Paradise: Land of Meat Puppets
Call of the Wild: Meat Puppets
Option Magazine, Jan/Feb 1988
It ain't the meat, as they say, it's the motion,and believe me, nothing beats a handful of animated hamburger racing around on your plate for downright weirdness. Remember the scene in Eraserhead, where the tiny game hen comes to life under Henry's carving knife, flapping its rubbery wings and spurting dark goop out of its headless neck? If that pork chop under your fork could talk, the world would be a far stranger place, my friend. It might be just like Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where a joint of mutton bows to a flabbergasted Alice, and a plum pudding grouses, "I wonder how you'd like it if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!" If your can of Spam could speak, maybe it would sound like these three long-haired guys from Phoenix, arizona--guitarist/vocalist Curt Kirkwood, his brother bassist Cris Kirkwood, and drummer Derrick Bostrom--who go by the collective handle the Meat Puppets
By Mark Dery
According to the trio, "meat puppet" is just another name for homo sapiens -- walking, talking guts and gristle trussed up in skins, like innards stuffed into sausage-casings. As Bostrom puts it, "'Meat Puppet' is a multi-meaning joke -- it can be religious, it can be dirty, it can be political, it can mean that we rock, it can mean that we're all people, it can mean that we're slaves to our dicks, it can mean that we're all one, in a spiritual way. People never seem to forget the name. We had a song called 'Meat Puppets,' and we needed a name and couldn't come up with one, and so we realized that 'Meat Puppets' meant everything to us. It's the best name possible. A Meat Puppet, " he concludes, "is a human being."
Likewise, Meat Puppets are a band whose records -- Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II, Up On the Sun, In A Car, Out My Way, Mirage, and Huevos -- constitute a refreshing islet of originality in the college radio swamp of two-four frat-rock and wheezing Anglo sensitivity. Where most bands spend LP after LP ploughing ground already furrowed by generations of 1-4-5 guitar-bashers, Meat Puppets' music is an eclectic crossweave. Jerry Carcia-styled counry licks, prog rock pseudo-classicism, fusion-inspired bass/guitar harmonies, scabrous guitar noise, pork-belly blues, and bongo-burning psychedelia blend in their signature swirl of sound.
It's a sound that relies heavily on Curt Kirkwood's imaginative guitaring. Hall-marked by a clean, singing tone light years away from the distorted hacking favored by most indide bands, Kirkwoods's playing emphasizes a much-maligned aspect of music -- technique. "I approach it in the same way I do rifelry," he says, "the same way I do riding motorcycles: I try to be good."
"Curt lives with his guitar around his neck," affirms Bostrom. "What I don't do is practice through an amp," the guitarist notes. "I always practice dry. I use a Les Paul solidbody. I practice around the house -- watching TV, mostly, I watch fishing programs if there's nobody else in the room. I don't work on technique, but I do try and live out my fantasies on the guitar. The thigns I would want to hear on the guitar, I specifically push myself to do. I don't practice things that I don't use; the only things I know how to do are what you hear."
What you hear, on the new LP Huevos, ranges from cornpone boogie ("Paradise") to fuel-injected metal ("Automatic Mojo") to moody tone poems that read like leaves from a psycho's diary ("Crazy"). As always, Curt Kirkwood juggles skirling solos and finger-picked rhythm with ease. "Certain effects that they've invented recently have facilitated fingerpicking on the electric guitar, such as Tom Scholz' 'Rockman' -- a remarkable machine in every aspect. I've been using that a lot for clarity in fingerpicking (in the studio). Live, most of my stuff is flatpicked."
Buoying Curt's open-voiced, jingle-jangle phrases are brother Cris' understated bass lines and Bostrom's carefully orchestrated drumming. Like Curt, Bostrom is a cathode-ray advocate when it comes to practicing. "I like to watch ball while I play," he confides. "It's one of the few things I can watch on TV and play [drums] at the same time. You don't need to have the sound on." Asked about the airy, unclutter feel of his kitwork, Bostrom says, "I always believed that the drummer should lay off, personally. I always had the real sparse pop attitude that the musicians should create space between the notes."
One attitude shared by all three is a healthy respect for lean, mean chops and spit-shined professionalism. Hollow-cheeked poseurs in paisley duds are out, say they; arena rockers with shaggy locks and sizzling licks are in.
"Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top are good!," enthuses Curt. Says Bostrom, "People get tired of hearing noise. They have to give up so much to get a little grain of that arty thing that they like, while there are bands like ZZ Top that are great for the entire concert." Cris chips in, "The Jesus and Mary chain are a real good example of a band that was just the most recent ripple in the pool of grooviness." Curt gathers steam for a wall-punching tirade. "Who needs that shit?," he snarls. "I'll tell ya one thing about the Meat Puppets -- we don't imitate anybody else. The one reason we stay together is because we thought that what we were doin' held its own."
Bostrom nods. "We don't try to make it easy on ourselves; we try to play really good. Mostly, we just want to be considered good players. We don't want to be liked conditionally, like "They're the best band -- from Arizona.' We want to be known for our talent, not for our political attitudes or our taste in clothing or our taste in trashy pop of the past. We want to tap into our ability to play and write music." Curt is still on a roll. "You can't go, 'Meat Puppets are pablum, the Meat Puppets are pandering, the Meat Puppets shake their hips...'"
Speaking of which, do the Meat Puppets shake their hips? "Yeah, I do," mumbles Curt, suddenly coy. "That's my newest uncontrollable thing -- it's a real modern, side-to-side sort of a sway." He fuels up again. "But we got somethin' that even the most miserable cynics aren't gonna be able to pooh-pooh, 'cause it's fuckin' stompin', and it's not punk rock. We were never accepted by the punk audience, anyway. Our audience, for the past few years, has been very courteous, and really ready to get into it. You couldn't ask for a better audience, 'cause they're comin' to get off. I seldom get off as much at other peoples' concerts. I have, before -- Bowie, ZZ Top I got off maximally on, Neil Young's really good."
Bowie? The master of artifice and posturing? Say it ain't so, Curt! "But he's great live! He's a great dancer, his voice is good..." Cris adds, "He developed a genre, and that's the thing we're sort of dealing with. Anybody that develops a genre is usually fairly creative -- they have the ability to carve out a niche and say, 'Here's the new direction -- go nuts!' It's like a religion, or something." Remembers Curt, "When Diamond Dogs came out, I was real young. I took my girlfriend and she wasn't paying any attention to me at all. I didn't give a shit about this guy, but since she wouldn't make out with me, I started watching. The guitar playing was i ncredible -- he had Carlos Alomar, at the time -- and his dancing was just too much."
And as long as we're digging up embarassing influences, what are those mid-seventies guitar frills that keep popping up all over Huevos -- like those Phil Manzanera-style guitar harmonies on "Sexy Music"? Does the trio owe a debt to -- gulp -- prog rock?
Bostrom votes yes. "I'd say we do. I don't like to compare, to pigeonhole us, but I liked ELP and Yes. These guys were more into progressive jazz and I was more into progressive pop -- Yes, Rundgren, ELP, the Dead. I wouldn't say just classically-trained rock musicians or an ything like that, but I'd say there's definitely an element of classical orientation in our pop." He does have reservations about the genre, though. "I think the prog rock bands were looking to sound facile. They were trying to be cold and technical, working to upgrade technology. We don't get into that -- we just use what technology we want."
Curt speaks for the Kirkwood clan. "We liked Mahavishnu, Gentle Giant, Daevid Allen's Gong. Yes was clever. I always liked Led Zeppelin. I also like Oregon, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Cris was into Sun Ra." Cris pipes up: "A lot of gigs came through Phoenix, 'cause it was on the way to L.A. A lot of people would stop off before their weekend gigs in L.A." "We saw a lot of stuff -- mostly arena rock, which turns out to be our biggest influence," recalls Curt. "We rock as hard as anybody else and our live thing is a strong combination of really good playing and energy that you'd be hard-pressed to find in any other band. We haven't really gotten it on record very well; we end up sounding like wimpy progressive rock." Bostrom says, "The head tends to take too much control in the studio. At the shows, something happens with the audience..."
Asked about their most memorable gigs, the band turns reflective. "At Charlottesville (on our last tour)," offers Cris, "we had a great gig. the crowd was there, we were there -- it was just phenomenal. We try to do it every night, but we're only human. The sound systems are questionable -- there are all these variables, and occasionally, they click together." Bostrom puts it this way: "My mood will just...flip. I'll be really pissed, and then, suddenly, my body will align with my spirit, and I'll be able to do anything, y'know?"
Cris adds, "Things used to be a lot weirder. We didn't rehearse. We've gotten better at playing, we don't have to rely on weirdness, we don't have to rely on things turning into a chaotic maelstrom, or whatever. Now, we just kick back and rage on the tunes, and it's satisfying enough. I'll come offstage occasionaly and feel so satisfied that I'm ready to get hit by lightning or have a bus run me over -- such a feeling of calm and wonder."
It's trippy testimonials such as these, coupled with the freefloating, spaced-out nature of Meat Puppets songs, that have fostered all the Grateful Dead comparisons. Cris, the seemingly more meditative half of the Kirkwood duo, gives the critics their due.
"I don't think we really sound like those guys that much," he asserts, "but I think we do have a similar attitude. We aren't 'struttin' our stuff' onstage; we're offering people the opportunity to get in with us on havin' a really neat time, to experience something that you just don't get that often. It's childlike, and special, the way that everything used to be when you were young -- until you became older and jaded. Also, with the Grateful Dead, there's a real exchange -- the audience is really into the music, and the band is really into the people, and they get together, and there's something that they hope to have happen where people come away feelin' really good. And that's basically our thing, too -- giving everything we have in an attempt to make this wonderful thing happen."
But lest the reader think the Meat Puppets are all cosmic blues and acid love, Curt plays Hyde to Cris' Jekyll. "'Liquified' is like a little taster (of what's to come)," he cautions, referring to the fuzzbox-burning jam that rounds out side tow of Mirage. "What we gotta do is fuckin' get real," he spits, "and stop tryin' to make a Prince album. The irony has gotta go. We've been playin' rock'n'roll with a wink. Maybe I'll just turn the amp up more."
And don't expect any flower-power lyrics, either, he warns. "I like the absolutely bizarre. Burroughs, for sure. My biggest influence is stuff like Eraserhead, (although) my own trip is a little less art-oriented. I don't feel that the grotesque is bluesy enough. The softer I am, the more ironic it is. I think that the negative is a cheap shot. It's a real challenge to avoid that sort of weirdness. If I get purposely sick, people are gonna expect that of a band called the Meat Puppets immediately. It's like Elvis never takin' his shirt off. I like to leave a lot to the imagination."