Meat Puppets - "Mirage" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live at City Gardens, Trenton, NJ 5/9/87 (Part 1 and Part 2)

In April of 1987, the Meat Puppets released their fifth disc, Mirage. This disc was the band’s first that sounded intentionally geared toward commercial accessibility and Derrick Bostrom has referred to the disc as the Pups “psychedelic epic”. This is a transitional disc for the Pups, which catches them between the blissed-out country-punk of Up on the Sun and the pre-grunge alt-rock of Monsters. The music on this disc falls somewhere in between these two points and most of it ends up sounding like the country rock of the Grateful Dead.

There are some good cuts on Mirage but this is my least favorite of the original seven Meat Puppets albums as it is “too produced”. Curt’s new Roland guitar synthesizer and a drum machine feature prominently on a few tracks which, unfortunately, gives these tunes a very dated “80’s sound”. It seems that these tracks didn’t hold up well for the band either as Derrick Bostrom said “By the end of the [Mirage] tour, however, we pretty much decided that doing this sort of material night after night was a drag. We jettisoned the stuff we didn’t enjoy playing, and began woodshedding a set of comparative “barn burners,” which became the “Huevos” album. We focused on creating more energy on stage, got looser still, and started breaking our songs open into extended jams and medleys. The party was just beginning.”

I’ve never noticed this on earlier discs, but the best songs on Mirage are where drummer Derrick Bostrom plays fast and loose; these tracks include “Quit It”, “Get on Down” and “Beauty”. The country rock songs aren’t bad and “Confusion Fog” shows Curt’s finger-picking prowess but they are missing that off-kilter charm that made Up on the Sun so memorable. “Liquified” is a great “guitar hero” song that is a big hairy rock number that showed what was to come on Monsters. Skip “Mirage”, “The Mighty Zero” and “I Am a Machine” (which sound either dated or like mid-period Paul Westerbeg [boring]).

Five instrumental bonus tracks have been added to this reissue along with the promo video for “Get on Down”, which seemed to get a lot of play on MTV at the time. This time out, the bonus tracks are an interesting assortment and the early versions of “The Mighty Zero” and “I am a Machine” seems to have more life than the final studio versions. One of the other bonus tracks is an instrumental version of “Rubberneckin”, which was made popular by Elvis Presley (but I’m not familiar with the original so…no comment) and a previously unreleased track of Curt working through some riffs entitled “Grand Intro”.



Bonus Tracks:
1. "The Mighty Zero (Demo Version)" (Curt Kirkwood/Cris Kirkwood) - 3:40
2. "I Am A Machine (Demo Version)" - 4:05
3. "Liquified (Demo Version)" - 3:39
4. "Rubberneckin’" (Dory Jones/Bunny Warren) - 2:46
5. "Grand Intro" - 2:03

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Meat Puppets - "Monsters" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live at Georgia Theater, Athens. GA 11-08-89

The Meat Puppets kicked off the tour for Monsters tour in December of 1989 at The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and, in a review of the show, the L.A. Times said: “As individual and uncompromising as the band's approach is, it is still difficult to fathom why the Meat Puppets haven't found the larger success of the Replacements, Bob Mould and other contemporaries. There is a distinctive, imaginative song craft at work in the Puppets' recent material which, coupled with the trio's blistering musicality, could easily snare fans from such disparate camps as R.E.M. and Metallica.“

The Meat Puppets released their 7th album, Monsters, in 1989 and, while the band came extremely close to signing with Atlantic, this disc was their final for SST. In the liner notes, Derrick Bostrom mentions that this disc was the Pups attempt to take their career more serious and "[court] the major labels in earnest". Listening to this disc for the first time in twenty years, I can hear the sound that band Nirvana and Soundgarden capitalized on in the early 90’s. This disc was recorded instrument by instrument and Bostrom used a drum machine to lay down the initial drum tracks, all of which gives the music the sort of ‘high gloss’ radio-friendly finish first heard on Mirage. Derrick Bostrom comments in the liner notes :"We...kept the electronic drums a secret to see if anyone noticed. Not only did no one notice, but some people even said that Monsters was the 'livest' sounding album that we'd done yet!"

Monsters is a big alt-rock album that could and should have been the hit that Nevermind was…but the Pups seemed to be cursed by bad timing and a lack of interest in sticking with one particular style of music. In the liner notes to Monsters, Curt Kirkwood said “We could have done Up on the Sun the first time around, but we didn't want to. The sound of that first record wasn't an accident...we needed the debut to have a ferocity and weirdness to it.”

As compared with Up on the Sun, Curt dominates this album with controlled vocals (that are in-key) and some chunky guitar riffs that are a mix between Billy Gibbons and Jimmy Page. “Attacked by Monsters” and “Party Til the World Obeys” are an indicator as to what Nirvana would became and “The Void” isn’t that far off from Alice in Chains 1991 debut CD. Never keeping to one style, “Light” shows Cris and Curt singing in Byrdsian harmony. One of the disc standouts is “Touchdown King”, which is the jangle-pop song that R.E.M. never wrote. Curt flexs his guitar hero muscles with the ZZ Top-style instrumental boogie “Flight of the Fire Weasel” and two very different takes of this song have been added as bonus tracks. The disc closes with the mellow, psychedelic and layered “Like Being Alive” which is a precursor to the similarly-veined bonus track “Wish Upon a Storm”.

As a point of interesting trivia, Derrick Bostrom notes that Curt was unhappy with the final mixes of "Attacked by Monsters" and "Like Being Alive" so he replaced these tracks with his rough mixes. This reissue also includes the promotional video for "Light” which features concert shots of the band spliced with footage of the desert.



Meat Puppets – “Monsters” Bonus Tracks
"Wish upon a Storm" – 4:27
"Flight of the Fire Weasel, Pt. 1" – 4:25
"Flight of the Fire Weasel, Pt. 2" – 4:44

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Meat Puppets - "Up On the Sun" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live @ McCabe's Guitar Show, Santa Monica, CA 5-3-85 (Up on the Sun tour)

In 1985, the Meat Puppets released their third full-length, Up On the Sun, and this disc was the turning point for the band’s sound. There is no sign of the band’s hardcore roots on any of the disc’s twelve tracks as the music continues on the acid-drenched, country-punk path that the band started down on Meat Puppets II. The music on this disc has held up well over the years and there seems to be an ongoing debate among fans over whether this disc or Meat Puppets II is the band’s strongest.

Looking back at this disc, it must be near impossible for anyone who wasn’t there to understand how a bunch of speedballing freaks who were recording for Black Flag’s label could transform themselves into a punk version of the Grateful Dead. In an interview with Goldmine Magazine, Derrick Bostrom described some of the impetus behind the band’s evolution in sound: “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]. “

Curt’s cover art for Up On the Sun, which shows a coffee mug adorned with a pot leaf, establishes the mood for this disc. Cris and Curt mix intertwined, noodling jams with mellow vocals and deliciously off-key harmonies to come up with a sound that pre-dates the “jam bands” that started to surface in the later part of the 80’s. The music, which is a mixture of mellow jams and blissed-out shoegazing, combined with Curt’s surrealist lyrics led Robert Christgau to declare “Curt Kirkwood is the David Thomas of endearing sloppiness “.



“Up On the Sun” Lyrics
A long time ago / I turned to myself / And said,”you are my daughter” / I saw that the image / I saw there was well, / “so you are my daughter” / Well then maybe we’ve got / Something to talk about. / Who told you so? / That gold burns slow / Like coal camper’s candles / All lost in the snow / Lay down — you’re on / The warmth that I’m weaving / Is for you alone / Up on the sun where it never rains or snows / There’s an ocean / With a wind that never blows / And if you see it closer / Then the finer points will show / Not too much more / Too much more

This is a fun and undemanding disc that you can ‘sink into’ and sail away. Two of the stronger tracks are the refelctive title track and the instrumental “Maiden’s Milk”. The later features an intertwined bass and guitar jam mixed with the band members whistling in harmony.

There are a strong set of bonus tracks on this reissue (the first four tracks are from a scraped recording session for what Derrick Bostrom called a “psychedelic epic” and the last track is an extended instrumental demo of “Hot Pink” (from 1983). The disc also holds a video of a live performance of “Swimming Ground” (which is surprisingly not apparently posted to YouTube).

Up On the Sun Bonus Tracks
1. "Hot Pink (Demo Version 1)" - 3:56
2. "Up on the Sun (Demo Version)" - 4:29
3. "Mother American Marshmallow" - 4:28 (Early version of “Maiden’s Milk”)
4. "Embodiment of Evil" - 1:53
5. "Hot Pink (Demo Version 2)" - 8:35

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Meat Puppets - "Huevos" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live @ Variety Arts Center, Los Angeles, CA 1-22-88

Always a prolific band, The Meat Puppets followed the April 1987 release of the very accessible Mirage with Huevos, which came out just six months later. This time out, the band are going for a bluesy, riff-rock power trio sound akin to the James Gang or ZZ Top. In the liner notes for the reissue, Derrick Bostrom said: “At this stage of our career, we weren’t punk enough for our old fans and we were too punk for our new ones...we decided we’d hit a ceiling with SST and developed the self-defeating attitude that as long as we were on an indie label, there wasn’t much sense in putting as much time and effort into out albums as we had with Mirage. For Huevos then, we took the directly opposite course: we vowed to finish the album in a week. “

Like Mirage, Huevos is very accessible and, retrospectively, seems to pre-date the alt-rock explosion of the 90’s. The disc’s sound centers around Curt’s thick guitar riffs and upfront (and reasonably) clear vocals, both of which are accentuated with a raw “live in the studio” production. A number of website cite a Musician magazine interview where Curt Kirkwood claimed that a fan letter he had received from ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons inspired a songwriting spree that resulted in many of Huevos' tracks. Derrick Bostrom mentions in the liner notes that a handful of the other tracks on this disc were leftovers from Mirage. While the songs on this disc come close to replicating the band’s live sound, the bonus video of “Automatic Mojo” (filmed at the Variety Arts Center in Los Angeles, Jan. ’88) shows the band playing more aggressively in the live setting.



There are a handful of standout tracks on this disc – “Paradise", "Automatic Mojo" and the brilliant "Sexy Music" – but one of the challenges of the disc is that too many of the rough edges have been smoothed off. This disc is extremely radio friendly, which shows that the Pups should have exploded long before Cobain and Too High to Die, but long-time fans will likely miss the eccentricities and raw intensity of the band’s earlier albums.

Moving over to the bonus tracks, most of these are ‘snoozers’ as four of the five bonus tracks are instrumental versions of album tracks that are extremely close to the final version. The one interesting bonus track is “Baby Want You Want Me to Do” which combines the words from “I Can’t Be Counted On” with the music of “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (a Jimmy Reed song that the Pups used to cover in concert).

Huevos Bonus Tracks:
1. "Baby What You Want Me to Do" - 1:29
2. "Sexy Music (Demo Version)" - 6:40
3. "Automatic Mojo (Demo Version)" - 3:56
4. "Paradise (Demo Version)" - 4:06
5. "Fruit (Demo Version)" - 5:20

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Meat Puppets- "On My Way" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live @ KCRW Studios, 1-16-86
(contains live versions of many of the songs from On My Way)

The Meat Puppets’ Up On the Sun (1985) was a staple of my college radio days and there was a rumor circulating at the time that the popularity of the disc was going to lead to the Pups signing to a major label. At this point in the band’s career, Curt’s songwriting had significantly matured, leaving no trace of the speedballing freaked-out punk from the band’s first disc.

Drummer Derrick Bostrom noted that, after the lengthy Up On the Sun tour, “no longer were we scruffy punks making noise for the party-soundtrack of our peers, we were now the proprietors of a prosperous new franchise”. As such, the Pups decided to record their next disc outside of an SST studio and planned test the chemistry at a local Phoenix studio with a stop-gap EP, “Out My Way”, prior to recording a full-length disc later in the year. (Those plans quickly changed after Curt broke some of his fingers and Mirage was delayed until almost a year later).

Out My Way was originally released as a 24 minute six track EP and this reissue has now been expanded to 52 minutes with the addition of seven bonus tracks. Most of the songs are straight-forward country-flavored 70’s rock with a little bit of Byrdsian psychedelia (“Other Kinds of Love”) thrown in. The disc opens with the rave-up “She’s Hot”…and the original disc closed on a similar note with Pups steamrolling through a cover of “Good Golly Miss Molly”. There isn’t a bum track on the disc but two of the stand-out tracks are “Not Swimming Ground” and "Mountain Line", which captures the classic Pups sound.



The bonus tracks, which were recorded around the same time as the EP, show the influences on the band range from George Jones (one of the bonus tracks is the Jones popularized song “Burn the Honkey Tonk Down”) to Foghat / ZZ Top-style southern boogie to Grateful Dead style jam bands (“Everything is Green” is a 8+ minute instrumental of Curt jamming to a drum track). The one oddball track of the lot is “Backwards Drums”, which has a trance dance- club sound. Derrick Bostrom describes this last track as being cut during Curt’s wood-shedding period for Monsters. The disc also includes a bonus live video of the Pups covering Hendrix’s “Little Wing” live at The Stone in San Francisco which shows just how tight the band had become musically.



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Meat Puppets - "Meat Puppets II" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Instrumental Rough Mixes from the "Meat Puppets II" Sessions

(Note: Download link posted to MeatPuppets.com by Meat Puppets drummer Derrick Bostrom)

The Meat Puppets' second disc, Meat Puppets II (originally issued in 1984), has aged well. This disc was a major leap forward, both sonically and musically, from its predecessor and started the band down the acid-drenched, country-punk path that defined their later releases. The Meat Puppets played this disc in its entirety as part of ATP's "Don't Look Back" series in 2008 and every review of the disc mentions that Nirvana performed three tracks from this disc during their MTV Unplugged appearance.



This reissue extends the disc's original twelve tracks with seven bonus tracks to bring the total running time up to 48 minutes and the disc also contains the promo video for"New Gods" (embedded above). Six of the seven bonus tracks are a mix of demos and outtakes (which include a Rolling Stones cover) but the seventh track, "Teenager" (1982), shows how the band's song writing was evolving away from their punk roots even prior to the recoding of Meat Puppets II. In the disc's liner notes, Derrick Bostrom said "The Take It! cut "Teenager(s)" was joining of two songs, the speedy first part by Cris and me and the slower part by Curt. Never much of a fan of punk rock, he drew instead upon his own tastes, creating a unique combination of country, psychedelia and country rock. The success of "Teenager(s)" encouraged us to get more ambitious on our next album (Meat Puppets II)."

Meat Puppets II established Curt as the band's principle songwriter and Curt cites Neil Young as one of his primary influences. “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 it, 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…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."

Many of the songs from this disc are still in the Meat Puppets' current setlist and, aside for a short digressions into hardcore with "Split Myself In Two" and "New Gods" and the freaked-out psychedelia of "Lake of Fire", "Plateau" (below) is fairly indicative of the overall sound of the disc.



There is a good reason that this disc was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die...

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Meat Puppets - "Meat Puppets" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - First Album Session Outtakes (first session)
(posted to MeatPuppets.com by Meat Puppets drummer Derrick Bostrom)

I can't imagine how today's RIAA-fueled culture of paranoia would have reacted to the hardcore bands of the early 80's giving away songs to fanzines and one-off cassette compilations. MVD's reissue of the Meat Puppets self-titled full-length debut contains the original 14 track disc (from 1982), the band's first five-track recording ("In a Car" EP) from 1981, along with an additional thirteen tracks of previously unreleased studio sessions and tracks from various compilations. Adding to the fun,the disc also contains a Quicktime video of the band performing "Walking Boss" at Target Video's studio in San Francisco.



This disc was the Meat Puppets hardcore album but there are some hints of the sun-baked cow punk that was to follow on the Puppets later albums. The sound on this disc is raw and loud and most of the songs are over in the blink of an eye and a burst of speed. Curt Kirkwood stated: "The first [album] was our LSD record. We were three days in the studio, and we tripped the whole time. And it was really cool, and really trying, too, because we went insane."

Like many of the hardcore bands of that time, the songs were often recorded live, in single-take sessions. Derrick Bostrom recalls that "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."

Where the Puppets showed that they weren't afraid to break from the hardcore pack is in their choice of cover tunes. Obviously NOT sharing punk's hatred of hippies and country music, the band covers "I Am A Child" (Neil Young), "Franklin's Tower" (Grateful Dead), Doc Watson's "Walking Boss" and Sons of the Pioneers "Tumbling Tumbleweeds". Adding to the potential confusion of the listener, the band's lyrical themes ranges from odes to weed ("Blue-Gold God") to twisted Bible imagery.

Given all this, I can't imagine the Puppets had much in common with their hardcore contemporaries at that time. In an old Goldmine article on the Puppets, Thurston Moore is quoted as saying: "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.”

There were some pretty influential punk discs that came out in 1982 - The Misfits - Walk Among Us, Dead Kennedys - Plastic Surgery Disasters, Flipper - Album and Bad Brains - ROIR cassette - and the Meat Puppets debut full-length has earned its place among these discs.

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