughout the '70s and '60s. We're a real typical Phoenix band in a lot of ways. We embody a lot of Phoenix qualities.
"It's a pretty wacky place. Like in Austin (Texas) you see a lot of bands that have a real lyrical sense of humor. Phoenix is a lot like Austin in a sense, only it's dirtier and more desperate. It's a lot less populated than New York, but there's still a couple of million people living there right now. In terms of area, it's probably the second or third largest city. We're right in the middle of a big huge expanse of nothingness, 350 miles on either side, east or west."
Curt cites another American band also formed around two brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, as a big influence.
"I was heavily into Creedence. I was a kid then and I bought the singles. 'Lookin' Out My Back Door' appealed to me a lot. I was 8 or 9. Fogerty's new stuff... it's okay, but it's not Creedence. He can't duplicate that sound by himself, though he's tried to a degree. Creedence was his concept, but there was more to it than him. Doug Clifford was a great drum player and (John Fogerty's brother) Tom was a fantastic rhythm player. Once the band broke up, Fogerty didn't have a whole lot to work with and it took him years to recoup from the natural high that Creedence could give. It's like what happened to Jimmy Page after Zeppelin broke up."
During their encore, the Meat Puppets had played a rave up version of Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly" that, Curt says, was modeled after Creedence's own cover of that song. The crowd (which had called for an encore with cries of "More Meat!") had gone wild.
"How we perform on any given night depends a lot on the club." Curt notes, explaining the reason why songs which sound so pristine on record are transformed live into nuggets of raw power. "Like tonight, this was such a gritty scene, so we played hard. It seems ironic you'd think that people would want to be pacified in a scene like this because it's so hot. But the reality is if you get too mellow, you'll make them feel themselves in this environment. I think it's better to just kick it out."
The Meat Puppets' gig at CBGB came at a time when New York was already experiencing an oppressive heat wave. With the club jammed to the rafters for the Meat Puppets' show, it felt like about 125 degrees inside. Right after the gig, the band all ran out the back door to find a summer rain falling, and the first third of my interview with Curt was conducted with him squatting on the wet ground in back of the club looking like a frozen moment from one of his own songs about wind and rain.
Reportedly, on the West Coast, many Deadheads have embraced the Puppets. SST has gone so far as to distribute flyers for the band at Grateful Dead concerts. With Deadheads becoming "Meatheads" (as one West Coast writer put it), Curt sees a diversity in his fans that is unique for an underground unit.
"I think we're getting more metal people at our shows," he notes. "Some of our fans are like open-minded metalheads, headbangers. They're not punk rockers. They're kids who might listen to Slayer maybe, who are a little more open-minded or just might have been exposed to us and know it's the same rush in a way."
Curt says his approach to lyric writing is "pretty loose. I try not to make it too heady," though a listen to mid-period Puppets songs might make one wonder. (Sample lyric: "A long time ago/I turned to myself/And said, 'You are my daughter'.") But newer tunes, such as Huevos's "I Can't Be Counted On," are far less opaque, and if these guys aren't careful, they'll have a hit single soon.
Curt, like the other Puppets, is a big rock fan with wide-ranging tastes. He isn't embarrassed to admit that he listened to, and liked, '70s fusion units such as the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, in addition to the Ramones and the Damned. "I've listened to just about everything as a matter of course."
The Meat Puppets spend a lot of time on the road, and that's how they like it. Next to the excellent press coverage they've been privy to for the past few years, word of mouth about their live shows is one of their strongest assets.
"We've been together eight years," says Curt. "Success has been slow in coming. It's not like, whoa, man, this overnight thing.
"We've been called an ironic band, but I think we're one of the most obvious groups out there, as far as rockin' goes. I think when we play it's really obvious what's happening. We're about a human energy type thing trying to inspire a feeling of transcendence--which is what the best art does."