The Boston Phoenix
Finding out what makes the Meat Puppets tick with a new oral history
They Ain't Heavy, They're the Kirkwood Brothers
By JAMES PARKER | May 30, 2012
DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS How else to account for the cracked beauty of Meat Puppets II — or the drum
machine on Mirage and Monsters?
As half-assed a form as it can be, the rock-band oral history is a folk form nonetheless, with a great claim to authenticity. Story by story it goes, voice by voice and mouth by ashtray mouth. The guitar dude rambles; the second drummer tells his tale. The drug-scorched roadie waxes unexpectedly bardic, ornamenting the legend in heightened tones. Democracy rules: the famous musician is a verbal dud, while the nobody from the record company turns out to be a sly and salty raconteur. Etc.
And if ever there was a band that qualified for the oral history treatment, for the anecdotal splurge and the first-person fuck-this-fuck-that, it's Arizona's Meat Puppets. Not only did this trio generate an extraordinary amount of stories through recklessness and general warped glee, they existed almost in their own stream of language: a strange, fried, elegant, innocent/corrupt, grotesquely fertile idiom that runs (still) beneath all their music and with which Greg Prato's Too High To Die is, thankfully, brimming. "I drove in there [New York City], and I liked the way people drove. I really liked the way the streets looked, all the big buildings. I didn't realize it was painted with urine at the time." Like that.
They stumbled out of the desert and into the '80s, two brothers and a drummer, gibbering longhairs nearly incapacitated, so it seemed, by their own creativity. Termite-mound boogie, shaky, desolate Neil Young chords, shimmers and spanglings of the Dead, all lashed to a chassis of bashed-to-bits punk rock — obviously they had to be on SST, at that stage America's most productively out-of-control label. Curt and Cris Kirkwood (guitar and bass, respectively) traded muzzy harmonies, crisp instrumental banter, and ding-dong fraternal vibes, while Derrick Bostrom sat on top and tapped along, left hand on the hi-hat. Then Curt would take one of his burning, doodling solos and every stricture of pitch and tempo would fall away, displaying mesas and vistas unguessed-at. Sometimes he didn't even have to solo, as in the coda to "Plateau" from Meat Puppets II — a few plucked strings, an immense and planetary chill.
II was slap-in-the-face great. It came out in 1984, part of the same evolutionary spasm that birthed Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, Black Flag's My War (all of them on SST). Stimulants were important, across the board. The Hüskers had their speed, Rollins his caffeine, the Minutemen ran on pot and politics, and the Meat Puppets were twisted with . . . . ecstasy? "That was another drug record," recounts Cris Kirkwood. "We knew a dude down at ASU that was a chemistry professor, and he made MDMA. We had a big fucking stack of that shit, and when we were recording we were doing gigantor rails."
The early years are thick with incident: going on pioneering cross-country tours with Black Flag, getting flipped off by the punkers. Even with Rollins on defense ("Someone had crushed a bunch of beer cans and was getting ready to throw them at them. I waited until he was pulling his arm back, and then took him down"), these were bruising encounters, characterized by Curt Kirkwood as "early Roadhouse stuff." Flea, one of Too High To Die's star witnesses, recalls Curt warning an audience in LA, "If any of you motherfuckers come up on this stage and start doing your fucking stupid punk-rock shit, you're going to get my guitar on the side of your head. I'll bash your fucking brains in!" And then being obliged, a few lazy bars of "Up on the Sun" later, to do just that. Sounds rough, sounds unconducive to beauty, but . . . am I getting old, or might today's up-and-comers benefit from some of this action — from forging their art in the crucible of loogies? Crushed beer cans like ninja stars, hurled at the head of the latest sensitive soul. I'm getting old.
Drugs, drugs, drugs. How else can we account for the red-eyed perversity that saw the Meat Puppets, on Mirage and Monsters, ditch Bostrom's beats in favor of a drum machine? The trippy '80s become the powdery '90s, and a wave of nods breaks over the scene. The Meat Puppets seem not to have had a real brother band on SST— their brother band, oddly enough, was Stone Temple Pilots, with whom they went on tour somewhere during the grunge wars, and around whom a lot of heroin was being done. For Cris Kirkwood in particular this was a double disaster: "I think some of it on my part was having worked so hard for so many years, just the way that we came up, so much of the work was done by us. We're glorified truck drivers. Van drivers. And to suddenly be on a tour bus, it was like, 'Well, that just increased the amount of time I can be completely out of my fuckin' gourd.' " His descent into junkiedom would be less of the old downward spiral, more of the shrieking Luciferian plunge. Even so, he wouldn't hit bottom for years. The wise Derrick Bostrom: "I strongly encourage all young people in bands to learn to avoid that kind of thing if they want their band to succeed. It destroyed ours."
The Meat Puppets are back now, sans Bostrom, and they still make skewed and lovely music. And Too High To Die is a fabulous read: Prato has tapped the scenesters, the old friends, the juju men, and he revels properly in the glorious and poetic testimony of the Puppets themselves. Negatives? A lack of editorial ruthlessness, resulting in too much blah. Kim Thayil (Soundgarden) seems like a nice, intelligent man, but why are there five pages about the first time he heard Meat Puppets II? Similarly, all the quotage from Buzz Osborne, Chad Channing, and Ian MacKaye, and most of the Dave Pirner, could be ditched without diminishing the book one jot. But that's the rock-band oral history for you: it spews and it sprawls, and it doesn't end where it should. Rather like the Meat Puppets.
TOO HIGH TO DIE: MEET THE MEAT PUPPETS BY GREG PRATO | LULU.COM | 396 PAGES | $24.99
Accessed: 5/31/12
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/arts/139397-finding-out-what-makes-the-meat-puppets-tick-with-/
Finding out what makes the Meat Puppets tick with a new oral history
They Ain't Heavy, They're the Kirkwood Brothers
By JAMES PARKER | May 30, 2012
DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS How else to account for the cracked beauty of Meat Puppets II — or the drum
machine on Mirage and Monsters?
As half-assed a form as it can be, the rock-band oral history is a folk form nonetheless, with a great claim to authenticity. Story by story it goes, voice by voice and mouth by ashtray mouth. The guitar dude rambles; the second drummer tells his tale. The drug-scorched roadie waxes unexpectedly bardic, ornamenting the legend in heightened tones. Democracy rules: the famous musician is a verbal dud, while the nobody from the record company turns out to be a sly and salty raconteur. Etc.
And if ever there was a band that qualified for the oral history treatment, for the anecdotal splurge and the first-person fuck-this-fuck-that, it's Arizona's Meat Puppets. Not only did this trio generate an extraordinary amount of stories through recklessness and general warped glee, they existed almost in their own stream of language: a strange, fried, elegant, innocent/corrupt, grotesquely fertile idiom that runs (still) beneath all their music and with which Greg Prato's Too High To Die is, thankfully, brimming. "I drove in there [New York City], and I liked the way people drove. I really liked the way the streets looked, all the big buildings. I didn't realize it was painted with urine at the time." Like that.
They stumbled out of the desert and into the '80s, two brothers and a drummer, gibbering longhairs nearly incapacitated, so it seemed, by their own creativity. Termite-mound boogie, shaky, desolate Neil Young chords, shimmers and spanglings of the Dead, all lashed to a chassis of bashed-to-bits punk rock — obviously they had to be on SST, at that stage America's most productively out-of-control label. Curt and Cris Kirkwood (guitar and bass, respectively) traded muzzy harmonies, crisp instrumental banter, and ding-dong fraternal vibes, while Derrick Bostrom sat on top and tapped along, left hand on the hi-hat. Then Curt would take one of his burning, doodling solos and every stricture of pitch and tempo would fall away, displaying mesas and vistas unguessed-at. Sometimes he didn't even have to solo, as in the coda to "Plateau" from Meat Puppets II — a few plucked strings, an immense and planetary chill.
II was slap-in-the-face great. It came out in 1984, part of the same evolutionary spasm that birthed Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, Black Flag's My War (all of them on SST). Stimulants were important, across the board. The Hüskers had their speed, Rollins his caffeine, the Minutemen ran on pot and politics, and the Meat Puppets were twisted with . . . . ecstasy? "That was another drug record," recounts Cris Kirkwood. "We knew a dude down at ASU that was a chemistry professor, and he made MDMA. We had a big fucking stack of that shit, and when we were recording we were doing gigantor rails."
The early years are thick with incident: going on pioneering cross-country tours with Black Flag, getting flipped off by the punkers. Even with Rollins on defense ("Someone had crushed a bunch of beer cans and was getting ready to throw them at them. I waited until he was pulling his arm back, and then took him down"), these were bruising encounters, characterized by Curt Kirkwood as "early Roadhouse stuff." Flea, one of Too High To Die's star witnesses, recalls Curt warning an audience in LA, "If any of you motherfuckers come up on this stage and start doing your fucking stupid punk-rock shit, you're going to get my guitar on the side of your head. I'll bash your fucking brains in!" And then being obliged, a few lazy bars of "Up on the Sun" later, to do just that. Sounds rough, sounds unconducive to beauty, but . . . am I getting old, or might today's up-and-comers benefit from some of this action — from forging their art in the crucible of loogies? Crushed beer cans like ninja stars, hurled at the head of the latest sensitive soul. I'm getting old.
Drugs, drugs, drugs. How else can we account for the red-eyed perversity that saw the Meat Puppets, on Mirage and Monsters, ditch Bostrom's beats in favor of a drum machine? The trippy '80s become the powdery '90s, and a wave of nods breaks over the scene. The Meat Puppets seem not to have had a real brother band on SST— their brother band, oddly enough, was Stone Temple Pilots, with whom they went on tour somewhere during the grunge wars, and around whom a lot of heroin was being done. For Cris Kirkwood in particular this was a double disaster: "I think some of it on my part was having worked so hard for so many years, just the way that we came up, so much of the work was done by us. We're glorified truck drivers. Van drivers. And to suddenly be on a tour bus, it was like, 'Well, that just increased the amount of time I can be completely out of my fuckin' gourd.' " His descent into junkiedom would be less of the old downward spiral, more of the shrieking Luciferian plunge. Even so, he wouldn't hit bottom for years. The wise Derrick Bostrom: "I strongly encourage all young people in bands to learn to avoid that kind of thing if they want their band to succeed. It destroyed ours."
The Meat Puppets are back now, sans Bostrom, and they still make skewed and lovely music. And Too High To Die is a fabulous read: Prato has tapped the scenesters, the old friends, the juju men, and he revels properly in the glorious and poetic testimony of the Puppets themselves. Negatives? A lack of editorial ruthlessness, resulting in too much blah. Kim Thayil (Soundgarden) seems like a nice, intelligent man, but why are there five pages about the first time he heard Meat Puppets II? Similarly, all the quotage from Buzz Osborne, Chad Channing, and Ian MacKaye, and most of the Dave Pirner, could be ditched without diminishing the book one jot. But that's the rock-band oral history for you: it spews and it sprawls, and it doesn't end where it should. Rather like the Meat Puppets.
TOO HIGH TO DIE: MEET THE MEAT PUPPETS BY GREG PRATO | LULU.COM | 396 PAGES | $24.99
Accessed: 5/31/12
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/arts/139397-finding-out-what-makes-the-meat-puppets-tick-with-/