Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
MEAT PUPPETS:
Curt Kirkwood's too high to die.
Guitar Player, April 1994
by Jas Obrecht
From Infotrac
Brief Summary: Guitarist Kirkwood explains his group's eclectic approach to making music as 'beer rock'- rock-saturated country music ideal for rock shows. He says he can work at songwriting intensively, take a couple of months off, and the unwritten songs reappear in his mind.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Miller Freeman Publications 1994
Levee-breaking riffs and roaring squawk-tones make "Violet Eyes" the thumpingest track on the Meat Puppets' eighth LP, Too High To Die. "We've always been trying to get heavy," reports Curt Kirkwood, master of the enigmatic lyric and monotone delivery. "That's the weird thing about us - we're all such pussies, but we play really loud sometimes."
Cult faves for a dozen years, the Phoenix-based trio have inspired members of Nirvana, Soul Asylum, Butthole Surfers, and Pearl Jam. And as their fans already know, the Puppets can jerk themselves in many directions. Their new record jams into Dead territory, detours through heatrbreak country into bluesland, and even delivers hippie coffeehouse folk flashbacks. Curt, meanwhile, tends to describe the band as punk rock: "I always try to use cliched terms that sound really hokey. I don't want to be correct in any way about this stuff. In actuality, we're like a living road atlas. We're all twisted from having done a lot of touring, but we're also better for it. I think most of the time we're ~beer rock' because that's what people do at rock shows - drink beer. Tons of beer are sold, and at the end of the concert the floor is a sea of cups. Maybe we're just a rock band that plays a lot of country music."
Inveterate jammers, drummer Derrick Bostrom and bassist Cris Kirkwood (Curt's brother) thrive on everything from Broadway tunes to space improvisations. For frontman Curt, though, the song matters most: "Ultimately what we do is based on melody and songs. We can jam and improvise, and we certainly have our bombastic elements live, but we always come back to the songs. I've got a real strong Beatles and Creedence influence, and I usually end up taking a George Jones approach to singing.
"When I write songs, I like to get something going on the TV - I like just about anything that's on, pretty much. Then I put some music on too, maybe watch TV without the sound. That makes it easy to write lyrics, which I do separate from the guitar - sometimes before, sometimes after. Usually I suddenly think of something funny and start writing. It has to be unthought-of, to a degree, which is why I like distractions. And I don't write songs down. I can go away from songwriting for a month or two and come back, and the ones that I had are just there. I've always believed that your imagination and creativity are just like an attic - you know, you can poke your head up in there and look around and then remember some of the things that you saw."
Produced by Butthole Surfer Paul Leary, Too High To Die lifts the lid on a treasure chest of tones. "A lot of it was Paul's doing," Curt says. "He's got some cool guitars that he let us use. Like on ~Violet Eyes,' there's an old Destroyer, a long-neck Les Paul SG, and a couple of Les. Pauls. And the guy at the studio in Memphis let me use this really cool old '57 Telecaster on the clearer things. A lot of this record turned out to be the scratch guitar, which is how I like to do it. I don't like to repeat myself and do two takes. A lot of times the first one's good, but it's hard to get people to accept that that's true. They just think I'm being lazy. But Paul and I just followed our hearts on it, and the first time heard the record, I was totally numbed." For his MTV Uplugged appearance with Nirvana Curt borrowed a patriotic Buck Owens American acoustic, while the new LP's woody tunes were cut on a Takamine.
Onstage, Curt run his Les Paul into a Chandler Tube Driver, a CryBaby wah-wah and a Morley chorus/echo. The signal then plits into stereo, with one line going through a Scholz Rockman into a Yamaha REX50 and the looped back to the Scholz and into a 100-watt Marshall. The other goes straight to a 50-watt Soldano with a Soldano or Marshall cabinets. "The REX50 has some real mutated digital setups that I use now and then to make the guitar sound not like a guitar. I also use it as a preamp. The Scholz and Chandler are for distortion. I love distortion boxes of any kind, and generally when I do distorted leads, I have at least two distortion boxes on." The Morley is Kirkwood's secret ingredient: "It's unique. It makes pitch changes, and it's real rubbery and sounds sort of like a string bend or a slide. You can hear it on ~Violet Eyes.' If you pedal it to echo, it's almost like a pitch-bender synthesizer. You can really get weird with it. The Morley is the most consistently sick thing I've used. They don't make 'em anymore, but they truly, truly are the most bitchin' thing in the world effects-wise."
Despite Too high To Die's guitar layering, Curt is unconcerned about how the new songs will play onstage: "I sometimes envy bands that have two guitar players, but I don't worry about it. Never have. I just don't bother playing the stuff that's not easy to do! That's the bottom line. We're used to being able to just let go."