“It’s gotten out of hand, the idea that people are run of the mill,” says Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets. “People who have noticed a `psychedelic’ strain in our music may also have been struck by how improbably unique their own lives are, and what a miracle it is to exist at all. If life isn’t psychedelic then I’ll eat my (expletive).”
The idea that life doesn’t suck may be the most radical notion in underground rock today, but then the Meat Puppets have never catered to fashion. In that sense the Phoenix trio is living out the legacy of punk rock, which produced only a handful of terrific bands but liberated countless others to think about and perform music according to their own rules.
Among the first wave of post-punk combos were brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood and boyhood pal Derrick Bostrom, who have been playing together since 1980. They, along with such bands as Black Flag, the Minutemen and Husker Du, established the California label SST as a major force on the independent rock scene, and laid the groundwork for the alternative-rock media feeding frenzy of the ’90s.
Unlike the above-mentioned bands, the Meat Puppets remain intact, and were among the last of the important SST groups to sign to a major label, in 1991. Their ninth full-length disc, “Too High to Die,” out Tuesday, is their second for London/Polygram Label Group, and in many ways it’s a culmination of more than a decade of willfully unpredictable, consistently involving music-making. In that time, the trio refused to become part of anyone’s scene except their own, and their discs remain an undiscovered treasure of the post-punk era.
The band’s 1981 “In a Car” debut EP and self-titled 1982 album won attention on the hard-core circuit, but even those contained scattered hints that the Puppets were anything but a conventional punk group. “Meat Puppets II,” with its sun-glazed country vibe and liquid, neo-psychedelic guitar riffs, established a signature, if somewhat haphazard, sound.
The Kirkwoods’ harmonies sounded blissful, dreamlike, as if they’d spent the whole day soaking up the Arizona desert sun, and Curt’s clean, finger-picking style of guitar-playing evoked the vast open spaces of the Southwest, abetted by his brother’s nimble bass and Bostrom’s agile, uncluttered drumming.
“The country thing is what we grew up on,” says Curt Kirkwood. “My brother and I were from Texas originally and we grew up around the horse racetrack in Phoenix because our parents raised horses. All their friends were cowboys or horse people, jockeys and ranchers and farmers, and they all listened to country. The radio station in town was KNIX, owned by Buck Owens, and it was on all the time. I wasn’t conscious of the fact that it was country music, because we were just naturally integrating it into whatever was popular, whether it was the Beatles or Petula Clark or Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
Although there was a briefly fashionable cow-punk movement in the early ’80s, the Puppets weren’t really a part of it, just as they also left the more narrow-minded members of their punk audience behind. Besides those influences, there also was metal and boogie that bowed deeply in the directions of Black Sabbath and ZZ Top, free-form freak-outs that touched on Sun Ra, and a gentle melodicism that evoked a punkier Grateful Dead.
Beginning with the dark yet whimsical “Meat Puppets II,” Curt Kirkwood’s lyrics began alternating cryptic psychedelia with zen-like poetry and oddly compelling vignettes that illuminated the commonplace. In the face of the underground rock scene’s almost unrelenting distaste for daily routine, Kirkwood’s lyrics reveled in being alive.
“I don’t pay/ No attention/ To the nastiness going down/ Just above me/ Within my reach/ There’s plenty of good things hanging ’round,” he sang on “Fruit,” from the 1987 “Huevos” album.
Which isn’t to say Kirkwood was out of touch with “the nastiness going down”; he was confronting it from the start. “Meat Puppets II” could be interpreted as an allegory about the dawning of the Reagan era, and the new “Too High to Die” is steeped in apocalyptic imagery.
“Roof With a Hole” laments that “everything’s been ruined by the rain” and “Lake of Fire” imagines where “bad folks go when they die.” On “Backwater,” the singer wakes up to find “blood flowing through the ceiling” and surmises, “In the backwater swirling there is something that will never change/ They just stand there looking backwards/ Half unconscious from the pain.”
Yet on “Severed Goddess Hand,” the singer demands, “I want more eyes, I want to see more life.” Never have the Meat Puppets’ vocals sounded more relaxed, or on key, and the beautifully realized performances run the gamut from bluegrass flights to gospel singalongs, Beefheartian blues to progressive metal.
The shambling, coming-apart quality of the early albums has given way to surer singing, dazzlingly tight group interplay and clearer production.
Yet, if anything, the Meat Puppets have become even more difficult to categorize. Their two most recent discs are genre-hopping tours de force, evoking different styles of music with little more than guitar, bass and drums.
Still, the band’s records remain cult items. The 1991 “Forbidden Places” has been the best seller, according to Kirkwood, at 60,000.
As a veteran of the so-called alternative scene, Kirkwood has seen bands influenced by the Meat Puppets, from the Butthole Surfers to Nirvana, go on to greater commercial success.
“There wasn’t always this opportunity for punk bands to achieve some kind of success and now it’s being taken as prerequisite for coolness, that in order to be cool you also have to be successful,” Kirkwood says.
But if commercial success were a goal for this band, it would have streamlined its sound a long time ago.
“It’s more convenient to label a band that plays in one style, but there are a lot of bands that have done just fine by playing lots of different kinds of music,” the guitarist says.
“That’s part of what we are, and I don’t look at it as a problem. It’s the archery approach to making records-shoot and see where it lands. I look at that a lot of times as being our savior.”
SIGNATURE SOUNDS: THE MEAT PUPPETS ON DISC
In a Car (1981) (STAR)(STAR): Five thrashy songs in five minutes.
Meat Puppets (1982) (STAR)(STAR): Sloppy but intriguing hints of greatness to come.
Meat Puppets II (1983) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR): Curt Kirkwood sings of bad dreams-of scaling a plateau only to find another on top of it, of drifting lost on a highway and of climbing on sand. At album’s end he’s left whistling in the dark. A better allegory for the Reagan ’80s does not come immediately to mind.
Up on the Sun (1985) (STAR)(STAR) 1/2: Sparse and bucolic, this at times sounds like a collection of demos.
Out My Way (1986) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR): Stopgap EP includes a blistering take on “Good Golly Miss Molly.”
Mirage (1987) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR): A fuller, more satisfying version of the gently rolling sound of “Up on the Sun.”
Huevos (1987) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2: Raunchier, heavier rock of rare beauty and optimism.
Monsters (1989) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR): Harder still, but more predictable.
No Strings Attached (1990) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR): A 24-cut anthology of the SST years.
Forbidden Places (1991) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2: A major-label debut that skips from genre to genre with casual brilliance.
Too High to Die (1994) (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR): The group’s best and most substantial album since “Meat Puppets II.” Produced by the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary, the style-hopping music dazzles, the plangent lyrics resonate.
