This review originally appeared at Green Man Review and has been slightly edited for publication here.
The Meat Puppets formed in 1980 in Tempe, Arizona, and yes, initially they were part of the punk scene. But through the Eighties and into the early Nineties, they continually reinvented themselves and their sound, by turns incorporating country, folk, acid-rock, and power-pop.
At their best, they created an entirely new hybrid sound, balancing all of these elements, complete with inventive guitar picking and spaced-out lyrics that were somehow both compact and hugely metaphoric. Lyrically and sonically, they were a major influence on the independent rock movement that in the Nineties gave birth to grunge.
In short, the Pups (as their long-time fans know them) were a one-of-a-kind band, true American originals, drawing on a wide array of American traditions including folk, blues and country. Their influences ranged from Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead to Marty Robbins and George Jones.
The Meat Puppets were chief songwriter Curt Kirkwood on guitar and lead vocals, brother Cris Kirkwood on bass and backing vocals, and drummer Derrick Bostrom.
After laboring in semi-obscurity for more than a dozen years, they got a taste of the Big Time when the Seattle band Nirvana invited them onstage during the taping of its “MTV Unplugged” set. The Brothers K backed Curt Cobain on three Pups’ songs: “Lake of Fire,” “Oh Me” and “Plateau.” It was a blessing and a curse, leading to heavy airplay for “Backwater,” the single from 1993′s Too High to Die, which led to a tour opening for the Stone Temple Pilots, which in turn led to Cris Kirkwood’s dabbling with and eventual addiction to heroin.
Fast forward to 1999. Cris is in jail in Arizona, following the heroin-overdose deaths of his wife and a friend at the bassist’s Phoenix home. Bostrom is running the band’s Web site, acting as chief archivist, supervising the release of a live set from 1988, Live in Montana, and the re-release of the band’s back-catalog on Rykodisc.
And frontman Curt has moved to Austin, where he has re-formed the Meat Puppets as a quartet. You Love Me is the new band’s first release, a testing of the waters in advance of a planned full-length release in April 2000. The band held a give-away of this seven-track EP through its Web site, and may hold another between now and the release of the full-length CD.
You Love Me is, like most Meat Puppets releases, a curious thing. In some ways, it seems like a collection of out-takes from 1995′s No Joke, although it contains some unique elements. One new feature is that Kirkwood wrote only three of the tracks; on the other four, the other band members share writing credit.
The new lineup consists of Kyle Ellison on guitar, Andrew Duplantis on bass and Shandon Sahm, son of the late Doug Sahm, on drums. Ellison toured with the Pups as second guitarist before and after the release of No Joke, and the other two have been active in other Texas bands.
The main impression is that this is a continuation of the direction Kirkwood was taking the band before its hiatus — hard, riff-dominated rock songs full of big, distorted power chords. But in places, it harkens back to the Pups’ last really folksy outing, 1985′s Up on the Sun.
The title track, which is apparently the only one destined for the full-length release, starts out sounding like something Mitchell Froom produced for Los Lobos or Richard Thompson in the late Nineties: distorted guitar scratching over what sounds like a basketball bouncing on the roof of a quonset hut. After a few seconds, though, Kirkwood’s big chords fall into place and it becomes a recognizable, mid-tempo Meat Puppets song.
Three other tracks — “Armed & Stupid,” “Monkey Dance,” and “Been Caught Itchin’” — are variations on this theme, punk/hard-rock hybrids of various tempos. The latter two have elements of hard-core punk, which hasn’t been part of the Pups’ act since their 1982 eponymous debut album.
Kirkwood rarely plays either punk or country styles without his tongue at least partly in his cheek, and he stays true to form here. “Monkey Dance” is built around a line from Jimmy Driftwood’s “Battle of New Orleans”: “We took a little bacon and we took a little beans,” which Kirkwood screams over and over until it becomes little more than gibberish. He intersperses that with multi-layered Black Sabbath-style riffs.
“Been Caught Itchin’” is more of the same, with screamed choruses and dog-barks over an even more manic punk beat.
Kirkwood carries the gibberish to its logical extreme on “Vegetable’s Opinion,” which has three entire verses of rhyming glossolalia. The jaw-harp and fiddle are new instruments for the Meat Puppets and give the tune a fun, country-shuffle feel; it’s too bad they’re not in the service of a song with actual words. “Vegetable’s Opinion” is amusing but pointless. Maybe that is the point.
Fortunately, the chief puppet’s magical way with lyrics shows up on the other tracks. Also fortunately, it’s all not as bleak as the title track, which has lines like, “Ever think it’s everything wrong/in a world that is totally blasted.”
Kirkwood has often called on the weather for some of his better images, and he returns to that well for “Armed & Stupid”: “The sun wants a place in the sky/as it spins all around/and the rain thinks that it was only dreaming/as it kisses the ground.”
“Diaper” sounds like something Randy Newman might have written in his younger days, a piano-driven ditty from the point of view of a baby in the crib. Lyrically, though, this series of scatological puns is a page out of Frank Zappa’s songbook: “I am a chemical reaction/to a practical solution/and I am trapped down in the middle/of a lake of my pollution.”
“God’s Holy Angels” is pretty long at six and a half minutes and contains some annoying voice-overs, but it sports another Meat Puppets’ first: bagpipes, albeit canned. And it’s a refreshing dose of Kirkwood’s lyrical gift. “Deep in the silent forest/the land makes eyes to see,” is one of my favorites. Another echoes some of the imagery from No Joke: “Man-made masters that feed on blood/all these creatures should be unplugged, I feel.”
The Meat Puppets have always been easy to over-analyze. And this is, after all, an EP (“extended play”), which record companies and bands often use to maintain interest in a band while dumping out-takes or less-commercial tracks that would otherwise clutter up the vaults.
But it’s hard to not expect too much from Kirkwood & Co., because they set their own bar so high in the early years. With that in mind, You Love Me is a tantalizing and somewhat frustrating taste of what may or may not be in store on the full-length release it foreshadows.
(London, 1999)
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