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Originally posted on “Paradise,” an old Puppets fan site on the now-defunct Geocities, looks like this one’s now only available on the Wayback Machine. Since this article would take way too long to OCR all over again, I’d feel better if it were in two places.

Meat Puppets: Swimming In A Lake of Fire
by Steve Roeser

“Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go down to the lake of fire and fry
Won’t see ‘em again till the fourth of July”
–lyrics from “Lake Of Fire” by Curt Kirkwood,
from the album Meat Puppets II, SST Records, 1983

There are worse ways, perhaps, for your life’s work to get the attention it deserves. You would have a tough time convincing Curt Kirkwood of that. Having your songs heard by millions of music fans is a great thing, a dream come true for any hard-working songwriter. But when it came to another guy named Kurt wanting to sing Kirkwood’s songs on a session of MTV’s Unplugged (and inviting Kirkwood and his brother to join his band onstage to perform them), the dream gradually turned into a nightmare.

Curt Kirkwood, his younger brother Cris, and their longtime friend, Derrick Bostrom, are the Meat Puppets. Now all in their 30s, they started the band when they were teenagers and have spent 15 years building a reputation as one of the most creative bands anywhere. Then, in 1993, the Meat Puppets got caught up in a rock star orbit called Nirvana, and they’re still dealing with the fallout. Recognition is indeed a two-edged sword.

“I see it now,” Kirkwood said. “The only person that’s asked me to play with him in the past 15 years is Kurt Cobain, outside of [our] band. That’s kind of, you know, one of the weirder things about my career.”

At the end of ’93, Nirvana was set to tape their session of Unplugged (released in November 1994 as Unplugged In New York). Cobain let it be known that he was very interested in playing some Meat Puppets songs. IN hindsight, this announcement by Cobain, whose Nirvana album In Utero was then riding high on the record charts, was particularly flattering. Among the 14 songs in their set, Nirvana played “Lake of Fire,” “Plateau” and “Oh, Me,” all written by Kirkwood. It so happens that all three songs came from the same album, Meat Puppets II, a record cut very early in the history of the Arizona trio (when Cobain was only 16).

“I think he could have picked out any three songs and done ‘em,” Kirkwood said. “I mean, those are three of the better ones off of that record. It made me realize that he was part of what we would call ‘our actual fan base.’ There’s a consensus that people have liked at least two of those songs, and the third one as well. Those have been popular songs amongst our fans.”

When Cobain invited Curt and Cris Kirkwood to come to New York, and called them out on the stage to join with the band in playing those songs (Bostrom was not present), he referred to them affectionately as “the Brothers Meat,” adding that “we’re big fans of theirs.” Although the Meat Puppets weren’t close friends with the guys in Nirvana, it was still a moment for the Kirkwoods to feel proud that their music had been appreciated.

For Curt, the invitation was welcome, but it also made him feel a bit strange. “It wasn’t just jamming with them,” he said. “It was actually fulfilling Cobain’s fantasies about being me for a little bit, or whatever the fuck he was tryin’ to do. Whether or not he liked our songs, why would he want Cris and I to play ‘em? Why not just cover ‘em, you know? I don’t want to trivialize it, because it meant a lot to me, in that I liked his voice a lot, and I’ve never worked with other people. So it was really fun to play some of my material with another drum player [Dave Grohl], and have Cris sit in on guitar and not have to sing it, have somebody with a distinctive voice sing it.

“Before then,” Kirkwood said, “if you’d asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to come up with any better idea than that. He was thinking along lines that wouldn’t have been unusual for me. But, then again, there’s hardly anybody else that I would have wanted to hear sing some of my stuff. Once again, in this situation, everything is adding up to the glorious virtues of ‘the legend.’ And that’s really wonderful. But I think in the long run, I have to take it back, look at it and go, ‘How can there be punk rock legends?’ So, who gives a fuck whether he was into us or not?

“He had a nice voice,” Kirkwood said of the other Kurt. “And he was beautiful. I’m sorry he’s dead. Outside of that, big fuckin’ deal. Who cares how big Nirvana was, or how fuckin’ great they were? I mean, I loved the band immensely. I’m sorry they were so huge that it has to color everything with this hogwash that just constantly emits from every orifice of the industry right now. For us, in particular.”

Kirkwood made oblique references to the fact that because his songs, including “Lake Of Fire,” were slated to be released on Nirvana’s Unplugged In New York album, music industry politics of one kind or another made it less than feasible for the Meat Puppets to release their own version of “Lake Of Fire,” which may have been the strongest possible followup to their 1994 radio hit “Backwater.” Both songs were on their most recent album, Too High To Die, although “Lake Of Fire” was not listed in the album’s information and credits. They had done a new recording of it, a decade after the original had been cut, and it wound up as a surprise track at the end of the album.

Kirkwood also let on that he and his bandmates found it somewhat embarrassing and unnecessary that their record label saw fit to elicit quotes from hot musicians that were then pressed onto a special sticker on the front of the album. Cobain was quoted as saying, “The Meat Puppets gave me a completely different attitude toward music. I owe so much to them.”

Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner was more direct with his estimation: “They’re my favorite fucking band,” he was quoted as saying.

“God, you know the germ of this band [the Meat Puppets] was concocted when those people were in grade school,” Kirkwood pointed out, referring more to Cobain than Pirner. “And suddenly some kids come along, and get into something that was going well before they ever had any thoughts of bein’ in a band. And it means shit? Not to me. Not on a certain level. You know what I mean? How could it? What, it’s going to make me something more [than I am]?

I already had kids that were four or five years old before Nirvana ever formed,” he said. [Note: Curt Kirkwood is father to twins who are now age 11.] “I’m glad that people like my music, and I’m totally blown away that there was another person in the world that could interpret it as well as Cobain did. It made me feel really, really swell. But for us, we’d have rather had those songs make it on their own. I mean, you can see that. I wasn’t just fucking around back then [in the early '80s]. I was trying to sell records just like anybody else. And those songs get ignored until ‘super-chimp’ does it. So, that makes them great songs all of a sudden? Not to take anything away from Nirvana.

It’s hard to say,” Kirkwood remarked, “whether or not the actual career of the band is being hindered or helped by what’s happened with our involvement with Nirvana. In terms of me, personally, I probably never would have made any money off those songs if he hadn’t recorded ‘em. Now I’m lookin’ to make good money off of ‘em. That’s nice. But in terms of the band, we’ve had to measure our steps since he did that. Because playing those songs was an endorsement, in terms of the industry. It opened up the gates for a lot of exploitative moves.”

For anyone familiar with the music and career of the Meat Puppets, it’s fairly well known that this is not a band that has ever expended much energy over measuring steps.

The Kirkwoods: Horses, Guitars, and Jesuit Priests

Curt Kirkwood was born January 10, 1959, his brother Cris less than two years later, on October 22, 1960. The brothers were born in Texas, according to Cris (Curt in Wichita Falls, Cris in Amarillo), where their mother was married for a brief time to their father, who was in the military. The marriage didn’t last and she left Texas, taking her sons with her.

“Dad was an Air Force guy and she met him on a date,” Cris said. “It was some crap in college, like he was handsome and she was a pretty broad. And there was some competition between her and her sorority sisters over who could get him first. So she won, or lost. However you look at it. So, that marriage didn’t last, but Curt and I are full brothers.

Like so many parents who end up being a divorcee, she hit the road with Curt and I when we were fairly young, and just kinda tripped around the country here and there,” Cris said. “Then she settled up in Omaha, where she’s originally from, and met this guy. She wound up with this cowboy guy, Paul. Again, another sex thing that turned into pregnancy. She got married again.

And he wanted to live out here in Arizona because he was into horses. He was a horseshoer. He wanted to be located near the horse track circuit. We have a half-sister who we grew up with, and our dad went on to have more kids who we didn’t grow up with. But we wound up in Arizona because of the cowboy guy [stepfather].

“We had a nice house, with a little bit of land to it, and horse privileges. So Curt and I grew up with critters,” he said. “We actually had a barn, our own stable out at the horse track, Turf Paradise. We’d have chores in the morning. Take care of the horses, feed the chickens, all that kind of crap. And every day after school we’d have to go out to the track for more chores.”

Curt also recalled the days in the mid-to-late 1960s, after his mother remarried and brought him and his younger brother to live out in Arizona. “I was five when my mom married this horseman guy and we moved to Phoenix,” Curt said. “He was into country music quite a bit. He always had it on the car radio. That pretty much started as early as anything I can remember. Country music was always around, it was always on TV. You didn’t really have to pursue it. I didn’t have a real interest in music until we moved to Phoenix.

“Nobody in our family was pointedly ‘into’ music,” Curt said, “but my mother had old favorite songs that she would sing. We would sing along in the car when we were traveling. She didn’t play any instruments or anything. So that was the only music that there was in our family, really. But the stuff that she sang wasn’t being played on the radio anymore. I was a kid, things that her dad probably sang. And by the time she was in her mid-teens, we just got out of music and started working on her education and starting a family. So she kept a lot of that old music [in her head] and that’s pretty much were she stayed.”

Curt added that at home in Phoenix there were hardly any records around the house. But one that he remembers his mother had was by the country singing group Sons of the Pioneers. This record ended up having a significant impact on the Kirkwood brothers. One of the members of Sons of the Pioneers, Bob Nolan, wrote a song called “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,” which was recorded for the first Meat Puppets album, almost 20 years after Curt and Cris first heard it.

“I watched a lot of TV,” Curt said. “We always watched Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Hee-Haw, and stuff like that. I watched that Beatles and Monkees cartoon shows on TV. Once I got to be a certain age, I suppose around fourth grade or somewhere in that area, I started getting into music. I wanted to get records. The first record I bought by myself was a Bobby Sherman record. And we bought a Petula Clark record, the album that had ‘Downtown’ on it. I had ‘MacArthur Park,’ stuff like that.”

The older Kirkwood acknowledged that, even though he was only a five-year-old kid when they first appeared on American television, the Beatles held a special fascination for him later in the ’60s.

“Oh, yeah, I was old enough to try and find clues as to whether Paul was dead or not,” he said. “The Beatles was a pretty big thing. I’m trying to remember the singles that I actually had. ‘Rain.’ ‘Paperback Writer.’ Yeah, I remember that. I think when the Beatles broke up, the world changed totally.”

“As young kids, we actually were aware of the Beatles,” Cris said. “There was this family down the street who had a couple of young boys close to our age. We would kind of vie for the honor of being the first on the block to have the new Beatles release. But I don’t think we realized, that much, that they were the Beatles. Maybe Curt did, somewhat. I didn’t, that much. I knew that they were THE BEATLES, but I didn’t know that I was collecting and keeping up with the Beatles. It wasn’t that purposeful.”

Later, Curt recalled, he continued buying 45s such as “Looking Out My Back Door” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “We’re An American Band” by Grand Funk. By then, Curt and Cris had both started playing guitar.

“Mom got us into guitar playing when we were pretty young, actually,” Cris remembered. “She had us take lessons. I was younger than 10 at the time and I didn’t like it. It didn’t really stick, not at all. I didn’t like it at all. It didn’t take [with me], but there was always a guitar around. Curt kind of got into it a little more.”

“She was into having us play instruments as a form of culture,” Curt added. “She thought it would be good to have cultured children, you know, in terms of actually being into music. But I never thought about being a musician until after high school.”

“I had more rudimentary lessons, but he went on to have lessons with a few different people,” Cris said about his brother. “Some classical lessons, some of which you can definitely see in his playing, still. He’s a real good finger-picker. He does those neat things, stuff like ‘Magic Toy Missing’ from our second record. Then he also actually studied with this guy MacLardy, who had this music store in the neighborhood where we grew up, Sunny Slope. He’s an old bebop kind of guitar player, and you could probably find him if you dig deep enough. He played with Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis and people like that. Curt took a few lessons from him as well. [Initially] I just didn’t give a crap about the guitar.”

Cris continued, “It didn’t catch my attention at all. At the time I was into other childish things, or whatever. I realized, years later, that my guitar teacher had mildly molested me. A couple of times he would squeeze my knee and tell me how much he liked me. And that ‘I couldn’t tell anybody else how much he liked me, but he really liked me a lot,’ and all this crap. Years later I realized, ‘Wow, that’s flat-out what that was.’ Kind of a weird come-on thing.”

Later on however, Cris found the inspiration to bring a fresh outlook to learning about music. He was spurred on by a strange series of events, the culmination of which was their mother’s insistence that Cris and Curt accompany her to the movies to take in a mismatched double feature.

“A few years later, there was another one of mother’s husbands, Eduardo, a Mexican guy,” Cris recalled. “They had kind of a difficult relationship. He was one of those crazy dipsomaniac guys. He’d drink and get nuts. Once time he actually burned our house down, after a lovely evening. And that led to us living in this weird little apartment thing.

“And for some reason, mother decided that Curt and I needed to see A Clockwork Orange. Mom was open-minded, but she’s from that straight Midwest world. I can’t really remember the motivation for taking us to see that. But playing with A clockwork Orange was Deliverance. So I went out and bought Deliverance [soundtrack album] and just freaked on the banjo. That’s what got me into playing music. After that, I went into MacLardy’s Music and found a banjo that I could slowly work into buying. Seventy-five big dollars for it, and I still have it. That’s how I got into playing.”

Curt also remembered seeing the movie with his brother and mother, but the music on the soundtrack didn’t have quite so profound an effect on him. “I enjoyed it,” he said, “But I was well aware of bluegrass music by then. I can remember seeing the Dillards on The Andy Griffith Show when I was a little kid. And I can remember seeing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on The Johnny Cash Show. Deliverance, that would be ’72, the same year I started high school. So I was well along there, in terms of knowing what was going on musically. Cris and I didn’t hang out that much when we were kids.”

“I mean, when you talk about [formal] lessons,” Cris said, “I know more about music than Curt does, just because I got into it later on and studied it as a young adult. So I actually know more theory, and that kind of crap. But Curt had a grounding in guitar. And then just at a certain point, it became obvious that Curt was just good at guitar playing. I don’t know, he became like ‘the guy that can make the electric guitar sound the wackiest,’ or something.”

Before 1972, before getting into their teenage years, the Kirkwood brothers didn’t run together very much and tended to soak up their musical influences separately from one another. But the early-to-mid ’70s found them comparing notes a bit more on a musical level. Cris recalled a significant occasion in 1974 when his brother turned him on to a hot acoustic guitar player.

“Curt bought me tickets for my fourteenth birthday to see Leo Kottke, and I just fuckin’ dug the shit out of that,” Cris said. “It was so great. That was one of my favorite concerts, still, of all time. I just loved it . But I was a fan already. I was really into music. That was the thing that caught me, I mean what got me into playing. I just saw all sorts of crap. I was into goin’ to concerts.”

One of these Phoenix shows featured the jazz fusion band Weather Report. The group’s lineup included drummer Alex Acuna, who would do some session work with the Meat Puppets many years later on their major label debut, Forbidden Places.

“Alex Acuna was the percussionist in one of the later versions of Weather Report, the first band [we saw where] Curt and I ever smoked pot together,” Cris remembered. “We were going to see Weather Report, and we’d both been dopers for a while, but that was the first night we actually smoked dope together. This was back in ’75 or so.”

For the Kirkwood brothers, the combination of instability at home (change in residences as well as parental authority figures), coupled with a shift in the direction of their schooling, drove them more toward the fulfillment music could bring. The prep school his mother sent the brothers school was not to Cris’s liking.

“After the house got burned down, that was a pretty fuckin’ weird time,” he said. “Mom decided that Curt and I should to go the Jesuit high school in town, Brophey [sic] College Prep. It had its good side, which is that the Jesuits were intellectually stimulating, or whatever. But it had its down side, in that you’re goin’ to school with all these fuckin’ Arizonan children, the rich kids. You know, it was kind of like the ‘styley-phoofey school.’ I went to school with [Supreme Court Justice] Sandra Day O’Connor’s son, who happened to be a real nice guy.

“But other people, like the son of a famed heart doctor went there also,” Cris said. “And he was kind of a lunkhead jock. But because his dad’s a rich guy or whatnot, he gets to be the quarterback! So I found out early on that I could distance myself from all these other people who were listening to Boston and whatnot, by digging a little deeper into these different types of music that were out there, that I was slowly discovering. I went and saw just a truckload of bands. And since Phoenix is close to Los Angeles, you got a lot of concerts here back in the ’70s. It was nominally that I wanted to be different, but it was also that I suddenly realized that there was just a ton more cool music out there.

“The down side of going through the school experience for Curt and I was all these fuckin’ spoiled rich Catholic kids that had all gone to parochial grade schools, and we hadn’t,” Cris explained. “I was one of just a couple of kids form my grade school that went to the Jesuit high school, where a lot of these cliques were already formed. Just because of the kind of people that we are, I was later told this by my hippie dope dealer friend, Dealer Dan: ‘You’ve just got an aura, dude!’ Meaning, we’re the kind of people that other people like to attack.

“I just didn’t like the high school that much,” he said. “The guys were all just too macho, and too fuckin’ stupid. So like I said, I didn’t get into rock that much. I actually found it kind of fuckin’ gross. Albert Goldman said it well in that Elvis book [he wrote]: ‘Pablum for teenagers,’ Pablum being baby food. And I kind of saw it as that. Just more of the same old crap. Or, as P-Funk put it, ‘the electric spanking of war babies.’ That was a funny way of putting it. People just being manipulated and sold shit, because people will buy crap if you set them up to it. That’s all I could see it as. It was obvious.

“I liked a few things in rock, or things that were rock-ish, like the Dead. But a lot of the pop/rock stuff that was really popular I didn’t like. I just didn’t get it, I just never cared. I wasn’t that adamantly against it, I was just into other crap. The kind of rock I was listening to at the time was like weird Swedish commie rock, or Euro-rock. The whole Henry Cow scene. Or else, [John] McLaughlin and all the tasty fuckin’ lick-meisters.

“So punk rock came along,” Cris said, “and I just thought it was more Bowie-clone shit. More dress-up crap, which I didn’t care for. I was fat. I was a fat teenager. I was like, ‘dress-up, shmess-up.’ Especially Limeys. I was like, ‘Gag!’ I just didn’t ‘get’ rock ‘n’ roll, rock as like, ‘Yeah, go wild! Go crazy! Get into it, man!’ And it actually took [hearing] Elvis and the Rolling Stones. I got the Beatles thing, but I got the music side [of that experience], right? Music as a fuckin’ head space. I got that off of them.

“I actually never got into rock ‘n’ roll until my first girlfriend turned me on to heroin,” Cris admitted, “and the Rolling Stones and shit. I was like, ‘Oh, I get it! You don’t play as good, in a way, but you make up for it with macho moxie, or something?’

“And off of the banjo, I realized what it took to develop an instrument. How it came through the talking drum thing, and how civilizations develop, and how the blacks moved here, and just the fuckin’ way the world came together, and ideas progressed and whatnot. How people want to make noise, you know, and how they want to make these particular sounds. And how particular sounds come out of them, dependent on their circumstance, and all this shit. I was into that, but I didn’t get the rock slide of that, you know, like [slipping into self-important cockney accent], ‘And some of us have tog to put on tight pants, because we’ve got fuckin’ monsters in our trousers!”

In 1976, when he was 17, Curt had also started to blaze his own musical path, shunning the run-of-the-mill arena rock bands of the time in favor of a more diverse and satisfying blend of styles.

“I remember George Jones from way back,” Curt said, “but I never developed an interest in him until my late teens. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was a big favorite of mine. Symphonion Dream was one of my favorite albums as a teen. And the Kottke, and all that stuff. We had that all goin’ on.”

In spite of their love for folk, country, and country/rock, the Kirkwood brothers couldn’t avoid the prevailing hysteria over punk rock in the late ’70s. Punk hit big in Phoenix, as it did in most of the larger American cities. Curt and Cris were swept along in the tide and formed their first band, trying to fit into the punk scene.

“We had a band called Eye,” Curt said. “That was the year before the Meat Puppets. That was us and two other guys. It was heavily influenced by Television and Devo, with some other guy’s tunes.”

“In Tempe [Arizona] there was a club called Dooley’s, which is still here, but it’s called After The Gold Rush now,” Cris said. “It was kind of a fern bar, hippie concert venue. I was too young to get in there, but I used to be able to sneak in. Back in the ’70s it was the kind of place that you could somehow fake-ID your way into. There were a few punk shows that came through there that just smoked my shit. Like Devo. That show fuckin’ made my brain fall out the back of my head. Devo was utterly great. I saw the Ramones with the Runaways in like ’78, and that was a riot! They were so fuckin’ good.

“So, suddenly I was getting the rock thing off of punk rock,” Cris said. “And how punk rock was the rebirth of the rock ideal, or the rock spunk or spirit. And I started to get it.”

The Bostroms: Percussion Instruments and Protestant Ministers

By the time they’d had their first band experience with Eye, Curt and Cris met Derrick Bostrom (born June 23, 1960), a drummer and punk devotee who lived in another section of the city. They met through a loosely organized church social group. Like the Kirkwood brothers, Bostrom and his younger brother, Damon, lived with a stepfather.

“Derrick’s mom was married to a doctor when he was growin’ up, who was not his dad,” Cris said. “But they were fairly well-off, so he lived in a nice part of town. Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, the chi-chier part of town, with the nice public school and whatnot, whereas Curt and I lived in more of a ‘white trashville.’ Sunny Slope is kind of white trashy. He was definitely the long-haired, hippie intellectual drop-out guy, and was friends with the guys that were like that as well.

He went to high school with this guy David, who he is still real good friends with,” Cris explained about Bostrom, “who is the son of a minister, and is now also a Unitarian minister himself, and a real smart, interesting, sweet guy. But those guys, and the smarties from their school, just had this scene [that they called] LRY: the Liberal Religious Youth, which was a part of the Unitarian Church.

“We weren’t involved with it at all, but a friend of ours was, who was the common link [with Bostrom]. David’s dad, the reverend, ran this church. So they had this little religious youth group, which was their excuse to fart around in the church. Hang out at the church at night, when nobody else was around. Anything like that, at that age, was just an opportunity for people to skirt their parents’ hold over them, just to get away from whatever and have a good time. I think Curt and I went by there once or twice with this other friend of ours.”

Bostrom’s memory of how he met the Kirkwoods followed rather closely to Cris’s account. “I actually met those guys around ’77, through mutual friends,” the drummer said. “They went to one school, I went to another, and we connected through the church group. The Unitarian Church is a very liberal, kind of non-denominational church, almost. All my friends would go there. A lot of times, we’d just get the key, go in there, and set up and jam. Another guy who went to the church knew the Kirkwoods, and they came to one of the jams. So I kind of got to know them that way. Paradise Valley was on the outskirts of the city, like Sunny Slope. both of those areas are north Phoenix.”

After the Kirkwood brothers met Bostrom at the church, they began hanging around with him, usually over at the Bostrom homestead. There they also became acquainted with Damon Bostrom, whom Cris admired as a peculiar yet very creative character.

“Damon’s quite a bit younger. He’s a fuckin’ freak, man,” Cris said. “Damon is a trippy guy. All the Bostrom kids are interesting, but Damon and Derrick are the only two full [blooded] Bostroms. Damon’s by far the most musically-educated of us all. Damon, back then, was the kind of guy who came in and one day he’d shaved off all his hair and his eyebrows. We were like, ‘Hey, cool look!’

“He was mad, because he had to take the bus three times down to another part of town to get this piece for his piano,” Cris recalled. “He was the kind of kid who had gone out and gotten himself a piano, but it needed some work. We were all fairly into drugs and shit. More like psychedelics and pot, not really into narcotics abuse. But Damon was younger and kind of the dangerous little nut-freak.

They’re both smart people, and both into some cool shit,” Cris said, “but Damon is a way better musician, in a way, than his brother is, whereas Derrick’s more of a culture vulture. Damon was more of the self supporting type. He didn’t even need a band.”

Although the band that was in its fermentation stage still had no name at that point, according to Cris, Damon could have joined them if he’d been inclined to. In a sense, he was the first in a series of players who have acted, for some period of time, as an unofficial “fourth Meat Puppets” over the years. (This select group of individuals, in recent years, has included ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary and guitarist Troy Meiss. The latter toured and played gigs with the Meat Puppets all throughout 1994.)

“[Damon] could have been a member of the band, and we could have had keyboards all these years,” Cris commented. “There would have been just a lot more color added to the thing, a lot more musicality. A lot more along my line. Because I’m more of the schooled noodge, or whatever. Rather than, you know, ‘It’s art, man!’ Curt and Derrick are both the older children, so they’re both like, ‘What I say goes!’ And Damon and I are like [speaking in timid, nerdy voice], ‘Well, there’s a long and distinguished line of musical history from whence to draw upon…’”

Curt, however, differed in his recollection of the days hanging around the Bostrom house. He also took an alternate view on the issue of whether or not Damon was ever seriously considered a candidate to join the band.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Curt mused. “I think that’s being really giving to say that [Damon could have joined]. You know, if that’s the case, there were probably three or four people that could’ve started playin’ with us, if they’d have had the notion to. Because at that point we were fairly loose. And it went that way, probably until about ’85. We’d look around and go, ‘God, our friends could play. Why don’t they ever ask?’ It was pretty loose.

“In hindsight, I think everybody let me believe that it was all a friendly thing. But, for whatever reason, people just don’t want to be involved with me, by and large. I used to think that it was just them. That they didn’t have it together, or whatever.”

Nonetheless, Cris believes that, had Damon not chosen to go his own way and “exclude himself” from the band, the Meat Puppets could just as easily have ended up as two sets of brothers joining together. If Damon made less of an impression on Curt, Cris and Derrick found it nearly impossible not to be influenced by him, and by his off-kilter point of view about music and about life in general.

“Both Derrick and Damon are just these really, really talented, smart guys,” Cris said. “But also a couple of the stinkiest, greasiest little fuckers you’d never wanna meet. It’s like, ‘Goddamn! What did your moms do to you?’ Just weird guys. Fuckin’ flipped-out people.

“If you talk to Derrick, he’s the kind of kid that in the fourth grade informed his mother that he’d no longer be participating in P.E. [phys-ed] and was collecting underground comics. He was fairly self-aware. He just was like that at a young age, into different things. I had more of a ‘younger brother syndrome,’ in those days. Derrick’s dad, his actual dad who was long-divorced from his mom, decided quite a few years ago that he’d had enough of the ‘lower 48.’ He dropped out of ‘Americadom’ and moved up to Alaska. He farms and lives this kind of agrarian life up there with the natives. They catch salmon, that kind of thing.

“Damon didn’t got to school at all,” Cris said. “He dropped out of grade school and just lived at home. He got his GED, eventually. But at that time he was a young teen, and just goofy.

“Derrick’s mom’s husband had this house that was up on one of the preserves, high up there where the rich people build their houses. And it had a guest house out back. She was in the process of divorcing her husband, so she didn’t care what happened to the house. The guest house had been given over to Derrick and Damon. They lived like feral children, or something. Damon had the other half of this thing. You’d open the sliding door and look in there, and he’d have painted everything white. The TV, everything, painted white. And there’d be this nasty little pile of dirty blankets on the floor, with his feet stickin’ out of it.

“One of the things that he had goin’ was this fuckin’ unbelievable sculpture in the garage,” Cris said. “It had all these little machines on it that moved. And all this crap, like melted [plastic] army men, and things all over it. It was fuckin’ huge. It was built on a couple of tables. It was really quite the art piece. And at one point he just decided that it was time for it to go. And he lit it on fire.

“He was just too wacky of a guy,” Cris ventured as to why Damon ultimately didn’t participate in the band. “He’s too self-sufficient and just not a joiner, or something. He actually did end up graduating from ASU [Arizona State University] here in Tempe. And while he was going to ASU, he lived in the desert. In Phoenix, there’s these mountain preserves, actual mountain ranges in the city. Raw desert or wild desert.

“You can get down in the desert, and he lived in this fuckin’ wash near ASU,” Cris said. “You’d see this big, barefoot fucker walking around the school. He was just one of those self-motivated guys. He graduated with a degree in composition and theory. He’s serious, to a fault. And now he lives down in Bisbee [Arizona], this old fuckin’ mining town just off the border of Mexico, down in the southeast part of the state,” he said. “I don’t know what he does for a living. He probably works at a convenience mart, if they have one there. He just scrapes by. He writes these compositions for instruments he makes himself. Things that are called, like, ‘The Wind’ and so on. He’s very into his own trip. The last I’d heard, he’d gotten into fuckin’ Jesushood or something. It’s all a quest for personal self … whatever. I don’t know what he’s actually into now. I haven’t seen him for a while. He’s got a couple of kids from a couple of different women. Just a very fuckin’ far-out guy.

“I started playin’ bass,” Cris said. “I had a knack for it, because I played banjo. So my fingers kind of worked, and I could just make myself do it. And the band just kind of fell out of this scene, this group of friends. It was just kind of a natural thing. All sorts of kooky things were happening. We just all went in these different directions, and everybody got into different little bits of music, here and there.”

Back when Cris and Curt were playing in the band Eye, Bostrom had also been making plans to start a band with another friend from school. But that group never really got going. “I messed around with a friend of mine,” the drummer said. “We went to college together for a year, and then I dropped out. He was in a different city, so that kind of stopped happening. And besides, I wanted to do it. And he was not as ambitious as I was. He had his own post-college game plan.”

Bostrom had no intention of pursuing anything besides music. Eventually, his comic book collection had taken a back seat to a record collection, one that had a particular concentration on punk rock.

“Everybody graduated from high school, and everybody went on about their business,” Bostrom said. “And I was still dedicated to bein’ a punk rocker. I’d been into punk since the minute I heard it, early ’77. In ’77, when I first got into it, there were a few punk rockers. Then there were some people that were into bands like King Crimson and Gong, and that whole kind of jazz, who were playing that kind of pre-punk/experimental/heavy metal/progressive sort of stuff. And we were big fans of King Crimson. We thought that stuff was great. Then punk hit. Of course, I was just a kid and I had never left Phoenix. But some people were going to L.A. and buying records.

“And the first time I heard about local punk rock was on a radio show on a station called KDKB,” Bostrom recalled, “which was a progressive station. They did a show about the local scene. And there was also an article about it in the paper. Then there was a show that I wanted to go see. But I was 17 and they wouldn’t let me in. Somebody wrote about that, saying, ‘If you didn’t go to this show, then you’re not with it, you’re not happening. You’re old.’ That was the thing that punk rockers used to call rock fans, right? So I wrote a letter back saying, ‘Fuck that “old” shit. I’m too young to go in. Why don’t you come play at my school?’

“And so, the singer from this band actually wrote me and said, ‘Well, you get us to play at your school. Gimme a call, let’s network.’ So I got to know some of these bands.”

“We actually kind of gravitated to Derrick,” Cris said, “because everybody else that we knew was a big [Bill] Bruford clone, without the talent. So there’d be all these drummers doin’ these fuckin’ stupid fills and we’d be like, ‘Would you stop that?’ Derrick was into that shit like King Crimson, but not in an uncool way. He liked it in like ’74, or when it first came out. That’s the kind of guy he was. But when it was time to move on and be into something else, he was. And he was never so uncool as to actually try to play like that or anything. It’s way cooler to, you know, not give a shit. He’s way more from that school.

“When we first started playin’ with him, he had a kick drum with a little cymbal screwed into the top of it, and a snare. And he taught himself how to play backwards. So he actually reached over with his other hand and played the cymbal with his left hand, while he smacked the snare drum with his right. Most people cross over, right? It was just like, ‘God, wind-up monkey!’ And we’d have him speed up or slow down, dependent on the song.

“And Curt and I knew a bunch of other things, too, that we’d show Derrick,” Cris said. “Like, musical things we’d turn him on to. Like we’d say, ‘Listen, hear that? That’s the bass.’ We’d turn him on to music as something other than just a cultural phenomenon, but as something self-indulgent.”

The Phoenix Scene and the L.A. Connection

A turning point for the Kirkwood brothers was the time they went to see Iggy Pop perform in town, in the late ’70s. Iggy had just come off working with David Bowie in Europe and had pieced together a new band. The makeup of Iggy’s band had more of an impact on the brothers than seeing Iggy himself.

“That show was one of the things that turned me on to punk rock,” Cris said. “I mean, Derrick was definitely one of the things that turned me on to punk, but so were a couple of other friends that were getting into it, slowly. Punk rock kind of started seepin’ in at a certain point. Definitely, that Iggy show was a blast. He had [Arthur] “Killer” Kane, from the New York Dolls, on bass. He himself was goofier than fuck. Somebody beaned him with a bottle. Good old Arizona. That’s classic behavior here. It was a fun show.”

Curt also remembered attending Iggy’s Phoenix gig and how something clicked in his head during the band’s performance. “I think, for me, it’s more of always trying to find a place where I can sort of get other people to pay attention to me,” he said. “I saw, at that show, a platform to be able to get a group of people together. Personally, I liked the guitar playing. He had the Damned’s guitar player, Brian James,” playing. I really didn’t care that much about Iggy’s trip, except for the fact that he threw himself down on the stage sometimes. I thought that was kind of cool. By and large, getting into things for me, it’s more a question for trying to find anyplace where I can get people to pay attention to me long enough to be able to work with ‘em.”

“They had told me they’d gone and seen Iggy Pop, and Brian James was Iggy’s guitarist for that tour,” Bostrom said. “And I was like [still stoked by the memory of it], ‘Oh, he’s the original guitarist for the Damned! I love him!’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, he was great!’ So I gave them my copy of the Damned album to check out, and my copy of [the Stooges'] Raw Power, and tried to get them into it. Of course, those are two bands [the Damned and the Stooges]–obviously known, but Brian James maybe less so. But he’s kind of a James Williamson-style guitarist. Both kind of flashy, as far as punk rock goes. But I got Curt to listen to [those albums], and he thought they were great.

“So I said, ‘Well, let’s learn some songs and jam,’” Bostrom recalled. “And we did. And we dug the way it sounded. So we stuck with it. I got him to learn about half my punk 45 collection.” By definition of Bostrom’s stash of singles, that must have been quite a few tunes that Curt picked up on.

“There were a few records that Derrick had,” Cris said, “that got us more into it, including an Iggy record. That James Williamson 7-inch, with ‘I Got A Right’ [b/w] ‘Gimme Some Skin,’ that was just one of my favorite records. That was so cool. And the whole first Damned album. And they were all easy stuff, too, for Curt and I to play.

‘Cause we’d kind of been off on this fusionary tangent, and both of us were just kind of good little stringmeisters. So we’d hang out with Derrick, who had all these kooky records, and learn all of ‘em. We learned the whole fuckin’ Damned record in an afternoon. So we played a bunch of punk songs, and Derrick would sit back there and sing ‘em.”

“We got bored with just playin’ in our back bedroom,” Bostrom said. “So we started playin’ out, some parties. And we found that playing in front of people increased the energy level by, like, triple. So we started to want to get gigs. We were like, ‘Oh, we’re onto something here. We like this.’ So we got a real gig. And about that time, Curt had written the song ‘Meat Puppets.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just call ourselves Meat Puppets. That works, that’s a proper noun.”

[Note: The song "Meat Puppets" was recorded for the Meat Puppets album in late 1981. Among the other songs on that album were an interesting cover of the Doc Watson tune "Walking Boss" and a Bostrom/Kirkwood original entitled "the Gold Mine."]

“And people liked it,” Bostrom said. “They were talkin’ as much about our name as they were about our performance. So we decided to keep it, because it was gettin’ us over.”

“I did all improvising music all through the late ’70s,” Curt said. “Cris and I would play different things. The Devo songs, or things by the Tubes, Talking Heads, what-have-you. Just playin’ around at home on drums and bass.”

“Curt and I were already playing other things as well,” Cris added. “We had gotten a drum kit and were just doin’ stuff together, with either one of us on drums. Both of us can play drums, too.”

“Mostly what we were into, what we were workin’ on,” Curt said, “when we got together and played around with friends, were these experimental noise jams. I didn’t start writing until we started playing together [with Derrick]. I had written a couple of country songs when I was a child. That’s about all I wrote before the Meat Puppets. I started writing in the Meat Puppets because nobody else was.”

“In Phoenix at that time,” Bostrom said, “there was this one club in Tempe, which is where we [still] live. It’s like the college area. Some of the local musicians were in with this bar owner. And they had enough pull with this bar to actually hire some of the punk rock bands from L.A. to come out and play in Phoenix. So, we had seen, for instance, X. This is like in ’80. Alley Cats, Plugz, Go-Go’s before they were popular. Bands like that. If you’re familiar with the L.A. scene, Dangerhouse has got their two-CD set of these bands. And Rhino did one [as part of its DIY series] on the L.A. scene.

“Anyway,” the drummer continued, “These bands were comin’ out. And one band that came out [from L.A. to play gigs in Phoenix] was Human Hands. And their singer used to be in a band called Consumers, who were from Phoenix. They had moved out to L.A., broke up, and then half of ‘em moved back to Phoenix. And this one guy stayed out there. And he joined this band called Human Hands.

“We had gone and seen Iggy Pop [after the Brian James tour], and it turned out that the opening act was a band called Feeders [sic], who were from Phoenix. They were around in like ’78, moved to San Francisco and did a couple of albums. And the original bass player had moved to L.A., but had come back to reform the band so they could do the opening slot. The singer, the head guy, had just gotten married, so it was like a big party. They did the gig and had a little reunion.

“There were these bands, Consumers, Liars and Annihilators,” Bostrom said. “Now, let’s see… One of the Consumers was Paul Cutler. And one of the Annihilators was Rob Graves, who was Paul’s bassist in 45 Grave. And Don Bolles was the bassist, I think for the Liars, as well as the drummer for the Annihilators. There were three to four bands, but only about six people. They just kept rotating costumes and playing different instruments.

“So Don Bolles went on to play in the Germs, and 45 Grave, Vox Pop and Celebrity Skin. God knows what he’s doing now. I’m sure he’s in there somewhere, doin’ stuff. Those are like the major people that came out of Phoenix. A lot of people who were serious about it went to L.A. They were either serious about their music, or the heroin connections weren’t good enough here, or whatever. But by 1980, there was another whole batch of bands.

“Some of the people who were in Consumers that didn’t want to live in L.A. had started Killer Pussy,” Bostrom said. “That was a band that started about the same time we did. JFA [Jodie Foster's Army] is another band that got out of Phoenix. They started about a year after we did. Their singer [Brian Brannon] is now the music editor at Thrasher [skateboarding] magazine in San Francisco.

“Sun City Girls was a band that started up around the same time we did. I think they live in Seattle or Portland now. It was a much more eclectic mix than the old punk rock of the late ’70s. We were more eclectic than punk rock. And there were lots of others. Bands that were more into the British scene, Joy Division-style bands. Or power-pop bands, like this one called Blue Shoes.

“And then there was a band called the Nervous,” Bostrom said, “who were kind of Talking Heads-oriented, more New York-style. Phoenix had its share of copycat bands, as well as its stone originals, like the Meat Puppets! And, of course, the Meat Puppets were the band that got the best luck. We got out of town, we were liked right away, we were able to get a record out quickly, and then we were able to tour the U.S.

“I ran into these people that I had known in like ’77, when they were still living in Phoenix and doing music there,” Bostrom recalled. “That’s when I was 17, and needed them to sneak me into gigs. And so I said, ‘I’ve got a band now.’ And the guy said, ‘Well, lay a tape on me. Do you write your own songs?’ And we were like, ‘No, we just do punk covers. But we do ‘em really good!’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you gotta write your own songs. Write some songs, send me some tapes, and we’ll get you some shows out in L.A.’

“So we did that,” Bostrom said. “This friend of ours, David Wiley, had the tape, which was very crudely made, played on Rodney [Bingenheimer's radio] show out there. And we got some gigs, with him and with some other bands. One of the bands we played with was called Monitor. Another band we played with was called the Urinals, who became 100 Flowers. And they both liked us a lot.”

Once the Meat Puppets were on the L.A. punk scene, it proved to be a relatively easy leap to go from playing gigs to actually cutting a record. The associations that developed through knowing Wiley, and through having their homemade tape played on Bingenheimer’s program, led directly to the first recording opportunities for the trio.

“We did a song on a compilation that the 100 Flowers did on their label, Happy Squid,” Bostrom said. “The compilation was called Keats Rides A Harley, and the song was called ‘H-Elenore.’ 100 Flowers and Gun Club were also on that compilation. And Leaving Trains, I think, is on a cut. Those are the artists I remember off of that.”

It was this compilation tape that first turned Leary on to the Meat Puppets. “Gibby introduced me to a record called Keats Rides A Harley, which was a compilation from California,” Leary said. “It had the Meat Puppets, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, the Urinals, or 1,000 Flowers [sic], or whatever they were called at the time. A whole bunch of bands.’

“And then the Human Hands organization was affiliated with a thing called L.A. Free Music Society,” Bostrom said. “and we did a cut with them on a cassette compilation. This L.A.F.M.S. cassette is called Light Bulb. It was a two-cassette compilation, with tons of bands on it. We did an early version of, or kind of a demo of ‘Meat Puppets.’ Just me and Curt did that, with two cassette machines. So, that and the other compilation song were both done in Phoenix. The Keats Rides A Harley thing we did on four-track at a friend’s house.

“Then Monitor were in the studio making an album, after already having done a single. And they had this one punk rock song, which they kind of wrote as a sendup of punk. And they wanted us to perform it, because we had the punk thing down. And they weren’t able to play it as fast and hard as they wanted. A lot of their stuff was, you know, slower. This Monitor cut was done at the same time as our first EP [in the spring of 1981].

“And they said, ‘As a trade-off, we’ll let you record five songs, and we’ll bankroll the single.’ So we did it,” Bostrom said. “We did their song, and a take. Then we did our own songs and a take, each. And they released it. And that was our little In A Car EP, that came out in the summer of ’81.”

SST Records — The Early Years

To hear Bostrom tell it, getting a recording career started was almost too easy for the Meat Puppets. One situation seemed to lead to another and things began happening. Now that they had some “product” to promote, the band felt extra motivation for staying away from Phoenix and out on the road.

“We started goin’ from L.A. all over, up to San Francisco,” Bostrom said. “We were selling the EP ourselves. So we would take it into record stores and sell them, and go to distributors, because Monitor knew these people. We went to Systematic and dropped records off there. And either the guys that were working there were these guys that ran their own label, which was called Thermidor, or we just went right to Thermidor. I’m not really sure. Either way, we went and visited these two guys who had this label, Thermidor.

“Monitor was putting out a surf record under an assumed name with them, so that’s how we got the connection,” Bostrom said. “And they were like, ‘You guys should put out a Meat Puppets album.’ And one of these guys, Joe Carducci, was about to go to work for SST. He said, ‘Thermidor will bankroll the recording, and then we’ll get SST to put it out. So it’ll be a joint release. And then I’ll go over to SST, and I’ll be able to work your album.’ We were like, ‘Okay. Sounds better than gettin’ a job.’”

Although the self-titled Meat Puppets debut album does contain a total of 14 songs, at less than 22 minutes it runs past the listener quicker than a typical EP. This one is much more Bostrom’s project than anything else in the Meat Puppets’ catalog, and sounds almost nothing like their later efforts. In fact, it is so starkly different from Meat Puppets II that, if you listen to them back to back, you might swear the two records were made by completely different bands.

“We started out with one concept,” Bostrom said, “which was to write a bunch of songs in an afternoon, which is what you used to do back then .We’d just get a lick, throw some lyrics together, and learn it. And we wrote songs like that for most of ’80, till we had a bunch of ‘em. We recorded ‘em all, and the ones we liked we threw onto Meat Puppets.

“That was when Curt wasn’t writing songs. We were just learning songs and playing ‘em. I said, ‘Curt, let’s write some songs.’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know how to write songs.’ And I said, ‘We’ll just, you know, do it. Here’s some lyrics. Just wiggle your fingers around on the fretboard until you come up with something.’ So I wrote most of the lyrics to the first record.”

Greg Ginn was in the band Black Flag and had started the SST label in the L.A. area. Chuck Dukowski helped him get things going. By the time the Meat Puppets came to Ginn’s attention in 1981, SST had released only a few titles. In the years that followed, SST would release hundreds of records from a wide variety of bands and artists. Some of these, including Soundgarden, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., have become big names in the ’90s. But when the Meat Puppets album was released in 1982, it was only the ninth offering from the label.

“It used to be that SST was just Black Flag,” Bostrom said. “Then they did a record [Paranoid Time] with Minutemen, who were friends of theirs, and another record [Pagan Icons] with Saccharine Trust. We were the first [band] that they had actually gone out and, ‘signed.’ Although, like I said, we came to them through Thermidor, because the guy who owned Thermidor went to work for ‘em. But we were like the very first ‘outsider band,’ the first SST ‘find,’ proper.

“And they put us in [the recording studio] with Spot,” Bostrom said. “Spot was an engineer in Hollywood that Greg and Chuck knew, who was kind of sick of the whole disco scene, or whatever, and got in with those guys and started engineering Black Flag session. He liked their shit, and started doing other stuff for that label. Spot was a cool guy, and he made three great records with us.

“Actually,” Bostrom said, amending his previous statement, “the first record was recorded by Ed Barger, who did the first Devo singles. The ones they did back in the Midwest, before they moved to Hollywood, or England, or wherever they made their major recordings. He did In A Car for us, and he also did ‘Jocko Homo’ and ‘Satisfaction’ and stuff for Devo. And then they, you know, dumped him once they got signed.

“Now, Meat Puppets was recorded live. So live that there wasn’t even any separation. We just set up the way we play onstage. Pretty much everything you hear on that record is just the drums and what’s bleeded through ‘em, and the vocals put on [later]. So that was a very raw project, and it sounds like it. You can hear the room. You can hear the direct signal, like the bass going [simulated loud crackling noise], and then you can hear everything else bleeding into the mikes on the drums.

“So anyway,” Bostrom continued, “we recorded the first record with Spot. And then our best friend in Monitor, Laurie [O'Connell], the bass player, who had taken us under her wing, wanted Ed to come in and mix it. They mixed it like four times, and ran up a huge bill. And then they got into a big argument with Greg and Chuck at SST. And then they stole the tapes. Meanwhile, they kept mixing. We said we liked the second mix. But then they went ahead and did the third and fourth. And we were like, ‘God, these people are out of control.’

“And they told us, ‘We’ve stolen the tape, we’re gonna release it on our label, and we’re gonna push you guys as a country act, because you’ve done “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.” But we’d done like a screamy, feedbacky version of it. And we were like, ‘Help!’ And then Spot sent us his mix, saying, ‘Just in case you wanted to hear this …’ And we went, ‘Ah, this is the record! This is what we did. This is what we wanted to hear.’ Laurie and Ed were gettin’ way out of control. With these weird rooming techniques and stuff, adding tons of reverb to it.

“So,” Bostrom recalled, “we just said, ‘We wanna work with Spot on this. We like his mix and we wanna use it. And furthermore, we made the record with SST. We said we’d give it to them, and we want to.’ And they said, ‘Well, then we’re out of the picture, because we won’t work with them.’ And so we no longer worked with Monitor or World Imitation [who had released In A Car].”

The Meat Puppets album featured cover art that was credited to Curt and to Damon Bostrom. In a sense, the record is an artifact from the days when the Kirkwood brothers and the Bostrom brothers hung around the guest house in the hills on the north side of Phoenix. Soon those days would be left far behind, although the band has never given up Phoenix as a port of call. (Damon had also done some of the artwork for the In A Car release.)

There’s a song called ‘Unpleasant,’ which we did in ’82 on a record called Amuck,” Bostrom said. “And it was on Placebo, which was JFA’s label out of Phoenix. They did a lot of compilations, and this was their first one. Cris and I are actually on another cut on that record called ‘Bottle’s Neck.’ And the band is Victory Acres. That cut and the rest of that session came out on a record, also on Placebo, within the last five years. It was the Victory Acres/Joke Flower record, which I think is still available on cassette and LP. The session with me and Cris is on one side, and on the other is more current recordings by the same group of people. Only now they’re callin’ themselves Joke Flower.

“We did a cut [also] in 1982 for a magazine called Take It, which was out of Massachusetts. They used to do flexis in their issues. And we did a song called ‘Teenagers.’ Half of it was fast. It was actually the very first thing we ever recorded that wasn’t like punk rock, that wasn’t screamy. We did just like a little chord progression that we jammed on, and tried to make it as mellow as possible. Because it was [considered] ‘punk’ to get more mellow than the, quote, ‘old, mellow rock stars.’ So that’s the origin of our mellow vibe. And it’s only available on flexi.”

That mellow vibe would carry over into the band’s next session with Spot, eventually released as Meat Puppets II. A lot of Curt’s surprisingly sophisticated country influences would also come to the fore. According to Bostrom, this musical direction all stemmed from the “Teenagers” track.

“II have no idea what happened to it,” he said, “but it’s a great cut. We have the multi-track tape, but we don’t have the mix we sent to them. I don’t remember what issue it was in, but Chris D. of flesheaters was on the cover. And also, on the flexi, is Tex and the Horseheads. ‘Cause this is when they were just comin’ out. That’s probably the most collectible thing we’ve done. I mean, the [Light Bulb] cassette’s pretty collectible, too. I know people are selling original copies of radio shows, stuff like that, that are being sold for lots of money.

“I don’t dare buy Goldmine,” Bostrom stated in a humorous aside, “because then I’ll see things I want to spend hundreds of dollars on. Or worse, I’ll see my stuff being sold for hundreds of dollars. I don’t pursue it the way I did when I was 17, when I had to have every 45 I saw. Eventually you have to pay your own rent. But before I had to do that, all my money went to punk rock records.

“But nobody’s ever gold me they’ve found a copy of that Take It flexi. And it’s pretty good stuff, too. I saw it, I have two copies of it. [So, it definitely exists.]

“In fact, I wrote an article for Take It, and gave them some art [work]. And the editor, or whoever was in charge of doing the story, called me back saying she didn’t understand what I had written. Because I was writing in a very ironic style, and being rather arch. She asked me to explain some of the references, and I did. I was very accommodating. And what she did was put approximations of what I had said in the bulk of the article, and then still credit the whole thing to me. Although half of it was misquotings of me that she had written into it, plus my stuff.

“And it ended up making SST very mad at us,” Bostrom said. “Because there were some jokes in there about them, like, ‘Yeah, we’re doin’ this country album for SST to capitalize on their punk market.’ And it was a joke. It came out sounding like, ‘We don’t like those guys, but we want their audience,’ or something. They didn’t like it, so they didn’t take us to Europe with them the first time they went. They took the Minutemen instead.”

Nonetheless, the Meat Puppets were starting to gain some notoriety outside of Arizona and California, a circumstance which sent them headed to the east coast for the first time. Meat Puppets was just beginning to get some play in alternative music circles, and the band started to conceive of themselves as more than just an “Arizona band” or a regional act.

“We’ve never gotten to tour with Sonic Youth, unfortunately, but we did a couple of shows here and there with them,” Bostrom said. “Actually we played with sonic Youth in 1982, the first time we ever came to New York. They opened for us at Folk City. It was like November of ’82, and they were just children, as were we. I remember being irritated, because I was on tour for the first time, and I had already gotten sick three times, or whatever. New York City scared the piss out of me, ’cause I was from the wide open spaces. I didn’t dig it. I was a long ways from home for the first time, working in a big city, not getting a lot of sleep, not eating well, and having to do shows. And it’s hard, when you’re not used to it. You have to pretty much know your limits, before you can go and rock out really hard. If you’re exhausted and strung out on bad food and no sleep, the shows start to suck.

“So I was kind of cranky, and I didn’t watch their [Sonic Youth's] set,” the drummer said. “But I remember Kim [Gordon] coming down into the dressing room, either before or after her set. I said nothing to her, and she said nothing to me. It was one of those uncomfortable things, like ‘Obviously we’re not saying anything.’ I wasn’t going to say anything! It’s all too easy for me to be just as uncooperative and incommunicative as possible.”

“Meat Puppets, they were really weird,” Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore said last year. “When they first started, they were just so fuckin’ weird. They were really twisted. They would come out and play a hundred songs, each one shorter than the last. Singing this Mickey Mouse gobbledy-gook. Then they’d break into a 20-minute Grateful Dead thing. The audience just did not know what to think of these guys. And they had long hair which was unheard of.”

In defense of his own band, Bostrom really didn’t think the Meat Puppets were all that weird in those days. “Well, we always figured that we had a side that people could relate to,” he said.

“We weren’t out trying to bust people’s balls, or freak ‘em out or anything. We had chops, we weren’t like a band that didn’t know how to play our instruments when we picked ‘em up. We already had somewhat of an idea of what direction we wanted to go into when we started the band.”

After 1982 is when Curt began to really come into his own, as a songwriter as well as a guitarist. Bostrom didn’t seem to mind that, after the first SST album, Curt quickly became the focus of the band, a perception that has largely remained with the Meat Puppets ever since.

“Curt started gettin’ in the groove and started turnin’ stuff out,” Bostrom said. “People were tellin ‘him he was good, and givin’ him encouragement. People outside the band, people in Monitor, for instance. So he soon began to develop his own style. And it wasn’t real punk-rocky [sic]. Plus, we were playin ‘these shows with punk rockers, like Redd Kross in 1981, Black Flag. We made the rounds. And the skinhead thing was coming in, the hardcore thing, which was separate from punk rock. Hardcore was kind of like jocks who got into it, because it was hard and fast, rather than because it was ‘anti-music’ or some sort of avant-garde thing. And so we were like, ‘Ugh! We’re not about that!’ We decided we were going to have to stop playing ‘hard/fast-rules’-style music, ’cause we weren’t like Wasted Youth or Bad Religion, or Adolescents. I guess they’re the typical band of that style. We weren’t like that at all.

“We had been listening to Fleetwood Mac, and Creedence, and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. And Neil Young, a lot. Those kind of bands. And I guess Meat Puppets II kind of showed our influences more than any other of our records did. I mean, let’s face it, ‘Lake of Fire’ is a pretty popular song right now [in the '90s]. It makes the rounds these days, getting played on MTV every now and again. That was a fairly fledgling Meat Puppets song. So, even stuff we wrote 10 years ago is considered popular now.”

“I guess, more than anything, I didn’t know how punk rock was gonna go over,” Curt said, acknowledging the band’s conscious swing back to the other end of its spectrum of musical influences. “When it did start to go over, I was pretty idealistic, and I didn’t really like the audience very much. So when, I took the time to think about it, I realized I needed to explore some of my other roots. I mean, we’d always had sort of a punk rock motive early on, but as a band, and individually, we’d never kept ourselves form doing anything.

I just had to start conscientiously having us do other things, which largely, I got the confidence to do through listening to Neil Young and the Grateful Dead when I was growin’ up. Those and the Flying Burrito Brothers [among others].”

“I think that Curt discovered the joy, of Neil, back then,” Cris said. “You know, the cool [records], where he’s a heartbroken little singer/songwriter. Like Harvest, or whatever the fuckin’ huge ones are. ‘For The Turnstiles,’ I think… I don’t know, but it has to do more with just pickin’ up an acoustic guitar. People like Cobain credited us with turnin’ him on to bein’ a pussy, and bein’ a hardass at the same time. Which is alternative, or some crap, right? It’s like, ‘We don’t cuss, so that it fits in between the commercials and gets on radio. But we don’t dress up, so it’s sincere.’

“So, when [Cobain] said that, we were goin’, ‘Well, you know, we got that off Neil Young, or whatever. And Neil Young got it off the fuckin’ Beatles. And the Beatles got it off of fuckin’ lysergic [acid], and being open-minded off of British culture. And you keep goin’ back, and there’s ol’ psychedelic Bill Shakespeare, and all his cool cohorts. And you go further back beyond that, and you suddenly realize, ‘Well, fuck, people have been into this kind of shit forever.’ You know? It’s just like, ‘To be, or not to be — and fuckin’ why?”

“You suddenly realize, ‘Well this is what a lot of great art is about.’ So I don’t take credit for that at all. If we happened to be the ones who turned that kid [Cobain] onto [sic] it, we got turned onto it at some point, too. Rock ‘n’ roll can actually be art, if you just look at it the right way.”

“The Neil thing goes back to stuff that I grew up on even before I heard Neil,” Curt said. “But I think he gave me the confidence, knowing that rockers could play rock, and then cross over. Neil was one of the only people who ever did t, for some reason. But we got tired of playin’ punk rock, that was it, I guess. We realized we could do the other stuff, so…

“I always kind of got a kick out of taking stuff that we recorded out to the desert, and listening to it,” Curt said. “It was kind of nice sometimes, when you’ve got a campfire goin’ or somethin, to hang the radio up in a tree somewhere and listen to it like that. But ultimately I just kind of think that people [have the impression] that there’s a certain amount of spirituality and freedom the desert provides. And, coincidentally, we play that kind of thing. And that gets attributed to the fact that we’re from here [Arizona]. But I don’t know that that has any bearing on [our music], that the two things come together that much. As if it wouldn’t be the same if we were from someplace else. It’s more about imagination and feelings than trying to paint a [musical] landscape, or anything like that.

“[Young's music] definitely has those plaintive strains, but I don’t know if there’s any music that really fits in that well here like that, like people think. You get imagery if you think about the desert. But being there really isn’t something, when you’re out there, that really makes you think about listening to music that much. Music, in my mind, is fairly, you know… You can kind of cross your idealism and your fantasies and stuff, to a degree. But actually being in the desert has more of a real feeling to it. We never really dragged our blasters out to the desert that much, and listened to music when we were out there.”

As much as the Meat Puppets enjoyed recording with Spot the engineer, they couldn’t count on him to let them in on the completion of their album once the sessions were done. Meat Puppets II was cut early in 1983 in Los Angeles, but the band played the rest of the year wondering what became of their album.

“We went on [recording] with SST,” Bostrom said, “and Spot did our next couple of records, and then Spot got out. It was just as well, ’cause Spot was very freewheeling on his own time. We recorded Meat Puppets II in like March of ’83, and then he disappeared with the tape till like November. So when we went to do the third one, Up On The Sun [in late January 1985], we demoed it ourselves, got it all finished and everything. and we said, ‘Alright, we want to block out three days, and at the end of those three days, the record’s gonna be done. No more dicking around.’ And we did it. And we haven’t been able to top that. We made a really fine record in a Friday/Saturday/Sunday lockout period, in a studio [Total Access, in Redondo Beach, California].

“And everything got done. Except for the editing, and that was a piece of cake. And that’s like [most] people’s favorite record of ours. Whereas Meat Puppets II was more varied, more difference from song to song, in instrumentation and arrangement. On Up On The Sun, each cut is arranged real similarly, to streamline the process. But that’s really the only place where we cut corners.”

Before the recording of Up On The Sun, the band had spent the year 1984 out on the road promoting Meat Puppets II. Due to their affiliation with the up-and-coming SST label, they would often play shows far from their Phoenix base with other SST bands.

“We played Seattle for the first time either in ’82 or ’84, which was with Black Flag at this school. It was definitely an ass-kicker of a gig. And then suddenly [several years later], there was the ‘Seattle sound.’ And we’re going, ‘Well, lookit there: “The Seattle sound” sure looks a lot like us!’ But it was no big deal. We didn’t give a crap about that, anyway.”

Touring had its own perils for the Meat Puppets, as it does for any band operating on a small budget. The bad food, lack of sleep and need for stimulants were constant facts of life on the road. Curt’s painting for the front cover of Up On The Sun gave an accurate indication of the band’s intake priorities. It was a picture of a coffee mug adorned with a burst of leaves form a marijuana plant.

“Unfortunately, I’m pretty much addicted to caffeine at this point,” Bostrom said. “It’s the only addictive substance I haven’t been able to shake. I tried, and it really hurt hard to try to cold turkey without coffee. The Descendents [another SST band] were heavily into coffee, and the Minutemen were into coffee, and we drink it.

“But we weren’t really influenced [musically] by any of that wave. The bands that we were listening to [before SST] from L.A. were like the Dangerhouse artists. And the original Slash [Records] artists, like Germs, Plugz, Alley Cats, the Dils, stuff like that. The first wave. I know the Damned came to L.A. in like 1977, and a lot of kids saw that and thought that was great. We listened to the bands that were influenced by the Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned. Not the second generation, or whatever. We came up at the same time as them. We never heard of the Minutemen until we had already kind of crystallized our thing.

“Being with SST gave us the opportunity to do even more gigs, expand our base,” Bostrom said. “And also play to their audience, which we found somewhat distasteful. So it led us to, like, blow off punk rock, and kind of go into the more mainstream sound. We started doing country-rock, or Creedence-y sort of stuff, or whatever we’re kind of still known for [today].

“We sent with SST on a national tour. And they had already done a few national tours, and had laid the groundwork for the touring network that they had. Then they had their own booking agency, which they started. And by the time Up On The Sun came out in ’85, we were able to tour the whole country, and capitalize on the fact that that record did very well for us.

“At the time,” Bostrom said, “the independent market was so small, that that record was able to reach #10 on the independent chart they had in Rolling Stone. Now, in order to get to #10, you’ve probably got to sell 10 times as many records as we did to do it 10 years ago. But around ’85, we started being able to support ourselves [solely through music]. We would put out a record, tour for like six month, chill for six months. Make another record, and start the whole thing over again.

“Of course, what we would do was cut corners like mad. We’d go out in a van with our small gear, sleep on people’s floors, or get one [motel] room, and sneak into it. And that started getting old. [Note: And dangerous. Around this time, D. Boon of the Minutemen was killed in a van accident on the highway.]

“Then, about that time, Husker Du and Replacements got signed [by major labels],” Bostrom said. “Se we began to get this pressure on us, like ‘Why haven’t you guys gotten signed?’ And we also started reaching kind of the ceiling of what we could do [saleswise] with SST. They could only push us so hard. They really weren’t geared toward bands that knew nothing about the business, and just wanted to make a record or two, and would get no exposure otherwise.”

“All through the ’80s, we had our cool relationship with this batch of other people that had their artistic intentions, financial intentions, social intentions and whatever,” Cris said. “And we managed to work within their confines at SSt. The art side of it was opening up, so it worked for us. Artistically [speaking], we were able to get done what we wanted to get done. Because that’s where we’ve always been coming from. We just want to do this work, you know? Regardless of [any interference]. But at a certain point, it fell apart.”

After touring behind Up On The Sun for most of 1985, the Meat Puppets put out the six-song EP Out My Way in 1986. Along with five new Kirkwood compositions (three of which were co-credited to Cris), the released contained, in a deliberate nod to rock ‘n’ roll history, a wild cover of Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly.” It had been 30 years since the original was cut, and the band still had enough of its late ’70s punk spirit remaining to do a bang-up job on it.

But, in all likelihood, it was the Creedence Clearwater version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” that inspired the Meat Puppets to cover it, as opposed to the original Little Richard recording.

The Late ’80s: Hallucinations, Eggs, and Other Scary Stuff

The year 1987 was a particularly busy one for the Meat Puppets. They recorded and released two full-length albums, kept touring like crazy, yet still weren’t convinced that the band was getting anywhere. After the Mirage album was completed, they concluded that its songs were too polished to play on stage night after night.

“We did Mirage, which was our proper followup to Up On The Sun,” Bostrom said. “And we spent about a month and a half doing it, which for us was quite a lot. We were very meticulous with it.”

“We farted around in the studio,” Cris recalled. “And the songs were a lot more conceptual, in a way. But then, all the Meat Puppets crap is all about, ‘The point is, there is no point.’ Mirage was just a little bit more picked over, we took a little more time with it. And then we just turned right around and whipped Huevos out, just because we wanted to.”

“What we found [with Mirage],” Bostrom said, “was that we only sold about as many as we did on Up On The Sun, and couldn’t really expand our base, given where we were at. Plus, we didn’t really like going out and touring on songs that were that heavily-crafted. So we did Huevos, which we did right before we went on tour, between two tours. It cost us like 1500 bucks, and we did it in like four days.

“And the idea was,” Bostrom said, “you know, ‘We need to put out some songs that we actually want to play on stage. Plus, why sp3end any more time on records, if they’re only gonna do [only] so well, no matter how much we put into it?’ Of course, what we found was that wasn’t really the case.

“We’d come home and it would be like, oh, such-and-such band has broken up, such-and-such a person has died of heroin abuse. Such-and-such a person has gotten married, or joined the church, or moved away, or whatever.’ Soon,” Bostrom said, “we kind of like got out of the scene. Curt had a couple of kids, and we moved out of the city to the outskirts, to get away from people who’d show up at our doorstep at 3 A.M.”

“Huevos, with another painting by Curt used as the cover (whereas Mirage sported Derrick’s artwork on the front cover), is now regarded by some as Curt’s “love letter to Billy Gibbons,” at least in terms of the guitar stylings employed on the nine tracks that comprise it. Curt preferred to back off of that estimation, but nonetheless freely admitted that he listened to a lot of ZZ Top in his formative years and that the pervasive influence of Gibbons no doubt was on his mind during the loose and lively Huevos sessions, which took place in Phoenix.

“Yeah, I’d say there’s probably two songs on there [inspired by early ZZ Top],” he said. “But, I don’t know, I’ve never been that heavy on rhythm ‘n’ blues. We’ve done rhythm ‘n’ blues songs occasionally, but I think [listeners are picking up on] probably the guitar sound more than anything.”

The Meat Puppets didn’t make an album in 1988, but by then had quite a back catalog available because of their seven years with SST. They were also fairly well-known in the underground music circles across the U.S. Their loyal fans loved them. They routinely won the respect of most music critics and, in more than a few instances, unmitigated acclaim. As with most bands labeled “alternative” in that era, what eluded them were fame and fortune. If you were to ask the typical MTV viewer, during Ronald Reagan’s final year as president, for an opinion on the Meat Puppets, the response you would have most likely gotten is, “The what?”

“For many, many years,” Curt said, “it was real easy, although we didn’t make very much money. It was more of a straight shot. Where we would just put out a record, go out and do it, and nobody had shit to say about it. And we weren’t you know, anybody’s big heroes, we weren’t ‘venerable,’ we weren’t any of these different things that [in the mid-'90s] are supposed to add up to something, and really don’t yet. I like doin’ music. I really enjoy that, that’s not a problem.

“It’s just a matter of basically being a fairly self-motivated autonomous sort of a person, and having to constantly compromise and co-opt myself [is something I despise]. That’s why I got into the indie record scene [to begin with]. And why I got into trying to do my own thing as heavily as I have. Even within the band I’m like that.”

Monsters, in 1989, was the last album the Meat Puppets made for SST. On their own terms, the band had been a success in the 1980s, but they had to think about the future.

“The press was going like, ‘Oh, the Meat Puppets, they’re backsliding. They’re never gonna get signed.’ And,” Bostrom said, “we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re supposed to get signed.’ Obviously, we started out as this scruffy punk band, doing it for ourselves. We weren’t really looking to make it big. But, we had kind of grown to love what we were doing, and we wanted to stick with it. And we found, as in a lot of businesses, that to stay in place was to move backwards. And we really were expected to ‘sign up, get with the program.’

“Meanwhile,” the drummer said, “on the other side, the alternative movement, the indie movement, was getting noticed by the major labels. They were beginning to buy up bands and labels. And soon, the indie network that we had helped set up — us and dozens and dozens of other bands — was beginning to crumble, because there was no product that was good. Bands were not going to indie labels anymore, and so [the old network] couldn’t be supported by the acts that were just doing it for fun, or whatever. All the good stuff was going to the majors.

“All the ‘big stars.’ the Husker Dus, Replacements, etcetera, were like ‘no longer there.’ We were just making ends meet. We decided to do Monsters more with an idea of trying to get signed. So we made that record, sent it out to record companies, and got a bunch interested.”

Critical reaction was typically positive to the effort, with the review by Cindy Laufenberg, editor and publisher of the Toms River, New Jersey-based ‘zine The Ledge, being more or less par for the course. “Those Arizona zanies are back, with a truly chuggin’ set of tunes that sound sorta like Black Sabbath meets ZZ Top,” wrote Laufenberg, who gave a thumbs-down to the Soundgarden album Louder Than Love in the same issue (#10, January/February 1990). “Less trippy-dippy than previous efforts, Monsters will keep your toes tappin’ and your air guitar in full swing, even though it’s still impossible to figure out just what they’re singing about.”

[Note: The CD version of this album, now available, does contain a lyric sheet, however, should anyone care to follow along.]

Laufenberg concluded her brief writeup by describing the Kirkwood brothers as “incredibly beautiful” (at least in photographic closeup), proving that the Meat Puppets did exhibit their own brand of sex appeal well before Evan Dando made the rounds on the alternative bandwagon.

“We ended up talking to the folks at Atlantic,” Bostrom said. “and the vice-president in charge of that kind of music was hired by PolyGram to run London Records, which they had just started up [in the U.S.]. So we followed him over [there].”

The 90s: The Big Time?

As the Meat Puppets were keeping a keen eye open for a major label record deal, alternative music colleagues form the early ’80s, notably Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers, were doing the same. Leary’s Surfers, after recording for the indie labels Touch and Go, Rough Trade, and Alternative Tentacles, eventually signed with Capitol. Sonic Youth struck a deal with David Geffen’s DGS Records, and soon afterwards Nirvana also wound up on Geffen’s label.

“They say that the Meat Puppets have influenced other bands,” Bostrom said. “And what I get off of that, when I hear people talk about it, is that we were one of the first ‘progressive’ punk rock bands. One of the first bands to come out and say, ‘Punk rock doesn’t have to be anti-everything that came before it.’ We were kind of filtering old music through a new sensibility, sort of. Through which people could get off saying that everything sucked, that came before punk rock, or whatever.

“Because before that, it was just like that: ‘You’re old.’ You know, the whole Sex Pistols thing: ‘We’re the future, period.’ That was kind of our contribution, along with several other bands that were doin’ that. But I think Meat Puppets II is one of the first overtly backward-looking albums, that really incorporated country-rock and mainstream rock into the punk rock sensibility. I can’t think of another one, and my memory is pretty good.” Bostrom said that all this information is stored on his “flesh hard-disc.”

To begin their association with London Records, the band returned to Los Angeles and entered a recording studio with guitarist Pete Anderson, who had already established good credentials as a producer through his work with Roy Orbison and Dwight Yoakam. The batch of songs that would constitute the Forbidden Places album were once again, all composed by Curt.

“I contributed a couple of [song] titles to Meat Puppets II,” Bostrom said. “I think Curt wrote all of Up On The Sun, except for a riff or two which Cris contributed. Likewise with Out My Way. Curt wrote all of Mirage and all of Huevos, except for an occasional lyric or an occasional riff that Cris would throw in. You know, a ‘part three’ or something. Cris really hadn’t written anything until [Too High To Die], on which he wrote ‘Station’ and ‘Evil Love.’”

“Curt’s just a fuckin’ machine,” his brother said. “He’s a very on it, visionary kind of creep, you know? That’s what he’s done for years. It’s like, ‘Well, there’s our new batch of songs.’ And I go, ‘Can I put a little [instrumental part] in the middle of it?’ And then I get my name on a few songs here and there. But Curt is just actually that kind of artist, who just [constantly] puts out work.”

For his part, while taking into account his contribution to the group, Curt is adverse to accepting the designation as leader of the Meat Puppets. He seems to love the band, and the idea of the band, as they first conceived it, far more than his own individual role in it.

“People put all kinds of shit off on me,” he said, “that has to do with nothing more than [me] sitting around in front of my TV, making up songs. People put this huge stigma of leadership and authority, and domination and intelligence, and all this different crap, that has nothing to do with what I do, at all. Basically, I often can’t see the forest for the trees, because the band is regarded as so much ‘me.’ And so much to do with whether or not I’m dominant or not.

“It’s a pretty psycho thing, not like it’s that crazy or anything,” Curt said, “It’s just that, in terms of working with other people, it’s always been just writing songs and then having them interpreted by this particular band. And this band can hold its own without my songs. It can do other people’s songs, or whatever. So, even that’s a crock o’ shit. Basically, I’ve been stigmatized by being clever, or something. I don’t know.”

A late ’94 Meat Puppets set in L.A. backed up Curt’s argument. The band did an outstanding acoustic version of “Tennessee Stud” during their performance. They also played a song written by Leary (which the Butthole Surfers have not officially recorded) called “Sleepy Pee Pee” (“Pee Pee The Sailor”).

Forbidden Places, perhaps reflecting some of Anderson’s influence, was somewhat of a return to the country-rock stylings contained on Meat Puppets recordings of the early-to-mid ’80s, in contrast to the heavy guitar and drum sounds on much of the Monsers album. Once again, critical reaction was largely favorable, but significant sales figures didn’t materialize. London’s enthusiasm over the Meat Puppets cooled a bit, as the label tried to figure a way to promote them.

“We had gone in to record Too High To Die as an acoustic EP, because they didn’t know what else to do with us,” Cris said. “We were ready to record [our next album] in the fall of ’92, and they wouldn’t let us go in the studio. They were keepin’ us from puttin’ out a record. They were like, ‘Well, read the contract.’ They were gonna have us put [the EP] out on Atlas, their little ‘alternative label.’

So we were just goin’, ‘Well, this is a fuckin’ wonderful situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into. Our whole little trip has been bought out by these people.’ Punk rock had been turned into little kids pretending to be English people again,” Cris said disgustedly. “Suddenly, ‘Mr. Big’ came around with his new flavor of cigar going, ‘It’s the “you can do your artwork” cigar flavor, because now it’s popular,’ and blah, blah, blah.

“They asked us to re-record our old crap, said Cris, indicating that the band was fairly flabbergasted by the absurdity of this request. “They wanted us to do Up On The Sun, all acoustic. And we were like, ‘Oh, okay, so you’re gonna sell us as an oldies act? Whatever.’ It didn’t matter how we felt about it. We were broke and up against the wall. So we had to do what we could. So we said, ‘Well, if it’s going to be a lesser priority thing, how about we do it with our friend Paul [Leary]?’ And they said ‘yeah’ to that.”

“The label said, ‘You guys can go in and record six acoustic things, which we’ll release as an EP as a stopgap until we can get the [next] record done.’ And we said, ‘Okay.’ We were without a producer and the last record had already been out a year and a half, and we still weren’t any closer to [completing another album]. Then we went to South By Southwest [annual music conference in Austin] and attended the Butthole Surfers’ album release party for Independent Worm Saloon. And we told Paul of our woeful story and he was like [in Walter Brennan voice], ‘Well, I’ll do it!’ We know his manager, and his manager pursued it,” Bostrom explained.

“So we did it. There was more pressure on us for this record than the last one. Because [Forbidden Places[ was made in the pre-Nevermind days, and was kind of like, 'We'll run it up the flag pole and let's see what happens.' But they knew [by 1993] that if they made the right record — you know, they were planning on making this record happen. So they wanted to hook us up with the right producer,” the drummer said. “We had talked to Tom Werman, who had done Motley Crue records, and Ted Nugent records, and Cheap Trick records and stuff. We’d also been considering David Briggs, Neil Young’s producer, and the label didn’t want us to use him. They were obviously lookin’ for somebody with some sort of ‘alternative clout.’”

“They were tryin’ to come up with a producer, and I kind of wormed my way into it,” Leary said. “They wanted Neil Young’s producer, and the label said ‘no.’ And they wanted somebody, I think the guy that produced Lynyrd Skynyrd, or somethin’. They were throwin’ out names of producers with platinum records under their belts. And the record label kept sayin’, ‘No, no, we want someone cool.’ And they were tellin’ me about it, and I just said in passing, ‘Well, hell, why don’t you let me do it?’ And they went, ‘Okay!’ I fooled somebody into thinkin’ I was cool.”

The band did the acoustic sessions for the proposed EP with Leary, and was tremendously pleased with the experience as well as the results on tape. They took the recordings back to the label with hopes of convincing London to scrap plans for an EP and just let the Meat Puppets go ahead and cut the next album with Leary at the helm. The plan was to record in Memphis.

“The label found the [recording studio in Memphis], I think they even own the place. It was a good place to do it. They were like, ‘We’ve got a studio out here, why don’t you come out and check it out? Check out the studio, and check out Paul. See if you like it. If it works, we’ll use it.’ We liked it, and it worked. You know, in Memphis there’s like a dozen recording sessions going on, instead of like 200 in L.A. I was able to go to the top drum store in town and deal with the owner. I could actually stick the stuff I wanted into the rental car and drive it to the studio. And there was a lot more available there. I mean, in L.A. there’s a lot of stuff, but you’ve got people who have been doing it for a long time who tend to, like, tell you what you’re going to do. It was just more relaxed in Memphis. We were pretty much able to do it more our way.

“Basically,” Bostrom said, “this album was really done by a producer that likes us just the way we are. He’s a big fan. He didn’t make us do anything. Basically, what he did was bring his guitar collection, and try to get one of his favorite guitarists to play some of his favorite guitars, and make sure the tuning was right. And let us do our things. So it was largely co-produced. And aside from fronting us for the label, there isn’t a whole lot that he made us do, or that he wouldn’t let us do. So this [Too High To Die] is pretty pure, unadulterated Meat Puppets.”

“We started recording,” Cris said, “and it just was comin’ out really great, like we knew it would. Because anything we do is fuckin’ brilliant! And with the inclusion of Paul, it’s only that much more good, green buds. When we recorded the album, we were like, ‘Look, we don’t want to put this old crap on there. These are old songs, we did ‘em a decade ago. We’re not a fuckin’ oldies act. We’ve got plenty of new songs that we like, and that’s all that’s ever been the criterion [for a Meat Puppets album]. It’s just, do we want to do it?’

“Suddenly, here’s this band that’s been this pillar of fuckin’ idealism and ‘do it your own way’ being shoved around by the one stick that everybody gets shoved around by — financial,” Cris said. In effect, he felt the band was being told, “You can’t do your work at all. You can sit at home, or I hope you like your Circle-K job.”

“Even after Too High To Die was completed, in mid-1993, the label still wasn’t totally convinced that the album had the potential to break the Meat Puppets to a wider audience. After the Memphis sessions were over, the band cut a track back in Phoenix which London wanted to release as a single. But Cris and the others couldn’t go along with that idea.

“Paul actually didn’t play any guitar on the sessions at all,” Cris said. “That’s weird. Me and him had one little jam one day. He had all his gear out there and he picked up a guitar. And I sat down at the drums to have a jam with him. I’m bigger than Derrick, so I play drums hard! Paul starts goin’ off and boom! He blows up an amplifier. It was hilarious. I guess you call that punk rock. But Paul did a really good job on the production side of it, with what he did, which is bring like an engineer’s knowledge of all the studio gear. Paul flat-out taught himself how to be an engineer, and then he’s just a really cool, artistic cat. And an old, dear friend, too. We’ve known Paul and Gibby since ’81, and we just fuckin’ love those guys.

“They’re both just totally sweet, far-out cats. Paul is tending to his own career as a producer, which is what he wants to be, and plus dealing with a band [the Meat Puppets] that he just loves. And we love the Buttholes. So it was a big butt-lickathon. It actually was a lot of fun, about as cool as you could get. We’d recorded an album that we wanted to make.

“But I’ve got my own eight-track studio here at home, and we recorded this song called ‘Don’t Touch My Stuff,’ with Derrick singing and playing guitar,” Cris said. “It’s a song that Derrick had written, who hadn’t written anything in years. He wrote this thing on a lark, and it was funny. He couched it in all this antimilitaristic cartoon drivel, that Derrick is wont to slant things as. It had this Nirvana kind of feel to it, like ‘Teen Spirit.’ It could have been on the record as a little Derrick song, but not as the fuckin’ single.

“They wanted to push us as a joke, just like they pushed that song ‘Sam’ off the [previous] record. Like, ‘Oh, wow, listen! They sing fast!’ Well, yeah, but we’ve also got 15 years of musical history. What about us as a fuckin’ band? How about that shit that we actually do? I mean, if we were, I don’t know, the Dead Milkmen or something, it’d be one thing. But we’re not, you know?”

While the wrangling over their follow-up to Forbidden Places continued, the Meat Puppets became aware that Nirvana’s Cobain was a fan of theirs, and had been for many years. It wasn’t something new or unique that a respected musician would mention in the press that he really dug the Meat Puppets, but the remarks usually didn’t come form someone who had Cobain’s level of fame.

“My old roommate had moved to Seattle,” Bostrom said, “and gotten involved in the club scene. He called me one day and said, ‘Can I give [Nirvana] your number? They love you.’ I was like, ‘Sure, what the hell. We want to open for ‘em sometime.’ I had never heard of them before Nevermind came out. We asked our manager to follow up on it. An old friend of ours from SST days, Ray Farrell, was actually their A&R guy over at Geffen. Eventually we hooked up through those channels.”

“I first heard about [Cobain] because of Ray Farrell,” Cris said. “Well, first I had seen things in the newspapers, when Nirvana first started coming out. I saw the guy mention us a few times here and there. But a lot of people mention us.”

Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow and the mother of his child, also attested to the Seattle punk rocker’s love of the music of the Meat Puppets. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Love told David Fricke (one of the last journalists to formally interview Cobain before his death), “He told me that the Meat Puppets’ second record was great. I couldn’t stand it. Then he played it to me — in his voice, his cadence, his timing. And I realized he was right.”

“I think Cobain heard Portland Zoo, this bootleg of us that came out from like ’90 or ’91,” Cris said. “A show up in Portland [Oregon]. And our shows have still been good, or whatever. And the band has continued to develop. And I think he heard that bootleg and realized that the Meat Puppets are [slipping into crazy old Appalachian backwoodsman voice] ‘still kickin’ ass!’

“Ray Farrell started workin’ at Geffen when Sonic Youth got signed. Cobain asked him what was up with the Meat Puppets. And Ray told him, ‘well, they’re havin’ a hard time gettin’ their record company to understand ‘em.’ And Cobain was like, ‘What can I do to help?’ I think he was specifically into turning people on to the shit he’d been into [when he was younger]. You’d see him wearing that Flipper t-shirt, and they did that Vaselines song, and that Raincoats thing.

“I heard that Cobain wanted to use his newfound power, or whatever, to help out shit he was into,” Cris said. “The first thing was they invited us to go on tour with them.”

“Nirvana had pretty much promised every band that they like, a week with them,” Bostrom said. “They would change opening acts every week. And so we got our week. We did a week’s worth of shows with them in the Great Lakes region. We did a shot in Detroit, a couple in Ohio, a couple in Canada, and one in upstate New York. We played with the Boredoms, too. They opened the show. Then they stopped touring and went to New York to do Unplugged, and Cris and Curt went out and did that with them. And we were gonna go out and do some more dates with them in Europe.

“We also heard somewhere,” Bostrom said, “in an article in Spin or something, that they were into Meat Puppets II, and they either wanted to cover ‘Lake Of Fire’ on their new album or an Unplugged session. And we were like, ‘Well, great. We’ll teach it to you.’ We never got around to teaching it to them, because they were horribly busy, just like we [got in 1994]. And they just said, ‘Hell, come along. We’ll buy you some [plane] tickets, and you guys can just play the track, because we don’t have time to learn it.’

“And, of course, that set a fire under everybody’s ass in the [London Records] office. It gave the publicity department something to hang the stuff on. They went and got quotes from [Cobain] and slapped it on the record [Too High To Die].”

“One night I was talkin’ to the guy [Cobain] about this and that,” Cris said. “We started talkin’ about cover songs and stuff. He said they wanted to play some of our crap. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ll show you how to do it. It’s fairly easy. There’s some little guitar things in there that you’ll have to get ol’ ‘big guy’ [Curt] to teach you.’ Cobain was more of a ‘chordy’ kind of musician. There are some little lines in there, little ‘notey notes.’ Curt, my Curt, is a pretty good guitarist, just more of a player.

“Cobain comes from more of a punker thing,” Cris said. “There’s more chords in his music. I mean, he was a good guitar player, really. But just an intuitive, natural, bitchin’ fuckin’ outlet for his screamy soul, or whatever, more than a technician. Whereas we’re more like little player nerds. Besides, he himself knew that, and interpreted it his way. And he said, ‘You guys should come and do it with us on TV.’

“It was a blast. I liked it not only because it was Nirvana and MTV, this world of Men Without Hats, or whatever, that we’ve never been allowed into. I liked doin’ the thing. On a musical level, I think Nirvana’s a good band. Because you don’t have to move your fingers [with super dexterity] to be good, right? It was good in that they put across bitchin’ shit, you know? Really organoid [sic], natural, neat stuff.

“And then to see my brother plain’ with other musicians,” Cris added. “Curt’s just hardly ever done that. I played Krist’s acoustic bass, and Krist [Novoselic] played acoustic guitar. I showed him how to do the crap simple, ‘the retard version’ of how to play all those songs, as opposed to the ‘teeny little notes’ version, which my Curt did. It was just neat to have Curt play with other musicians. And they happened to also be a really good band. That was the main thing about it. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise, if they weren’t people we could stomach. But beyond stomaching them, they were actually really fuckin’ good, in their own way.

“It was just bitchin’ on a musical level,” Cris said, “let alone the other aspects. It sure as shit didn’t hurt our career. Although, it kind of did. I mean, it kind of made us [look like] ‘the grand old farts’ who the cool, young guys like, or whatever. But Cobain knew that we were in hell, basically, that our relationship with our record company [was tenuous]. That’s one of the reasons that he had us go on tour and took us on TV with him.”

Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session started airing during the 1993 holiday season and some new, younger music fans started discovering the Meat Puppets. Then Too High To Die came out at the start of ’94 and things were looking brighter for the band. But by early March media reports about Cobain’s problems were heard with greater frequency, and his brilliant collaboration with the Meat Puppets only a few short months earlier suddenly seemed not to matter very much. Cris expressed a wish that he could have, perhaps, convinced Cobain to take some time off and come down to Arizona to hang out, if he’d been aware of the extent of his troubles.

“The Cobain thing helped [the Meat Puppets], as far as catching people’s attention and shit,” Cris said. “It was, for sure, a lot of good exposure. And then he shot himself. It was just sad, that the poor little guy had to [resort to that]. It was just like, ‘Dude, come down here for a while. Come live in the desert, that’ll make your life worth living. It will at least make you enough of a lizard that you wont’ give a shit! But, ah, too much rain …”

After Cobain’s suicide, 1994 had its ups and downs for the Meat Puppets. Meiss, a former roadie for the band Feelies, joined the band to complement Curt on second guitar. “Backwater” became a popular song (“a fluke,” Cris thought) and the album sold steadily throughout the year. With no more than a week’s break to return to Phoenix, the band spent nearly the entire year on the road, for a spell as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots.

“We toured with STP,” Cris said, “these guys who are millionaires now, basically. These guys grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and shit, and couldn’t be nicer guys. And they take a lot of shit for bein’ the band that they are, but still have succeeded really wildly in the way that they wanted to.”

“We’ve been out on tour with Blind Melon, Soul Asylum and Nirvana, and we spent two months out with Stone Temple Pilots,” Curt said. “We’ve [lately] been rubbing shoulders with the seriously wealthy. All we get to do is talk to other wealthy people, and listen to other high-salaried opinions. Their opinions are all colored by keeping their big boats afloat. And I don’t got a fucking boat at all. It gets old [hearing this stuff]. Basically, it bothers me as much as our old routine of not makin’ any money. It’s the same thing, by and large.

“I’d really love,” Curt said, “at some point during my children’s adolescence, just to be able to get things straight. To not have it the way that it has been through their whole childhood. Just constantly makin’ ends meet, or borrowin’ from Peter to pay Paul. It totally clouds my attitude about stuff. It’s been this way for years. And fortunately, for one reason or another, it doesn’t really affect my artwork.”

In their travels during the latter part of ’94, the Meat Puppets stopped in New York to do a gig at the beacon Theatre on the upper west side of Manhattan. Their audience that night was treated to a double-dose of bizarreness during the show. First, Curt finished the set dressed as a woman, following a photo shoot earlier that day for Rolling Stone. But before the set came to its wild conclusion, infamous radio personality Howard Stern, a longtime fan of the band, walked out on stage with a guitar strapped on and jammed with the Meat Puppets, to the delight of the band and the crowd. Soon afterwards, Stern invited Cris, Curt, Bostrom and Meiss to appear on his morning radio show, a session that was also taped by a video camera and shown on the E! Entertainment cable network. Stern jammed with the band on “Lake of Fire” and “Backwater.”

“Howard is a gentleman, regardless of what his public persona may be,” said Bostrom, who was allowed to have a modified version of his drum kit set up so that he could play in the cramped radio broadcast studio. “He’s actually a delight, I mean he’s a fan, right? And as a fan he’s a gentleman as well. We were able to corner him [at the Beacon] and get him to bring us on the show, which we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.

“Actually, it was my understanding that SST had spoken to him in 1986 or ’87 and he had asked us to come on, but we’d never heard of him [back then]. So, once we started to find out who he was, we wanted him to get us back on. He couldn’t remember what had happened, but we finally got on.”

No one can say, in 1995, that the Meat Puppets haven’t persevered. Even if, as Bostrom points out, they aren’t “as famous as the Gin Blossoms,” the Meat Puppets are probably the most musically interesting band to emerge from Phoenix in the past 20 years. Whether that’s enough to attain rock immortality, only time will tell.

“This is art,” Cris said about what his band does. “It’s not like fuckin’ science. This is the land where you go, ‘No what I say is, is.’ You know? That’s what art is all about.”

Welcome to the planet of the Meat Puppets.

–Thanks to: SST Records, Regina Joskow at London Records, Thurston Moore, Paul Leary, Mike Alvarez of Not Records Tapes, the SST Super Store, Dean Abramovitch, Ken Roeser, and Derrick Bostrom, Cris and Curt Kirkwood for the phoners; also, thanks to Tammi at Gold Mountain.

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Art | 4 Comments »

After the release of “Meat Puppets II” in 1984 and “Up On The Sun” in 1985, the Meat Puppets found themselves transformed. No longer mere “local boys made good,” we became players on the national stage. As more people began to take us seriously, we began to take stock of what what the band meant to us and what we wanted to do with it. We experienced lots of growing pains as we struggled to assess our goals and ambitions. But back in those days, nobody had a road map. What exactly did success look like for a punk rock band in 1980′s America?

We were already painfully aware of our limitations, that the same “straight” critics who praised our album were coming away disappointed from our performances. We all pointed fingers at each other, but at the end of the day, the truth was obvious. For the moment at least, our reach had exceeded our grasp. Our only option was to close our eyes, hold our noses and roll up our sleeves. It would take a couple years and a lot of work before we really began to put it all together and become the band we wanted to be.

But not everyone back then shared this low assessment of our live shows. Plenty of folks dug the way we interspersed breakneck punk rock with long clumsy psychedelic jams and tentative workouts of future Puppets classics. For them, the sloppy sense of discovery found in these shows was the real deal. I happen to hold that opinion myself, which is why I regret not keeping more recordings from back then. I would tape every show I could, but I only kept the highlights for my own personal collection. I left the rest of them with our sound man. Unfortunately, we had a falling out, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to get our live tapes out of his house before we fired him. To make matters worse, I lost an entire box of masters when our van was broken into during a trip to Los Angeles.

Happily, every so often an old fan crawls out of the woodwork with a handful of heretofore unheard audience recordings. A new one just came to my attention just this week: witness Peteykins of the Princess Sparkle Pony blog, who shares three shows from 1984-5, and describes his preference for those years. Peteykins is like a lot of Puppethead tapers. For one thing, he’s somebody I probably once knew but have now completely forgotten (sorry man; it was a long time ago). Second, he was kind of afraid to post shares for fear of pissing off the band. So, my purpose here is twofold: first, to popularize his recordings (and maybe take down his blog in the process due to heavy traffic — again: sorry man), and second, to encourage the rest of you. Tapers: if you got shows, by all means rip em and put em up somewhere before the tapes rot!

As far as I can tell, the Sparkle Pony recordings of these shows are the only ones in existence. I’m pretty sure I don’t have copies of any of ‘em. So, I’m as anxious to hear this stuff as the rest of you are. I’m sure it’s terrible!

GET EM HERE, and remember: if you have issues, you’ll have to contact Peteykins yourself. I’m not your dad.

Links, Music | 16 Comments »

Among the many benefits of a reunited Kirkwoood brothers is that they now have an opportunity to get out there and surpass their bothersome status as a mere footnote in the biography of Kurt Cobain. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s great when you can find entertainers more popular than yourself to help carry your water. In fact, The Meat Puppets have always counted on the kindness of strangers. Back in the day, some of our very first traction was among the ranks of L.A.s existing avante-guard music scene.

Yep, the Los Angeles Free Music Society was but the first in a long line of organizations that recognized the band’s undeniable greatness. And even as much as I love to pull out “Nevermind” or “Purple” every so often, you always tend to remember your first. That’s why I was so jazzed to find the Mutant Sounds blog. Among the obscurities to be found there are many works by the LAFMS, including work by Doodooettes, Solid Eye, as well as World Imitation alumnus, the amazing Steve Thomsen. Even folks who like their noise in small doses will enjoy the comparatively poppy Darker Skratcher album and of course the Light Bulb cassette, which contains the first-ever piece of music released by the Meat Puppets themselves.

Though some of the post-Nirvana Puppets fans might not give a shit about the noise contained on these records, I can assure you that it makes Your Truly a little nostalgic to put them on. Click on over to Mutant Sounds and check ‘em out. And if your really lucky, maybe one of the album cover scans will feature a legible address that you can send some money to. I’m sure they would appreciate it.

From the blog:
“The Los Angeles Free Music Society, formed around Tom Recchion in 1972, was a collective of underground artists loosely inspired by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (but also all jazz and classical avantgarde movements). Le Forte Four, who released four lunatic electronic-folk albums starting with Bikini Tennis Shoes (1974), Doo-Dooettes (two albums), Smegma (one album) and Airway (one album) were some of the performers devoted to free improvisation, abstract cacophony and demented chanting.”

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This just in from Dave Markey:

“Shot prior to the release of their breakthrough “Too High To Die” LP at the Ventura Theater, in beautiful Ventura California in 1993. Contains the super-rare Cris Kirkwood original “David Beware (Film The Trolls)” overture. They also jam out “Attacked By Monsters” & “Sam”. Edited in camera, Mannequins and Trolls courtesy of the stores on California Ave.”

For a look at some of Dave’s more current work, check out his video for “Rotten Shame.”

Links, Music | 6 Comments »

Two years ago, we ran an interview I gave to Matthew Lahrman back in 1993. When he sent it to me, Matt said he also had a long interview with Cris that he’d let me have once he got Cris’ premission to publish it. Apparently, they two of them finally met up, because I heard from Matt last week. The two interviews make for an interesting study in contrasts.

The following is a phone interview with Cris Kirkwood, bassist for Meat Puppets, conducted by Matthew Smith-Lahrman who, at the time, was a PhD student in Sociology at Northwestern University. Matt is now a Professor of Sociology at Dixie State College of Utah (lahrman@dixie.edu). Cris was at his home on February 3, 1993.

Matt: So how’s it goin’?
Cris: Fine.
M: Good. I was wondering how. . .
C: How did you get Derrick’s number?
M: I wrote you guys a letter.
C: And he sent it back?
M: He sent it back with his number and your number.
C: God. He sent you his number?
M: He sure did? He actually sent me your number as well.
C: Well, I’m in the phone book.
M: He did quite a good interview.
C: He’s an intelligent guy. He likes college students. I think he regrets his not having become a college student.
M: What has what you do in the band changed from before you ever recorded anything up until now?
C: Well we started recording stuff fairly quickly, with the band. It wasn’t that big of a time from when I wasn’t recording to when I was. The only thing that’s really changed is that now that we’re on a major label, they care more about how many units are sold. For me nothing has changed.
M: But before you were on a major label, as far as the business end of things, did you personally have to take care of more of that kind of stuff?
C: No, not really. I still deal with pretty much as much of it. I used to talk to the agent a little bit more. Our cross-over to the major label hasn’t been the big “now I’m a rock star” thing. Maybe once I achieve rock stardom or something on a major label, if I do, my life will change. Or if I get dropped my life will change drastically. It’s changed. The only real change is the real or perceived pressure, whichever, of needing to sell more or else getting dropped. Having to view my things in terms of success or failure on a financial level, which we never really had to do before. We don’t have to now. Like I said, perceived pressure. If I want to I can, but I still don’t have to, unless I want to give a shit. And I do to a certain degree, I don’t want to have to stop recording. I really enjoy making records. But I record at home all the time. That’s really where my true interests lie.
M: On your own?
C: Yea. I have my own home studio. I’m not adverse to selling a bunch more records. But it doesn’t drive me crazy or anything. It never has. The goal never was to only sell records. It was to have a band and to be able to make music for a long time. It was never something I wanted to get into and cash in on. It’s just one of the only things I found that interested me, making music. And that doesn’t mean being a rock star. It’s playing the music and trying to make the two align. It’s an interesting sort of conundrum, trying to make a living out of being a fuckin’ total wasterum.
M: Is there a difference between making music on your own at home, without any thought of selling records, than writing songs. . .
C: Yea, definitely. I’ll do strictly, satisfy the creative part of myself at home with my studio. In the studio you try to do that while making it pop. I’ll do things that aren’t considered pop. You’re dealing slightly with a . . .We don’t take it heavily into consideration. Curt just happens to write pop songs, and I occasionally write a few, whatever. So the band just kind of naturally has a pop angle. But we’ve tailored that to the audience. We also don’t just go in and make records full of our own little sound experiments like I do at home.
M: Because the audience is going to be different?
C: The band doesn’t do the kind of shit that I do. The band noise is more playing Curt’s songs, and wanting to go in and sculpt, give a little version of each of these new batch of tunes so our friends know what they are when we come to town next time and use them as spring boards to go off on the noise making crap that is more, is a little more similar to the kind of shit that gets done in my home studio. We do that kind of stuff live more than in the records.
M: The experimenting stuff.
C: Umm hmm.
M: You do different kinds of shows. I saw you—I’m in Chicago—at the Metro and then at Lounge Ax. At the Metro you did this ten or fifteen minute kind of spacey thing, with keyboards and stuff and you didn’t do it at Lounge Ax.
C: We always do. I mean that’s the thing. We always do the different things and what-not. The reason the records usually come out as they do is because, you know, we write a lot of songs. Curt especially writes tons of pop songs. And it just gets down to what do you want to put on a record that’s only ‘X’ amount of time long? And what kind of a slant do you want to put on it. I mean it’s one particular art piece. And it just happens to be one that goes out to public consumption as well. So slightly there’s a consideration in there as to getting people to buy it. It’s like how much pressure do we want to put on people. We’re already a hard enough band to get in that sense. And it’s never been like we’re worried about being gotten, but there’s always been a certain awareness of the fact that we didn’t want to just. . .that we’re making art projects. That we were doing a particular piece and how we wanted the piece to come out. What we were aiming for for the piece. We’re not that interested in being that self-indulgent, we’re pretty interested in being pretty goddamn self-indulgent. But within the context of pop songs we’re trying to say something with the band. It’s a fairly clear statement if you read it. It basically says “fuck off and die.” The whole Meat Puppets’ stance is right around in there. The only reason we don’t put out records with noise crap is ‘cause my big brother is in the band. I always just go, “Ok. No noise jams? No bass solo?” We’re sell-out little weasels. We’ve been trying to be REM for years. To cash in and get the big clams. Everything I say is a lie.
M: So I imagine there’s. . .
C: We played at Northwestern before.
M: Somebody was telling me that.
C: I met a guy from that band Urge Overkill. He told me that the show we did at Northwestern was the show that inspired him to start Urge Overkill. I think it was the guitar player that told me that. They’re nice guys. We played at a dorm, at a frat house.
M: Yea. They have things at Northwestern where they don’t advertise it in the city. They just advertise it on campus.
C: We might of played there another time.
M: Somebody told me you played at Norris Center, which is a student center.
C: Yea, that’s it. We played there too. Oh, God. I could tell you some stories about that, but I won’t while you’re still going there. I could tell you some funny stories about it.
M: How does a record label, especially now that you’re on a major label, do they come forward overtly telling you to make more poppier songs, more accessible type songs?
C: Yea. They want to try to tell us that. They want to deal with us in the way they deal with their other artists, who all are just on their knees trying to become stars. So they try to deal with us that way. They tell you, and if you don’t do it to their satisfaction, even if you try to and you still don’t manage to get it, what they think are hits. They control you more by denial rather than trying to make you do shit.
M: So you write a song that they don’t like. . .
C: . . .and they just don’t let you record it. Basically all they are is loaning you money. You don’t want to loan money to somebody that’s invented the toilet again that’s not as good as the original toilet. That’s how they see it. Their lookin’ at it as. . .especially if the new thing is shitting in your pants, and invented a toilet that actually whisks the doo-doo away or something. “Pants pooping is in this year, so bring us a fuckin’. . .a whatchamacallit.”
M: A diaper.
C: It’s a silly game.
M: So what kinds of specific things do they ever. . .
C: They go “write hit songs.” They ask you, “Why do you do art? What is it? Are you just trying to satisfy your ego? Are you trying to make money? Are you trying to say something?” It puts the question to you, “What the fuck are you about as an artist?” Because they’re not into the art business. They’re into the music business. Selling music. They support the arts to the degree that they can as long as it’s gonna sell a bunch of copies. They don’t mind. You can be as fuckin’ arty as you want. And recently, like Nirvana, or. . .Those guys are definitely art students from the look on them. And by their song content and shit. It’s huge, they don’t mind. They can get as arty as they want as long as they sell all those records. But they’re gonna poo poo something like if our next video is our guitar player’s butthole mouthing the words. They’re gonna try to talk him out of that. And if they can’t talk him out of that, then another link in the chain will halt the process. It won’t get played or whatever. It all depends on how many units you’ve sold. It’s not like you can go in and go “we’re brilliant art. We have a really cool idea that is a classical idea that men have been about all through the ages and yada yada yada.” They’re just like “Isn’t that nice. You’ve never sold over 100,000 records with any single release. So what you are in our books is what we call a failure.”
–Cris gets a call on another line—
C: So specifically you’re asking what do they ask?
M: Do they say something like “we’re looking for this kind of tune?”
C: It depends on which particular record company you signed with, what the record company’s intents are, and that kind of shit. And it depends on what you’re A&R guy, your boss at the record company, sees for you. What do you see for yourselves? Basically what you’re trying to do is reach an agreement with the businessmen who are gonna sell your crap. And if you can all agree “we’re self-indulgent little pigs, and all we want to do is record our fart sounds on record,” and if they agree with it, do that and live with the sales that are gonna be generated by something like that. Or if they believe that fart sounds are gonna sell a gajillion records. It all depends on basically everybody agreeing on the goals of the project.
M: And sometimes they don’t know what’s gonna sell, right?
C: They like to think that they do, and a lot of times they know that certain things are definitely a trend. So what they do is basically like any investment. You try a bunch of things, and whichever one goes is the one you run with.
M: So, say, with Nirvana, they can pay for a lot of other experimental kind of stuff from the profits from Nirvana.
C: Right. And then Nirvana started out as a fairly experimental thing. It gets all into levels of, they were fairly experimental but they still had quite a bit of money put into them ‘cause there was already the Seattle scene. It had a big buzz. Things like plastic beads and shit just sets off bells. They know what teenagers are into. Teenagers are into this rebellion sort of a trip. And especially rebellion that everybody else is doing. “Be an individual along with all the rest of ‘em.” So they see something like that, and Nirvana. . they pushed the shit out of that on a certain level. But they didn’t push the livin’ shit out of it. They didn’t give it the fuckin’ Shaneese treatment. But it still got the livin’ crap pushed out of it. And once it starts to run, then they unload the coffers onto it. And they’d do that on anything. And the degree to which they push it initially gets back to that agreement that you have with the company. “Ok. I believe that this is gonna be huge, so I’m gonna push it. I believe that this might be huge, so I’m gonna push it to this degree.” Initially when you’re dealing with them, where we’re at with them now, is trying to figure out, “What do you want to do with the thing?” Our record company thinks we could be big stars, and wants us to be. They didn’t sign us to be, to continue to be the heroes of musicians. And musicians love us.
M: And the critics love you, too.
C: The critics have loved us. But we’ve abandoned. . .We’ve never stayed good little critical guys like REM or something who, not to slag them, I think they’re great, but who still, they just kind of mine that one thing. We could’ve stayed critical faves, and we still are with some records. But we’ve made records that weren’t. Which I like. I like not just being a critical little weasel. I like getting out on the limb where nobody likes it.
M: Which albums didn’t they like?
C: They’ve said bad things about all of them. All of them have had good things said about them. Some have had ridiculous amounts of good things said about them where we’re suddenly like a big band to the critics. And then some of them have been slagged like shit. Some records have gotten both extremes. Most of them have. The record company isn’t interested in keeping it at that level. They want us to push it over. They saw all that alternative shit getting popular and they were like “Alternative!” A name had arisen for it. Once it got to that we got signed. We’re pretty, fairly pro-rock in a way. We’ve been around for a long time. We can play fairly well, and if we want to we can do noise jams and be good little rock spuds. And they see that in there. And that’s what they want out of us. “Be good little boys.” To not make it harder on them. But they’re idea is that they want us to be huge.
M: And what do you think about that?
C: That just makes them say, “Write hit songs. Make it easy on us.” And we just go, “That’s fine.” I’d love to be huge. The gear that would come with it. All the little toys that you could get. My real love, deep down, is making the noise. Being huge to me means unlimited supply of tape. I could really fuckin’ lose myself to what I really love. It’s my discipline. It’s my soul, man! And what I think about them asking us to write hit songs is that I know my brother, who’s our main song writer, is a really unique and strong artist. But I don’t know how good he’s gonna be at taking his talent and imitating Bon Jovi with it. And the critics have been on us to do it for years. That’s kind of why some of the critics stopped liking us, is ‘cause we didn’t do what REM did, which is solidify our vision to the degree that we can be consumed on a popular level. We can either experiment and break new ground within our own little thing, and that’s not what they want you to do. They want you to condense, and get to the core of it. And that’s where they’re at. “Well what are you doing this for? What are you about here?” That’s where they’ll try to lead you in that direction. And, you know, the idea of a producer is take the artists vision and clarify it and blah blah blah. And years ago we went into Geffen and talked to the guy, Gary Gersh, who sat there and told us how he signed Gene Loves Gezabel without even hearing them play. He just met the brothers. Just by the way they looked. And this is in like ’86. And we’re goin’, “That’s really nice Gary.” He’s sittin’ in his socks and his gajillion dollar office on Sunset and the Geffen Company which is just so exciting. He tells us he doesn’t sign us then ‘cause he says we’re unfocused. To us. He calls us unfocused. Well, we don’t have a costume. No, we don’t. We have a costume but it’s a real broad based costume called music. Called fuckin’ whatever we want to do. “We were inventing something new here Gary. We’re rediscovering something that’s always been around. And that when it comes to the fore, it’s considered. . .It’s part of a renaissance period and everyone looks back on it lovingly, and there are high points in musical history and artistic history and the history of the, you know, the human chimp.” He didn’t give a shit. He was lookin’ to be there when the timing comes up. He wants to be a part of it. He’s the guy who signed Nirvana, who are basically the realization of what we were talking about. But they do a real good careful pop. . . a good job of being real. . . condensing it down and making it that pop thing. That’s what pop is, is an art idea that can be sold to tons of people. It doesn’t have to. . .they don’t have to get it. They don’t have to be smarter than a shoe to get it.
M: So has your next release been slowed up by this?
C: Yea. That’s what has happened. We almost got dropped and shit. We just got sick of them. We almost dropped ourselves. Just like, “You guys don’t get it. You don’t want to try to get it. Go die. We don’t care. We’ll find somebody that does.” Cause we stomp! We fuckin’ play circles around other people. If anybody gave a crap about fuckin’ bass solos than we’d be huge. So they’ve kind of slowed it up a little bit. But all that slowing up stuff also gets down to how much the artist wants to get into being a businessman. How much we want to get up and say, “No, you can’t slow us down because I’m a visionary, man, and I’ve got this fuckin’ thing I gotta put across.” We’ve never had that. We’ve never been, you know, “Baby we were born to run!” We never had this, you know, from the streets to the. . .you gotta make it. That’s where the fuckin’ passion comes from. “And I said, ‘Daddy, I want it all!’” That’s not where our whole egis has been. Whatever “egis” might mean. I doubt if it means what I’m using it as. That has never been a big part of our thing, chest pounding. We’ve always been willing to make music without anybody getting it. We didn’t really give a fuck. We’ve been absorbed into all these different little scenes, and they’ve come and gone around us.
M: How old are you?
C: 32
M: And Curt’s older than you?
C: Yea. Two years.
M: So you started out when you were, what, around. . .
C: 19. I was 19.
M: So with that in mind, you guys aren’t teenagers anymore. Rock is sold to teenagers, basically. They’re the ones who buy most of the records. Who do you see as your audience?
C: Whoever listens to it. I don’t think about that that much. I know I could, but I never gave a fuck about rock and roll. I’ve just never been into it to be a rock star. I always thought it was fuckin’ stupid. I never gave a shit about it. It’s only been in the last few years, in the last decade that I’ve realized what rock and roll meant. I always dug music, but I never gave a crap about rock, ‘cause I always thought it was pandering twaddle aimed at being baby food for teenagers. I just never gave a shit. It was all about this fuckin’ moronic teen stance that is the same thing as fuckin’ racism to me. It’s, what, play down? You play down and empires collapse. I think we’re undergoing systematized institutionalism of which I’ll play no part. Because of that I’ve been forced to watch all my friends who greedily slurped up teenage butthole oil become millionaires.
M: Such as?
C: You know, all the obvious ones. I’m not gonna name any names about my pals who it’ll get back to, and who are now rich and can fuck with my career.
M: Bands from that L.A. punk scene?
C: Like the Chili Peppers. Not to take anything away from them at all, but they’ve always been way more about. . .they got a lead singer who’s willing to do this whole lead singer shtick. And that’s just a difference. It’s not a bad thing. But they took, and had punk ideas, and the same with Nirvana, any of these people, they had a punker idea. . . not like I’m punk or whatever. . . but they took elements of that, and elements of funk and this and that and that, along with elements of straight rock and roll such as packaging, and your look. . . and those guys are always careful to wear goofy shit, and keep in really good shape. And to play with their shirts off, and have that macho swagger. All those things that are aimed at pleasing teenagers. I’ve never even given it consideration beyond, you know, “who wants to get hit in the face with the blunt end of my guitar?” I just never cared. I never could relate to my teen chimps. It’s not against my fellow man or anything, it’s just that rock itself. . .I only started to give a crap about it once I realized that. . .the idea of rock as a soul music. That I started to get. I only heard cheeseball rock, mostly. And never really gave a crap about the ‘60s bands and all that. And then I started to see that some of them, some of those older bands have got some cool shit goin’ on. I started to understand rock as. . .I just came down off of my alienated high horse. I was driven into snooty music more as I had (A) something that had a little more substance and (B) I hated everything. I hated Boston and I hated all my fellow high school assholes. I thought they were a bunch of fuckin’ small minded versions of their parents. They looked like the next step down in the rotting of American, to the sound track of “More than a Feeling.” It made me want to barf, I couldn’t relate. Then I started to see that punk. . .Derrick was into punk, and I checked that shit out. He’s the guy who turned me onto rock. I started to see that there’s a certain thing about rock that’s this Jim Morrisony kind of fuckin’ burn-out fast explode type of thing. Or just an attitude thing that you can express your feelings. There is an art angle to it that can be stroked. And not even an art. It can be an expression of your being. I’d never seen rock as anything but a product. Then I got turned onto a few things.
M: So you’re at least willing to do the product thing?
C: Oh yea. We always have. We’ve always made records. I was never against that. I was always just not interested in concerning myself about it. I think that the fact that we sell the records is the product. They’re not for free. But I’ve never been interested in having that play any part in what the product was. I strictly wanted to make it an art piece. And then if it sold, fine. But if it didn’t, fine also. I never expected it to sell, ‘cause of what people have been into. Once I became aware of rock as art, I saw why it stopped being art. That’s where I developed. . .I realized all along that my thoughts on the way that people as. . .are analogous to countries, to the world in general, and the way entropy works and why fuckin’ good ideas get used by assholes to turn the fuckin’ environment to shit. So no wonder rock turned to crap. Cause like any other groovy new thing, becomes. . .goes from Christ to Tammy Faye Baker. From the land of the free and the home of the brave to fuckin’ Pat Buchanon. Why do these things happen? What causes people to have to strive for freedom, and then let that freedom become just another cage? These kinds of things.
M: But, again, being on a major label. . .
C: That’s where we’re at still. How do you sell a lot of records? I don’t know if it was a good idea for us to sign. But we’re finding, we’ve been around long enough so that now we can still make music that we like and want to make, and people will like it. We’ve got our quirks. We’re not trying as hard to do them, ‘cause we can play better. So it’s not as much trying as doing now. We’ve always tried shit. That’s something that you don’t do if you’re a successful pop artist. You do what you know you can do. There’s REM. Those guys don’t get up on stage and try to fuckin’ thrill everybody by making noise jams, much. They’ll have their projects for that. For REM they’re very careful to recreate the record. With Stipe up front jumping, you know, goading the crowd on really carefully. It’s a good idea. It’s just only showing your strengths. But we’ve always fucked that off. Not being big rock. Like Pet Buck, a rock aficionado. Part of his art trip was to get popular. Which was never was one of ours. Curt and I were never rock gearheads. He’d probably say that he was, but you won’t be able to talk to him.

–SIDE ONE OF TAPE ENDS—

M: It’s interesting that both you and Derrick used REM as an example.
C: They’re a good one. They’re our old, you know, they go back a long ways and shit. They’re our parallels, you know, in a way. They embody a lot of the same ideals and stuff, but they were just more careful about it. They got a lead singer. They got a little creep up there that, what’s he gonna do when the bass player goes over and starts noodling on his fucking Casio? He’s got to take out his butthole, you know. What else is he gonna do? They just are a different kind of band. We purposely never got a lead singer. ‘Cause we weren’t about that. We weren’t about relating to the audience. That’s what the singer does, you know, up there fuckin’, you know, cheerleading essentially. And, you know, that wasn’t part of the trip. It was for those guys, definitely. They’ve always been, you know, years ago they wore those little vests and their long sleeved shirts and all that. Everybody’s been a lot more careful about being good little pop stars than we have, that’s for god damn sure.
M: So have you been careful not to be the good little pop artists?
C: No. We haven’t tried. It just comes naturally to us. That’s what I’m saying. We’re not like anti-pop, you know. I’m not fuckin’ Trent Rezner or whatever. I’m not trying to appease to a radically different crowd either. We’re radical as fuck but not in a traditionally radical. . I’m not gonna get into, you know, techno-whatever and cut my hair sideways or whatever. I don’t need to. I’m fuckin’ radical in my ideas. And also not sucking up to the notion of radicalism because I don’t believe in normalism. I just do exclusively what I want to do. And that’s as radical as you can get these days. It’s not like weird for weird’s sake. It’s fuckin’ freedom because that’s what my mind needs.
Music to me is really broad based. I like all sorts of different kinds of music a lot. Some kinds that aren’t considered cool at all. I like classical. I listen to it all the time. It just fuckin’ fucks my brain up. All different types. Some really old shit, you know, newer composers. Plus a ton of other stuff. I like, you know, fuckin’, the “Ritual de Bobo” by the Pigmies of Ghana or whatever. I’m into all sorts of crap. And I like to play all sorts of crap. It’s a question of me and my big. . .rather than me and my tenure as a rock star.
The Meat Puppets have always been a live project and that’s what all great art is. Somebody can’t help it. We are what we are, period. We’re not what we’re trying to be.
M: So is it possible to sell a lot of records, to have a platinum album, with that attitude?
C: At points it’s been possible. And like I said before, when those points have arisen, you know, those are considered golden ages. And very rarely has it been that the artists with the most radical and outward considerations and, you know, the most advanced and considered playing and whatnot have been on the top of the charts. In the ‘60s they were. In the bebop era they kinda were; the big band/bebop era. Those guys were definitely the furthest out and coolest shit around and it was what everybody was into. They’re considered golden ages.
M: What about this whole Seattle thing?
C: I don’t think they’re that.. .the guys are just a bunch of heavy metal posers. Suckin’ up big time to.. .I just saw the Seattle scene developing and it was just, you know, little junior hippy rock, with their little beads, and their little abdomen muscles. And the little combination with each of the bands that are kind of getting popular now, and they all sound like Ozzy Osbourne to me, they all sound like Black Sabbath. You know, it’s trendy fuckin’ suck up shit and it’s gotten a lot more popular. I mean, I like it better than I like most rock, there’s some of it I do. I think Nirvana are pretty cool. Some of the other shit I think is just flat out fuckin’, you know, the same thing to me as Poison, basically, no difference at all. “Oh is this bitchin’ with the teenagers? Get me my funny little hat and my love of sports.” To me that stuff is fine. But I don’t think they did that. I don’t think they took extreme radicalism in any way and made it popular. I don’t think Nirvana did either, just ‘cause they smash their crap. The fuckin’ Who did that years ago. I’ve been smashing my shit for years. It hasn’t got me anywhere. I saw that band about a year ago. They played real safe. They play all their songs like they are on their record. And then at the end they smash all their crap. It’s real predictable. I wasn’t that impressed. I think it’s just like what’s kind of existed for awhile. These bands. . .Seattle. . you, know, real solemn, seriously heavy batch of fuckin’ artists purveying this wondrous new vision.
There’s very few artists in rock that I think are worth half a shit at all.
M: Which ones are worth half a shit?
C: To me, people that have done interesting things in rock and roll are, you know, a lot of the sixties people made fairly far-out shit. It was one of those periods where the best and the brightest were actually looking to go the furthest.
M: Can you name specific bands?
C: Like the Dead, who are still around. I think something like that is bitchin’ But bands that were around and were fuckin’ making interesting shit, like Pink Floyd, any of that old crap. The Beatles. The Beatles are the ultimate example of someone that were really pushin’ it, and their audience was keepin’ up with them. That’s all it is. It can exist at any time, but it’s circumstantial to the way that systems unravel themselves. You can study it a lot if you want to, and become the next Tony Robbins. You can go out there and bilk cajillions of dollars just by manipulating the group psyche which is on display. It’s obvious it’s fucked to me. I’m the next Maurice Starr. It’s so obvious, you know. Sit there and crank out this pure pabulum. Just occasionally the circumstances will come together. It always takes something really radical, like a war or something, to motivate people into a higher conscious. They have to get used to that degree. Extreme oppression seems to finally do it. The level of oppression that we’re at now is just not oppressive. This is how empires fall. They get soft around the middle. They get used to their cereal in the morning. And they get used to their fuckin’ Kenny G.
M: Or their Nirvana.
C: Yea. Or their Nirvana. Then it’s down to.. .it’s down to Lettermen rock. “Ooh. Can you say ‘poop’ on t.v.?” Which is, “Ooh. How scary! Ooh, God, he really smashed that drum up! Yike!” That coupled with Geffen having put a million dollars into it at the beginning really made them sell a lot of records. And punk rock, you know, finally coming to the surface. It’ll be gone in a couple years. And what will be next? Booger rock. It’s social dynamics once again. Some bands I just like. I like the Dead. I think there’s a band that just fucked everybody off and didn’t give a crap and plays fuckin’ goofy ass shit and stays together all these years. I like them. I like the Chicago Art Ensemble, speaking of Chicago. Modern Jazz Quartet. They’re classical musicians. People that fuckin’ devote themselves to something within themselves. That’s why I like found musics. I really dig local musics, you know, or indigenous musics. Stuff like that. I don’t give a crap about hearing these little fuckin’ guys trying to get their rocks off.
M: Do you listen to much rock?
C: No. Not a whole lot. I have artists that I respect. Zappa I think is a fuckin’ hilarious guy, flat out. Really wide ranging and funny.
M: What bands from the scene you guys started with?
C: I have my pals who I dig. My best pals. They’re old friends. Like the fIREHOSE guys. Mike and George are really sweet guys, and Ed is a nice guy, too. But the Minutemen were great! That’s a band I thought was great. I think the Butthole Surfers are great.
M: And they’re about to come out with a major label record.
C: Oh. What it gets down to is all these bands, you know, giving their ass for art, and who now get to go and be fuckin’ failures. So what do they do? They have to sell-out. God, please let the Buttholes imitate Nirvana enough on this new record to sell a cajillion copies. ‘Cause they’re sweet people and I’d love to see them make a lot of money, ‘cause all of them have more talent, and more fuckin’ open-mindedness which, to me, equals talent to a degree, and more fuckin’ humor and a broader consideration of everything than 99% of the shit that’s on MTV. And all these undeserving butt sucking little fuckin’. . .play into the hands of the people who have fuckin’ put a nice big hole in the ozone and are making Somalians starve and letting the war in Bosnia happen and turning the east coast into a garbage pit, and America into one big giant Las Vegas. And being their little good boys. It’s disgusting. I’d just like to see my friends get in with these scum and make a bunch of money and move the fuck away to some nice little part of the world that doesn’t exist anymore call “Suicideville.” There’s a lot of shit that gets me off. I’m way more interested in my life than I am in fuckin’ rock and roll. It’s stupid. That’s why the Meat Puppets have never done very good. But why we’re worshipped by musicians on a certain level. And by critics and stuff. ‘Cause we’re into these kinds of ideas. But these aren’t applicable ideas. These are the kinds of ideas that inspire men to fuckin’ rise up from their chains when they’re in bondage. These are the kind of things that get people nailed to a cross and worshipped for it. But the poor fucker who thought it up had to cut off his ear and eventually shoot himself. ‘Cause nobody would buy his crap. Or he had to get tacked to a cross or whatever. But years later, “don’t worry buddy, be bummed now, but in 100 years your butt farts, your last bag of semen is gonna be worth 100 million bucks!” Yea, and me and a lot of my pals from the days, that are still around, it’s all they. . .it’s obviously the people that had the better idea than just “I’m punk rock!” And they’re still failing because of it. In the same way that the country is going to shit. But suddenly Nirvana is huge and there’s a new president. But Nirvana is huge with their really careful record. It’s all these cool little pop songs that are all just the right song and they’re catchy and really carefully constructed and sell cajillions. And the new president is a professional politician scum sucker who immediately hires all these other old guard. And it’s just yet another fuckin’ snooze bag piece of shit politician. And basically America has gone to hell. Human kind has gone to hell. We’re all fuckin’ doomed! So what!
M: Which is strange. Another band like Bad Religion who sold out the Metro, with 13 year olds. These kids were maybe 2 years old when Bad Religion first began. But that’s who their music appeals to.
C: Because, you know, that’s what REM did too. But with something that’s a bit less moronic than Bad Religion. And carefully kept making the same record over and over. That’s fine. Eventually your market will grow up, or it will catch up. If any of that punk rock shit came out now it would be huge. Wait until Black Flag gets back together. It’ll be like mania for a couple years. They’ll be able to pack anywhere too.
M: Or Social Distortion.
C: Or Social D is a perfect example. And Nirvana is just the realization of it. They’re students of punk rock. You just distill out all the best elements of it, and it’s already getting more and more popular anyways, and you put on some cute little beads and some torn jeans and a jacket and you make it obvious how to get to it. And I’m not against any of that. I always sound bitter, but I’m not. I don’t give a fuck. People can do whatever, they’re all doomed. I consider humans the walking dead. I don’t even think of them as walking dead people. I think of them as walking dead plant life. Dirt, animated mud. Electromud. That’s a good song title. It’s too late, we already used it on our first album. That’s what Meat Puppets means. “Yea, go ahead and yammer, you little fuckin’ monkey. You little constructed bag of space born vacuum resistant nothingness.” We’re not like punk standard bearers. We’re not gonna pack the Metro with 13 year olds, because we weren’t punk. Nor are we gonna fill it up with dudes wearing cowboy hats, ‘cause we’re not cowpunk. Nor are we gonna fill it up with Prince clones, ‘cause we’re not, you know, Prince or any of that shit. But we do fill the Metro up fairly good with people that can dig our trip. We’re not that far out or anything. But we’re definitely not one of those bands that have been around forever and are still bloody but unbowed. We just never have been. Those are some funny days, when punk rock was really punk. We had all these nasty little fuckers–all of ‘em are for sure in jail by now–comin’ to the gigs. It was like “Punk or Die!” It was just so stupid. “Yea right, man! Punk out!” And some of those bands are still together. I don’t give a crap. I’ve just gotten so used to it, gotten so used to shit selling. What I consider to be pure unadulterated fuckin’ garbage. And that’s helped me to be the really self-satisfied person that I am. I’ve always thought this. I’ve never felt anything different. If I had felt different I would’ve bought into America. I’d be a good little fuckin’ controller pig, ‘cause I’m more than smart enough to be able to. Nobody comes anywhere near me in manipulability. In being me. I’m the only person I know who’s me. And I could do whatever I wanted. I’m white. I’m a white young male. I have the chance to take over the reins of Coke-Negro-Slovakia, whatever this country is called. No. I chose not to. ‘Cause I’m not into that. I’m on a different trip. I don’t give a fuck about Bad Religion or REM or rock ‘n’ roll or making money or any of that shit. But I do. I mean I have to ‘cause I have to feed my little self. So I’m an idealistic non-purist.
M: That’s what the Meat Puppets are all about.
C: Only! That’s what anybody is about. But pretty much they don’t want to admit it. Most people express it through their love of football. You can see what the Meat Puppets are about. If you talked to Derrick and you talked to me, and you see what kind of people we’re about. You can kind of get an idea.
M: When can I expect an album?
C: Soon. The record company has gotten on it. We’re getting on it more and more. We’ve got all the songs together. And there are all these bitchin’ new songs. But is it the next “I’m Going Hungry” or whatever? Is it the next “Jeremy”? Fuck no! “Have you written the next teen angst song about a teenager who’s just misunderstood”? Fuckin’ no, we haven’t. Maybe we have, but I don’t think so. We don’t deal with those issues. We never have. We kind of did on our last album. That song “Sam.” In there somewhere it talks about how someone who wasn’t related to anyone, picked up a dollop of the doobiest doo doo, sparkled like something folks scramble to swallow. That’s funny.
M: But you did it in a way that nobody could understand what you were singing anyway.
C: ‘Cause we’re not fuckin’ retarded enough to, you know, “War is bad!” “Really? We hadn’t noticed that.” We’re not interested in manipulating the indigenous market groups as they’re able to be manipulated. Sell fuckin’ titties and beer to the twenty-somethings. Rebellion against your parents for teenagers. Titties and beer to the twenty- and thirty-somethings. Oppulance and cars to the forty-somethings. Power and fuckin’ misogyny to the fifty-somethings. And fuckin’ adult diapers beyond that. I don’t know if we’re gonna be huge or not. I doubt it. I highly doubt it.
M: Do you hope to be popular? Do you care?
C: For my brother’s kids, I would like us to be more popular. For all the other people around me who aren’t as strong as me, and who can’t take what we can take. We don’t have any money at all, ever.
M: But you’ve got a studio.
C: Yea, I have a few things. And at points we’ve done fairly good. We get little tiny piles of money. But then I gotta go right back out on tour again to support everything and we haven’t been out for a while. And now we’re in this other land. That’s something independents offered us, is the ability to connect with the people that are out there. ‘Cause people are into anything, anything you can think of as a human, you can find other people who are into it. There’s billions of us, and even if you’re into killing people and cutting them open and taking out their doo doo and making a lovely little brisket out of it, you can find at least another ten thousand people that are into it. So the Meat Puppets have found hundreds of thousands of people that dig our shit. And that’s been enough for years to roll with it. But then this major label thing came along, and we’re not anti-it, it’s just too fun to resist. So we’re in with them and they’re a challenge, you know. Can we make this thing, this really fairly interesting thing, that’s been noticed as interesting, and billed as such by the rock intelligence, can we make that something that is widely received? And that’s what the critics all came at us with years ago. “Can you do what Hendrix did? Can you do what the Beatles did?” That’s what all the old sixties critics said to us. “Can you make it a movement and change to face of the world?” And we’re like, “No. As a matter of fact we can’t. ‘Cause we’re not gonna dress up like fuckin’ Hendrix did, or like the Beatles did. Nor is there a war for us to exploit. ‘Stop the war, man!’ Oh, groovy!”
M: Well, I think I’ve got an interview.
C: Groovy. You have the startings of a book there.
M: I sure do.
C: This is a stock standard “Interview to College Guy: Brand Q.” A PhD, though, in something as frivolous as that. Silly little waster of your own life and your parents money.
M: And everything you say is a lie, correct?
C: Yea. I like to preface my statements with a little bit of fuckin’ boiled yak lard.

Words | 14 Comments »

Now that they’ve been out working in the limelight for a couple years, our old pals the Kirkwood brothers are once again delivering the goods on the interview circuit. This has been a welcome development for Meat Puppets fans of all stripe. Even if you no longer care for the music, the Kirkwood ink can still hold the power to inspire, enthrall and sometime even frighten — especially if you’re the interviewer. One thing’s certain about these two, when they go on tour, they like to leave their internal editor at home. You never know what they might say. The most important job of the journalist in attendance is to keep his head down and try to stay out of the way.

When I put together the “Classic Puppets” retrospective for Rykodisk, I excerpted extensively from my collection of print interviews, creating in effect a chronological collage of quixotic quotes (sorry), but I’ve barely begun to delve into those interviews in my collection taped from the radio. With this post, I attempt to work on this imbalance with a couple of recordings from the early 80s.

The first one is from Corvalis, Oregon, during our tour with Black Flag in the summer of 1983. Flag bassist Chuck Dukowski and I do most of the talking. Chuck slides comfortably into the alpha chair at first, not realizing that the Puppets don’t ever willingly relinquish the spotlight. It doesn’t take long before both Kirkwoods work to challenge the Black Flag dominance. For my part, I’m content to just hang out with Chuck and enjoy his rap (if you’ve ever witnessed it, you know what I mean). But almost immediately Curt steps in: “I’d just like to say that I’m not happy to be here and I think you’re all fucked.”

This was Curt’s only on-mike contribution, but it sets the tone for the rest of the session: it prompted an angry call from the station manager who got Curt on the phone (off the air) and bawled him out personally. Cris takes a more effective approach, going out to the pay phone in the parking lot and placing a prank call to the station. At first, the Flag guys think it’s one of their own crew. But when they fail to recognize the voice, they assume it’s a legitimate caller. Cris leaves both Chuck and drummer Bill speechless.

The second interview takes place in NYC during the fall of 1984. Curt had tried to find something to eat before the interview, but there hadn’t been time. The deejay takes it lightly, saying we have “more important business” to attend to. But as we were to learn in later years, to ignore Curt’s ectomorphic calls for food was to risk sending him into a blind torrent of abusive rage. But he manages to hold it together here long enough to offer one memorable quip. When the deejay prods him to admit that he drops acid on stage, Curt replies, “the only liberties we take with our freedom is to occasionally inflate our tires with milk.”

In both interviews, it’s clear that Bostrom is a poor comedian. He seems content to believe that people actually want to hear about the band’s history, and he goes about trying to pass on the correct details. The Kirkwoods obviously find this approach tiresome, and actively work to keep the facts succinctly soundbytable, so as to leave more room for zaniness. And the zaniness continues right up to this day.

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Words | 21 Comments »