Meat Puppets Interview
Reviewed By: Y ([email protected]
Second Supper, June 2009
The casual music receptor will vacantly note the Meat Puppets as being the guys who played with Nirvana on that band’s Unplugged performance. What doesn’t often show up in these history books is that the Meat Puppets had seven albums out at the time and had made a long career out of being inconsistent in tone. Attempting to pin the group to even the vaguest musical labels proves trying.
Throughout the lifespan of the band, Curt Kirkwood has become the sole constant, keeping things together when the original lineup, which included his brother Cris and drummer Derrick Bostrom, disappeared from view. As such, there’s no better source to tell the almost 30 year story of the Meat Puppets, who come to La Crosse on July 10th to play the Warehouse.
The Second Supper: Tell me about your new album, Sewn Together.
Curt Kirkwood: It’s a collection of songs, some recent, some a bit older, loosely based around the last song, “Love Mountain.” That was the cornerstone, and then I put it together around that. We recorded it last summer in Phoenix, and now we’re out working it.
SS: What kind of sound are you bringing to the table this time?
CK: A lot of the same stuff. We have a good piano player on a few tracks. We recorded it on analog tapes; it had been awhile since we did that. I like it a little better than digital recording. Other than that, we pick up some songs, play them with the three piece, and get what we get. It’s always been that way.
SS: The Meat Puppets has always been a band that plays fast and loose with many different styles of music, even within the same albums. Is being this expansive a matter of finding a core sound, or avoiding one?
CK: The core sound is the vocals and the three piece. There are different styles that we got off of bands that we grew up on. Some of the bigger bands seem to jump around from genre to genre, eliminating genre. The genre is the band. It’s not really intentional to do different stuff.
SS: Do audiences expect consistency, that when a new album comes out, it should sound like the old ones?
CK: I saw that with Metallica fans; I think that they didn’t respond to St. Anger as well as might be hoped. [Metallica] wanted to branch out and show their Jethro Tull roots, and they were denied. Now that they’ve gone to that [old style], the audience is like, “Okay, you guys are back on target, whatever.”
I saw the Stones do it a lot from album to album. They’d say, “Here’s our psychedelic album,” then, “Now we’re back to our roots.” But it’s still the same guys singing; you hear the same harmonies. The Beatles were always very instrumental. That was the impression that I got, that things were supposed to be interesting, and variety is the spice of life.
It depends on the band. With us, I never really thought of it, for better or worse. There has to be some touchstones, I know that, but I can’t account for the audience, and I don’t really try to. That makes it easier. As an artist, one of the last things on my mind is to serve some invisible Audience X. An audience beyond five of your friends, you really can’t account for at all.
SS: How does this variety factor into your live performances? Do you bring songs from earlier and new albums?
CK: Definitely. We’ve got a good variety of things that we can draw upon. Some of the stuff is constantly evolving through phases; the old stuff will come more into line with some of the newer stuff that we’re playing. It’s really more of a challenge to fit the new songs in with the older ones, as our stock and trade is our older songs. That’s something consistent about all bands. You’re not going to find someone who won’t throw in a couple of their favorite songs, even if it’s at the end of the set. That’s another touchstone, that timeline.
SS: On your earlier albums, the changes in styles were more obvious. What were the thoughts behind making each album?
CK: I think a lot of it is that you have one album at a time that you get to do, and it’s really not that much music. When we first got together, we had our punk songs. That was the stuff we formed around and how we bonded, playing The Damned and The Fall, more British punk rock with the occasional Ramones or Black Flag song. From the go-get we had tons of different interests, so we proceeded to that on the next album. It wasn’t so much conscious, but really taking the opportunity of having more space to record on. You can hear little hints of this and that. You take a “Walking Boss” and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” element off Meat Puppets, and then go to Meat Puppets II and get a little more folky. Up on the Sun was going back to service our Beach Boys side, with multi-track and vocals. There’s where our consistency from album to album is. If you took stuff from Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun together, you’d think that would have been really confusing, but we are probably capable of doing it. We’ve grown musically, but we were fairly open from the go-get. The punk rock was a style that we knew with much abandon, and we’d rein it in here and there. That’s where it would get confusing, when we would fill all these symphonic diversions, and turn it into more opera from album to album. I think it’s just for ourselves; we get stuff off our chests and move on to the next thing, but it doesn’t mean that we’re just getting it when we get to that album.
SS: The inevitable question – your appearance on Nirvana’s Unplugged performance. From a historical perspective, it seems to have parallels with Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails as a swan song. How did that performance affect your band?
CK: It dovetailed nicely into our major label career. We were getting good attention at our label, and that solidified it. There were people trying to break the band on radio, and when that came up we had “Backwater” already recorded and people felt justified getting behind it. They smell money, they come running.
SS: Do you get people who see you play “Plateau” or “Lake of Fire” and think they’re Nirvana songs?
CK: Oh, sure. I’ve heard that 50% of America thinks the world is flat, and 90% of them are illiterate?
SS: The band split up a few years later…
CK: Yeah, that was when we started our hiatus. Derrick got a job, there were personal issues with the band. We never said we were calling it a day; I just figured I would take some time off so Cris could get off drugs, and it took longer than I thought. When that happened, I cancelled a couple months of tour and Derrick faded. I think he was on the fence about the band anyway, that it was something that went further than he expected it to. He felt committed, but I don’t know that his heart was really in the music. And he got married.
I waited a little bit. I had been playing with the Meat Puppets for so long that I didn’t think this was going to be a long hiatus. But it took longer and longer, and I moved to Texas to put out another Meat Puppets album with some other dudes – Kyle, Shandon, and Andrew – and tried to keep it going. And the hiatus went along.
SS: Wasn’t the new band supposed to be called Royal Neanderthal Orchestra?
CK: True. I had a contract, though, and when I tried to get a contract for RNO, Sony was interested, but the truth came out that I was double-dipping. At the time, London Records wasn’t interested either, because I was still under contract to them with the Meat Puppets. So here you go; here’s a Meat Puppets album.
SS: How did playing with a completely new band change the Meat Puppets?
CK: The audience reaction was great. I didn’t know what to expect. It was really good, but it was different. I could do the Steppenwolf trip and fade into the next room and not think anything of it. I don’t know that the audience didn’t do that either. I didn’t feel uncomfortable doing it, but it was a different band. That’s a different thing in art, that a rose isn’t a rose by any other name; it’s whatever I say it is. It could be a raindrop that I say is a cow.
From my perspective, it went pretty well. From the other guys’ perspectives, it was probably a little uncomfortable, because there are anticipations. We didn’t try to figure out how that other band played; we just took that new band and went with it with the skills they had.
SS: Now, the incarnation of the band is you and Cris, with a new drummer, Ted Marcus. How did this almost complete reunion come about?
CK: Well, Cris got better. The next thing I know, I was calling him up and asking if he wanted to do this. I wanted to make a new Meat Puppets album after my solo album. Initially, it was thought that I’ll just play everything, but then somebody told me that Cris was better. I called him up, and he was into doing it. We were doing it ourselves, and I was playing drums, but Ted was in the studio doing work with a buddy of ours. He did some drums on Rise to Your Knees, and we decided to go that way.
SS: What’s the likelihood of Derrick returning to the band?
CK: I would say slim to none. I asked him if he wanted to do it; he wasn’t into it. He has a steady job, and it’s been a long time since he played drums.
SS: So where are you now, personally and professionally?
CK: I reached puberty last year, and I’m about to graduate from clown school.
SS: What do they teach in clown school?
CK: Shitty rock music!
The Meat Puppets play The Warehouse on Friday, July 10th.
Accesseed 7/2/09
http://www.secondsupper.com/review.php?r=88
Reviewed By: Y ([email protected]
Second Supper, June 2009
The casual music receptor will vacantly note the Meat Puppets as being the guys who played with Nirvana on that band’s Unplugged performance. What doesn’t often show up in these history books is that the Meat Puppets had seven albums out at the time and had made a long career out of being inconsistent in tone. Attempting to pin the group to even the vaguest musical labels proves trying.
Throughout the lifespan of the band, Curt Kirkwood has become the sole constant, keeping things together when the original lineup, which included his brother Cris and drummer Derrick Bostrom, disappeared from view. As such, there’s no better source to tell the almost 30 year story of the Meat Puppets, who come to La Crosse on July 10th to play the Warehouse.
The Second Supper: Tell me about your new album, Sewn Together.
Curt Kirkwood: It’s a collection of songs, some recent, some a bit older, loosely based around the last song, “Love Mountain.” That was the cornerstone, and then I put it together around that. We recorded it last summer in Phoenix, and now we’re out working it.
SS: What kind of sound are you bringing to the table this time?
CK: A lot of the same stuff. We have a good piano player on a few tracks. We recorded it on analog tapes; it had been awhile since we did that. I like it a little better than digital recording. Other than that, we pick up some songs, play them with the three piece, and get what we get. It’s always been that way.
SS: The Meat Puppets has always been a band that plays fast and loose with many different styles of music, even within the same albums. Is being this expansive a matter of finding a core sound, or avoiding one?
CK: The core sound is the vocals and the three piece. There are different styles that we got off of bands that we grew up on. Some of the bigger bands seem to jump around from genre to genre, eliminating genre. The genre is the band. It’s not really intentional to do different stuff.
SS: Do audiences expect consistency, that when a new album comes out, it should sound like the old ones?
CK: I saw that with Metallica fans; I think that they didn’t respond to St. Anger as well as might be hoped. [Metallica] wanted to branch out and show their Jethro Tull roots, and they were denied. Now that they’ve gone to that [old style], the audience is like, “Okay, you guys are back on target, whatever.”
I saw the Stones do it a lot from album to album. They’d say, “Here’s our psychedelic album,” then, “Now we’re back to our roots.” But it’s still the same guys singing; you hear the same harmonies. The Beatles were always very instrumental. That was the impression that I got, that things were supposed to be interesting, and variety is the spice of life.
It depends on the band. With us, I never really thought of it, for better or worse. There has to be some touchstones, I know that, but I can’t account for the audience, and I don’t really try to. That makes it easier. As an artist, one of the last things on my mind is to serve some invisible Audience X. An audience beyond five of your friends, you really can’t account for at all.
SS: How does this variety factor into your live performances? Do you bring songs from earlier and new albums?
CK: Definitely. We’ve got a good variety of things that we can draw upon. Some of the stuff is constantly evolving through phases; the old stuff will come more into line with some of the newer stuff that we’re playing. It’s really more of a challenge to fit the new songs in with the older ones, as our stock and trade is our older songs. That’s something consistent about all bands. You’re not going to find someone who won’t throw in a couple of their favorite songs, even if it’s at the end of the set. That’s another touchstone, that timeline.
SS: On your earlier albums, the changes in styles were more obvious. What were the thoughts behind making each album?
CK: I think a lot of it is that you have one album at a time that you get to do, and it’s really not that much music. When we first got together, we had our punk songs. That was the stuff we formed around and how we bonded, playing The Damned and The Fall, more British punk rock with the occasional Ramones or Black Flag song. From the go-get we had tons of different interests, so we proceeded to that on the next album. It wasn’t so much conscious, but really taking the opportunity of having more space to record on. You can hear little hints of this and that. You take a “Walking Boss” and “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” element off Meat Puppets, and then go to Meat Puppets II and get a little more folky. Up on the Sun was going back to service our Beach Boys side, with multi-track and vocals. There’s where our consistency from album to album is. If you took stuff from Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun together, you’d think that would have been really confusing, but we are probably capable of doing it. We’ve grown musically, but we were fairly open from the go-get. The punk rock was a style that we knew with much abandon, and we’d rein it in here and there. That’s where it would get confusing, when we would fill all these symphonic diversions, and turn it into more opera from album to album. I think it’s just for ourselves; we get stuff off our chests and move on to the next thing, but it doesn’t mean that we’re just getting it when we get to that album.
SS: The inevitable question – your appearance on Nirvana’s Unplugged performance. From a historical perspective, it seems to have parallels with Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails as a swan song. How did that performance affect your band?
CK: It dovetailed nicely into our major label career. We were getting good attention at our label, and that solidified it. There were people trying to break the band on radio, and when that came up we had “Backwater” already recorded and people felt justified getting behind it. They smell money, they come running.
SS: Do you get people who see you play “Plateau” or “Lake of Fire” and think they’re Nirvana songs?
CK: Oh, sure. I’ve heard that 50% of America thinks the world is flat, and 90% of them are illiterate?
SS: The band split up a few years later…
CK: Yeah, that was when we started our hiatus. Derrick got a job, there were personal issues with the band. We never said we were calling it a day; I just figured I would take some time off so Cris could get off drugs, and it took longer than I thought. When that happened, I cancelled a couple months of tour and Derrick faded. I think he was on the fence about the band anyway, that it was something that went further than he expected it to. He felt committed, but I don’t know that his heart was really in the music. And he got married.
I waited a little bit. I had been playing with the Meat Puppets for so long that I didn’t think this was going to be a long hiatus. But it took longer and longer, and I moved to Texas to put out another Meat Puppets album with some other dudes – Kyle, Shandon, and Andrew – and tried to keep it going. And the hiatus went along.
SS: Wasn’t the new band supposed to be called Royal Neanderthal Orchestra?
CK: True. I had a contract, though, and when I tried to get a contract for RNO, Sony was interested, but the truth came out that I was double-dipping. At the time, London Records wasn’t interested either, because I was still under contract to them with the Meat Puppets. So here you go; here’s a Meat Puppets album.
SS: How did playing with a completely new band change the Meat Puppets?
CK: The audience reaction was great. I didn’t know what to expect. It was really good, but it was different. I could do the Steppenwolf trip and fade into the next room and not think anything of it. I don’t know that the audience didn’t do that either. I didn’t feel uncomfortable doing it, but it was a different band. That’s a different thing in art, that a rose isn’t a rose by any other name; it’s whatever I say it is. It could be a raindrop that I say is a cow.
From my perspective, it went pretty well. From the other guys’ perspectives, it was probably a little uncomfortable, because there are anticipations. We didn’t try to figure out how that other band played; we just took that new band and went with it with the skills they had.
SS: Now, the incarnation of the band is you and Cris, with a new drummer, Ted Marcus. How did this almost complete reunion come about?
CK: Well, Cris got better. The next thing I know, I was calling him up and asking if he wanted to do this. I wanted to make a new Meat Puppets album after my solo album. Initially, it was thought that I’ll just play everything, but then somebody told me that Cris was better. I called him up, and he was into doing it. We were doing it ourselves, and I was playing drums, but Ted was in the studio doing work with a buddy of ours. He did some drums on Rise to Your Knees, and we decided to go that way.
SS: What’s the likelihood of Derrick returning to the band?
CK: I would say slim to none. I asked him if he wanted to do it; he wasn’t into it. He has a steady job, and it’s been a long time since he played drums.
SS: So where are you now, personally and professionally?
CK: I reached puberty last year, and I’m about to graduate from clown school.
SS: What do they teach in clown school?
CK: Shitty rock music!
The Meat Puppets play The Warehouse on Friday, July 10th.
Accesseed 7/2/09
http://www.secondsupper.com/review.php?r=88