Meat Puppets reissued by Megaforce

One of the most praised bands of the 1980s and 1990s by the likes of Kurt Cobain – you can find three of their compositions covered by Nirvana in the beautiful album Unplugged in New York (DGC, 1994) – Meat Puppet, from Arizona, have always been a peculiar band difficult to classify, to put into a box, even if they basically created a bridge between hard rock and psychedelia (in the terms of her less polite son: acid rock). 

The reissues of their back catalogue from the beginning to 1989 started last year and since this February we had the possibility to listen again to a masterpiece like Meat Puppets II (Megaforce, 2024) originally released in 1984. While enjoying this album, one wonders how it could have been approached by a contemporary fan or even by a casual listener back then. 

Meat Puppets II has few hardcore punk moments – and sometimes they are mixed with other worlds such as in Teenager(s) – while for the rest you can listen to ragged country as in Plateau, or more intimate moments like Lake of Fire. Some critics have compared Curt and Chris Kirkwood creature to Holy Modal Rounders and Grateful Dead in the past years. 

Far from the stardom of more clearly recognizable groups, Meat Puppets have always opted for their creativity in full instead of giving to the public what they were supposed to want – net of some albums more refined in terms of sound – and they have paid becoming a ‘cult’ band, a well kept secret between fans and musicians, more than a commercial successful rock band. 

In a way, it is correct to find in them, as it happened, some prodrome of grunge, since their freedom of expression and their will to go beyond the categories, and their being in a way a revival of genres at their peak during the 1960s and 1970s is coherently in line of the characteristics of bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Screaming Trees. 

And if in tracks like What To Do Meat Puppets are able to fuck around with style, in the best rock tradition – think about the lyrics of Arnold Layne by Pink Floyd – the project of the band, whose records in those times were released by the label SST as it happened to Minutemen and Dinosaur Jr, was solid and devoted to variety from the very beginning. 

Mirage (Megaforce 2024), originally released in 1987, marks a first shift into a more easy to listen music, becoming more abstract and full of nuances thanks to Curt Kirkwood’s chisel work with his own, mostly acoustic, guitars. This was an era in which many bands coming from subcultures understood they had no possibility of surviving if they wouldn’t clean up and refine their sound, becoming more commercial. 

Meat Puppets followed this trend, with pieces like Quit It. Another term of comparison for the band in these years was not only Jerry Garcia but also Neil Young, meaning that the Kirkwood brothers were not only well refined instrumentalists but also nice composers, firmly anchored to the tradition of rock songwriting. 

Country and folk elements are still audible as in Confusion Fog, and will become preeminent also in the future albums of the band. And if in I’m a Machine Meat Puppets break into an attempt to give life to funky oriented music, in A Hundred Miles they present themselves as anti-heroes, with more doubts than pillars in which to believe.

As previous re-releases by Rykodisc in 1999, even this new prints present extra tracks (after a Liquified that seem like Devo from the Freedom of Choice era) like, in this case, the demos for The Mighty Zero, I Am a Machine, the same Liquified, Rubbernecking’ and Grand Intro. More openly melancholic than the previous releases, Mirage is in the end the perfect predecessor for the following Monsters, originally released by SST in 1989. 

Monsters is for Meat Puppets an attempt to create a music with a commercial appeal but full of details coming from the alternative world. It can be considered a pair to Neil Young’s Trans, in a way. Attacked by Monsters, the fist track, seems like Alice in Chains becoming synthetic, with electronic drums and synthesized guitars. Compositions are longer now, reaching six minutes each with The Void and Touchdown King. 

Strange as it can seem nowadays, at the point that such an album can be taken as a pure compromise, one must contextualize this output in the period: the end of the 1980s were years in which all the labels, even the independent ones who mostly were supported by the majors as far as distribution, were heavily asking the musicians to become more commercial. 

This isn’t something new in the music business: if John Coltrane had to release an album of ballads and one with a singer before his success with A Love Supreme, why should we be shocked if a rock band in the Reagan era was asked to produce more salable products, even if without selling out completely? 

After all, we all know what happened before. We had Nirvana, we had Jeff Buckley, we had pure creativity for a certain amount of time even passed through radios or tv. And never mind if it was mostly a revival of the music from the 1970s: after all we also enjoyed industrial-metal, like NIN, or it was the right time for songwriters like Johnny Cash to resurface. 

In a way, without all this music, we wouldn’t had neither post-rock nor some electronic music of pure research like that issued by Raster-Noton, to which many of us came after a short period in which we loved more commercially conscious acts. Without those acts, in effect, none of us would have been prepared to listen to these more adventurous musicians. 

Look at the present times, as an example. Not as far as creativity, but as far as broadcasting. We all see what’s missing now, and how much time it will occur to obtain more attention from at least part of the masses for our music. It’s a problem we can’t solve today, nor tomorrow, maybe – maybe – after tomorrow.