Meat Puppets II

On July 8, 1976, a Grumman Goose seaplane refueled at Red Lake, Ontario on its way to the Hudson Bay. The aircraft had trouble staying in the air with the extra fuel—on board were also five people, ten 50-gallon tanks of propane, and a substantial amount of sports fishing equipment. Then, south of Churchill, Manitoba, the left engine stalled. Too heavy to fly with one motor, the plane dropped out of the sky. The wings were cleaved off and the tail twisted upward as it plowed 100 yards through a forest. The pilot broke his knee, but the passengers remained, miraculously, unhurt; they all fled the plane at once, as it now contained a cocktail of propane and gasoline that had been very thoroughly shaken. One of the passengers, a 17-year-old Curt Kirkwood, volunteered to walk to Churchill for help.

During that walk, Kirkwood made a decision: He was never going to do anything that he didn’t want to do. What he wanted to do was play guitar in a rock’n’roll band and stay perpetually high. And so he worked hard to make his way from a solidly middle-class upbringing to the margins of society. After graduating from a private Jesuit high school, he dropped out of a private Jesuit university. Then he dropped out of a public university. Then he moved back home to Phoenix, Arizona and worked a series of odd jobs—bussing tables, mowing lawns, driving buses. He quit those one by one, too. Eventually, just as he intended, music was the only avenue left open to him.

Kirkwood formed the Meat Puppets in 1980 with his younger brother Cris, an inventive bassist with an incurable coattails complex, and their friend Derrick Bostrom, a drummer who steered the band toward punk rock with his collection of hardcore 7-inches from the burgeoning Los Angeles scene. But the trio’s tastes proved too wide-ranging for the strictly policed boundaries of hardcore; they were just as likely to listen to the Grateful Dead or Lynyrd Skynyrd, Petula Clark or George Jones, Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart. They bonded over a love of drawing, filling thousands of pages with doodles inspired by Francis Picabia and Vincent van Gogh, Jack Kirby and Walt Disney. They also bonded over drugs, fueling their shared “trip” with mountains of weed, acid, and MDMA.

By the early ’80s, the tenets of hardcore had calcified into a strict code of conduct, with pummeling guitars, slam dancing, and shaved heads all de rigueur. On the underground punk circuit, the Meat Puppets’ long hair and psychedelic jamming were widely disdained. It was only a matter of time before the band’s volatile mix of influences would breach containment on Meat Puppets II, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert. With its release in 1984, the Puppets proved that hardcore’s independent network of bands, labels, and venues could be harnessed for much stranger deeds.

Chances are that if you listened to college radio as it transformed into alternative rock in the late ’80s, your favorite band’s favorite record was Meat Puppets II. The album earned the respect of contemporaries like R.E.M., Violent Femmes, and Melvins, but it inspired awe in younger acts. Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil speaks of II in reverent tones; Lou Barlow has called it a “blueprint” for Dinosaur Jr. Of course, the Puppets’ most consequential fan would be Kurt Cobain, who invited the band to play three songs from II on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. After that performance, the Meat Puppets would forever be linked to the grunge movement and cited as the primary influence of its tragic figurehead. Yet the Meat Puppets always lagged behind, even on the trail they helped to blaze. It took 10 years for them to catch up to the success of the bands they’d influenced with II; in the meantime, they labored away in the underground as their peers signed to major labels. Finally, caught in the whirlwind of Nirvana’s rise to superstardom, the Puppets experienced their own brief moment in the sun—only to crash down again.

Phoenix in the early ’80s was home to a tumultuous punk scene centered around Madison Square Garden, a dilapidated wrestling ring in the bad part of town. Its denizens made the Meat Puppets look conventional: Frank Discussion, lead singer of the Feederz, was a follower of Situationist philosophy known for killing rats onstage. Killer Pussy’s Lucy LaMode threw dead fish at her audience as she sang songs like “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage.” JFA, or Jodie Foster’s Army, was formed just a few weeks after John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress the actress—the group’s name was a dark bit of satire from a band whose singer was only 14 years old. The Puppets reveled in this chaos even as they sought to branch out from the local scene. “There was people in Phoenix before us that influenced us, that never made it out,” Curt would later say on a New York public access show. “We’re the first band that got outta there.”

They began sending out recordings, making connections in the L.A. punk scene that had inspired them. The song “Meat Puppets” first appeared on a Los Angeles Free Music Society cassette, and then “H-Elenore” became the only track from an Arizona band on the SoCal punk compilation Keats Rides a Harley. The L.A. band Monitor invited the Puppets to record a song for their debut album in exchange for some studio time, which they used to produce the In a Car EP, five tracks of red-hot hardcore that scream by in as many minutes. These early songs outpaced even the fastest bands in Los Angeles. “We were gaining fans out there, because I guess we could play fast and were totally insane,” Curt told journalist Greg Prato. “We had developed this way of playing a lot faster than most of the punk rock.”

The Puppets’ technical precision and lunatic live shows grabbed the attention of Joe Carducci and Greg Ginn at SST Records, home to an increasingly diverse stable of underground DIY bands including Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, and Hüsker Dü. Ginn, SST founder and Black Flag guitarist, asked them to record their debut for the label, leading to a long and contentious relationship. The Puppets recorded the self-titled album over a three-day acid bender on Santa Monica Boulevard. This was a looser and more varied outing, featuring roaming psychedelic detours as well as hyper-focused hardcore. It was also their first recording to hint at their desert origins through covers of Western hits like the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and Doc Watson’s “Walking Boss.” The Puppets’ version of the former is a piss-taking parody with bratty, mocking vocals, but “Walking Boss,” an indignant workers-rights song, is played straight, making plain the band’s sincere debt to folk and country.

But between their debut and Meat Puppets II there’s a rift the size of the Grand Canyon. Ask each member to explain the band’s sudden evolution and you’ll get three different answers. Bostrom told Carducci that “from the beginning of the band Curt and Cris could play anything, and now that he also could play anything they were no longer a punk band.” Cris demurred, telling Matthew Smith-Lahrman that “to us there wasn’t that big of a shift between Meat Puppets I and Meat Puppets II.” For Curt, though, it was simple: “Because I wrote it, and Cris and Derrick wrote most of the first one!”

The shift in songwriting duties goes a long way toward explaining the Western-gothic tone that permeates II. Explaining how exactly Curt wrote such compellingly oblique poetry on his first set of songs is more difficult. The drugs certainly helped. Two of the album’s best tracks, “Lake of Fire” and the instrumental “Magic Toy Missing,” were written during an acid trip while Curt’s friends were at a Halloween party. “‘Lake of Fire’ was kind of like, ‘Oh, the bad people! They're out tonight—look, it’s Frankenstein and the Mummy!’” he told Prato. “‘Magic Toy Missing’ was from looking at the moon and it was making a kaleidoscope happen, when you’re tripped out like that. I tried to make a musical version of the Spirograph sort of thing that the moon was doing. I wrote them both in about 20 minutes.”

But any attempt to write off Curt’s songs as the product of an altered state only tells half the story. He drew on a language of religious fervor that was deep-seated and purely American:

Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to the lake of fire and fry
Won’t see ’em again till the Fourth of July

Now people cry and people moan
Look for a dry place to call their home
Try and find someplace to rest their bones
Before the angels and the devils fight to make them their own

The drama of perdition is painted with such simplicity that it seems cribbed from a children’s rhyme, the Book of Revelation compressed into a two-minute sketch.

Curt constructs a new character for II: the slacker-prophet, who, like an omniscient desert flâneur, observes everything that happens from his position of relative idleness. “Plateau” describes striving toward the afterlife as scaling a grand plateau where “holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand/To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands.” But our narrator remains unbothered; he knows that “there’s nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop/And an illustrated book about birds,” nothing to meet the newly deceased at their goal other than mundanity. These songs seem like they’ve always existed, like they’ve been channeled from some hymnal lost and forgotten in the sand. But Curt, when pressed, will pause and shrug and say it’s “probably just desert stuff.”

Expressing these strange allegories of doomed America required something new of Curt. Now that he’d written these haunted honky-tonk songs, he dropped his hardcore screaming and adopted a vocal style somewhere between a bored drawl and a strained caterwaul. It also required buy-in from his bandmates, who he recalls as having to be convinced of the Puppets’ country pivot. But Cris and Bostrom didn’t seem to mind. In fact they savored the opportunity to get high—this time the drug of choice was MDMA, scored off an ASU chemistry prof and gulped down in double-locked capsules—and play like their heroes. Bostrom loosened up and played simpler, more expressive drums like his idols Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, while Cris filled up the newly created space with busy, percolating bass lines inspired by Phil Lesh. These were not trendy names in Los Angeles’ punk scene in 1983, but the Puppets embraced their most unfashionable impulses, sticking up for the mainstream yet somehow becoming outsiders even to the outsiders.

The Puppets didn’t immediately reveal their new direction on II. Album opener “Split Myself in Two” could pass as a hardcore song, maybe, with all three Puppets racing each other to the end until they are overtaken by the washes of distortion pouring out of Curt’s guitar. Except that the lyrics give the lie to any punk rock posturing: For those paying attention, the song serves as the introduction to Curt’s mystical main character, who sells his soul for “the card that said I never would fall.” For the rest of the song, and the rest of the album, he’s in a panic about the return of the devil, who “said I’m leaving now but I want what you owe me/I’ll be back in a little while.” Similar paranoid encounters litter the album, as if the singer is on the run across a degraded West that, despite its scope, is still claustrophobic and mean.

“Lost” finds him on the highway in search of a safe haven. It’s a road song worthy of Johnny Cash, but if he’s been everywhere, man, Curt has been nowhere, doing laps around the desert. A shuffling beat and a walking bassline propel him forward, but he’s “lost on the freeway again/Looking for means to an end,” running out of favors and running out of friends. He does his best cowboy impression, complete with unhinged “Yahooo!,” and it’s almost believable; more authentic is his dexterously picked guitar solo, which has a twang more befitting the Grand Ole Opry than the Whisky. The inverse of this suffocating West is Curt’s inner world. “I can’t see the end of me,” he sings on “Oh, Me,” “My whole expanse I cannot see.” It’s a classic stoner conceit of glassy-eyed introspection, finding freedom in his mind as he’s caught wandering the arid plains.

Despite the freewheeling drug use, the Puppets were focused on what they knew would be their statement album. “We recorded it a lot more carefully,” Bostrom told Prato. “We sat down and tried to make the arrangements different, we worked more closely with [SST producer] Spot, chased more people out of the studio—it was just the three of us working intently.” They completed the record in May 1983, but their statement would be delayed. SST did not have the record mixed until November of that year, and it wasn’t released until April 1984, an eternity in the quickly evolving world of punk rock.

Still, II pissed off the punks. Playing these navel-gazing, shit-kicking songs on the hardcore circuit was never going to be easy, especially opening for Black Flag, who were a lightning rod for aggressively macho crowds. But the Puppets didn’t even try to meet them in the middle; if anything, they ran in the opposite direction. They treated their audiences to 15-minute-long Grateful Dead covers. They played selections from Elvis and the Beatles. They practiced their harmonizing with Everly Brothers tunes. In return they were spat at and physically threatened. Not to be intimidated, Curt and company would then scream obscenities and play sloppily on purpose. A portion of the audience would always stick it out anyway, drawn in by their audacity. As with the Replacements, the Puppets put on a good show even when they were bad.

The more pressing concern during the ’84 tour was the Puppets’ deteriorating relationship with SST. Despite a four-star review in Rolling Stone that called II “one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums of 1984,” the band could not find their record on shelves no matter where they went. Were copies sold out, or were they not being distributed at all? It was impossible to say, but after the delay in the album’s production, it was easy for the Puppets to sense that they were not a priority for their label. The root of the problem was a clash of cultures: Bostrom explained to Jim Ruland that touring with Black Flag was “grueling and authoritarian,” an exercise in rigor and discipline that epitomized the strict SST ethos.

Beginning with their next album, Up on the Sun, the Puppets began doing things their own way. They bought an RV and reached out to Frank Riley, who booked artists like Violent Femmes, the Replacements, and R.E.M., to schedule tours outside of the SST bubble. They invited Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn to Phoenix as part of a push for mainstream press. Their intentions were increasingly clear: They wanted to get signed to a major label. Yet in the second half of the ’80s, the work began to suffer. The critically lauded Up on the Sun was followed by a series of hit-or-miss records. “You get into a whole different level of slogging and careering, whereas nothing after Up on the Sun is nearly as brilliant,” Bostrum admitted to Prato. “You get this success and you want to take it further. The only direction that you think to go in is like, mainstream. We’re doing songs that are less quirky, with a greater attempt to replicate standard kind of pop sounds, and not having quite as much success with it.”

Meanwhile, their peers were leaving them behind. By 1990, the Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. had signed to Sire, Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. had signed to Warner Bros., and Sonic Youth had signed to Geffen. A possible deal with Atlantic for the Puppets’ sixth album Monsters was blocked by Ginn, leading to litigation on both sides. Finally, they signed to London Recordings for 1991’s Forbidden Places, which sold 60,000 copies—their biggest hit so far, but still far short of their ambitions.

Help came from an unlikely source. The Puppets learned they were favorites of grunge wunderkind Kurt Cobain through an interview in Spin; shortly thereafter, they were invited to open a leg of the In Utero tour (Cobain used the tour as a sort of showcase of his influences—other openers included the Boredoms, Half Japanese, and Butthole Surfers). Backstage at the Buffalo show, Cobain made an announcement: He had just signed on to play MTV Unplugged, and he wanted the Meat Puppets to play, too. The recording would be in less than two weeks.

It was a gesture of solidarity from the biggest rock star in the world. MTV wasn’t thrilled. They had imagined Cobain’s guest stars would be Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell, not a pair of unknown brothers playing songs from a decade-old album. But on the night, the Kirkwoods were there, hiding behind matching shoulder-length, curly brown hair. Curt used a quarter to pluck Pat Smear’s red, white, and blue Buck Owens guitar while Cris borrowed Krist Novoselic’s acoustic bass. “That’s Curt, and that’s Cris,” Novoselic introduced them to the crowd. “No, that’s Kurt, and that’s Krist,” answered Cris. “No, I’m Thing 1, and that’s Thing 2,” Curt rejoined. The band, backed by Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, played languid versions of “Plateau,” “Oh, Me,” and “Lake of Fire,” with Cobain swiveling in an office chair like a preoccupied child, his voice a softer take on Curt’s wild warble.

The performance garnered publicity on a level completely unprecedented for the band. After Cobain’s death by suicide the following April, MTV ran Unplugged on a loop. DGC released MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994, giving the Puppets the unenviable fortune of being guest stars on a posthumous album, lauded as a favorite of the deceased. The material benefits were undeniable. The next Puppets album, Too High to Die, released in January 1994, was certified gold, selling more copies than all their other albums combined. But the band had trouble processing its sudden success and the tragic circumstances surrounding it. “At that fucking point in my life, for Kurt Cobain to come from out of nowhere… I mean, I had no fucking association with the guy, none whatsoever, until —BOOM!—there he was,” Curt told Option magazine in 1995. “When you’ve been dogged all your life, and all of a sudden some little champion comes through for you… I don’t know what to say. I wish my thoughts could come out more completely.”

The Meat Puppets had finally reached their peak, and on the other side was not a plateau but a cliff. During an arena tour with Stone Temple Pilots, Cris began using heroin, forming an addiction that quickly led to his ouster from the band. Tragedies piled up, including the deaths of his wife and one of his best friends. Meanwhile, Curt gamely kept on with different iterations of the Puppets and a short-lived supergroup, Eyes Adrift, with Novoselic. On the day after Christmas, 2003, Cris was arrested for attacking a security guard outside a post office in Phoenix; he was shot in the back during the confrontation. He went from the ICU to federal prison. Finally, after getting clean in prison, Cris reconnected with Curt and the Meat Puppets reunited (without Bostrom, who would eventually rejoin in 2018).

One of the highest-profile gigs for the reunited Puppets was All Tomorrow’s Parties 2008, where they were invited to play II in its entirety. The concert served as a long-delayed victory lap for the album that made their name. The Puppets still point to II as their defining moment: Bostrom said, “It will speak to people for the longest… It stands up in the pantheon of rock n’ roll in ways that the other records don’t.” It’s a strange and twisted monument, but out in the desert, it casts a long shadow.

Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II

$23 at Rough Trade