Paradise: Land of the Meat Puppets
Woodstock.com, 2000
"Meat Puppets, Ver. 2.0: The latest update" By Tom Griswold
http://www.woodstock.com/html/meatpuppets.shtml
A lot has happened in the past 19 years for the Meat Puppets. The Arizona band ventured west in the early eighties and almost immediately landed on the "band you gotta hear" list, in the still vibrant Los Angeles post-punk scene. So hot was the in-crowd buzz, that another band native to the area, Monitor, recorded a cover of one of their songs for their first album right about the same time the Meat Puppets were putting out their own debut record on SST. Their association with SST Records alone was testament enough of their initial impact. Famed home of Black Flag and other popular second-wave LA punk bands, the label wasn't exactly known for its roster diversity, let alone desert-bred psych cow-punk.
Nonetheless, the Meat Puppets took it all in stride. While most of the bands from that era of the Los Angeles scene disbanded years ago, the Puppets are still going strong, and have just released a new album, "Golden Lies," on Broken Records, a imprint record label run by Hootie and the Blowfish. (To those familiar with SST, this might give some indication to how worlds do indeed collide within the music biz.)
The buzz has slowly continued to build since the beginning, as a result of the raves of high profile fans (such as Nirvana's Kurt Cobain) and good old-fashioned perseverance. Meat Puppet leader Curt Kirkwood is convinced that it's only a matter of time before a sufficient number of people will hear them, and it will be then that they stick to the wall. "There's no accounting for taste, you just get people exposed to it," he told MTV. "No matter what you play, if you just hang on and keep doing it. It may be Madonna-like, you may rise to huge cult and mass status, both. It may take awhile for you to find what your thing is."
"Golden Lies" is their first album in five years. And the last five years weren't exactly a vacation either. Meat Puppet leader Kirkwood spent a good part of the time hoping that his brother, and co-founder of the band, Cris, could kick his heroin addiction. When efforts proved fruitless he had to go about starting over, recruiting guitarist Kyle Ellison, drummer Shandon Sahm and bassist Andrew Duplantis. The new line up will be touring in support of the album beginning November 28 in Lawrence, Kansas.