A Testament to the Strength of the Human Gullet
by Kenneth Van Doren
Interview with the Meat Puppets (Chris Kirkwood)
***
“Basically, we found something that we liked to do, which was play music,” Chris Kirkwood began. “Curt and I came from different angles. I started playing after I saw the movie Deliverance. When I was twelve, I got a banjo. Curt had taken up guitar… we had gotten really into it in our teens. I started playing bass at some point and then we [got] together with Derek [Bostrom] and started a band.
“It felt right at the time. We thought about “what it is to be” and “what do you want to do with yourself” and those decisions you make definitely depends on who you are as a person. At the time, especially when you’re young like that, it sounds like a good idea to drop out of school and become dirty old punk rock musicians, ya know? So that’s what we did, and that’s never really gone away: the feeling of pursuing something as personal as music in that sort of way, at least for me. It was a good tool for discovering who I am and what I think about things.” After a pause, he facetiously remarked, “Beyond that, we were intent on becoming the first white, reggae three-piece to have massive chart and pop appeal, but The Police beat us to it.”
Prior to 1980, Meat Puppets was a late-night activity played by fetishists in the back of a butcher shop. However, brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood adopt the name for the band they form with drummer Derek Bostrom. Nowadays, the term “Meat Puppets” is synonymous with iconic and influential grunge rock, as well as the group that had the biggest impact on Nirvana’s sound. From underground punkers, to cow-thumpin’ rockers, to classic stardom through drug addiction and back, the Meat Puppets were and are one of the most prolific and dynamic bands that have ever sprung up from the underground. Recently, I was graced with the opportunity to speak with Cris Kirkwood about his life as a legendary bass player. He spoke in a witty, deeply profound, and absolutely hilarious manner. After only a few moments of talking with him, I was convinced that had he chosen another vocation, he would’ve made a great fortune as a stand-up comedian or an author of existential philosophy. Here is what he had to say:
EM: Well, aside from Deliverance, what influenced you early on? What made you guys play the style of music that you do?
KIRKWOOD: Well, Curt and I were definitely old enough to be children of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I mean, all of the rock stuff, definitely… The Beatles were a huge influence. They were one of the things that turned me on to what music could be. I started getting into different kind of music and it made me want to make music. I started seeing it as a tool to, you know, explore the depths and lows of the human mind. So I started getting into all kinds of different stuff, I got into bluegrass, indigenous musics that sort of reflected a region and I got a kick out of that, and it opened my eyes to the idea of regionalism as opposed to, you know, say, nationalism specifically. I liked the idea of people making noise because of the foods that are available to them and the kind of topography that they live in. I started tracing back the roots of music and getting into jazz, classical, things like that and realized, “oh my god, the depths that exist, the heights, and the fuckin’ depths of thought and the wherewithal to achieve the level of ideas of being involved in something as complex and lofty as that. And the language it took for something like that really blew me away… then I realized, “Jesus, I’m way too retarded for that! I like to smoke way too much pot!” then I thought, “oh, punk rock… well there’s something I can handle [sarcastically]” [laughter] So, you know, all sorts of different stuff influenced us, and one of the bands that made me realize that rock and roll was tolerable was that I really dug Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead… I liked the sense of humor and the musicianship and fuckin’ the extreme weirdness as well, and the improvisational side of it as well and certainly in terms of rock and roll because I really wasn’t that into rock at the time. I was brought up to see it as sort of an advertisement for the size of your dick. I just wasn’t that taken with it, you know? But I got into it more when I found punk rock, because that was like “well, there’s a more raw form of expression” and I really got a kick out of that, and it was really easy to play. But punk rock kind of turned me on to rock and roll and I went backwards from there.
EM: It seems that the blending of those elements in your sound worked for you, since SST signed the band. How did that come about?
We started working with those guys when we put out our first 7” [record] with Monitor called World Imitation. [Monitor] was an arty/punky band from the scene that was going on in Los Angeles at the time, and we played a show with Black Flag sometime around ’81 and they really liked us, so they invited us out to play in L.A. and asked if we’d like to make a record with them. Black Flag had put out their first album, and ours came out shortly after that.
EM: How did that change the direction of the kind of music you guys were making? Did that give you any kind of realization that the Meat Puppets were going to be bigger than you’d thought?
We were one of those bands that allowed things to happen as they went. We weren’t able to make any other kind of music than the music we were making at the time, and it wasn’t like “oh, we’re gonna be huge” … Black Flag’s label [SST] didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal at the time, you know, but in retrospect, it’s become a hallmark of a time and place of one branch of American music, and a particularly healthy, thriving, interesting branch at that. But at the time, you couldn’t really see it that clearly since we were in the midst of it. Looking back at bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth, these bands that went on to become a fuckin’ pillar of a certain type of American music, but at the time, it was just a bunch of dudes who were playing the type of music that they wanted to play.
EM: So how did you go from playing with those bands early on to joining Nirvana on stage for their MTV Unplugged album? That must have been a huge deal. Can you tell our readers a little bit about that and how it changed things for the band?
Well, we got in there because Cobain was such a huge fan of the Meat Puppets and a lot of the bands I just mentioned, the SST scene, had a big influence on the whole Seattle scene. I mean, they had a huge influence ultimately, in retrospect if you look back it was a very fertile time in American music and they created a rock scene that we all put together from different areas of the country… and we’d been influenced by other people, so where does it come from? You can always follow the path backwards and we were just the next link in the chain that was forged up in Seattle. So Cobain invited us, and at the time people really dug [the “Seattle Sound”] and really dug Nirvana so we went on tour with them. [Kurt Cobain] really liked the Meat Puppets as a kid and he asked us if he could cover some of our crap and we told him that he definitely could if he wanted to, and that took off and led to us doing that Unplugged thing. For us, it was a cool thing to do musically and to see how somebody else interprets our songs. Suddenly, bands that were influenced by us became some of the most popular shit in the world, but basically, it was just something to do for us. The record company definitely liked it, it was all business stuff, but MTV didn’t want us to do it. They didn’t want Cobain to have the ratty old Meat Puppets on there to spoil their unplugged session but Cobain insisted.
EM: So MTV didn’t want you guys on there and Kurt had to push for you guys to include you?
Well, the Unplugged thing was a TV show, and it came down to what they’re trying to get across and what kind of art they wanted to sell. We never had the money to make a video or anything so we never got played, but we would have if they’d played the crap out of our little $200 videos. They could have if they had wanted to, but they didn’t want to because it wasn’t a part of their agenda. So when Cobain wanted to take us on there, [MTV] said, “Well, why them? Why not Eddie Vedder?” [laughter] but the cool thing was that [Cobain] insisted and it turned out to be a very touching, cool thing. One of the coolest things about that guy is that he wanted to expose his millions of new fans to the shit he liked and the shit he listened to when he was a kid. But the whole thing goes to show the effect of mass commercialism, I mean, the guy killed himself, which is a shame, obviously, it was like he had too much success and we never had enough, so how do you make yourself happy? Fuck it, you know? Figure it out… or blow your brains out.
EM: Fortunately, you never wound up blowing your brains out, but you did have some serious personal issues with drug abuse and anger…
No, I didn’t, but the lack of success definitely played a part in my eventual self-destructive ways, which is kind of ironic, because [Cobain] offed himself because, well, who knows why he did it, I mean, I don’t want to try to conceptualize why the guy did it, but he was obviously having some problems with being a celebrity. It’s like “screw it” … if you’re having that hard of a time, just bail, but I mean, if you gotta kill yourself, you gotta kill yourself. I had to self-destruct, and to be honest with you, it’s because I never felt like I got enough ego strokes or enough confirmations of the work I’d done over all those years, but mostly, I was just sick of being fuckin’ broke… but when we did find success and the money started coming in, I spent it all on hurting myself, so be careful what you wish for! But it’s a shame that the guy had to wind up killing himself because they’d come and hung out with us some more and he really wound up sinking himself into the life of a musician and it’s one thing to be a musician and another to be a celebrity… so just give it a little time, age with it, let it go. Just keep going. Keep poking at it.
EM: You eventually hit that ‘low’ with the incident at the post office thing and the assault. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Ehh, you know, after years of being a loser after my wife passed away… THAT was the low. That was the bottom, you know, and beyond that I discovered truly down ‘low’ is and I stayed there for a real long time; became a horrible, horrible fuckin’ mess… I was already a mess by the time she passed away, you know, it was because of our bad behavior that she passed away, but it was a treatable mess because you can get over them. You can get over drug problems, but you can’t get over being dead. I just couldn’t deal with the fact that she’d died… I was just GONE, and eventually, you know, years pass then just some more dumb shit went down. I wound up getting shot by a guard at the post office over nothing, just a stupid little argument with a lady in the parking lot. Actually, it wasn’t even an argument, I just told her to fuck off and she started yelling at me and got the guard, who got in my face, I told him to fuck off, he shoved me, I belted him, he went down and got his stick, hit me with it, took it from him and hit him with it a couple of times, then I turned around and he blasted me a couple of times in the back. I got about a year and a half on that one for assault, then another year before that already. I was in and out of jail after my wife passed away; I was just in the toilet. All my own fault; all my own fault. No one else’s fault but my own, you know. Bad decisions on my part.
EM: So you take full responsibility with everything that happened during that period of your life?
Absolutely. I take it just because I can, you know, because what’s the point of lying to yourself? It was something that was totally stupid and I regret the shit out of it and miss the fuck out of my wife every day… but I’ve learned to live with the fuckin’ fact that I destroyed something as fuckin’ precious as my wife’s life, my personal life, my professional life, my health, I mean, I didn’t die, but I destroyed every other fuckin’ facet of my existence, and I finally figured out how to accept what happened and that it was my fault. That was the bitterest pill of it all. It’s one thing to be a tragedy, but a self-induced tragedy? That’s a fuckin’ hard nut to swallow! [laughter] but here I am! I’m a testament to the size and strength of the human gullet! [laughter] there’s a quotable quote! Because I was just saying that it was a hard nut to swallow, but I did it so I must have a pretty tough gullet, and that’s basically what I’m saying, so…
EM: Well you seem to have gotten back on your feet…
I’ve managed to keep from looking back and seeing it ALL as regret, and I’ve learned a lot about the healing qualities of time and whatever the fuck we are, and what’s “yourself,” like when you say the word ‘self’ who are you talking about? Life is a mystery, we are mysterious, there are no finite points that can be made, ultimately… I don’t think. It’s all wisdom and knowledge and everything is based upon or agreed upon according to the parameters of the human mind, which is finite.
EM: Do you have any final thoughts or nuggets of wisdom for our readers? Any witty quotes or advice for budding musicians?
Well, I’d always rather be rich than influential [laughter] errh, ahh, the best of both worlds! Ask Michael Stipe kind of how that feels! [laughter] Crispy ol’ Cris of the ratty ol’ Meat Puppets… If I stick my head far enough up someone’s ass and blow hard enough, I’ll have a brain bubble making machine. I say that it’s a rough & tumble business and [with a comedic sneer] ‘a scrappy attitude that might just serve them well!’ … ‘Although I’m not familiar with the band’s work, let them know that Mr. Kirkwood wishes them well!’
EM: And what can we expect from the Meat Puppets in the future?
More music! That’s really all Curt and I are into, so that’s what we’re going to do. We fart around a little bit with visual arts, with Curt taking it a little more serious than me. I’m more of a doodler and a line-drawer and he actually puts paint to paper, or canvas I suppose… We just use those things to decorate our musical work. I would say ultimately, the straight-forward, not trying to amuse myself answer would be: probably some more music!
Sewn Together OUT NOW on Megaforce Records!
***
For more on the band, visit: http://www.myspace.com/themeatpuppets
Art direction on feature story: Brian Yu
Accessed: 1/30/13
http://evilmonito.com/2009/11/07/a-testament-to-the-strength-of-the-human-gullet/
by Kenneth Van Doren
Interview with the Meat Puppets (Chris Kirkwood)
***
“Basically, we found something that we liked to do, which was play music,” Chris Kirkwood began. “Curt and I came from different angles. I started playing after I saw the movie Deliverance. When I was twelve, I got a banjo. Curt had taken up guitar… we had gotten really into it in our teens. I started playing bass at some point and then we [got] together with Derek [Bostrom] and started a band.
“It felt right at the time. We thought about “what it is to be” and “what do you want to do with yourself” and those decisions you make definitely depends on who you are as a person. At the time, especially when you’re young like that, it sounds like a good idea to drop out of school and become dirty old punk rock musicians, ya know? So that’s what we did, and that’s never really gone away: the feeling of pursuing something as personal as music in that sort of way, at least for me. It was a good tool for discovering who I am and what I think about things.” After a pause, he facetiously remarked, “Beyond that, we were intent on becoming the first white, reggae three-piece to have massive chart and pop appeal, but The Police beat us to it.”
Prior to 1980, Meat Puppets was a late-night activity played by fetishists in the back of a butcher shop. However, brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood adopt the name for the band they form with drummer Derek Bostrom. Nowadays, the term “Meat Puppets” is synonymous with iconic and influential grunge rock, as well as the group that had the biggest impact on Nirvana’s sound. From underground punkers, to cow-thumpin’ rockers, to classic stardom through drug addiction and back, the Meat Puppets were and are one of the most prolific and dynamic bands that have ever sprung up from the underground. Recently, I was graced with the opportunity to speak with Cris Kirkwood about his life as a legendary bass player. He spoke in a witty, deeply profound, and absolutely hilarious manner. After only a few moments of talking with him, I was convinced that had he chosen another vocation, he would’ve made a great fortune as a stand-up comedian or an author of existential philosophy. Here is what he had to say:
EM: Well, aside from Deliverance, what influenced you early on? What made you guys play the style of music that you do?
KIRKWOOD: Well, Curt and I were definitely old enough to be children of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I mean, all of the rock stuff, definitely… The Beatles were a huge influence. They were one of the things that turned me on to what music could be. I started getting into different kind of music and it made me want to make music. I started seeing it as a tool to, you know, explore the depths and lows of the human mind. So I started getting into all kinds of different stuff, I got into bluegrass, indigenous musics that sort of reflected a region and I got a kick out of that, and it opened my eyes to the idea of regionalism as opposed to, you know, say, nationalism specifically. I liked the idea of people making noise because of the foods that are available to them and the kind of topography that they live in. I started tracing back the roots of music and getting into jazz, classical, things like that and realized, “oh my god, the depths that exist, the heights, and the fuckin’ depths of thought and the wherewithal to achieve the level of ideas of being involved in something as complex and lofty as that. And the language it took for something like that really blew me away… then I realized, “Jesus, I’m way too retarded for that! I like to smoke way too much pot!” then I thought, “oh, punk rock… well there’s something I can handle [sarcastically]” [laughter] So, you know, all sorts of different stuff influenced us, and one of the bands that made me realize that rock and roll was tolerable was that I really dug Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead… I liked the sense of humor and the musicianship and fuckin’ the extreme weirdness as well, and the improvisational side of it as well and certainly in terms of rock and roll because I really wasn’t that into rock at the time. I was brought up to see it as sort of an advertisement for the size of your dick. I just wasn’t that taken with it, you know? But I got into it more when I found punk rock, because that was like “well, there’s a more raw form of expression” and I really got a kick out of that, and it was really easy to play. But punk rock kind of turned me on to rock and roll and I went backwards from there.
EM: It seems that the blending of those elements in your sound worked for you, since SST signed the band. How did that come about?
We started working with those guys when we put out our first 7” [record] with Monitor called World Imitation. [Monitor] was an arty/punky band from the scene that was going on in Los Angeles at the time, and we played a show with Black Flag sometime around ’81 and they really liked us, so they invited us out to play in L.A. and asked if we’d like to make a record with them. Black Flag had put out their first album, and ours came out shortly after that.
EM: How did that change the direction of the kind of music you guys were making? Did that give you any kind of realization that the Meat Puppets were going to be bigger than you’d thought?
We were one of those bands that allowed things to happen as they went. We weren’t able to make any other kind of music than the music we were making at the time, and it wasn’t like “oh, we’re gonna be huge” … Black Flag’s label [SST] didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal at the time, you know, but in retrospect, it’s become a hallmark of a time and place of one branch of American music, and a particularly healthy, thriving, interesting branch at that. But at the time, you couldn’t really see it that clearly since we were in the midst of it. Looking back at bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth, these bands that went on to become a fuckin’ pillar of a certain type of American music, but at the time, it was just a bunch of dudes who were playing the type of music that they wanted to play.
EM: So how did you go from playing with those bands early on to joining Nirvana on stage for their MTV Unplugged album? That must have been a huge deal. Can you tell our readers a little bit about that and how it changed things for the band?
Well, we got in there because Cobain was such a huge fan of the Meat Puppets and a lot of the bands I just mentioned, the SST scene, had a big influence on the whole Seattle scene. I mean, they had a huge influence ultimately, in retrospect if you look back it was a very fertile time in American music and they created a rock scene that we all put together from different areas of the country… and we’d been influenced by other people, so where does it come from? You can always follow the path backwards and we were just the next link in the chain that was forged up in Seattle. So Cobain invited us, and at the time people really dug [the “Seattle Sound”] and really dug Nirvana so we went on tour with them. [Kurt Cobain] really liked the Meat Puppets as a kid and he asked us if he could cover some of our crap and we told him that he definitely could if he wanted to, and that took off and led to us doing that Unplugged thing. For us, it was a cool thing to do musically and to see how somebody else interprets our songs. Suddenly, bands that were influenced by us became some of the most popular shit in the world, but basically, it was just something to do for us. The record company definitely liked it, it was all business stuff, but MTV didn’t want us to do it. They didn’t want Cobain to have the ratty old Meat Puppets on there to spoil their unplugged session but Cobain insisted.
EM: So MTV didn’t want you guys on there and Kurt had to push for you guys to include you?
Well, the Unplugged thing was a TV show, and it came down to what they’re trying to get across and what kind of art they wanted to sell. We never had the money to make a video or anything so we never got played, but we would have if they’d played the crap out of our little $200 videos. They could have if they had wanted to, but they didn’t want to because it wasn’t a part of their agenda. So when Cobain wanted to take us on there, [MTV] said, “Well, why them? Why not Eddie Vedder?” [laughter] but the cool thing was that [Cobain] insisted and it turned out to be a very touching, cool thing. One of the coolest things about that guy is that he wanted to expose his millions of new fans to the shit he liked and the shit he listened to when he was a kid. But the whole thing goes to show the effect of mass commercialism, I mean, the guy killed himself, which is a shame, obviously, it was like he had too much success and we never had enough, so how do you make yourself happy? Fuck it, you know? Figure it out… or blow your brains out.
EM: Fortunately, you never wound up blowing your brains out, but you did have some serious personal issues with drug abuse and anger…
No, I didn’t, but the lack of success definitely played a part in my eventual self-destructive ways, which is kind of ironic, because [Cobain] offed himself because, well, who knows why he did it, I mean, I don’t want to try to conceptualize why the guy did it, but he was obviously having some problems with being a celebrity. It’s like “screw it” … if you’re having that hard of a time, just bail, but I mean, if you gotta kill yourself, you gotta kill yourself. I had to self-destruct, and to be honest with you, it’s because I never felt like I got enough ego strokes or enough confirmations of the work I’d done over all those years, but mostly, I was just sick of being fuckin’ broke… but when we did find success and the money started coming in, I spent it all on hurting myself, so be careful what you wish for! But it’s a shame that the guy had to wind up killing himself because they’d come and hung out with us some more and he really wound up sinking himself into the life of a musician and it’s one thing to be a musician and another to be a celebrity… so just give it a little time, age with it, let it go. Just keep going. Keep poking at it.
EM: You eventually hit that ‘low’ with the incident at the post office thing and the assault. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Ehh, you know, after years of being a loser after my wife passed away… THAT was the low. That was the bottom, you know, and beyond that I discovered truly down ‘low’ is and I stayed there for a real long time; became a horrible, horrible fuckin’ mess… I was already a mess by the time she passed away, you know, it was because of our bad behavior that she passed away, but it was a treatable mess because you can get over them. You can get over drug problems, but you can’t get over being dead. I just couldn’t deal with the fact that she’d died… I was just GONE, and eventually, you know, years pass then just some more dumb shit went down. I wound up getting shot by a guard at the post office over nothing, just a stupid little argument with a lady in the parking lot. Actually, it wasn’t even an argument, I just told her to fuck off and she started yelling at me and got the guard, who got in my face, I told him to fuck off, he shoved me, I belted him, he went down and got his stick, hit me with it, took it from him and hit him with it a couple of times, then I turned around and he blasted me a couple of times in the back. I got about a year and a half on that one for assault, then another year before that already. I was in and out of jail after my wife passed away; I was just in the toilet. All my own fault; all my own fault. No one else’s fault but my own, you know. Bad decisions on my part.
EM: So you take full responsibility with everything that happened during that period of your life?
Absolutely. I take it just because I can, you know, because what’s the point of lying to yourself? It was something that was totally stupid and I regret the shit out of it and miss the fuck out of my wife every day… but I’ve learned to live with the fuckin’ fact that I destroyed something as fuckin’ precious as my wife’s life, my personal life, my professional life, my health, I mean, I didn’t die, but I destroyed every other fuckin’ facet of my existence, and I finally figured out how to accept what happened and that it was my fault. That was the bitterest pill of it all. It’s one thing to be a tragedy, but a self-induced tragedy? That’s a fuckin’ hard nut to swallow! [laughter] but here I am! I’m a testament to the size and strength of the human gullet! [laughter] there’s a quotable quote! Because I was just saying that it was a hard nut to swallow, but I did it so I must have a pretty tough gullet, and that’s basically what I’m saying, so…
EM: Well you seem to have gotten back on your feet…
I’ve managed to keep from looking back and seeing it ALL as regret, and I’ve learned a lot about the healing qualities of time and whatever the fuck we are, and what’s “yourself,” like when you say the word ‘self’ who are you talking about? Life is a mystery, we are mysterious, there are no finite points that can be made, ultimately… I don’t think. It’s all wisdom and knowledge and everything is based upon or agreed upon according to the parameters of the human mind, which is finite.
EM: Do you have any final thoughts or nuggets of wisdom for our readers? Any witty quotes or advice for budding musicians?
Well, I’d always rather be rich than influential [laughter] errh, ahh, the best of both worlds! Ask Michael Stipe kind of how that feels! [laughter] Crispy ol’ Cris of the ratty ol’ Meat Puppets… If I stick my head far enough up someone’s ass and blow hard enough, I’ll have a brain bubble making machine. I say that it’s a rough & tumble business and [with a comedic sneer] ‘a scrappy attitude that might just serve them well!’ … ‘Although I’m not familiar with the band’s work, let them know that Mr. Kirkwood wishes them well!’
EM: And what can we expect from the Meat Puppets in the future?
More music! That’s really all Curt and I are into, so that’s what we’re going to do. We fart around a little bit with visual arts, with Curt taking it a little more serious than me. I’m more of a doodler and a line-drawer and he actually puts paint to paper, or canvas I suppose… We just use those things to decorate our musical work. I would say ultimately, the straight-forward, not trying to amuse myself answer would be: probably some more music!
Sewn Together OUT NOW on Megaforce Records!
***
For more on the band, visit: http://www.myspace.com/themeatpuppets
Art direction on feature story: Brian Yu
Accessed: 1/30/13
http://evilmonito.com/2009/11/07/a-testament-to-the-strength-of-the-human-gullet/