Meat
Puppets Return to Their Trippy Psych-Rock Roots
Peter Lindblad
Goldmine Magazine, Online, July 2007
Not exactly known for being open-minded and accepting of outsiders, the American hardcore scene of the early '80s didn’t welcome the Meat Puppets with open arms.
Though they played as fast and loud as anyone, and had the backing of SST, the same label that housed the Minutemen, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets didn’t look, or sound, the part.
Wearing their hair long and dressed in clothes that hadn’t been in style since the Summer of Love, they appeared to be refugees from some desert hippie commune. And, horror of horrors, they embraced classic rock. Not only that, but they played country and folk immersed in mind-bending psychedelia, and they jammed like the Grateful Dead.
Over time, the band’s sound gradually morphed into something that bore only a passing resemblance to punk.
“We did ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ or the song ‘Big House’ on our very first 7-inch ... It’s just nuts, but if you slow it down, it’s just, ‘ding, dinga,ding/ding, dinga, dinga ding,’” says Curt Kirkwood. “It’s just a weird little country song, and there’s ‘Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds’ and ‘Walking Boss’ on our first album, although they were done kind of shred style.
“Outtakes from the session include ‘Franklin’s Tower’ by the Dead and ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ from (Harry) Nilsson, and we were just always into a lot of different kinds of music. And so, when I decided to actually make it more anachronistically appealing in that way, with country for instance, and not such a slam, I did it because the punk-rock audience was a bunch of apes.”
Live shows often erupted in violence.
“They were animals,” recalls Curt, who formed the band with brother Cris and drummer Derrick Bostrom in their home of Phoenix, Ariz., in 1980. “I hated 'em. They’d spit on you. My teeth got all broken up. It was really frustrating. They took us as a punk band, but then we’d play live and they’d hate us because we pulled weird shit out of our asses ... You know, some dumb psychedelics or something stupid, and be really trying to take it out there, taking it seriously.”
The negative reactions only spurred the Meat Puppets to crazier sonic journeys.
“People weren’t getting it,” says Curt. “And I was like, ‘F**k you, then have this. This is pure angel dust and ecstasy shit right now. This is our X album, something that’ll completely melt your spine and also, by the way, remember: ‘F**k yourself while you’re dying.’”
That middle finger came courtesy of 1984’s Meat Puppets II, considered by many as one of the greatest records in punk, or rock for that matter. A stylistic gumbo that scrambled the senses, Meat Puppets II is still treated with reverence.
Twenty-three years later, with Cris sober and out of jail after years of drug problems, the Meat Puppets have finally issued the proper followup, Rise To Your Knees. A return to the freewheeling approach that marked the Meat Puppets’ early works, Rise To Your Knees is 15 tracks of relaxed, trippy psych-rock — frayed at the edges with outlaw country and traditional folk, and loaded with menace, distortion and enough hallucinogens to send you on the acid-trip of a lifetime.
To do it right, the Meat Puppets recorded Rise To Your Knees the way they used to.
“It was just a more hands-on kind of thing, a more deliberate thing,” explains Curt. “Especially now, since you can be so manipulative with Pro-Tools and computer recording programs, it’s fun to use the new, updated technology and record it the same way, and not go back and mess with it as much as you could, for instance, and keep it ... not necessarily low-tech, it’s just that you want to record kind of actual live sounding stuff ... you just set up and play live like that and keep the overdubs to a minimum.”
The simplest, quickest approach works best for Curt, who admits his mind starts to wander the longer the recording process goes on.
“I start to get bored after a while and listen to other things going at a certain pace,” he says. “It’s just ... you’re working with a small amount of material in reality. It’s only, whatever, 45 minutes worth of material? So, spending three months, or even three weeks sometimes, it’s like, ‘I’m getting really sick of this,’ and it just kind of takes the wind out of my sails. This is like a sprint, and you’re really quickly at the picnic at the end of it.”
In a sense, the past two decades have been a whirlwind for the Meat Puppets. Born and raised in the desert Southwest, Curt and Cris began playing in high school with local rock bands. Growing older, they discovered punk and formed the Meat Puppets, intending it as a vent for their hardcore and experimental tendencies. A year later, the band issued the fiery EP In a Car. It got the attention of Black Flag guitarist and SST label head Greg Ginn, and a partnership was born. Hardcore was a force to be reckoned with, and SST was the alpha dog.
“There was nothing like (SST),” says Curt. “We started seeing other labels popping up right away. And, you know, SST was modeled after Bomp! and other things, too, but by the same token, they were more adventurous in their signings and (Ginn) had a nose for shit that was incredible. And they became the paradigm for the indie labels in this country.”
Night after night, the Meat Puppets shared stages with the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. The competition was intense.
“We had like three of the best three-pieces and we were all buds — the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü and us — and that was something that at least the underground knew,” says Curt. “We just drowned out all other three-pieces. It was the weirdest thing, and we were way into it, and Bob (Mould) and Grant (Hart) were way into big-time (pro) wrestling. It was throw-down time ... ‘We’re going to play circles around you,’ and it was like that with the Minutemen and (Mike) Watt.”
Relentless touring and the band’s ever-expanding sound caused a stir in the underground, with Meat Puppets’ self-titled debut setting the stage for Meat Puppets II. Further releases, such as 1985’s Up On The Sun, cemented the band’s reputation as sonic chemists and maturing songwriters.
Gradually, the Meat Puppets morphed into more of a country-rock, bluesy, psychedelic outfit, issuing critically received albums like Mirage and Huevos. They were growing too large for the underground to contain them. Monsters, the band’s last SST album, saw the Meat Puppets getting heavier and playing it straight.
That didn’t sit well with the band’s audience, and after the album failed to generate any enthusiasm on college radio, the Meat Puppets broke up. They reformed in 1991, signing a major-label deal with London Records. Forbidden Places was the band’s London debut and, again, the album was largely ignored. Despite that, the band still had its admirers, including Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.
Two years after Forbidden Places, the Meat Puppets opened for Nirvana on its In Utero tour. Then, the Meat Puppets were asked to appear on Nirvana’s unforgettable “Unplugged” appearance on MTV. The two acts combined to play three songs off Meat Puppets II — “Lake Of Fire,” “Plateau,” and “Oh, Me.”
At the time, the Meat Puppets were just putting the finishing touches to their second album on London, 1994’s Too High To Die. That record, with a push from the “Unplugged” episode, went to #2 on album rock charts and allowed them to almost infiltrate the Top 40 with “Backwater,” an ominous threat of a song couched in backwoods’ madness and dark Americana.
“‘Backwater’ had already been recorded when we went out on tour with those guys, and they asked us to be on ‘Unplugged,’ and our record came out literally like a month after,” says Curt. “But, what (‘Unplugged’) did was it validated (us). Some people thought that ‘Backwater’ was a good song, and that had other executives take a second look, even the ones who were going, ‘What is this? I don’t get it.’ Then they were like, ‘Well, okay, that’s Nirvana. That’s big bucks.’ There you go. That was the insider push.”
All along, the Meat Puppets knew “Backwater” had potential.
“From the outside, we knew we had a slam-dunk. We had a hit right away,” says Curt. “We had independent radio programmers tripping over it and stuff, the kind of stuff you see with a major, that if it wasn’t happening, it was going to be a fluke. There was that element too, but the real fluke was that (the label) didn’t really put very much money into it, and it did become a pretty big song.”
Even after it caught fire, label support was minimal.
“Nobody wanted to throw down after the fact and admit they were wrong,” says Curt. “So, they only let it go to gold. They never really put shit into that record. They were just glad to recoup, and let it ride. They admittedly told me, the president of the label, said, ‘The coolest thing is we didn’t have to do much. It just happened on its own.’ And that was cool, but it would have been nice ... and you don’t want to get in anybody’s face and say, ‘Where were you when I was down though, you know?’”
In the years after Too High To Die, the Meat Puppets experienced plenty of lows. The followup, 1995’s No Joke!, stiffed commercially and critically, and led to a lengthy hiatus. Meanwhile, Cris’ world was spiraling downward as drugs and the legal problems that came with them, the Kirkwoods’ mother dying, and the death of Cris’ wife sent him into a tailspin. Thankfully, he seems to have put all that behind him.
London Records died in a major-label takeover and Curt moved on, forming the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra with Doug Sahm’s son, Shandon, Kyle Ellison and former Bob Mould bassist Andrew Duplantis. That band eventually took the Meat Puppets name and put out Golden Lies in 2000 on an Atlantic Records’ offshoot.
That brings us to Rise To Your Knees, a multi-layered affair with moody textures and swirling instrumentation. A candidate for comeback album of the year, Rise To Your Knees is a classic Meat Puppets pu pu platter of cosmic riffs, hypnotic melodies, laconic grooves and genre-defying mysticism.
The disorienting, Middle Eastern-tinged psychedelia of “Light The Fire” harkens back to the Beatles, while “Stone Eyes” is both creepy and sunny, “Enemy Love Song” has a languid, island feel, and “New Leaf” is “Backwater” on steroids, much heavier and faster paced with strong riffs and a blinding prism of guitar notes.
And yet, the Meat Puppets make it all sound effortless.
“I think that’s part of what makes it successful in my book is that they do sound like easy songs, but they’re recorded in a grand opus sort of a way,” says Curt. “That’s what I wanted, “sing around the campfire” kind of songs, but like, do ‘em like big rock.”
Unusual instruments, like the “guit-jo” Cris plays on “Tiny Kingdom,” make an appearance.
“It was actually written on a little Tacoma, half-size guitar, like a little Robin guitar,” says Curt. “It’s actually a ‘guit-jo’ ‘cause it’s six-string banjo, a backless six-string banjo that’s tuned like a guitar, and a buddy of mine made it for me. It’s a beautiful instrument, [and] a real unusual-sounding thing. It almost sounds like a koto (a traditional Japanese stringed musical instrument derived from Chinese zithers) or something.”
Some of the songs have been rattling around in Curt’s possessions for a while.
“Oh, some of this stuff is pretty old for sure,” says Curt. “I would say mid-’90s even for some of it, where I’ve been working on something like ‘Disappear’ for that long. I mean, I’ve had so many variations of that song. When it started out, it was about Fred Savage. It was an interview with Fred Savage in the vocals. It was called ‘Savage’ and then it became ‘March of the Disenfranchised Yeti,’ and then, eventually, it became ‘Disappear.’ I liked the riff, and I didn’t want to waste it.”
That’s the way Curt has always worked.
“Stuff will be hanging around,” he says. “You know, it’s like having a swatch of cloth and if you’re like a tailor, you have a little warehouse of stuff that you use.”
I accessed this article on July 16, 2007
http://www.goldminemag.com/Default.aspx?tabid=825&articleid=6849&articlemid=4972#4972Articles
Peter Lindblad
Goldmine Magazine, Online, July 2007
Not exactly known for being open-minded and accepting of outsiders, the American hardcore scene of the early '80s didn’t welcome the Meat Puppets with open arms.
Though they played as fast and loud as anyone, and had the backing of SST, the same label that housed the Minutemen, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets didn’t look, or sound, the part.
Wearing their hair long and dressed in clothes that hadn’t been in style since the Summer of Love, they appeared to be refugees from some desert hippie commune. And, horror of horrors, they embraced classic rock. Not only that, but they played country and folk immersed in mind-bending psychedelia, and they jammed like the Grateful Dead.
Over time, the band’s sound gradually morphed into something that bore only a passing resemblance to punk.
“We did ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ or the song ‘Big House’ on our very first 7-inch ... It’s just nuts, but if you slow it down, it’s just, ‘ding, dinga,ding/ding, dinga, dinga ding,’” says Curt Kirkwood. “It’s just a weird little country song, and there’s ‘Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds’ and ‘Walking Boss’ on our first album, although they were done kind of shred style.
“Outtakes from the session include ‘Franklin’s Tower’ by the Dead and ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ from (Harry) Nilsson, and we were just always into a lot of different kinds of music. And so, when I decided to actually make it more anachronistically appealing in that way, with country for instance, and not such a slam, I did it because the punk-rock audience was a bunch of apes.”
Live shows often erupted in violence.
“They were animals,” recalls Curt, who formed the band with brother Cris and drummer Derrick Bostrom in their home of Phoenix, Ariz., in 1980. “I hated 'em. They’d spit on you. My teeth got all broken up. It was really frustrating. They took us as a punk band, but then we’d play live and they’d hate us because we pulled weird shit out of our asses ... You know, some dumb psychedelics or something stupid, and be really trying to take it out there, taking it seriously.”
The negative reactions only spurred the Meat Puppets to crazier sonic journeys.
“People weren’t getting it,” says Curt. “And I was like, ‘F**k you, then have this. This is pure angel dust and ecstasy shit right now. This is our X album, something that’ll completely melt your spine and also, by the way, remember: ‘F**k yourself while you’re dying.’”
That middle finger came courtesy of 1984’s Meat Puppets II, considered by many as one of the greatest records in punk, or rock for that matter. A stylistic gumbo that scrambled the senses, Meat Puppets II is still treated with reverence.
Twenty-three years later, with Cris sober and out of jail after years of drug problems, the Meat Puppets have finally issued the proper followup, Rise To Your Knees. A return to the freewheeling approach that marked the Meat Puppets’ early works, Rise To Your Knees is 15 tracks of relaxed, trippy psych-rock — frayed at the edges with outlaw country and traditional folk, and loaded with menace, distortion and enough hallucinogens to send you on the acid-trip of a lifetime.
To do it right, the Meat Puppets recorded Rise To Your Knees the way they used to.
“It was just a more hands-on kind of thing, a more deliberate thing,” explains Curt. “Especially now, since you can be so manipulative with Pro-Tools and computer recording programs, it’s fun to use the new, updated technology and record it the same way, and not go back and mess with it as much as you could, for instance, and keep it ... not necessarily low-tech, it’s just that you want to record kind of actual live sounding stuff ... you just set up and play live like that and keep the overdubs to a minimum.”
The simplest, quickest approach works best for Curt, who admits his mind starts to wander the longer the recording process goes on.
“I start to get bored after a while and listen to other things going at a certain pace,” he says. “It’s just ... you’re working with a small amount of material in reality. It’s only, whatever, 45 minutes worth of material? So, spending three months, or even three weeks sometimes, it’s like, ‘I’m getting really sick of this,’ and it just kind of takes the wind out of my sails. This is like a sprint, and you’re really quickly at the picnic at the end of it.”
In a sense, the past two decades have been a whirlwind for the Meat Puppets. Born and raised in the desert Southwest, Curt and Cris began playing in high school with local rock bands. Growing older, they discovered punk and formed the Meat Puppets, intending it as a vent for their hardcore and experimental tendencies. A year later, the band issued the fiery EP In a Car. It got the attention of Black Flag guitarist and SST label head Greg Ginn, and a partnership was born. Hardcore was a force to be reckoned with, and SST was the alpha dog.
“There was nothing like (SST),” says Curt. “We started seeing other labels popping up right away. And, you know, SST was modeled after Bomp! and other things, too, but by the same token, they were more adventurous in their signings and (Ginn) had a nose for shit that was incredible. And they became the paradigm for the indie labels in this country.”
Night after night, the Meat Puppets shared stages with the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. The competition was intense.
“We had like three of the best three-pieces and we were all buds — the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü and us — and that was something that at least the underground knew,” says Curt. “We just drowned out all other three-pieces. It was the weirdest thing, and we were way into it, and Bob (Mould) and Grant (Hart) were way into big-time (pro) wrestling. It was throw-down time ... ‘We’re going to play circles around you,’ and it was like that with the Minutemen and (Mike) Watt.”
Relentless touring and the band’s ever-expanding sound caused a stir in the underground, with Meat Puppets’ self-titled debut setting the stage for Meat Puppets II. Further releases, such as 1985’s Up On The Sun, cemented the band’s reputation as sonic chemists and maturing songwriters.
Gradually, the Meat Puppets morphed into more of a country-rock, bluesy, psychedelic outfit, issuing critically received albums like Mirage and Huevos. They were growing too large for the underground to contain them. Monsters, the band’s last SST album, saw the Meat Puppets getting heavier and playing it straight.
That didn’t sit well with the band’s audience, and after the album failed to generate any enthusiasm on college radio, the Meat Puppets broke up. They reformed in 1991, signing a major-label deal with London Records. Forbidden Places was the band’s London debut and, again, the album was largely ignored. Despite that, the band still had its admirers, including Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.
Two years after Forbidden Places, the Meat Puppets opened for Nirvana on its In Utero tour. Then, the Meat Puppets were asked to appear on Nirvana’s unforgettable “Unplugged” appearance on MTV. The two acts combined to play three songs off Meat Puppets II — “Lake Of Fire,” “Plateau,” and “Oh, Me.”
At the time, the Meat Puppets were just putting the finishing touches to their second album on London, 1994’s Too High To Die. That record, with a push from the “Unplugged” episode, went to #2 on album rock charts and allowed them to almost infiltrate the Top 40 with “Backwater,” an ominous threat of a song couched in backwoods’ madness and dark Americana.
“‘Backwater’ had already been recorded when we went out on tour with those guys, and they asked us to be on ‘Unplugged,’ and our record came out literally like a month after,” says Curt. “But, what (‘Unplugged’) did was it validated (us). Some people thought that ‘Backwater’ was a good song, and that had other executives take a second look, even the ones who were going, ‘What is this? I don’t get it.’ Then they were like, ‘Well, okay, that’s Nirvana. That’s big bucks.’ There you go. That was the insider push.”
All along, the Meat Puppets knew “Backwater” had potential.
“From the outside, we knew we had a slam-dunk. We had a hit right away,” says Curt. “We had independent radio programmers tripping over it and stuff, the kind of stuff you see with a major, that if it wasn’t happening, it was going to be a fluke. There was that element too, but the real fluke was that (the label) didn’t really put very much money into it, and it did become a pretty big song.”
Even after it caught fire, label support was minimal.
“Nobody wanted to throw down after the fact and admit they were wrong,” says Curt. “So, they only let it go to gold. They never really put shit into that record. They were just glad to recoup, and let it ride. They admittedly told me, the president of the label, said, ‘The coolest thing is we didn’t have to do much. It just happened on its own.’ And that was cool, but it would have been nice ... and you don’t want to get in anybody’s face and say, ‘Where were you when I was down though, you know?’”
In the years after Too High To Die, the Meat Puppets experienced plenty of lows. The followup, 1995’s No Joke!, stiffed commercially and critically, and led to a lengthy hiatus. Meanwhile, Cris’ world was spiraling downward as drugs and the legal problems that came with them, the Kirkwoods’ mother dying, and the death of Cris’ wife sent him into a tailspin. Thankfully, he seems to have put all that behind him.
London Records died in a major-label takeover and Curt moved on, forming the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra with Doug Sahm’s son, Shandon, Kyle Ellison and former Bob Mould bassist Andrew Duplantis. That band eventually took the Meat Puppets name and put out Golden Lies in 2000 on an Atlantic Records’ offshoot.
That brings us to Rise To Your Knees, a multi-layered affair with moody textures and swirling instrumentation. A candidate for comeback album of the year, Rise To Your Knees is a classic Meat Puppets pu pu platter of cosmic riffs, hypnotic melodies, laconic grooves and genre-defying mysticism.
The disorienting, Middle Eastern-tinged psychedelia of “Light The Fire” harkens back to the Beatles, while “Stone Eyes” is both creepy and sunny, “Enemy Love Song” has a languid, island feel, and “New Leaf” is “Backwater” on steroids, much heavier and faster paced with strong riffs and a blinding prism of guitar notes.
And yet, the Meat Puppets make it all sound effortless.
“I think that’s part of what makes it successful in my book is that they do sound like easy songs, but they’re recorded in a grand opus sort of a way,” says Curt. “That’s what I wanted, “sing around the campfire” kind of songs, but like, do ‘em like big rock.”
Unusual instruments, like the “guit-jo” Cris plays on “Tiny Kingdom,” make an appearance.
“It was actually written on a little Tacoma, half-size guitar, like a little Robin guitar,” says Curt. “It’s actually a ‘guit-jo’ ‘cause it’s six-string banjo, a backless six-string banjo that’s tuned like a guitar, and a buddy of mine made it for me. It’s a beautiful instrument, [and] a real unusual-sounding thing. It almost sounds like a koto (a traditional Japanese stringed musical instrument derived from Chinese zithers) or something.”
Some of the songs have been rattling around in Curt’s possessions for a while.
“Oh, some of this stuff is pretty old for sure,” says Curt. “I would say mid-’90s even for some of it, where I’ve been working on something like ‘Disappear’ for that long. I mean, I’ve had so many variations of that song. When it started out, it was about Fred Savage. It was an interview with Fred Savage in the vocals. It was called ‘Savage’ and then it became ‘March of the Disenfranchised Yeti,’ and then, eventually, it became ‘Disappear.’ I liked the riff, and I didn’t want to waste it.”
That’s the way Curt has always worked.
“Stuff will be hanging around,” he says. “You know, it’s like having a swatch of cloth and if you’re like a tailor, you have a little warehouse of stuff that you use.”
I accessed this article on July 16, 2007
http://www.goldminemag.com/Default.aspx?tabid=825&articleid=6849&articlemid=4972#4972Articles