Phoenix Tribune fri 16 apr 1999

Forward & Back

Despite setbacks, the Meat Puppets launch two-pronged return to music spotlight
by Thomas Bond (Phoenix Tribune)

In recent years, the Meat Puppets had been given up for dead. The Phoenix trio - guitarist and vocalist Curt Kirkwood, his bassist brother, Cris, and drummer Derrick Bostrom - went their separate ways after their album No Joke! was released in 1995.

Four years later the band, though still separated, is back.

Curt Kirkwood, who fronts a different Pups lineup, is working on a new record in his new home base of Austin, Texas. Bostrom, still a Valley resident, is overseeing the re-release of the band's first seven albums and a new live CD. The odd man out is Cris Kirkwood, who his brother says is a heroin addict.

"I tried really hard to help him and I just can't do it anymore," Curt Kirkwood says from Texas. "He doesn't care about the Meat Puppets - I mean, its not like he doesn't care, but that's the sickness." It's reached the point where contact between the brothers has ceased. "I don't know what's up with him at all and I've had to keep it that way," Kirkwood says of his heartwrenching decision to let go. "It's beyond painful. I don't even know what the word for that emotion is and I'll have to live with it the rest of my life."

Attempts to contact Cris Kirkwood at his Valley residence and by telephone were unsuccessful.

The brothers also have had to deal with the deaths of their mother and Cris' wife, the latter of a drug overdose. Curt Krkwood was left clinging to the band - or at least what the band means to him. "It has kind of wrecked my life. I have Meat Puppets and I'm glad, it's the only good thing I have left that's mine. That and my kids," he says. "Having Meat Puppets is something I needed for my psychology. Having it now and having it be what I want. I would be (expletive) otherwise. You can only push somebody so far."

The Meat Puppets now are Kirkwood, the primary songwriter, and new members Kyle Ellison, who had toured with the original trio, drummer Shandon Salim and bassist Andrew Duplantis.

The group, which came together after Kirkwood moved to, Austin, called itself the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra. "I couldn't move to Austin and try to audition people going, 'It's the Meat Puppets,'" Kirkwood says. "I had to find friends and people that I could hang with."

He is still under contract with London Records, which guided the return to the Meat Puppets moniker.

"I've seen the light and realized that Meat Puppets is bigger than me," Kirkwood says. "I never went away from Meat Puppets in my heart but it took me a while to get back to it because I was overwhelmed with circumstances outside my control." Of course, he also had to break the name change to the erstwhile Neanderthals.

"When I told the guys in the band I was calling it Meat Puppets, they were like, 'Ohhhh, dude!'" Kirkwood says, emphasizing their disappointment. "But if I had said that a year ago, everybody would have been falling all over themselves."

The new Meat Puppets have played only a handful of shows, including one at the recent South by Southwest music conference. Kirkwood says the band has been "obnoxiously well-received" and there hasn't been much backlash about the lack of the other original members.

"I've heard it from one person so far," Kirkwood says. "A guy (at a show) in Dallas was screaming at me and I told him to go get his money back." He bristles at the thought of anyone giving him flak about it. "I'm 40 (expletive) years old and it's nobody's (expletive) business but mine - and Derrick's, to a degree. My mom died and my brother went crazy; if anybody wants to get in my face about it, I'll kick their (expletive) teeth in," Kirkwood says. "That's my personal business and they don't know what happened. It has been a ride through (expletive) hell."

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Original drummer Derrick Bostrom feels as much a part of the Meat Puppets as he ever has. He's overseeing the re-release of seven albums the band recorded in the 1980s and a new live album recorded in 1988. "Curt's doing his thing in Austin as Meat Puppets and I did the live album by myself as Meat Puppets," Bostrom says. 'There's really no difference."

Each of the Rykodisc re-releases comes with original artwork, video footage of the band and several bonus tracks. Bostrom, long the group's historian, also contributes personal recollections in the liner notes. It's all part of weaving his group's place in the great rock 'n' roll tapestry.

"From 1980 to 1996, we worked nonstop. We lived in each other's laps," Bostrom says. "We stuck with it for a long time and carved out a history for ourselves." That the Meat Puppets were influential in the independent music underground of the past decade was cemented when Nirvana, credited with bringing "alternative" music into the nation's consciousness, covered three of the, group's songs on a 1993 MTV Unplugged special and invited the Pups to perform the tunes with them on the program.

With their national profile elevated, and on the strength of the single Backwater, the Meat Puppets' ironically titled next record, 1994's Too High to Die, went gold. It was the group's commercial peak and, possibly, led to their downfall. "We finally started to make some money and once you make money, you go, 'This is what I want to do with my life,'" Bostrom says. "Curt wanted to move out of Phoenix and we know what Cris wanted to do."

But he refuses to fault his friend for the lackluster sales of the band's followup album.

"If the fact that Cris had drug problems stopped No Joke! from being a bigger hit then we're the first band in the history of rock 'n' roll to be stopped by drug use," Bostrom says sarcastically. "We worked with Blind Melon and a drug overdose killed that band. (Stone Temple Pilots) had their problems. Nirvana and Hole had their deaths. So many of these people who came up and finally got their shot broke on the rocks of their success, because it's just not what they got into (music) for - ourselves included."

Bostrom has an insider's perspective on the rise and fall of alternative music. "We're a small part of the big story, which is the underground, indie American rock movement of the '80s and what happened to it - as far as I can see it 's gone," he says. "It did what a lot of movements do: It got hyped and co-opted and was basically drained off. Alternative is just a style now. It used to be a group of people going out and sleeping on people's floors or driving overnight to play gigs because they wanted to." It's not something Bostrom wants to be a part of at this juncture of his life. "I don't want to do alternative music if it's just a style," he says. "It's not as fun as it used to be and I'm not young anymore, either. When you're 25, you don't have to make hard-and-fast decisions and stick to them about what you're going to do. You go wherever the road takes you, and that's what we did for 15 years."

He has no complaint about not being involved with Kirkwood's new lineup. "I'm just a drummer," Bostrom says. "He's a singer/songwriter/guitarist and if he's going to be creative, he's got to have people to play with. He can't do it over the phone and I'm not moving to Austin."

Still, even with the distance separating the Meat Puppets camps, there are still some strings attached. Curt Kirkwood says, it best: "We are all one."