Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Guitar World Online
November 1995
Meat Puppets
Life has been no fairy tale for the Meat Puppets' Cris and Curt Kirkwood, but they have the last laugh with their new album, No Joke!
By Charles M. Young
In the beginning there was Carl Renstrom, a Swedish immigrant to the United States. At 5'2", he spent his life looking up at the world, but in every other way, he was an imposing man, able to sell pretty much anything to anybody, often inventing the stuff that he sold. By the time he sold Tip Top, his hair care products conglomerate, to Faberge in the late Fifties, he was very, very rich.
Renstrom's daughter Vera had two sons-Curt and Cris-by a man named Kirkwood, who left when the boys were four and two, respectively. They grew up on a horse ranch outside Phoenix with all the advantages and disadvantages of wealth: private schools, lots of animals, various factions fo the family fighting over the money, so many stepfathers that neither brother can remember the exact number. One night during the Kirkwood's adolescence one of those stepfathers burned down the house.
"That's dirty laundry. I don't even want to talk about it," says Curt, the Puppets' guitarist. "It was horrifying, one of the worst things that ever happened to me. I just sat there and watched it burn. 'Well, it's burning and I can't do a thing about it'-that was my take on it. I didn't hold a grudge afterwards."
But your turtle got boiled.
"Well, boo-hoo. I grew up on a farm. I didn't torture domestic animals, but I blasted plenty of doves and quails and rabbits and ducks and raccoons and whatever the hell else was running around out there."
So you went through a Beavis and Butt-head stage?
"No, I was a hardcore outdoorsman. When I graduated form high school, I went to Alaska and backpacked and canoed all over the place. My only complaint was that I really did like to play electric music, and in the outback, there's no room for it. I had an acoustic guitar, but that wore thin in a month."
"I think Curt Kirkwood is the best guitar player in the world," says Paul Leary, guitarist of the Butthole Surfers and producer of the Meat Puppets' last album, Too High To Die, and their latest offering, No Joke! "He's always stunning, and he's a hell of a songwriter. You get a sound going for him, hit the record button, and he lays down a perfect track every time."
Is the "best guitarist in the world" an exaggeration? "Who's better?" insists Leary, who in the realm of psychedelic electric guitar is a serious contender himself. "All I ever did is copy Curt. The Meat Puppets are my all-time favorite band. I was into them from before their first album. When the Butthole Surfers first went to Los Angeles in 1982, we stopped in Phoenix and stayed at their house. It was one of those things where we instantly knew each other, and there's been almost a sacred bond betweeen the bands ever since."
Any insights on Curt's character? "He likes to free-associate. After about 20 minutes, it dawns on you that you have no idea what he's tlaking about. He goes from being real humble to, 'I am the center of the universe!'"
And his brother Cris? "He gets me laughing so hard that I've been doubled over with pain, severe pain. And he's probably the most horrendous driver in the world. You'll be riding down the street, and he'll suddenly start veering from one side of the road to the other, saying, 'Must kill self. Take others with me,' like a robot."
"Yeah, well, Paul, he's a horrendous passenger," says Cris Kirkwood, bassist of the Meat Puppets. A suspicious sucking/gurgling noise over the phone seems to indicate no further elaboration will be forhtcoming on that point. Cris' driving habits aren't all that important, either, except that they make a nice metaphor for the Meat Puppets' music, which veers dangerously from heavy electric to delicate acoustic, framing lyrics that make spectacular leaps of intuition over jagged chasms of surreal imagery.
"Yeah. A great metaphor." Suspicious sucking/gurgling noise. "I'll go along with that."
Perhaps the reason that the Meat Puppets have never sold product in amounts commensurate with their influence on the punk scene is that their satire of the cosmos is so relentlessly disturbing. No Joke! extends the Meat Puppets' dark vision with songs like the single, "Scum," with its monstrous guitar and this chors: "Under the stars, we find the scum."
GW: Where could such a line come from?
Curt Kirkwood: From Earth, from the planet Earth.
GW: Would you elaborate on that?
Curt: I wrote 25 songs in January, plus another 15 left over from other times. I don't sit around all year and write songs, waiting for my artistic nature to spring forth. I just decide I'm going to write the next album. I thought we had a pretty good selection edited down, but we needed one more bookend element of heaviness. I don't always remember the source of inspiration, but in the case of "Scum" I do remember: I wanted another song. That's it.
GW: Have you been working on your singing? It's almost like crooning, like the Everly Brothers on Valium over these super-energized guitar riffs.
Curt: It's something that's come together through touring. My approach solidified somehow. I realized that if I quit trying, it would be better. My inspiration for singing has always been trying to sing like I talk. Then I realized there was no trying involved. You just sing. I do it in an entirely dispassionate way and wait for the passion to come. If I try to sound passionate, it's ridiculous. I learned a lot from the cool tenors of the Sixties: Sam Cooke, Roy Orbison, Marty Robbins, George Jones. Not a lot of rock influence in my voice.
GW: Has the royalty money from having three songs on Nirvana's Unplugged made life any easier?
Curt: I don't know if money makes life any easier or harder. It's just a piece of paper. My life is the real thing. I do okay without much money. It's mostly inconsequential to me.
***
When Curt returned from his wilderness adventure after high school, he tried college for a year, then started gigging around with various cover bands. He and Cris hung out in different crowds but gradually discovered each other as musicians. Their grandfather had set aside just enoguh money for them to get through four years of college, and after much arguing, they got their hands on their trust funds which financed the Meat Puppets for the first two years. They played in Los Angeles a lot, hung out with the more eclectic art punks like Monitor, Human Hands, Snakefinger and the B-People. They singed with SST, the indie label run by Greg Ginn of Black Flag, then moved to London Records three albums ago. "SST did business out of an old doughnut shop," says Kirkwood. "London is in a high-rise in New York. At SST the business concept was that nobody was allowed to sell more records than Black Flag. London wants to make as much money as possible."
GW: The argument that indies inherently have more integrity than the majors is getting a bit stale.
Curt: I don't know. I judge a man's integrity by the smell of his feet.
GW: Is there such a thing as selling out?
Curt: I think it's just a concept people use to kill their heroes. They have to do it, because it's stupid to have heroes. If you have some special admiration for somebody because you think they've risen beyond apedom, that's an impractical stance. You shouldn't admire anyone except for what they've created. Anything else is none of your business.