No band, and I mean literally no band, from the Lamentable Creation to the Unpalatable Present, ever evolved as radically as Phoenix, Arizona’s Meat Puppets. Over their first three LPs they didn’t so much change as transcend time and space, blithely leapfrogging your normal stages of musical development and basic human logic in their bizarre segues from the brilliantly unintelligible rototiller-vocal hardcore country punk of 1982’s self-titled Meat Puppets to the vocally intelligible and sonically gripping psychedelic country of 1984’s Meat Puppets II to—frankly, I’m at a loss what to call 1985’s Up on the Sun, so let’s just settle for deliberately off-key, acid-twisted Byrdsian folk-rock with an Arizona sun- and sand-blasted Krautrock kink.
Those first three albums remain a twisted trifecta of artistic genius by a chemically-addled trio—Curt Kirkwood on guitar and vocals, brother Cris Kirkwood on bass and vocals, and Derrick Bostrom on drums—in a constant state of musical mutation and creative flux, and the Meat Puppets spent the next several years tinkering with and consolidating the sound they’d developed on Up on the Sun with 1986’s Out My Way and 1987’s Mirage and Huevos.
Then they went metallic on 1989’s Monsters, and many folks, including yours truly, got off the boat. It’s inevitable. I daresay I’d have lost interest in the Minutemen at some juncture, even had D. Boon not departed this mortal coil, and I can’t think of a single band that has continually maintained my interest for over 10 years except The Fall, whose Mark E. Smith is not a careerist, or even a human being, but a bullet from the gun of Paul Verlaine. And bullets, unlike careerists, never take wrong turns. Just ask Arthur Rimbaud.
The Meat Puppets’ history post-Monsters was both sweet and scary monster dark. Things were looking up as they signed to a major label. Unfortunately, Cris Kirkwood was a sinking ship, between his addictions to heroin and crack. Ironically, his getting shot twice in the stomach following an attack on a security guard outside a post office in Phoenix—and the state prison term that followed—may have been the best thing that could have happened to him. His wife and a best friend, both of whom overdosed in his Tempe, AZ home, weren’t so lucky. The Meat Puppets had already dissolved as of his shooting, but they reunited following his release from prison, with Ted Marcus (and then Shandon Sahm, son of Doug Sahm) replacing Derrick Bostrom on drums.
I’ve always loved the Meat Puppets—their psychedelic hardcore home-on-the-range hippie shtick makes them the Black Oak Arkansas of America’s West—so I’m happy they’re still around. And I’m very pleased to announce they released a 2013 LP, Rat Farm, which I am not reviewing here. Instead I’m reviewing 2011’s Lollipop, because its songs—which range from the exquisitely beautiful to the markedly different to the uncommonly lackadaisical to the strangely familiar—mark both a stark departure for the band and an exhilarating restatement of their core values.
“Hour of the Idiot” sounds like the Meat Puppets circa Up on the Sun, with the Kirkwoods singing together and Curt Kirkwood laying down a couple of furious freak guitar solos. Chimes sound, Sahm’s drumming is every bit in lockstep as Bostrom’s was, and this is one tune that doesn’t seem destined to have a happy ending: “This is the hour of the idiot/Wonderful time, we’re declined to take command/This is the mirth of human brilliance/A wonderful hour of the idiots at hand.” “Lantern” is a lovely melodic shuffle with a particularly beautiful chorus (“In the canyon, getting hard to see the light/Bring the lantern, setting fire to the night”). While the Kirkwoods sing about having dust in their eyes, Curt plays a delicate guitar that evokes a cold, dark night in the desert.
“Town,” meanwhile, strikes a Byrdsian note, with Curt strumming a lovely guitar in the slow build-up to the wonderful chorus: “Nowhere an hour is the speed that I fly/Greeted by vapors when I do arrive/Don’t mind my story/It’ll only drag you down/In a one-trick town/One sick clown/Instincts on a high wire/The rain flying around/In a one trick town.” It reminds me of the town where I grew up, moribund but beautiful in its way, haunted with the rattling skeletons of dead friends that “will only drag you down.” “Baby Don’t” is a stripped-down rockabilly shuffle featuring one lightning fast and echo-drenched solo by Kurt Kirkwood, and is guaranteed to have you doing the boogaloo with your inamorata, especially when Kurt sings, “Baby don’t blink, lightning speed/Anything is alright with me/Chase that rabbit, up the tree/Anything is alright with me.”
Album opener “Incomplete” is incomparably beautiful, with a soft feel and both Kirkwoods repeating, “Hard as a sun who rides in the western wind/My hands in fire but I can’t feel the heat/Torn from the wind/Torn from the very breath that I am made of/And incomplete.” There’s a synthesizer in there somewhere, and Kurt’s guitar is lovely, and the song slowly builds to mini-crescendos, the Kirkwoods singing, “The screw is turning beneath the crown/The porch lights are burning and no one’s home” until the song reaches a magnificent climax with Sahm pounding away at the drums while Kirkwood’s guitar soars and the Kirkwoods sing their hearts out. “Orange” is a harder rocker, with more dual vocals by the Kirkwoods. Propelled by Sahm’s pounding drums, Cris Kirkwood’s throbbing bass, and Kirkwood on guitar, who plays a couple of short but spazzed-out solos, this one could have come off of Monster, and if it’s not my favorite, it’s guaranteed to keep you dancing in the end zone like a touchdown king.
“Shave It” marks a new direction for the band; a reggae-inflected number, it bops along at a raucous clip, with Sahm keeping a rock-steady beat and Curt playing some long, sinuous guitar solos while the Kirkwoods sing in the background: “Move the picture from the wall to the shelf/And the picture said ‘I love myself’/Swearin’ at the rain as it fell/And the rain said back ‘I’m not myself.’” I have no idea what it means, but the Kirkwoods make it sound meaningful, and that’s all that counts. “Damn Thing” is one of the catchiest songs on Lollipop, trucking along as it does at a healthy clip, all guitar and drums and cryptic lyrics like, “Here’s a question, which one is right, now?/Now replyin’, chicken equals cow/And cows don’t mean a thing/Here’s the righteous thing.” And then there’s the chorus: “And I’ma put my ass on the line in this song/And you can kiss this if you think that I’m wrong/And I don’t know a damn thing anyway” which is followed by some righteous Kirkwood fret contortions and more declarations of “I don’t know a damn thing now.”
“Amazing” is just that, a delicious mid-tempo song boasting an otherworldly beguiling melody and a great acoustic guitar opening with some feedback tossed in. Then come the happy opening lines, “Insanity is our saving grace/Like cannonballs exploding in space/And everyone is lying in bed/Happily, they’re swallowing feathers.” The chorus is a thing of beauty: “Amazing, just a taste of blood/I tried to slap the face of an alien/Amazing, everyone’s requiring a taste of blood/I’d like to say you’re amazing.” And on it builds, Kirkwood throwing in some tasty feedback, followed by a neat percussion segue, and then the Kirkwoods sing, “Goddamn the human ape/Everyone’s requiring a taste of blood/I’d like to say you’re amazing” before the song comes to an abrupt close.
“Way That It Are” is a catchy rocker, with a big-ass Kirkwood guitar running through it until it catches flame and turns into a wild, feedback-drenched solo, then returns to sonic overdrive before returning to fiery, feedback mode to end the song. Meanwhile the Kirkwoods sing about how they’re sea sick, and wasted every night, while Sahm rocks the boat with some savage pound, pound, pound, explaining the boys’ nausea. Or maybe their nausea is due to the canine chow: “This dog food tastes alright/I’m wasted every night/I’m wasted/And wasted.” In any case, “Way That It Are” is one addictive slice of sound, as is “Vile,” a high-propulsion, kick-ass piece of drum pummel with lots of freaky guitar lines thrown in, including a super-spacey solo that ends the song. Meanwhile Curt Kirkwood sings over and over, “Had a reaction to the video/Vile, vile/Just one deep breath and it’s a way to go/Vile, vile, vile, vile, vile.”
Album closer “The Spider and the Spaceship” is a nifty country honker with a perty melody that moves along at a nice clip thanks to Kirkwood’s acoustic guitar—he tosses in a lovely solo in the song’s middle—and some understated rhythm work by Cris Kirkwood and Sahm. Kirkwood opens the song with some typically cryptic wordplay: “I don’t think too clearly on matters sincerely/And matters sincerely seem cloudy at best/There’s debate about the mascot for a building in the neighborhood/And minolean chickens are growing out west.” I have no idea what minolean chickens are (could he mean Minoan chickens?), or why he asks, “Which one is larger, the spider or the spaceship?/It’s the question of the hour, if you know what I mean.” But I love the verse that goes, “Mr. Saturday Night is a cowboy in a motorcar/With a head full of answers to criminal schemes/His daddy’s in prison and his friends are all fuckers/The car drinks petroleum, Mr. S. runs on beans” as much as I love the moment after the song ends, when Kurt says, “I don’t know. I could probably do it better.”
I can’t even count on both hands the bands I used to love that I haven’t listened to for decades. The Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, The Gun Club, Butthole Surfers, Fear, Minutemen—the list goes on and on. Tastes change and you can’t go home again, as I found out recently when I returned to my old family homestead in Littlestown and found it empty and kicked the back door in and stood in the destroyed “playroom” where my crew used to get shit-faced and listen to our favorite bands, and didn’t hear so much as the faintest echo of Minutemen’s “History Lesson Part 2” or The Replacement’s “Unsatisfied.”
But if you can’t go home again you can take a chance on the present and check out what your old faves are up to now. You just might be pleasantly surprised, as I was by Lollipop. I don’t know whether I’ll ever put Up On The Sun on the turntable again, but I’ll bet you my shiny bald head and big white beard (they strike fear into the citizenry!) I’ll be listening to Lollipop. And maybe I’ll drag my little brother to Littlestown and kick the back door in again and head to the basement with a gun to play one last game of “Dodge the Ricochet,” with Lollipop cranked full blast. It would be worth the flesh wound. Because bullets, like great songs, never take wrong turns. Just ask Arthur Rimbaud. Or better yet, Cris Kirkwood.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
