Meat Puppets
94/02/28 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
interview by Apple-O for Inside Beat, 2/94

Their influence is heard lots these days in popular music. Krt Cobain didn't exactly pick them out of thin air to be guests of Nirvana on MTV's Unplugged. They pioneered sounds later used by White Zombie, Blind Melon and, yes, Pearl Jam. Who? Why? How?

On a wet Sunday afternoon, I got to talk to Meat Puppets' drummer Derrick Bostrom about his band before they opened for Blind Melon at the Rutgers Gym. I learned many things, so here's the scoop:

Apple-O: You tour all over, so how does New Brunswick compare to the rest of the world?

Derrick Bostrom: It's easy to get to... we don't really like the snow!

A: Are you looking forward to returning home?

D: I'm not even thinking that far forward... we've got a huge tour ahead of us that we've only just begun.

A: Speaking of new beginnings, in the past you've always had paintings for your cover art, but not this time.

D: Well, we have a painting for this one, but it's on the inside.

A: So why the change?

D: The thing we changed was years ago, that was we signed a major label contract and now they have input into what we do.

A: Really?

D: Of course! They spend a lot of money on it and beyond that the more people at the label who work on it, the more stake they have in it, doing it. We get everybody involved- that way, if we go down- THEY go down!

A: Not having total control doesn't bug you?

D: Man I've been doing this for a long time -this is like our ninth album- we're like, self-expressed up the yin! We've done an awful lot of things- you can't stand still in the world, you have to change... We've got a drawing or painting on every damn album we've ever made, it gets old after a while. The last two records had paintings that were just lying around - they weren't even square - we ended up putting the name on sideways so it would fit... The label wanted to do a photo and we got the shots, we got some that we liked, and they put together the cover. We're supposed to make a good record- we think we did that. We think we did a good enough record to where we're just like going "Look- we did the recording, we love it, now you guys do your best. We'll all meet in the hereafter with little wings on..."

A: How do you like touring with Blind Melon and Alice Donut?

D: This is just the second [show]

A: Do you get along with them?

D: I haven't seen any of them, I wouldn't recognize them. They look like students to me- I mean I'm an old man by this point in my career. I don't know Blind Melon- I saw them on Saturday Night Live once and that's about all I've seen. I don't have MTV so I don't really know their stuff.

A: What foods do you like?

D: Whatever I can get for free! No really, I like nourishing food. That's the beautiful thing about food - you eat one thing, you get sick of it, you can go on to the next. What's YOUR favorite food?

A: Lately I like cheese fries with hot sauce on them!

D: I don't like gross stuff, I just like to eat... like today's around valentine's day so backstage there's a lot of chocolate lying around.

A: Do you believe in worm farms?

D: Worms are important for making soil healthy and rich.

A: One of your tour shirts has Abraham Lincoln on it, and he's colored pastel blue and green. Why?

D: Why Abe?

A: Do you like Abe?

D: Curt did that. Actually that was taken from a cup that had Lincoln's face on it. Curt always thought that it was funny that the license plate from Illinois said "Land 'o' Lincoln", back when he was a kid. He got a cup that said that on it, and of course it had a picture of Lincoln on it and so he did a painting of the art on the cup and we just used that for the t-shirt. There's a Curt Kirkwood "They Might Be Giants" T-shirt too, in that kind of style. We've got a new t-shirt but it won't be on tour until Wednesday because of the snow and the problems with shipping and stuff... It's bogged down and lost somewhere between here and our t-shirt place.

A: You were produced by Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers... [at this point someone outside rings a buzzer]

D: ARGH! Fire alarm!

A: are you buddies with the Surfers?

D: Yeah, we've known the Surfers since like '81 when they stayed at our house on the way to Tuscon

A: What did he do? What's does production entail?

D: He would submit a budget to the label to get them to OK how much they would pay...

A: But is there more creative input?

D: A lot of the time he'll sit in the control room and listen, kind of like a surrogate audience member. One of the things was that he loves the band. Having your producer love the band will make a lot of difference.

A: Having a producer that doesn't love the band would seem kind of pointless...

D: Well, our last producer sort of loved the band, but he also worked a lot with Dwight Yokum and he was trying to... Paul's not a producer, he'd like to be one but he's just starting out so he doesn't have this tried and true formula that he has to stick to. Like if you were listening to a Todd Rungrem or an Eno produced album you would hear a lot of Todd and Eno sounds that you could hear no matter what artist it was. But Paul, he's done Buttholes albums but mostly he let us do it our way, he was there to...

A: Give opinions?

D: Yeah. Our last producer wanted me to use a click track, I didn't have to do that this time. And Paul would go "That take was good but I think you can do better, let's run through it again" or "Those strings need changing, they're starting to get dead" or "You're a little out of tune" or whatever, and in Paul's case he brought a whole slew of amps and guitars that he wanted Curt to try because he loves Curt's guitar playing -he's a guitar head- and he's like [in texas accent] "I always wanted to hear you play through this amp, my favorite amp!" so what you can hear on the record from Paul is a certain difference from sound to sound, because he coaxed Curt into using different things. But then we went and had someone else mix it... We got the opportunity to work with Dave Jerden, who's a pro and a highly regarded mixer... he mixed both Alice In Chains and Jane's Addiction records. We just gave him the tapes -didn't let him hear the mixes we'd done- just said "Here, what do you want to do with this? Let's see what your version of the Meat Puppets is," so we let him make the call.

A: What happened between that first 7" ("In A Car") and Meat Puppets II. What made you change so radically?

D: You can only go so far with making every song sound exactly the same! It's just an old punk idiom which we grew out of. We were all into punk but we weren't really punks... We all knew how to play music before punk. We weren't like people that picked up guitars because they wanted to be punks, we could already play. So we dabbled with it, thought it was pretty funny. Then we went on tour with it, ran into punk/hardcore crowds, decided we didn't like getting spit on and having shit thrown at us, because we still had long hair even though we were playing punk rock and the hardcore audience was like, "Long hair - WRONG!" [sticks thumb down] So we were like "Fuck that! We're going to stop playing punk rock, then."

A: What do you think of people who come to your shows now as opposed to then?

D: Well back when I started, a lot of the audiences were my age, and now they're a lot younger than me. So people must be getting younger!

A: If you could change any laws, what would they be?

D: I would get rid of all the laws... especially the laws that say the police are allowed to carry guns or anything like that, I'm against coersion, so that means we'd have to get rid of everybody. I'd like to set one new law, and that is everyone must be killed!

A: Are your parents still around?

D: Yeah they're alive, they're not around...

A: You don't talk to them?

D: Well one of them lives in the Carribean and one lives in Alaska, so our family's pretty well spread out these days.

A: Are they proud of your career in the band?

D: My dad got a good laugh over the fact that the album's called "Too High To Die" and I was wearing a dress on the cover, but he says "Well, whatever it takes!"

A: Were you born in Arizona?

D: I was!

A: Do are any of your lineages go back to cowboy days?

D: No, no... Arizona actually was populated by Indians and people from Mexico long before we were there, especially Tuscon. Phoenix is a relatively new city, it's 100 years old... But Tuscon just a couple of miles away is hundreds and hundreds of years old and people have been living there for generation after generation... We're from Phoenix... just kind of a regular city.

A: Are people out there the same as in New Jersey?

D: No, no, people are different from city to city. But we're in the southwest- Phoenix is a pretty isolated place. There're no large towns except for Tuscon, it's the only other big city in Arizona.

A: So how would people be there compared to here?

D: Well, how do I seem to you? People are kind of LA oriented... Phoenix is kind of like LA, moreso than say, that it's like New York. People are spread out, you've got to have a car. Lot of suburbs, not a lot of congestion- people aren't breathing down each others' necks. It doesn't snow but it gets really hot.

A: We talked about parents before, would any of you be parents? Do you have girlfriends or wives?

D: [grinning] Wouldn't you like to know! Curt's got twins...

A: Seriously?

D: Yeah! Curt has ten year old twins. They're not young people...

A: So he's married?

D: No- he's just got twins!

A: Do you meet women on tour? Got any good groupie stories?

D: Well I have a lot that I could tell you that would boost the myth quality of the Meat Puppets, but you would probably be getting lies so what's the difference! I have some good lies to tell!

A: What would motivate you for commercial success?

D: [sarcastically] You mean so we could stop doing this? We want to get popular so we could stop doing this!

A: What about being able to earn enough to raise a family...

D: I don't need to be a success to reproduce myself! I just have to be drawn into the desire to do it, which I have not yet done.

A: The songs "Roof With A Hole" and "Coming Down" seem to be about getting away from drugs...

D: I don't do drugs, personally.

A: Could you speak for the others in the band?

D: I couldn't speak for them, but you know we all grew up in America like everybody else in the 70s, so we have plenty of reference points which are psychedelic symboligy. You'd have to ask Curt what those songs mean but to me, "Comin' Down" is like the bookend to climbing. I mean if you go up a mountain, unless you live there you've got to come down, and if you do live there you've still got to come down for provisions and to pay your bills. What goes up must come down!

A: You three have been together as a band for many years, and you're not bored yet... What's your secret for a long and healthy life?

D: Doing what we want, not feeling walled in. We pretty much make it feel like we're doing what we want. We like the music, there's still a lot of things we haven't done... Opening shows is something new for us, we've always headlined. But then you've got to play in clubs, unless you have a hit and you can do your own multi-thousand seat shows. Opening for another band is fun. There's a lot of different things about it. The pressure is not as much... maybe the audience doesn't like it as much. I don't know to what extent Blind Melon's fans and our fans coincide- obviously we're here to pick up new fans out of Blind Melon's crowd, and we think that the chance is good to do it or else we wouldn't bother.

A: So it's a new challenge?

D: Yeah- that's what it's all about. New challenges! You got to have'em. You students out there, remember - new challenges!

A: I don't have anything else to ask- thanks!

But wait! There's more! Before he left, Derrick made mention of a FOURTH Meat Puppet, so the tape recorder went back ON...

D: We just added a second guitarist just the same way Nirvana did.

A: Didn't they add Pat Smear?

D: Yeah, that's Pat Smear. We'd love to have had Pat but he's taken. We just have a buddy of ours, I'm not sure where he's from originally, when we met him he was living in Kansas... when we'd tour there he started coming around.

A: What's his name?

D: Troy Meece. Now he lives in Hoboken.

A: Is he your age?

D: No, he's probably your age! I'm not sure how old he is but it's somewhere in his middle twenties.

A: When he learned all the tunes did he make up new parts to add or learn some of the millions of background guitars on the records?

D: Yeah, we're just trying to make it sound a little more like the new record. Mostly we taught him the new record... he stands over on Kris's side, which gives Curt a chance to work the audience a little more. Because Curt is singing, playing leads and rhythm and everything

A: Doing a lot...

D: Just doing too much. So we got this other guy so that when Curt takes a lead it doesn't just drop out- there's still a band playing behind him. He can rock out more. It rocks! Last night, we got into Newark at 6:30 and we had to play at 8:45 and we just got there, shook Troy's hand, said "Let's do it!"... we didn't get a chance to play any soundcheck or anything.. just plugged in & rocked out!

A: Did he learn the tunes on his own or from playing with you?

D: He's been hanging with us in Phoenix for several weeks

A: So how were you impressed by his playing?

D: He hung around long enough to know that we wouldn't hate his guts, he was fitting in. We stayed at his house when we came out here... he was just one of our group. You know a second guitarist is a glorified roadie! Just a guy that we hire to come along and help us out... If he wants to join the band then we'll see how it goes. We've been together so long we're kind of...

A: Set in your ways?

D: We've got our thing down. But we needed another guitarist... The label wanted us to have a backdrop, they insisted that we have a backdrop, and they were pushing us to do this too. Curt had been interested in doing it for a long time and the label was like "Well do it, then!" and we're like "Alright, whatever! Make it happen! Make it part of the budget!"

A: Where did you play in Newark?

D: Fordam, the university there...

A: How were you received? Did people like it?

D: Sure! They were there to see Blind Melon, but they didn't chase us off the stage...

A: Do you like Alice Donut?

D: I didn't see them- I don't really sit out and watch, to save my ears... We're professional musicians so to what extent I'll see either of those bands, it'll be through ear plugs. I'll have to check out their album. Last night was rushed... there's a bunch of things that haven't gotten here yet because of the snow... It's the first night of the tour and we haven't established a rhythm yet, we're still running around trying to make sure everything gets done.

A: Is this lifestyle too fast paced at times or insane?

D: I don't like the driving. We're still driving ourselves from gig to gig...

A: You've got your own van?

D: We've got a couple of vans, and we could definitely use a bigger crew... That's why we're working it... the first few hundreds of thousands of dollars we make, if we ever make it, would go to making our show better. We just have three or four roadies- Blind Melon has got probably two dozen people working for them.

A: How long have Blind Melon been around?

D: This is their first album isn't it? Three singles...

A: You must feel your success is harder earned than theirs...

D: We think of it this way... REO Speedwagon, we'd have a tougher time getting on their tour. We need these bands that are popular to get on their tours, because we're not popular enough to go out and headline our own show like this. I was talking to Exene from X and she said when they got their major label deal - back in '84 or '85 - nobody'd take them out. It's one of the reasons they didn't get exposed, because there were no avenues to break their act into the major markets. And thanks to bands like Nirvana, Soul Asylum and Blind Melon, bands that love us and listened to us before they got their bands together, they're willing to take us out and we're able to get exposed to audiences and get the experiences playing on big stages and getting out of rock clubs.

A: Making the best of it...

D: I think it's great that these bands are around. It would be really stupid of us to just say "Well, we're better than them!" or "We deserve it more, so we're not gonna open- we're just gonna play in clubs the rest of our life!" This is how you play to kids. The only way to get to kids is to do an in-store. Not if you're playing in a bar...

A: Are in-stores new to you?

D: More this tour. We're mostly doing in-stores this time because we had a whole country's worth of shit to do for promotion and then this tour came up. We just did our promotional thing on the west coast and we're just shoe-horning our east coast thing. We had to cancel this one, just to meet everybody and stuff.

A: Are you tired?

D: I'll go if you're done...

Brandon: You want to get food?

A: You guys should eat at our dining hall. I'd like to know your opinion on the food here...

D: I get free food at the gig!

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