Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Washington Post, February 2, 2001
"Meet the New Meat Puppets" by Richard Harrington
(I bought this article for you for $1.50. Feel grateful.)
IT WAS 20 years ago, give or take a day, that the Meat Puppets released "In a Car," a seven-inch vinyl slab of thrashing hardcore punk that crammed five songs into 349 seconds.
Guitarist-singer-songwriter Curt Kirkwood, bassist Cris Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom charged out of the Arizona desert -- well, actually an upper-class Phoenix suburb -- and became alt-rock pioneers, with a dozen genre-defying albums that melded punk, country and bluegrass (what came to be known as cowpunk) and generally psychedelicized roots music. "Abstract rock 'n' roll," Curt Kirkwood called it.
As the Velvet Underground had a generation before, the Meat Puppets inspired a bin full of new bands, most notably Nirvana. Kurt Cobain noted that the 'Pups were what made him decide to do music in the first place, while Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea called them "one of the most influential and important bands of the last 20 years."
So what does Curt Kirkwood wish he'd known then that he knows now?
"I wish I'd stayed in my '70s funk-dance band," Kirkwood says from the road. "We wore three-piece suits and played 'Love Roller Coaster' and stuff. It would have come back around again.
"I would have been a disco superstar," he says with a laugh.
Sadly, superstardom has eluded Kirkwood, though assorted travails have found him easily.
Last September, the Meat Puppets released "Golden Lies," their 12th album but the first in five tumultuous years. Only Curt Kirkwood remains from the original trio. Bostrom is temporarily retired in Arizona, where he oversaw last year's acclaimed reissues of the band's SST catalogue through Rykodisc.
Cris Kirkwood, whose wife overdosed on cocaine and morphine in 1996, has been battling heroin addiction for years and has been in and out of both rehab and jail. Neither participated in the making of "Golden Lies," which features the new Meat Puppets lineup of drummer Shandon Sahm (son of the late great Doug Sahm), guitarist Kyle Ellison and bassist Andrew Duplantis.
The forced hiatus was also a result of the Meat Puppets getting caught up in the tidal wave of music industry consolidations that has left many acts in contractual limbo. The irony was that in 1995, after a decade as underground mainstays, the Meat Puppets were coming off their best-selling (and only gold) album, "Too High to Die," which had also produced their only radio hit, "Backwater."
Part of that success was built on exposure afforded them by No. 1 fan Kurt Cobain, who had asked the Meat Puppets to open for Nirvana on 1993's "In Utero" tour and to back him that December on MTV's "Unplugged in New York." Cobain's performance included three songs from the band's seminal "Meat Puppets II" album: "Plateau," "Oh Me" and "Lake of Fire." After Cobain killed himself in April of 1994, MTV aired the show round-the-clock, and the subsequent "Unplugged in New York" album went quintuple platinum, earning the Puppets significant royalties and boosting the visibility of "Too High to Die."
Unfortunately, it also presaged the turmoil of the next five years, both personal and contractual. For instance, after 1995's "No Joke" album, there was no more touring, a serious blow to a band whose reputation was cemented by raucous concert performances.
"Cris just got sicker and we tried to give him a short break and it turned into years -- and there was nothing I could do about it," Curt says. "But Seagram and Universal held up my career longer than my brother did with the little pissing match they had with London for 2 1/2 years."
Curt Kirkwood eventually moved to Austin and put together the new lineup, playing under the name Royal Neanderthal Orchestra. At one point, London rejected demos sent under the Royal Neanderthal name, only to enthuse about them when they were re-sent under the Puppets' name. "They liked it, but not enough to release it," Kirkwood says.
Then London/Polygram was swallowed up by Universal, which, according to Kirkwood, had no interest in releasing new Meat Puppets material but wouldn't release the band from its contract. "To get off, I had to pay Universal a kickback," he fumes. "It's a rip-off. As a musician, you can't let your spirits fly when you're just completely tied to paper like that."
"Golden Lies" was finally released on Breaking Records, the Atlantic-distributed boutique label run by Hootie and the Blowfish. And it came out under the Meat Puppets moniker, which Kirkwood obviously had a proprietary interest in, despite the contractual controversies.
"I felt that, marketing-wise, we were in full stride when my brother got sick and I decided that was the most appropriate way to make a continuation of it," Kirkwood says.
If Kirkwood sounds a bit moody and frustrated, it's because he is that and more.
"When you're in the situation that I'm in, there's going to be some misplaced aggression and confusion on my part," Kirkwood concedes. "I try not to pigeonhole and blame my brother so much; he's still pretty sick, and not really getting better, not as far as I'm concerned. But I try to give due to the corporate monster without confusing the fact that I love the business and the opportunity to sell a lot of records."
Which, Kirkwood admits, the Meat Puppets didn't do in particularly large numbers during their '80s heyday on the seminal punk label SST, which brought the world Husker Du and the Minutemen at about the same time. The band's SST catalogue was revitalized last year by Ryko, which rereleased the Meat Puppets' six albums and one EP, all with bonus tracks, new liner notes, expanded artwork (Curt did all the original covers) and CD-ROM videos; they also released "Live in Montana," the band's first official live album, taken from a typically rowdy and expansive 1988 concert that underscored a contemporary evaluation from Kirkwood: "We've been country, psychedelic, space-weirdo-punks, pop. Any of those things is basically a Meat Puppets interest, rather than anything conclusive about us."
Going through the reissues confirms how quickly the Pups moved beyond the hardcore origins of "In a Car." Even the 50-second trashing of the country-western standard "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" proved to be the first of many stylistic divergences/embraces that took the band's fans (a k a Meatheads) on unexpected adventures. Each new album offered the sound of surprise, from the psychedelic Cinemascope of 1987's "Mirage" to the twisted ZZ Top/Van Halen variations of 1987's "Huevos" and 1989's "Monsters."
"Absolutely," Kirkwood says. "Go for it, or go buy another Bon Jovi record. There's so much stuff that sounds just like the record before it. Variety is the spice of life. God, what happened?"
The bonus tracks are a treat and confirm the band's wide-ranging interests from the start: Add-ons from the 1982 debut album include not only the "In a Car" tracks but such eclectic covers as Neil Young's "I Am a Child," Iggy Pop's "I Got a Right" and the Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower." The 1986 EP "Out My Way," doubles the number of tracks and adds a CD-ROM of the trio performing Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing."
And, according to Kirkwood, "thanks to the remastering, 'Up on the Sun' sounded a lot better than I'd heard it since I was in the studio [recording it]. I thought that album in particular came to bloom because it really was a nicely recorded thing. Its execution and concept were also complete, way more than 'Meat Puppets II' in terms of an actual musical piece."
And while the furious sonic machinations of "In a Car" supported a kinetic punk aesthetic, the Meat Puppets had all played in mainstream rock bands (and that funk-dance band, of course) before falling under the influence of punk. They got silly about it, at times, refusing to rehearse, preferring instead to throw appliances at each other in the Kirkwood family kitchen. The punk edges would soften over intervening albums, but the shambolic, anarchic spirit remained, tempered by inevitable musical maturity.
Funny thing: After all that, the new group and the new album feel like part of an organic process, according to Kirkwood. "I never had tryouts for this band -- it just fell together with the first people I played with since I played with Cris and Derrick. I was glad to play music with anybody. That's how we whiled away our time while these nefarious [label] shylocks tried to destroy us."
And, he adds, the new record represented a familiar punk process.
"We made it ourselves, totally. It's so DIY, a lot of it was recorded in our garage!
"Through all the pressure, we just made a record behind London's back, using all of London's money, and Breaking put it out."
In the end, Kirkwood says, things seem to be back on track.
"I never felt like I should be doing anything else. I wanted to make a living, and it's really worked out good. The frustrations that I have -- I don't take it personal. It's like bullfighting. All things considered, I should probably be washing cars."
MEAT PUPPETS -- Appearing Saturday at the 9:30 club. To hear a free Sound Bite from Meat Puppets, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8110. (Prince William residents, call 690-4110.)