Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Guitar Player, July 1987
"Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets" by Jas Obrecht
Deep in Arizona's Sonoran Desert lurks a quirky trio known as the Meat Puppets. Master improvisers, these hombres specialize in rearranging roots American music--everything from country to bash-and-thrash punk and Grateful Dead space jams--into something fresh and urgent. No two of their concerts--or albums, songs, or solos, for that matter--are alike. "No question," declared critic Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times, "the still-evolving Puppets is one of rock's best bands." A few listenings into Up On The Sun, Out My Way, or Mirage, you may agree.
Much of the band's cult status on both coasts--and on many campuses in between--is due to the eccentric visions of Curt Kirkwood. With a voice that struggles to pitch, he lyrically explores the backroads where imagination defeats logic, where a man can ride "backwards to the sunset on a horse without a brain" and enjoy "petrified lizard antlers" and "freeze-dried gerbil ears--liquefied." His guitar style is equally imaginative. Onstage with his brother Cris--a fine bassist with a rapid-fire, bottom-heavy approach--and drummer Derrick Bostrom, he conjures huge, distorted sounds, roaring cascades of notes, and seemingly limitless abandon. "Catharsis," he calls it.
By contrast, recent Meat Puppets albums find him casting crystalline solos above tasteful rhythms and clean, syncopated riffs. His perfect country bends in the title track of 1986's Out My Way recall the work of rockabilly maestro James Burton, while his layered riffs in "She's Hot" mine a vein Jimi Hendrix tapped on War Heroes [Reprise, MS 2013]. Curious fingertaps flood "Not Swimming Ground." The EP closes with a Blue Cheer-on-speed approximation of "Good Golly Miss Molly."
Kirkwood pushes his boundaries further still on the newly issued Mirage. Pristine arpeggios and sophisticated chord voicings abound; most solos are polished little gems. "Liquefied," the LP's thud rocker, climaxes in a whirligig frenzy of sound as he hammers a peso against his fingerboard. "My sense of humor is a big part of it," the 28-year-old confides. "It's probably better than my guitar playing."
Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, Curt moved to his home base of Phoenix early in his youth. His first musical heroes were the Beatles and Johnny Cash, and by fourth grade he was playing clarinet. For a while he and his year-and-a-half younger brother Cris took classical and jazz guitar lessons. After the Kirkwood house and guitars were destroyed by fire, Curt abandoned playing in favor of a new passion, motorcycles. He still listened voraciously to rock, though, especially Gentle Giant, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Grateful Dead, and ZZ Top. "My brother and I were really big ZZ Top heads in high school," he confesses. "We'd put on Tres Hombres [Warner Bros., BSK 3270] and just leave the arm up so it would play over and over again. Then I got into jazz. I really loved John Abercrombie in Oregon, Mahvishnu John McLaughlin. I kind of admired Al Di Meola and those types. It's weird, but later on the ZZ Top infatuation came back around after all that other stuff."
During senior year Curt rediscovered the guitar through Randy Blake. "He's a real nut," Kirkwood laughs. "He used to tell me I was terrible--we'd be playing, and he'd say, 'Oh, God, you suck!'--and that gave me great encouragement. We'd go around to parties and play on acoustic guitars to irritate people, and we'd jam on our electrics at home. When I first got into bands, they used to give me such shit because I'd go off. They'd yell at me, 'What are you, retarded or something?'" Curt was thrilled when he unwrapped a black Gibson Les Paul Custom as a high school graduation present. "It was a really nice guitar," he eulogizes. "I rebuilt the pickups on it, so it just screamed. It got swiped in 1980 when I left it in the back of a car--real stupid." To this day, Les Pauls are his favorite guitars.
Kirkwood traveled to Canada and then lived in Omaha, Nebraska, for a while. When he returned home, he formed the Meat Puppets with Cris and Derrick. "The band has been the same from the very beginning," he says. "It's always been a ridiculous extension of our friendship. It's a really fun band. I like it so much that I haven't played with anybody else in seven years, except for Gary Russell from Killer Pussy. The Puppets could play it like Return To Forever, but we decided early on that that was just not as fun. We pretty much got our whole style from a band here in Phoenix called Loosely Tight."
To say that 1982's Meat Puppets is raw is akin to saying that the desert is "sort of warm" in July. The 14-song, 12" EP was recorded live in the studio with no overdubs. Curt's vocals sound like a cross between the Clash and a tomcat being strangled. His playing is even more unbridled. This project, along with the subsequent tour, labeled the Meat Puppets as punk thrashers. A few tracks on 1983's Meat Puppets II took another nod toward the raucous, but overall the LP showed dramatic improvement in musicianship and recording skills. "Magic Toy Missing" introduced Curt's punchy country breakdown style, and "Aurora Borealis" hinted at the riff-and-arpeggio style that would become the cornerstone of later albums.
With Up On The Sun, released in 1985, the Meat Puppets came into their own. Curt's vocals exude a lazy confidence; his playing is superb. He and Cris craft adventurous, fast-moving arrangements reminiscent of the Dregs. The album became a smash on college radio, with "Swimming Ground" breaking onto mainstream stations. The band followed Up On The Sun with its most accessible albums yet, Out My Way and Mirage.
The Meat Puppets have toured extensively since 1982. While the trio appears most often at bars, rented halls, and colleges, it also plays New York's Ritz and nicer clubs in southern California. Fans come expecting the unexpected, since until recently the band never learned to duplicate its own records. Past shows have featured rave-up versions of "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," and the Everly Brothers' "All I Have To Do Is Dream."
Curt's expansive imagination carries beyond music into the graphic arts. His paintings appear on the covers of Meat Puppets II, Out My Way, and Up On the Sun, and he provided the drawings that accompany his views in Speaking Puppet.