Meat Puppets

Comments

There are no comments yet. Click here to start the conversation!

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Printer friendly

More Music News

• Campbell: Tuned In: Sade, Pantha Du Prince, Meaghan Smith
• Bonnaroo 2010 lineup: Avett Brothers, OK Go, Punch Brothers added
• UT Symphony offers free concerts

Share and Enjoy

Curt Kirkwood perks up when he hears the words "Knoxville, Tennessee."

"Is that where Rock City is?" he asks. "I used to like that a lot. I used to talk my grandmother into taking me there."

He says it's OK, upon hearing that Rock City is in Chattanooga. Kirkwood says his grandmother used to live in Asheville, N.C., and the Arizona-based Kirkwood would visit her regularly. He says he can't exactly remember the details of Rock City, but he remembers always liking it.

And it's nice to imagine the leader of the Meat Puppets, one of rock's most lovably contrary acts, as a child looking at black-light illuminated fairytale scenes.

On this day, Kirkwood is talking on his cell phone while walking in Chicago, the city where the band will play later.

The Puppets (initially Curt's brother Cris on bass and Derrick Bostrom on drums) sprang from the Phoenix, Ariz., punk music scene in 1980, but quickly abandoned the confines of the genre.

"I thought the stuff should be as irritating as possible," says Kirkwood. "Cut out all the fence straddlers. But, you know, if there's punk rockers at the show, they liked to throw (stuff) at you. Then I thought it'd be cool to have more songs, more ballads. I'd take the polar opposite attitude of the venue I'm in. What if I wrote songs you'd sing around the campfire and played them at punk rock shows?"

And that's exactly what Kirkwood did. He injected some folk and country sounds into the act. He wrote numbers that were relaxed and melodic.

"People would go, 'There's that country stuff! You're cow-punk!' But there's nothing country about us. People are so defined by their tastes in that way. 'This is so me! That's what I listen to.' There's no boundaries on what I like to hear."

Kirkwood says his early artistic influences include the movies "Pinocchio" and "The Wizard of Oz."

"I just loved the little Munchkins," says Kirkwood. "They were so funky-looking and kind of scary, too. 'Wizard of Oz' used to come on TV once a year and that was a big deal."

He says musically, the first things he remembers having an impact were the Beatles singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and seeing the melodramatic Hank Williams Sr. biopic "Your Cheatin' Heart," which starred George Hamilton.

And his first successful band?

"We all wore powder blue suits. ... We played weddings. We did 'Evergreen' and 'Love Rollercoaster.'"

And maybe you can hear a little bit of all that in the Meat Puppets' music at various times.

The Meat Puppets earned critical acclaim in the 1980s, but didn't hit the mainstream until Kurt Cobain invited the band to sit in on Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged" session in 1993. When the show was aired, the Puppets' song "Backwater" got a boost up the charts, followed by album "Too High To Die," which eventually sold 500,000 copies.

The band's lowest point, though, began shortly thereafter. Cris became severely addicted to drugs.

"The only time it made me not dig it was when Cris was nodding out," says Curt.

Cris eventually left the band and, in 2003, got into an altercation with a policeman in Tempe, Ariz., which ended with Cris attacking the policeman, getting shot and spending two years in jail.

In 2006, Curt and a rehabilitated Cris reunited to record, "Rise to Your Knees," the first new Meat Puppets album in six years. In 2009, the band (with new drummer Shandon Sahm) released "Sewn Together."

Curt says he's considered a non-art career, but it isn't possible for him:

"Even if you think, 'Oh, I'd like to have a more standard lifestyle, and maybe punch a clock.' No. Can't do it. It won't let me. I think that's why I called it the Meat Puppets, really, because it's like out of control. It's like something else is pulling the strings."

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
Want to use this article? Click here for options!