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Meat Puppets

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Meat Puppets are an American rock band formed in January 1980, in Phoenix. The group's original lineup was Curt Kirkwood (guitar/vocals), his brother Cris Kirkwood (bass guitar) and Derrick Bostrom (drums).

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Meat Puppets concert reviews and tour history

• rating: 90% (1)

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The sinclair in cambridge, us on wed, 29 oct 2014.

Would have been perfect but the venue shut the band down at midnight despite the crowd insanely yelling for more. Great, great night.

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• The Sinclair in Cambridge, US Wed, 29 Oct 2014 90% from 1 rating

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Meat Puppets tour history

About meat puppets.

Meat Puppets is a group founded 44 years ago in 1980 in Phoenix, US.

Based on our research data, it appears, that the first Meat Puppets concert happened 44 years ago on Sat, 23 May 1981 in Al's Bar - Los Angeles (LA), US and that the last Meat Puppets concert was 2 years ago on Thu, 29 Sep 2022 in La Souris Verte - Epinal, France.

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Music Interviews

Meat puppets return from a decade of turmoil.

Christian Bordal

meat puppets perform at npr west

"monkey and the snake", "go to your head", "sewn together".

Sewn Together is the latest release from Meat Puppets. Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood left their high society life in Phoenix, Ariz., to form the Meat Puppets in 1980. Courtesy of the artist hide caption

The Meat Puppets were never your average punk band. They listened to Neil Young — in the 70s.

"It's one of the reasons we weren't entirely accepted by the punk-rock scene," says Cris Kirkwood, who started the band with his brother Curt. The Kirkwoods also didn't fit in because punk rock was a working-class movement, sneering at the glam-rock excesses of the 1970s, while the Kirkwood brothers' upbringing in Phoenix, Ariz., was decidedly upper-crust.

"My mom was the child of a person that was the kind of rich that people don't even dream of," Curt says. "So we grew up around Lear jets and hotels and all this crazy stuff: mansions all over the place."

In 1980, the brothers left high society and started The Meat Puppets with drummer Derrick Bostrom. They were signed to SST Records along with punk bands Black Flag, the Minutemen and Husker Du. After The Meat Puppets spent more than a decade on college radio, Kurt Cobain invited the band on a tour with Nirvana , and to appear on MTV Unplugged . Soon afterward, the Kirkwoods scored a hit with "Backwater," from their commercial breakthrough album, Too High to Die .

A Decade of Turmoil

That's when Cris began his struggles with alcoholism and heroin. By the next year, his heroin use was out of control, and his life started to unravel. In 1996, Cris' and Curt's mother died, and in 1998 Cris' wife died of an overdose.

Cris says he ballooned to 300 pounds and lost all his teeth. Then, in 2003, he was shot after assaulting a security guard in a post office parking lot. He went to prison for a year and a half, which finally cleaned him up. A year after he got out, the Kirkwoods were back together, releasing music after more than a decade away from the industry.

The Road to Recovery

"It was pretty amazing when Curt called me, the timing and everything," Cris says. "I actually had managed to turn the corner ... having wrecked my career, having ruined my relationship with everybody that loved me and who I loved."

Curt says he's not bitter about the fact that Cris disappeared into heroin right as the band had its chance to break through.

"I mean, having money and fame and all that stuff, they don't say it's hollow for nothing," Curt says. "At the peak of their popularity, when things should be the best for them, everybody's bummed out, especially in punk rock or rock 'n' roll. It's not just punk rock. The beautiful people all choked on their vomit, too."

Fortunately for The Meat Puppets and their fans, Cris Kirkwood didn't.

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Meat puppets in concert, web resources.

Exclusive Book Excerpt: ‘Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets’

By Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

The Meat Puppets ‘ story is one of many ups (guesting on Nirvana’s Unplugged ) and downs (bassist Cris Kirkwood’s drug addiction derailing the band). The new book, Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets , is a comprehensive oral history of the band’s career, assembled by Rolling Stone writer Greg Prato. It features all-new interviews with band members past and present, as well as with Flea, Peter Buck, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Kim Thayil, and Scott Asheton, among others. Here is an exclusive excerpt from the book, which tells the tale of the group’s classic 1984 release, Meat Puppets II . Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets is now available here .

MEAT PUPPETS II [1984]

Cris Kirkwood [Meat Puppets bassist]: I remember getting up one morning – we all lived together, and Cinda may have been pregnant…or maybe [Curt’s children] were real teeny-weeny – and he was sitting at the table. He was like, “I’ve got a new song,” and it was “Lake of Fire.” He played it, and I was like, “God…that’s great, dude! What cool imagery and satisfying chord changes.”

Curt Kirkwood [Meat Puppets singer/guitarist]: It was Halloween. Everybody wanted to go to a Halloween party – we all were living together in the same house with some girlfriends. I thought the Halloween party was a really dumb idea. Being a new adult myself at the time, I was like, “Adults are always in disguises. Everybody’s got a dumb costume on constantly. Whether they know it or not, they’re all in costume, and they want to go out and put on a different costume and act like children.” I guess I was being a party pooper.

They all went to the party, so I dropped a hit of acid, and wrote “Lake of Fire” and “Magic Toy Missing.” I sat out in the backyard and wrote them, when it was a full moon, too. “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. “Lake of Fire” was kind of like, “Oh, the bad people! They’re out tonight – look, it’s Frankenstein and the Mummy!” Just making fun of my friends, really.

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Cris Kirkwood: “Plateau,” I thought the lyrics in that were great. Curt started writing really bitching lyrics. And it became a hallmark, it made the band what it is.

Curt Kirkwood: Whereas I remember writing “Lake of Fire” and “Magic Toy Missing,” I don’t remember writing “Plateau.” I was experimenting with moving an open G chord up and down the neck, so I came up with that one. “Oh, Me” was kind of a ponderance on something that Derrick [Bostrom] and I were into, which was “me-ism.” Ego-ism. Just worshipping ourselves. Blind faith in ourselves.

Cris Kirkwood: But “Plateau,” those songs have taken on extra cache or whatever, because the Cobain/Nirvana thing [Nirvana would later cover several Meat Puppets II tunes for MTV Unplugged ]. And they were good choices by Nirvana. That kid really got Meat Puppets II in the way that I didn’t realize people were getting it back then like that. I didn’t realize that anybody noticed at all, because all the more straightforward punker stuff had an easier time of it in a way.

Curt Kirkwood: We did Meat Puppets II , we had an ounce of ecstasy. We just snorted X the whole time, and it was “MDMA” back then. We were really into putting things into these double locked capsules full of MDMA, and getting high as shit. Nobody knew what X was yet.

Yeah, we were having a blast. See, we didn’t drink, that’s the thing about the Meat Puppets. My brother would drink some, but Derrick and I didn’t drink at all in the early days. We smoked some weed – we weren’t your typical partiers. It wasn’t “rock” really, it was peer surrealist art for us, like we get to do this and emulate our heroes.

Derrick was way into surrealists like [Francis] Picabia, and then cartoonists like Jack Kirby. We were trying to find some sort of forum for high art. And also just trying to integrate our psychedelic experience into it intentionally.

Derrick Bostrom [Original Meat Puppets drummer]: I think we did the first vocal pass, and that’s when Curt realized his old way of singing wasn’t going to match this new music. So we had to do another pass with the vocals, and it was hard for him, because before, it was just straight Captain Beefheart-style growling. And to actually sing, it wasn’t that he wasn’t able to do it, it was just that he hadn’t been used to it. It took a different strategy, and it took him a while to figure out what it was.

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Curt Kirkwood: The first album [ Meat Puppets ], I was high when I did that, so I screamed a lot. And then I started chilling out, and going, “I don’t want to scream my whole career.” Metallica came around, and it was like, “God, they do that a lot better anyway.” The vocals have always been what I tried to have stitched stuff together, get some nice harmonies going, and sing it pretty straight – no matter what’s going on. A lot of my favorite bands as a teenager were the Stones, Zeppelin. They had different kinds of music. No limitations stylistically.

Derrick Bostrom: We weren’t entirely satisfied with Meat Puppets II , in the sense that the start of it was in March, and we didn’t get it mixed until November that fall. It basically languished for at least six months, and by the time it finally came out, in March of 1984, the impact that we had wanted it to have, with our country leanings and whatnot, had been somewhat blunted by the delay. That made us very uncomfortable. We felt that this was our first inkling that how you’re going to manage your label relationship to make sure you get what you want. You can’t count on anybody else but yourself to do what’s best for you. And the way that SST – who were a little weary about putting out this country rock crap on their punk rock label – started to throw a wedge in it.

Cris Kirkwood:   I remember when Curt painted that picture [that became the cover of Meat Puppets II ]. We were still living at my mom’s house. We used to hide in the bathroom and smoke grass. We were in the bathroom getting stoned, and he picked up this little piece of canvas, and real quickly, whipped off this thing. And that’s the cover. It took him about a minute to do that – we used it a few years later as the cover for the record. It’s Curt’s acrylic work, and definitely Van Gogh-inspired painting technique. It was back when you still had vinyl, so you were making this shit in terms of being “an album.”

One of the cool things that we did was we did a photo session with this guy, Anvil Blockhammer, here in town. We drove around West Phoenix, and we were out in a field, an agricultural thing. It was Derrick’s cool arty idea – that picture that’s on the back, where we’re in silhouette.

Dave Pirner [Soul Asylum singer/guitarist]:   It was right before their second album came out [the first time Pirner saw the Meat Puppets]. I distinctly remember hanging out with them and watching them play live. Then their second record came out, and it seemed to bring another level of awareness to the band. It surprised the shit out of me, because it was so easy to understand. The music before that was really frantic, and it was really exploring I think what they wanted to do, and they didn’t really know what they wanted to do. The second record seemed sort of like, “This is what we can do, without even really thinking about it.”

Flea [Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist]: Meat Puppets II , man, it’s the warmest, coolest fucking record.

Lou Barlow [Dinosaur Jr. bassist, Sebadoh singer/guitarist]:   When they became more of “a country band,” the way that they switched between the really crazy material and the county-esque material was really almost like a blueprint for Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh. Mike Watt told me that when D. Boon first heard Dinosaur Jr., he thought we were “the east coast Meat Puppets.”

Peter Buck [R.E.M. guitarist]:   I got Meat Puppets II before I ever saw them. But I saw them on that tour. I traveled so much in those days – I know I saw them in Athens a couple of times. I think the first time might have been in New York. The whole post-punk thing in America was happening. It was blossoming everywhere. Everywhere you went, there was some new, different kind of band, that you’d think, “That’s interesting.” When I heard the Meat Puppets, it was like, “I can get some of their influences – there’s a little Grateful Dead in there, maybe a little Neil Young.” But there was interplay between the instruments that was just insane. It sounded like when you think of when you look at a magician, and go, “That guy spent a huge amount of time just sitting in his bedroom all by himself, learning to do that.” The Kirkwood brothers’ interlocking parts were so weirdly intense. I remember going, “This is more like jazz than anything, in its own weird way.”

Kim Thayil [Soundgarden guitarist]:   1984 comes along. That year, you had My War by Black Flag, Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü, Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen, Meat Puppets II , Surviving You, Always by Saccharine Trust, and the first Saint Vitus album [ Saint Vitus ]. That was the golden age of SST Records. I remember anticipating the Meat Puppets II release, because they’d become probably my favorite band of that time. I just had to hear what they were going to do next. Soundgarden formed in September of 1984. So I was tripping out to Meat Puppets II before Soundgarden formed. But when Soundgarden formed, it got played a lot. I remember playing it for Hiro [Yamamoto, original Soundgarden bassist] and Chris [Cornell, Soundgarden’s then-drummer, later singer] all the time.

The first song I heard off of Meat Puppets II was “I’m A Mindless Idiot,” which is an instrumental. I heard it on the radio, I think it was KCMU. My jaw dropped, because it wasn’t fast and it wasn’t punk rock and hardcore. It was like the trippy thing I heard on side two of the first Meat Puppets album. They expanded upon it, and it sounded great. To me, the production sounded great. And it was an instrumental, which tripped me out even more. I was blown away.

Here’s the weird thing – I still don’t have Meat Puppets II on vinyl, because a good friend of mine in college gave me a homemade cassette. On one side is Blue Cheer – it had a bunch of stuff off Outsideinside and Vincebus Eruptum . And the other side of the cassette had Meat Puppets II . That thing, I would just play it and watch the sun rise, I would play it and watch the sun set. I’d come home from college from classes – I’d go by a local convenience store and buy a couple Buckhorn Beers, a pack of cigarettes, and some string cheese, and go and sit in my bedroom. My bedroom was a sort of walk-in closet and the window faced west. So I laid there eating string cheese and drinking my Buckhorn Beer, and I’d put on Meat Puppets II and watch the sun go down. I had to do that all the time. It tripped me out, and it was the coolest feeling – being mildly intoxicated.

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And Meat Puppets II was great if I smoked pot, which I rarely did, but on the occasion I did, I was like, “I’ve got to listen to the Meat Puppets!” And on the occasion of doing MDMA or anything else that may cross the path of a 22-year-old musician who is a student. That album tripped me out – it seemed to be heavy and wild in these other ways. Psychologically and emotionally. I loved it. It had these elements that I found in the Velvet Underground, the MC5. And that Meat Puppets’ second album became not only my favorite Meat Puppets album, but perhaps one of my favorite albums of all time.

From the Book:  Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets by Greg Prato Copyright © 2012 by Greg Prato, Published by Greg Prato

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Meat Puppets II

By Matthew Blackwell

March 24, 2024

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.

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30 Years Later: Meat Puppets Finallly Hit The Charts With ‘Too High To Die’

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30 years ago Meat Puppets released their iconic Too High to Die LP just months before their heralded performance with Nirvana on MTV Unplugged in New York for three of their own acoustic songs from Meat Puppets II. Brimming with 14 tracks (if you’re including the hidden bonus track “Lake of Fire”) of murky grunge with angelic vocals to juxtapose the dense arrangements, the album was released to wide acclaim and still holds up all these decades later. Calling an album “timeless” feels cliche nowadays considering a majority of these albums we label as underrated have amassed millions of streams thanks to the internet. These hyperbolized fixations we have on classic albums can tarnish albums like Too High to Die , praising every album that was released over twenty years ago diminishes special albums like this one. Meat Puppets didn’t enter the studio to create the classic LP with complex structures and nuanced musicianship as they did, they simply wanted to create. 

This bare-bones approach can be felt throughout the album. Too High to Die was recorded throughout 1993 and produced by Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary. The punk influence is palpable in these songs with Meat Puppets opting for more honed and detailed arrangements rather than the larger-than-life chord progressions that lined their previous releases. This approach complemented Curt Kirkwood’s songwriting perfectly. He was able to explore new melodies and different approaches to his iconic vocal inflections. The album is also home to “Backwater”, arguably Meat Puppets’ biggest hit of their career. The success of this single pushed the album to sell rather well. Too High to Die earned a gold record in only a few months after its release. The album landed at number one on the Billboard Heatseeker charts and peaked at 62 on the Billboard 200. 

Enough about numbers, Too High to Die proved Meat Puppets weren’t afraid to rethink their approach. The album fearlessly intertwines different eras of different genres into one neatly woven basket overflowing with poetic lyrics and stunning harmonies. The fact a twangy ballad like “Shine” can sound so comfortable next to the distorted onslaught and blistering tempos of “Flaming Heart” speaks volumes to the headspace the band was in. The way the album is inconsistently entertaining and can bounce around moods and emotions with ease is enough for us to be talking about the release three decades later. 

It doesn’t stop there though, Too High to Die features some stellar vocal performances. The harmonies that push a track like “Severed Goddess Hand” sound like their being passed down by a Goddess themselves. The raw vocals and lo-fi tones on “Why?” emphasize the nuances that make these performances so memorable. It’s not that the singing is particularly impressive but no long falsettos being held over two minutes can compare to what Meat Puppets accomplished here. 

If you haven’t listened to Too High to Die in a while, this is your sign to dive back into its magic. Don’t approach it with the idea of “timeless” in your brain, approach the album the same way the band did; with an open mind. Everything from the juxtaposing tones to the pure playing allows Meat Puppets’ eighth studio effort to sound current and present despite the many changes the genre has gone through since 1994. Although, one could argue all those changes might not have happened if it wasn’t for the fearless creativity displayed on Too High to Die . 

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In the week of the 21st anniversary of Nirvana recording their ‘MTV Unplugged In New York’ album, and 20 years today (November 19) since its US chart entry at No. 1, Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets has spoken candidly about his role in the performance.

In an interview with Billboard to commemorate the anniversary, Kirkwood recalls how he and his younger brother (and fellow Meat Puppets member) Cris joined Nirvana on stage at the Sony Music Studios filming in New York. The filming took place while the two bands were touring together and bonding as friends.

As Kurt Cobain and the band shunned the usual expectation of playing their best-known songs and took the opportunity to acknowledge the influence of Meat Puppets, the brothers stepped out of the audience to accompany them on the three songs they covered from the ‘Meat Puppets II’ album of 1984, ‘Plateau’, ‘Oh, Me’ and ‘Lake Of Fire.’

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“I started to become friends with them,” says Kirkwood. “It was just like family to a degree. It’s a strange thing to have the alternative bands start to get that attention…But we’re all pretty private people and at the time were new to that sort of attention.”

He also explains that the invitation to join Nirvana on stage was made by Cobain in a typically matter-of-fact way. “I was talking to Kurt backstage at one of the shows; I forget where. He was just saying what they were going to go do that and they wanted to do three of our songs and just asked us real simply if Cris and I would like to come up and do the guitar stuff on them.”

Kirkwood adds that although the highly popular ‘MTV Unplugged’ series of the time had something of a reputation for being arduous for the musicians involved, “this was just like a real show, almost a coffee house-sorta thing from front to back, with no retakes or anything. My memories are really fond. I still mostly look at it as having been an audience member ‘cause I played on three songs and I’m just doing my thing.”

The Nirvana album went on to win a Grammy for Best Alternative Album and was certified quintuple platinum in the US. The previously underground Meat Puppets would also benefit, as their ‘Too High To Die’ album charted in April 1994 and spent 27 weeks on the Billboard 200, turning gold.

“I love Nirvana,” concludes Kirkwood. “When I get to talk about it, it’s like looking back through a fairy tale photo album. It’s one of my favourite memories, and it’s easy to see why. It was a blast and I love those guys.”

Listen to ‘MTV Unplugged In New York’ on  Spotify Download the album from  Google Play  or  iTunes  or buy it from  Amazon Buy Nirvana in our  uDiscover Deluxe Audio Store Visit our dedicated  Nirvana Artist Page

October 17, 2022 at 4:07 am

My eyes welled up. Really miss being that young. I miss the way the world felt at that age, in the 90s, when it was my generation’s turn to speak.

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