Deep Album Cuts Vol. 258: Meat Puppets
For a long time, there were a few Meat Puppets albums missing from streaming services. But as of the past year or so, all of their full-lengths are on Spotify, although 1986's Out My Way EP is not, which is disappointing, because it's really good (and actually longer than their first album). And the band recently released Live In Manchester 2019, which reminded me that I wanted to do a playlist of my favorites.
Meat Puppets deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Meat Puppets
2. Lost
3. Split Myself In Two
4. The Whistling Song
5. Miaden's Milk
6. Animal Kingdom
7. Buckethead
8. Quit It
9. Look At The Rain
10. Touchdown King
11. Open Wide
12. Nail It Down
13. Violet Eyes
14. Never To Be Found
15. Comin' Down
16. Sweet Ammonia
17. Cobbler
18. Endless Wave
19. Island
20. The Monkey And The Snake
21. Baby Don't
22. Down
23. Dusty Notes
Track 1 from Meat Puppets (1982)
Tracks 2, 3 and 4 from Meat Puppets II (1984)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Up On The Sun (1985)
Track 8 from Mirage (1987)
Track 9 from Huevos (1987)
Track 10 from Monsters (1989)
Track 11 and 12 from Forbidden Places (1991)
Tracks 13, 14, and 15 from Too High To Die (1994)
Tracks 16 and 17 from No Joke! (1995)
Track 18 from Golden Lies (2000)
Track 19 from Rise To Your Knees (2007)
Track 20 from Sewn Together (2009)
Track 21 from Lollipop (2011)
Track 22 from Rat Farm (2013)
Track 23 from Dusty Notes (2019)
I remember when I started hearing "Backwater" on WHFS and I really liked it, but I really wasn't picturing these long-haired, druggy Arizona wild men the first time I heard the Meat Puppets. With Curt Kirkwood's calm, almost monotone vocal and the song's rigid, shuffle, for some reason I'd picture these very straightlaced short-haired guys in glasses singing the song. But then I saw Curt and Cris Kirkwood on Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged" and decided to pick up Too High To Die, and man that album kicks ass, Curt very quickly became one of my favorite guitarists.
The mid-'90s were an exciting time for me because I was getting into so many bands that had already been around for a decade or more, especially all the former SST bands now on major labels. So I'd get the latest Sonic Youth or Meat Puppets or Dinosaur Jr. album and quickly go down the rabbit hole of their earlier stuff, and those bands were and still are really central to my taste in rock. Obviously, Meat Puppets' '80s albums didn't have a lot of official singles and none of them charted. But I avoided some of the more famous early songs like the songs on II that Nirvana covered and Up On The Sun's title track, those aren't really 'deep cuts.'
I remember hearing many of these songs for the first time on the No Strings Attached compilation when I was first getting into the band. I used to get "The Whistling Song" confused with "Maiden's Milk" (both songs contain whistling, but the former also has vocals and the latter has no vocals and far more whistling). Those early albums are fascinating because Meat Puppets was recorded in 3 days while the band was on LSD, and is primitive and incoherent to the point that it can be a little hard to listen to. But then there's a huge leap forward in songwriting on II, and another huge leap forward in musicianship on Up On The Sun, they just became a great band so quickly. Huevos is an awesome album, but Mirage and Monsters are a bit overproduced, I didn't realize how good "Touchdown King" was until I heard live recordings of it.
I got to see Meat Puppets live at a festival in '95, and in the late '90s I spent time on a Meat Puppets' e-mail discussion list where drummer Derrick Bostrom was a frequent and friendly presence, one of my first experiences with the internet making favorite musicians accessible and easy to interact with. But by that point, the band had gone on a lengthy hiatus, and Cris Kirkwood went through a very rough period that included heroin addiction, his wife's overdose death, and an incident in which he assaulted a security guard and was shot, and spent over a year in prison.
Curt Kirkwood released one Meat Puppets album in which he was the only remaining member from the original trio, Golden Lies, which I reviewed for Pitchfork during my brief stint there in 2000, and I think is one of my only reviews still on the site out of about 30 I wrote. A few years later, when Cris Kirkwood got out of prison, the Meat Puppets returned with a new drummer and made a few albums, and I saw them open for Built To Spill and they were great. Curt's son Elmo played guitar with the band for a few years. And then Derrick Bostrom rejoined in 2018 and the original trio made an album, Dusty Notes. And while those later albums are hit-and-miss, I found some favorites for their playlist, and really this band coming back together was something I never expected and I was so happy to see it, these guys are legends who deserve a happy ending to their story.
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on Friday, June 10, 2022 at 9:11 AM.
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