Curt Kirkwood’s Tinker Toy Still Life with the Meat Puppets
By: Ric Hickey
published on June 17, 2011
Crawdaddy! Magazine
Although their first record was released nearly three decades ago, the Meat Puppets still bring the psychedelic folk storm like a youthful gang of delirious sun-dazed bandits. The veteran group has weathered more than its share of adversity in its storied past, including but not limited to, drug problems and jail time. It was just a few years ago when band leader Curt Kirkwood welcomed the return of his brother and Puppets’ original bass player Cris back into the fold. And now son of the late, great Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quartet, drummer Shandon Sahm is a full-fledged member of the band. With that, the brothers Kirkwood can now count the Sahm family bloodline as part of the Meat Puppets’ rock ‘n’ roll DNA. The band’s new album Lollipop, their 13th, is turbo-charged by Sahm’s confident drum pummeling. His exuberant drum work propels the hypnotic, pounding “Orange” while his clever timing shifts animate the album-opening “Incomplete.”
Despite the band’s long history, the new record bounces with youthful vigor. When told this sounds like a band that’s just getting started, Curt Kirkwood shrugs, “We always were energetic. And Shandon is just hopelessly enthusiastic. Always. That’s part of his deal. I don’t know where he gets it, but his dad had the same thing. It’s some kind of sickness! That enthusiasm for making something cool, be it a gig or whatever. And Cris is glad to be playing again. This is the third album we’ve done since he got out of rehab, so we’ve kind of got our sea legs back. And that’s also kind of the reason why I called the record Lollipop too, because it’s such a toe-tapper. Even the slower stuff has a kind of inertia to it. It’s kind of a jolly record.”
The curtain rises on the simmering “Incomplete” with its layers of vocal harmonies, jangling guitars, and eerie strings implying ghostly counter melodies. Leading the charge is an undulating Cris Kirkwood bass line that moves in an unpredictable zig-zag course through the song’s verses. Like lazy waves of heat rising off Arizona asphalt, Curt’s laconic vocals set the tone here for the rest of this great collection of pop song abstractions and fevered rock ‘n’ roll dreams. Curt and company took a slightly different approach to recording Lollipop.
“We didn’t rehearse the material or anything,” he says. “The stuff was really only about half done when we went in the studio, so we were able to just build it from the ground up like tinker toys. That’s what it reminded me of right away: It was like a tinker toy still life.
“Generally,” Curt concedes, “We like to go and learn the songs and cut some live tracks and then augment them. Or at least try to do it as realistically as possible. But this time Shandon and I cut everything on guitar and drums first so that we didn’t get away from the framework of the tunes. We started with the vocals because Cris and I are not very strong singers and we need to have the space there. If you dive right in with a band arrangement, you’re gonna have guitars in the mix, and they tend to fuck with our vocals.” In spite of employing this previously untested recording method, Curt happily reports, “The paradox is that it actually ended up sounding pretty natural and ‘vibe-y.’ Although it was completely put together in a way that I think a lot of people really wouldn’t like to do it, we had fun with it.”
A new approach to the recording process does not, however, signal a change in Kirkwood’s songwriting techniques. His methods are, in his words, “About the same as they’ve always been, really.”
In his patented deadpan tone of perma-shrug, Buddha-slacker confidence, the lanky singer-guitarist, known the world over for his highly influential and irreverent rock ‘n’ roll deconstructionism and psychedelic cow-punk, elaborates on an unexpectedly mathematical songwriting formula. About his approach to songwriting, Kirkwood says, “I’ve always done these things as a kind of geometry. Musically and lyrically too there’s a lot of geometry involved, but it’s sort of an oblique geometry because you can do what you want but still there’s movement and there’s lines. It’s in the way that I see them. It’s more geometry than colors. Color comes in later. But first there’s gotta be that geometry, and I’m still into that.
“Of course that’s just the formulaic part of it,” he concedes to illuminate an afterthought. “The other side of it is that there’s some cool chord change or something that you just stumble across. And if you’ve got cool chords, you’re probably gonna get a cool melody, if you take a little time. Or if I have just the same old chords that everybody has always used, then it’s all about finding a melody that’s just a little bit different. But once again, for me, that seems kind of like geometry.”
Ironically, for a band whose material always abounds with energy and subversive charm, Kirkwood claims, “I don’t approach the stuff that emotionally. I like it to have an impact that’s a little beyond that. That kind of far-fetched feeling that’s a little beyond any of the emotions we pre-figure. It’s like that feeling when you go to a good concert or something like that makes you happy, but it’s a little beyond that. There’s an exuberance that you can’t put your finger on. I’m always looking for something that will do that. And I’ve been doing it that way a long time, you know? It’s a weird little dragon chase!” Whether juxtaposing abstract phrases over an otherwise straightforward hoe-down like “Baby Don’t” or copping to blissful ignorance with unexpectedly clever language in the catchy “Damn Thing”, Kirkwood’s mastery of psych-folk song craft is in strong evidence on every track on the new record. One of the down-tempo numbers that still has a solid hook to it is an acoustic guitar and vibes-laden tune called “Amazing.” Again here, Sahm’s innate sense of restraint creates a drum track that alternately punches and suspends the tension. The song’s chorus is a melodic murmur that gets stuck in your head like a viral tape loop.
Asked about the tune, Kirkwood laughs and says, “That was originally called ‘I Hate the Human Race!’ It’s a funny one. Instead of saying ‘Amazing’ in the chorus, it used to say ‘I hate the human race.’ But, you know, I just couldn’t sing it live. Funny enough, we were going to open for Willie Nelson for a Christmas show about 10 years ago. So I wrote it as like a Christmas song!” Laughing about the tune’s unlikely origin and previous incarnation, he goes on to say, “Some of my closest friends were like, ‘God, that song’s awful man!’ And you know, as much as I like it and as perfect as I thought it was, it is hard to sing. Like, to look somebody in the eye and sing that? And I guess I just didn’t want to be that committed to it in its original form. So I took that little phrase ‘amazing’ that was at the end of the chorus and shoved it at the beginning, and it works. This was kind of at the last minute, and I just thought, ‘Oh shit! Good!’ because I love the song, and I love the chorus. I’d had the song around for a while but I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it. But we recorded it anyway, and when the lyric change came, it seemed that the content to me was still the same. You can take it however you want.”
Kirkwood pauses to think before answering questions. With each inquiry he seems to be turning the question over and over in his hands before finally shrugging and muttering remarks that sound offhand, maybe even offering the same answers that he’s trotted out for stock questions over the years. But once into the rhythm of the conversation he hits his stride, and it wasn’t long before I realized that his were not tired and rehearsed responses. It’s just that the guy has been doing this a long time. While there will surely forever be an impossible-to-name magic to the process involved, the man’s methods are tried and true, and clearly he’s sticking to his guns. In “Town” from the new record, Kirkwood laments his role as “one sick clown in a one trick town.” There is considerably more than that to the man who coined it, but it is maybe a better metaphor for his place in rock history than even he is aware of.
The calmly measured, almost drowsy-sounding tone of his voice is rendered transparent by the obvious enthusiasm that Kirkwood still feels for his lot in life. When pressed for his favorite part of the work cycle involved with recording a record and then going out on tour with the band, he says, “The whole process is a blast. There’s a lot of it that I really like. I really like hearing the album done. I love that rendition, that final shove off. When you think, ‘Okay it’s done.’ Because then you just say, ‘There it is. That’s what it is.’ And it’s kinda hard to aim that stuff. Then the mystery finally comes to light and all of a sudden you see what your work yielded. And it’s kind of a crapshoot really. But I love that part of it.”
Eager to hit the road and play the new material, Kirkwood says, “I guess I also like seeing the difference between how the stuff sounds on the album and how it sounds live. I like to see if it comes off live like it does on the album or if it takes on a life of its own.” About the recording-and-touring cycle that many find tedious and redundant, Kirkwood admits, “It’s fun to stay focused on something for that long because I generally don’t do it. My attention span is usually good for about half an hour of watching cartoons and that’s about it, ya know?”
The confident but self-deprecating tone gives way to well-deserved pride when Kirkwood reflects on the Meat Puppets’ trajectory and track record. Like someone who somehow managed to dodge every bullet in a shower of machine-gun spray, Kirkwood sounds grateful for the fact that he never had to do much of the bullshit dance with major labels. Unlike the overwhelming majority of his peers, he says, “I’ve never really had to yield too much to that major label stuff. I mean, I’ve always just had what material I have, you know? So in my case it’s always been more about talking the label into what I have. It’s real hard for me to write or to compete with stuff that I don’t agree with, like, to write something specifically for someone else’s aim. Whether it’s for a movie soundtrack or whatever, I’ve never had a whole lot of luck at that. So I just have what I have. And with that I held my own with the majors.”
About the band’s earliest recording endeavors, Kirkwood happily admits, “SST spoiled us. Back then we could just do whatever we wanted, and they would gladly put out whatever we gave them. They didn’t blink an eye.” Nowadays the band is signed to Megaforce, and Kirkwood gratefully relates that their new label is “definitely like that too. They’re concerned that it’s a good record of course, and we see eye to eye with that. And they let me produce the record myself. Which I think says a lot. I don’t have a big track record except for our indie stuff from the ‘80s. We produced all that stuff ourselves. But they kind of just let me keep going in the direction that I was going in with our record Rise to Your Knees [Anodyne Records, 2007]. It’s been amazing for me, because in the past I have had to take all that cool stuff I learned in the ‘80s and completely put it away and do a whole producer/arranger trip. I work real hard on my craft, and it’s hard to work as much as you do on it and then have other people come in and do more to it when you think you’re done. And I’ve conceded to that plenty of times because I love Paul Leary, and I love Pete Anderson [producers of 1994’s Too High to Die and 1991’s Forbidden Places, respectively]. And I’m not the one to say ‘the art is done,’ you know? I’m no artist. I’m just a fucking peon with a paintbrush. And it’s hard to just say ‘Oh, I know more than you do.’ That’s a really bad stance in art. Fortunately, I’ve never had to work with a total douchebag producer, but there have been situations where I would still have to listen to the ones I have worked with. And who knows? They could be right! But nonetheless I work really hard on this stuff. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Shaking off the seriousness and breaking into a chuckle mid-thought, Kirkwood is quick to close with the quip, “I’ve been in my own corner for so long, whether I wanted to be or not, that it’s pretty gratifying to be given the opportunity to produce these records myself. You know, outside of just being a guitar monkey!”
Accessed 6/18/11
http://www.crawdaddy.com/index.php/2011/06/17/curt-kirkwoods-tinker-toy-still-life-with-the-meat-puppets/
By: Ric Hickey
published on June 17, 2011
Crawdaddy! Magazine
Although their first record was released nearly three decades ago, the Meat Puppets still bring the psychedelic folk storm like a youthful gang of delirious sun-dazed bandits. The veteran group has weathered more than its share of adversity in its storied past, including but not limited to, drug problems and jail time. It was just a few years ago when band leader Curt Kirkwood welcomed the return of his brother and Puppets’ original bass player Cris back into the fold. And now son of the late, great Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quartet, drummer Shandon Sahm is a full-fledged member of the band. With that, the brothers Kirkwood can now count the Sahm family bloodline as part of the Meat Puppets’ rock ‘n’ roll DNA. The band’s new album Lollipop, their 13th, is turbo-charged by Sahm’s confident drum pummeling. His exuberant drum work propels the hypnotic, pounding “Orange” while his clever timing shifts animate the album-opening “Incomplete.”
Despite the band’s long history, the new record bounces with youthful vigor. When told this sounds like a band that’s just getting started, Curt Kirkwood shrugs, “We always were energetic. And Shandon is just hopelessly enthusiastic. Always. That’s part of his deal. I don’t know where he gets it, but his dad had the same thing. It’s some kind of sickness! That enthusiasm for making something cool, be it a gig or whatever. And Cris is glad to be playing again. This is the third album we’ve done since he got out of rehab, so we’ve kind of got our sea legs back. And that’s also kind of the reason why I called the record Lollipop too, because it’s such a toe-tapper. Even the slower stuff has a kind of inertia to it. It’s kind of a jolly record.”
The curtain rises on the simmering “Incomplete” with its layers of vocal harmonies, jangling guitars, and eerie strings implying ghostly counter melodies. Leading the charge is an undulating Cris Kirkwood bass line that moves in an unpredictable zig-zag course through the song’s verses. Like lazy waves of heat rising off Arizona asphalt, Curt’s laconic vocals set the tone here for the rest of this great collection of pop song abstractions and fevered rock ‘n’ roll dreams. Curt and company took a slightly different approach to recording Lollipop.
“We didn’t rehearse the material or anything,” he says. “The stuff was really only about half done when we went in the studio, so we were able to just build it from the ground up like tinker toys. That’s what it reminded me of right away: It was like a tinker toy still life.
“Generally,” Curt concedes, “We like to go and learn the songs and cut some live tracks and then augment them. Or at least try to do it as realistically as possible. But this time Shandon and I cut everything on guitar and drums first so that we didn’t get away from the framework of the tunes. We started with the vocals because Cris and I are not very strong singers and we need to have the space there. If you dive right in with a band arrangement, you’re gonna have guitars in the mix, and they tend to fuck with our vocals.” In spite of employing this previously untested recording method, Curt happily reports, “The paradox is that it actually ended up sounding pretty natural and ‘vibe-y.’ Although it was completely put together in a way that I think a lot of people really wouldn’t like to do it, we had fun with it.”
A new approach to the recording process does not, however, signal a change in Kirkwood’s songwriting techniques. His methods are, in his words, “About the same as they’ve always been, really.”
In his patented deadpan tone of perma-shrug, Buddha-slacker confidence, the lanky singer-guitarist, known the world over for his highly influential and irreverent rock ‘n’ roll deconstructionism and psychedelic cow-punk, elaborates on an unexpectedly mathematical songwriting formula. About his approach to songwriting, Kirkwood says, “I’ve always done these things as a kind of geometry. Musically and lyrically too there’s a lot of geometry involved, but it’s sort of an oblique geometry because you can do what you want but still there’s movement and there’s lines. It’s in the way that I see them. It’s more geometry than colors. Color comes in later. But first there’s gotta be that geometry, and I’m still into that.
“Of course that’s just the formulaic part of it,” he concedes to illuminate an afterthought. “The other side of it is that there’s some cool chord change or something that you just stumble across. And if you’ve got cool chords, you’re probably gonna get a cool melody, if you take a little time. Or if I have just the same old chords that everybody has always used, then it’s all about finding a melody that’s just a little bit different. But once again, for me, that seems kind of like geometry.”
Ironically, for a band whose material always abounds with energy and subversive charm, Kirkwood claims, “I don’t approach the stuff that emotionally. I like it to have an impact that’s a little beyond that. That kind of far-fetched feeling that’s a little beyond any of the emotions we pre-figure. It’s like that feeling when you go to a good concert or something like that makes you happy, but it’s a little beyond that. There’s an exuberance that you can’t put your finger on. I’m always looking for something that will do that. And I’ve been doing it that way a long time, you know? It’s a weird little dragon chase!” Whether juxtaposing abstract phrases over an otherwise straightforward hoe-down like “Baby Don’t” or copping to blissful ignorance with unexpectedly clever language in the catchy “Damn Thing”, Kirkwood’s mastery of psych-folk song craft is in strong evidence on every track on the new record. One of the down-tempo numbers that still has a solid hook to it is an acoustic guitar and vibes-laden tune called “Amazing.” Again here, Sahm’s innate sense of restraint creates a drum track that alternately punches and suspends the tension. The song’s chorus is a melodic murmur that gets stuck in your head like a viral tape loop.
Asked about the tune, Kirkwood laughs and says, “That was originally called ‘I Hate the Human Race!’ It’s a funny one. Instead of saying ‘Amazing’ in the chorus, it used to say ‘I hate the human race.’ But, you know, I just couldn’t sing it live. Funny enough, we were going to open for Willie Nelson for a Christmas show about 10 years ago. So I wrote it as like a Christmas song!” Laughing about the tune’s unlikely origin and previous incarnation, he goes on to say, “Some of my closest friends were like, ‘God, that song’s awful man!’ And you know, as much as I like it and as perfect as I thought it was, it is hard to sing. Like, to look somebody in the eye and sing that? And I guess I just didn’t want to be that committed to it in its original form. So I took that little phrase ‘amazing’ that was at the end of the chorus and shoved it at the beginning, and it works. This was kind of at the last minute, and I just thought, ‘Oh shit! Good!’ because I love the song, and I love the chorus. I’d had the song around for a while but I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it. But we recorded it anyway, and when the lyric change came, it seemed that the content to me was still the same. You can take it however you want.”
Kirkwood pauses to think before answering questions. With each inquiry he seems to be turning the question over and over in his hands before finally shrugging and muttering remarks that sound offhand, maybe even offering the same answers that he’s trotted out for stock questions over the years. But once into the rhythm of the conversation he hits his stride, and it wasn’t long before I realized that his were not tired and rehearsed responses. It’s just that the guy has been doing this a long time. While there will surely forever be an impossible-to-name magic to the process involved, the man’s methods are tried and true, and clearly he’s sticking to his guns. In “Town” from the new record, Kirkwood laments his role as “one sick clown in a one trick town.” There is considerably more than that to the man who coined it, but it is maybe a better metaphor for his place in rock history than even he is aware of.
The calmly measured, almost drowsy-sounding tone of his voice is rendered transparent by the obvious enthusiasm that Kirkwood still feels for his lot in life. When pressed for his favorite part of the work cycle involved with recording a record and then going out on tour with the band, he says, “The whole process is a blast. There’s a lot of it that I really like. I really like hearing the album done. I love that rendition, that final shove off. When you think, ‘Okay it’s done.’ Because then you just say, ‘There it is. That’s what it is.’ And it’s kinda hard to aim that stuff. Then the mystery finally comes to light and all of a sudden you see what your work yielded. And it’s kind of a crapshoot really. But I love that part of it.”
Eager to hit the road and play the new material, Kirkwood says, “I guess I also like seeing the difference between how the stuff sounds on the album and how it sounds live. I like to see if it comes off live like it does on the album or if it takes on a life of its own.” About the recording-and-touring cycle that many find tedious and redundant, Kirkwood admits, “It’s fun to stay focused on something for that long because I generally don’t do it. My attention span is usually good for about half an hour of watching cartoons and that’s about it, ya know?”
The confident but self-deprecating tone gives way to well-deserved pride when Kirkwood reflects on the Meat Puppets’ trajectory and track record. Like someone who somehow managed to dodge every bullet in a shower of machine-gun spray, Kirkwood sounds grateful for the fact that he never had to do much of the bullshit dance with major labels. Unlike the overwhelming majority of his peers, he says, “I’ve never really had to yield too much to that major label stuff. I mean, I’ve always just had what material I have, you know? So in my case it’s always been more about talking the label into what I have. It’s real hard for me to write or to compete with stuff that I don’t agree with, like, to write something specifically for someone else’s aim. Whether it’s for a movie soundtrack or whatever, I’ve never had a whole lot of luck at that. So I just have what I have. And with that I held my own with the majors.”
About the band’s earliest recording endeavors, Kirkwood happily admits, “SST spoiled us. Back then we could just do whatever we wanted, and they would gladly put out whatever we gave them. They didn’t blink an eye.” Nowadays the band is signed to Megaforce, and Kirkwood gratefully relates that their new label is “definitely like that too. They’re concerned that it’s a good record of course, and we see eye to eye with that. And they let me produce the record myself. Which I think says a lot. I don’t have a big track record except for our indie stuff from the ‘80s. We produced all that stuff ourselves. But they kind of just let me keep going in the direction that I was going in with our record Rise to Your Knees [Anodyne Records, 2007]. It’s been amazing for me, because in the past I have had to take all that cool stuff I learned in the ‘80s and completely put it away and do a whole producer/arranger trip. I work real hard on my craft, and it’s hard to work as much as you do on it and then have other people come in and do more to it when you think you’re done. And I’ve conceded to that plenty of times because I love Paul Leary, and I love Pete Anderson [producers of 1994’s Too High to Die and 1991’s Forbidden Places, respectively]. And I’m not the one to say ‘the art is done,’ you know? I’m no artist. I’m just a fucking peon with a paintbrush. And it’s hard to just say ‘Oh, I know more than you do.’ That’s a really bad stance in art. Fortunately, I’ve never had to work with a total douchebag producer, but there have been situations where I would still have to listen to the ones I have worked with. And who knows? They could be right! But nonetheless I work really hard on this stuff. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Shaking off the seriousness and breaking into a chuckle mid-thought, Kirkwood is quick to close with the quip, “I’ve been in my own corner for so long, whether I wanted to be or not, that it’s pretty gratifying to be given the opportunity to produce these records myself. You know, outside of just being a guitar monkey!”
Accessed 6/18/11
http://www.crawdaddy.com/index.php/2011/06/17/curt-kirkwoods-tinker-toy-still-life-with-the-meat-puppets/