Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Guitar Player, July 1987
"Speaking Puppet" as told to Jas Obrecht
Note: This article was illustrated with Curt's own drawings. I will try to get them scanned eventually.
First whacks. I got my first electric in seventh grade, and started playing Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" and the Stones' "Satisfaction" real amateurish and real loud. I used to put the amplifier outside the window, and I'd stay inside with the curtains closed and make a lot of noise. I made some friends that way--people used to come around. I got kind of a thrill that nobody could see me.
Albums vs. Concerts. Out albums are sculptures; our live shows are external combustion and a lot of drool. We've always approached records with a real carefree attitude and never tried to get the sound that we have live. We never tried to say, "This is what the band is," so all the albums are kind of different. Most of the stuff is done in one take, and then we do a little overdubbing. Onstage we play really loud, and the music has always been way, way more raw. We work off of flow real heavily, and I like to put everything I've got into it. It's like catharsis. That's probably the only reason I like Springsteen--not for his songs or guitar playing or anything--but because he just about vomit when he goes for it. I like that approach.
We could never do our early albums live; people didn't like it because it was too raw. They'd come expecting real crystalline stuff from Meat Puppets II, and we'd just blow it out. See, we never practiced until last year. We're pretty sloppy sometimes, but we're better these days. We're a lot more popular now that we practice. Our next tour will be as close as we've ever come to playing the stuff the way it sounds on the album, but it's still going to be a lot louder. It's comedy to blow big wads of sounds around; it's one of the funniest things you can do. But it gets kind of scary unless you take it lightly.
Guitars and Motorcycles. The electric guitar is a lot like motocross--you can do all kinds of cool stuff with a motocross bike that relates to the way you think and move your body. You preconceive something, look at the dirt, and then go for that feeling with the bike, and the bike will do it and stay upright. Music on the electric guitar can take that a step further. You preconceive what you want to do and go for it, but you can't fall down! I like all the sounds that come out of an electric guitar. I don't think you can make a bad sound with one. You have the whoop-dee-doos and all the jumps and the roostertails. A guitar can actually throw a roostertail--you can see it happen. That's one of the things Hendrix was good at.
Country Roots. My mom married this guy who had race horses. I used to work at the track and ride around with him in his pickup truck, and he always played country music. So it bled through. Also, we used to drive back and forth between Texas and North Carolina a lot, and it seemed like all the South was just Elvis, old cars, and trees. Elvis was everywhere. My grandmother has Elvis 78s. I never knew that he was rock and roll--I thought that Elvis was like art Linkletter or cars. That's the kind of country and western I like--that rockabilly two-step. I loved Johnny Cash. We used to watch his show as a family, and my stepdad, the redneck that he was, would have arguments with us over who was more of a man--the Beatles or Johnny Cash [laughs]. It was really ridiculous! He'd go, "They sing like girls." I was about six years old, and I was into the Beatles cartoon show.
Billy Gibbons. Oh, man, I love that guy. He's the best. He's both Cris' and my favorite guitar player. He's hilarious, and he's such an awesome musician. I've been a big van since I was a freshman in high school. I have to be honest about it--I've got all of ZZ Top's records, and that's the only band I can say that about. I saw them for the first time last September, and my brother and I have been starry-eyed ever since. The only thing that I could compare the Afterburner tour to is Disneyland. I love that combination of that seamless Gibbons guitar with machines. That ZZ Top show inspired us to start practicing. We said, "Aw, man, you can do that with guitars?" It made me want to be a better live player. We devoted the next eight months to practicing, without missing a day. I'd like to practice more, but I get distracted and put the thing down. Then I get to miss it. I think, "I put the guitar down to do this?" It always hits me when I'm at a movie or something--I go, "Aw, I'd much rather be playing with the band."
I'd Love To Jam With... ZZ Top, but where would you fit in? I fantasize about doing what they're doing--they sit there and stroke their beards afterwards and go, "Heh, heh, heh." It's too good! To be riding that machine would be too much. Playing with the grateful Dead would be a real blast. They get floating to where it's the music of the spheres. I'd love to jam with Elvis' band, back when he had that great lineup with James Burton on guitar and Ron Tutt, who's a hell of a drummer. Burton is about the screwiest guitar player next to Gibbons; he can make you laugh with just his string bends.
Soloing. A solo should make your brain run out of your eye sockets. I try to be transportative--I've always loved that quality of rock. The solo should amuse me, it should get me off. I love my own guitar playing--that' one of the reasons I keep doing it. I'm a big fan. I don't view myself as that good a guitar player, but I do like some of the ways that the solos come off. Sometimes I surprise myself while I'm doing it. My setup seems to do things by itself. And the more I practice, the more weird things happen all by themselves--strange harmonics and runs. I don't learn riffs or anything like that. I just play what I feel. Cris is the same way--he never plays the same thing twice, but it's the same song.
Composing. I write words separate from the music. I usually think of something amusing that will make a good song. I don't know what the criteria is, really, and I think that shows, too. It's just, "hey, I never wrote that kind of song before." The music is riffs usually. I'm a real sucker for a hook--a blues hook, a pop song. Michael Jackson, whatever. You can take any hook and play it really loud with a fuzz guitar. We've played all our favorite songs with this band. We used to open shows with the theme from The King and I--that was a real killer. A lot of songs happen when I come into practice and we start to play. See, we're all really good friends. We're the only friends we got in Phoenix [laughs]. We hang around together a lot, just the three of us. The band started out of our friendship, and that's why it's a good band. It's a real serious clown act. We go, "Okay, this is going to be the most intense thing right now--bonk. Now we're gonna be pussies--meep meep meep." It's really ridiculous, but that's how we write songs.
To Wail Or Not To Wail. My biggest conflict is our first album versus Up On The Sun and Mirage. Should I expose my balls--turn the thing up and be a juvenile delinquent as of old--or should I be a clean, head-like guitar player and use what I've tastefully developed over the years from George Benson and Les Paul, all these wonderful Jerry Garcia concepts I've learned. The conflict is still happening in Mirage: I've got "Liquefied" tagged at the end of it. I want to do another album of that kind of raw stuff, and I will. That's one of the wonderful things about being independent.
Recording. For me, the best way to get a good sound is to only listen to myself, but this hardly ever happens. I take people's advice too much. I can get some really nice sounds and make myself happy when I'm recording at home, but I can't figure out why I can't seem to get them on the record. The engineer gets a little confused about it because my sound is so fuzzed-out. But you have to have a lot of faith in what the magnetic tape will pick up. It does amazing stuff. You can let fate take control, and don't try to do anything to it--just put a microphone in front of the amp and overdrive it. Turn it into a rocket ship and make it as ugly as you can, and it'll record beautifully.
On this last record, I used a three-way setup. I ran into a Morley CFL Stereo Chorus Flanger that's really fantastic if you use it like a wah-wah. It goes berserk. It's light-triggered and a great device. It's the only thing that I've used consistently for years. I've got a lot of other effects, but I change them around a lot. From the Morley I came out stereo to a 100-watt Marshall and to a stereo Rockman. I have all the channels recording at once, but I don't think I emphasized the Marshall enough. The lead on "Leaves" was exactly how I wanted it to be.
Distortion Plus. I've always loved really heavy distortion. Onstage I go through a Rockman set on "distort," a Chandler Tube Driver--a great distortion box--and the Morley. The Marshall is also on distort, so it's like three distortions in a line. I keep the Marshall's bass all the way up, and turn the mid, presence, and treble all the way off. This gives me pure balls, and that's what I sound like. If I turn the Morley on with the echo all the way down, it clarifies the sound and gives me a lot of intensity coming through the Marshall. It's like steam coming out--real breathy. For a three-piece band, bottom end on the guitar is real necessary. I don't like to sound too garage; I like to sound more unearthly. I get a lot of that from Neil Young and Billy Gibbons. Other great fuzz players were Tony Iommi, Steve Hillage, and Phil Manzanera. Robert Fripp also had some wild low-end weirdness, cello-like sustain.
Guitars. I've never seen an electric guitar that I didn't love. To this day, I'm entirely fascinated with the whole concept. The guitar I've used on most of the records is my '82 Gibson Les Paul. It's a sunburst copy of a '59, all stock. I also used an Ibanez Roadstar a lot on Mirage, and a Roland guitar synthesizer. I used a Jackson Flying V-style guitar with a whammy bar for the sharp-sounding lead in "A Hundred Miles." I'm a big fan of the whammy, but I only do it at home. The Jackson's fretboard is just magic. It's an amazing guitar, but it just doesn't have the soul of a Les Paul. I love Les Pauls; I've never been able to get that fat tone off of any other guitar. Unfortunately, I threw my Les Paul about 40 feet across the stage into the drum set at UCLA when we filmed The Cutting Edge. The headstock cracked, and I had it glued back. I'm really sorry now, because I love it so much. I tend to get attached to one guitar.
The Nerd Factor. I know what an arpeggio is and when I'm doing one, and i know string bends. But it's pretty embarrassing how little I know about music theory. I just learned how to put strings on last year to where they stay tuned. That's why I thank Rich Beck from Beck's Guitars [see Crosscheck, page 179] on Mirage. He's been teaching me a lot about it, because I've just been a complete nerd. That's one of the reasons why my playing defies categorization: I've always just absent-mindedly reached over and turned the knob up to where I can hear it, or if I want it to fuzz out, I turn the slave up all the way. I don't have any absolutes or defined things that I do. The only thing I ever really picked up was "Kowloon Jag" off of Larry Coryell's column in your magazine years ago [Apr. '77]. I learned some stuff from Jerry Hahn's column, too. I tend not to think too much about what I do. I just pick up the guitar and start to play.
Picking. After I read that Brian May played with a 10-shilling piece, which doesn't have a serrated edge, I played with a nickel for about a year. Then I read that Billy Gibbons played with a peso, and he liked the serrated edge because you could really grind it on there. So I got a surplus of the big old pesos in Mexico City, and sure enough, they are way better than a quarter or a nickel. All of Out My Way was played with a peso.
I alternate between flatpicking and fingerpicking. "Confusion Fog" [Mirage] is fingerpicked--that weird Leo Kottke influence. For something like "Up On The Sun," which alternates between flatpicking and a fingerpicking part in the middle, I tuck the peso between the second knuckles of my thumb and middle fingers, and pick with my thumb and index and middle fingers. Hammering on the fingerboard with the pick is one of my specialties. You can hear it in "Liquefied," after which come birdie noises that I also do with a peso.
Stage presence. I like it to be a living thing, like Godzilla has come in, so the wild things that go on are many. No matter how respectable of musicians we are, we've had to put up with a lot of weirdness from being considered a punk band. I've been attacked many times. I've had to kick a lot of people in the face and in the chest because they were hurting me with my own mike stand. I used to dive off the stage with my guitar. That was a lot of fun--you get running and just fly. I just about broke my shoulder one night.
I hanged myself one night with my belt and kept playing. I stand on my head sometimes at the end of the show. I turn the guitar up all the way and get the Morley happening so that people think that they are not going to be the same ever again afterwards. When Cris and I get going, we run into each other and Cris rolls through the drum set, and we still keep playing for half an hour. Sometimes we fasten our belts together in the back and fly around playing in a whirling dervish.
Sibling Revelry. There are no cons to playing in a band with my brother, just pros. He's a real good guitar player--he's just as good as I am. Cris never practices the bass; he plays the guitar all the time. He's a big influence. He's the one who gets me to clean my act up for the records. He lampoons the blues-demon trip. We do things just about exactly alike. Whatever we want to do, we can do it. There are no limitations at all. We've been doing such weird stuff together since we were little kids that we're not embarrassed to do anything.