Meat Puppets: “We’re Really Good”

By Jeannette Madden
Music Editor

The Meat Puppets have been around for over thirty years and are known for being a band’s band. These days, their tours mainly consist of other artists inviting THEM out on the road and now they’ve even got a new album, “Lollipop”, released April 12, 2011. “Lollipop”, produced by band leader Curt Kirkwood and recorded at Spoon’s HiFi Studio in Austin, Texas, has been called “a record that stands on its own, not on the band’s reputation.”

The Meat Puppets will be playing with Slightly Stoopid on May 5 at the Venue. Curt Kirkwood spoke with the Reader about, among other things, the band, “Lollipop”, and playing live.

Curt started by giving me a history of the Meat Puppets and where they are now. “We started in 1980 and we had a long run on SST Records as an indie band,” he said. “We put out about eight records up until the ‘90s when we got major label backing. We did a lot of touring in the ‘80s and ‘90s and put out three records on London/Universal and then took a hiatus for a few years from the original band. I moved around, moved to Venice Beach and then out here to Texas to have some other guys in the Meat Puppets after a few years.”

“I took some time to do a record with Krist Novoselic and Bud Gaugh from Sublime and then I put out a solo record. We started making some Meat Puppets records again about four years ago and that’s where I’m at now. Got my brother cleaned up – he had a lot of personal issues for a number of years and he wasn’t available – he’s been back playing with me since ’06 so that’s where we’re at. We just put out this new record and I think it’s our thirteenth but maybe there’s more than that, I don’t know.”

What Curt had to say about “Lollipop” blew me away. Not only did it provide insight into the band’s dynamics, it also explained a lot about him as a musician. “What can I tell you? I’ve reached the point where I should be sick of it but I’m not. Usually by a certain point I can tell whether I like a record I made and what I like about it and I kind of like this whole record. Some songs on it I’ve had for awhile and didn’t really care for that much but I like them in the context they’re in…I’m now listening as an audience member and seeing how it plays off on me and I like playing it.”

“I play along with it on the stereo. That’s my version of practice. I know the whole thing, which is unusual. Usually I know a couple of the songs I’ve put out and have taken them to heart and want to play them and know them well enough to try to pull off live. This one, though, I’ve got the whole thing and its nice. The last couple that I put out were nice recordings with a couple on each one that I kind of liked to play but in terms of playing the whole thing I wasn’t doing it. So, this is a fun album. I’m liking it and I think the Meat Puppets did a good job.”

And how does Curt decide what to play live? “I only do stuff that I like to do.” He said, laughing. “I won’t play stuff if I don’t like it. I don’t service anybody but myself. I’m very self-centered. I’m a sociopath and arrogant.”

Curt described how he came up with the name Meat Puppets and by the time he was done I felt like I had been there when it happened. “I think what did it for me was I was trying to come up with a fun name that wasn’t stupid but I didn’t want it to be serious either so it was kind of a conundrum,” he explained. “We were playing and I had this strobe light on and I bent over backwards and I was looking at this ceramic skull that was from Disneyland hanging on Derrick’s wall…once I was upside down and the jam was really good the skull started moving and it was like singing along. I could tell the phenomen of the strobe light was making it looking like it was singing. Afterward, I was thinking how it was cool that you can just play and not even think about it. It was like the most fun I’d had playing music; it was completely mindless like we weren’t doing it ourselves. Something else was pulling the strings at that point, which is the goal.”

“I saw Itzhak Perlman when I was about eighteen and I got to go backstage afterward and talk to him. He played the Devil’s Dance, the Paganini song, and it was completely insane the way he played it. I was like ‘How can you do that? How can you follow that?’ And he said, ‘If you think you’re lost, don’t think.’ I said ‘So that’s how you do it?’ and he said ‘Yeah, if I think about it I’m lost.’ That’s where I got it.”

“We’re really good.” Curt said, when I asked him about a live show. “We’re different than most bands and that’s what’s been our biggest excuse, more than any hit records or hit songs, we’ve always been a different kind of band. We just do what we want live. We improvise a lot…we tend to jam out a lot and we just do whatever we want.”

Curt said he has too many influences to name. “I’m pretty open minded that way, even something like Madonna, although it doesn’t sound like us, is an influence because I know about it. I’m very aware of what’s going on and I know what I am. I know better than to try and sound like anybody else and I’ve never been a singer like that. I’m limited by that as I got into singing to sing my own songs. What you hear in the music a lot of times is just a good mix of a lot of different stuff that I like, you know, the Dead to Buck Owens to Led Zeppelin and The Stones…The Who is in there and Bowie was my first concert. It’s pretty broad. These days I hear a lot of stuff and I don’t have anything strike me in the same way as like Nirvana did but that’s the way those things always are.”

Curt Kirkwood struck me as a very smart man, both about himself and his music. I’m excited to see the Meat Puppets and what this band has evolved into over the past thirty years. Catch them yourself Thursday, May 5 at the Venue. Tell them I sent you.

Listen to the Meat Puppet’s newest release “Damn Thing” off of Lollipop by clicking here: http://tinyurl.com/MeatPuppetsDamnThing

Watch the Meat Puppet’s just released video “Orange” off of Lollipop by clicking here:
http://www.pitchfork.com/tv/#/music-videos/1657-meat-puppets/2664-orange/

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