Many decades have passed since Arizona’s Meat Puppets first arrived on the hardcore scene, and they’ve finally become what they were always destined to be—grizzled but cheerful desert prophets just returned from panning for psychedelic gold in some dry gulch in the remote reaches of a fantastical place you won’t find on any map. They know things you and I don’t, they’ve seen and learned things you and I haven’t, and they have a mystical gleam in their eyes.
And their music, as you can hear on 2019’s Dusty Notes, is the mature expression of some bearded old-timers who have gone through hell and come out the other side—it’s all survivors’ wisdom and joy, yet still of a piece with the storied music of their long journey through the past. They’ve come full circle, and the circle is unbroken. They were always old beyond their years, always out of step with their contemporaries, always traveling alone down a path only they saw. Nobody made the kind of music they made, and they’re still making it. And the music they’re making now is easily some of the best music they’ve ever made.
They were always part and parcel of that weird old America we’re always hearing about. During their early years they were the most rapidly evolving organism in the post-punk universe. From their eponymous 1981 hardcore debut (clamorous speed topped by frontman/vocalist/guitarist Curt Kirkwood’s hilariously unintelligible vocals) to 1984’s Meat Puppets II (twisted psychedelic country that won them the abiding love of one Kurt Cobain) to 1985’s Up on the Sun (giddy-making dada guitar pastorals), the Meat Puppets were on a quest to make it new.
What followed was some consolidation, then a swerve towards a harder ZZ Top-influenced sound on which Curt went heavy metal guitar god in a big way. They had a hit and then they had trouble (brother Cris Kirkwood disappeared in a haze of narcotic abuse that ended not in death, as everybody expected, but with him being shot in the stomach and serving jail time—which in effect saved his life).
But they persevered. Cris is back (after being out of the band for a good while) and healthy, as is original drummer Derrick Bostrom. Curt’s son Elmo has also joined on guitar, and they’ve even added a keyboard player in Ron Stabinsky. Stabinsky in particular adds a rich new dimension to the band’s music, without detracting from the Puppets’ unique sound. The music is fuller, but it’s still 100 percent Puppet.
Dusty Notes is a spiritual album and a sublime listening experience. I hear it and I experience joy. I feel the holy spirit of some ancient and loving God, a god of the desert, and what I hear when I listen to it is the Meat Puppets saying, “We have overcome, and you can too.” It gives me hope. The only way out is through, and the Meat Puppets have come through and come through smiling. I can’t think of any better way to put it than that. They’ve emerged from the desert and it seems to have given them peace—peace and wisdom. I first heard it when I was in a very bad place and it was like a balm to the soul. Who talks like this about a mere album? I do, because it’s the god’s honest truth. This is an album that could save your life. It may well have saved mine.
Its pastoral sound is not a departure—it’s a culmination. Its folk and country flourishes hint at the arrival at some promised land—not the promised land of Chuck Berry, or the promised land of the bible, but the promised land we all have inside us and spend our entire lives trying to get back to. It’s the fugitive music I’ve been catching snatches of all my life, that was always in me and was always the best part of me. Exiled from myself, I listen to it and know I’m home at last.
These songs are not spirituals. Curt Kirkwood’s no riverside tent preacher. The lyrics are oblique and filled with odd images, and sometimes they hit you smack between the eyes and sometimes they have the feel of someone trying to communicate the incommunicable. The Holy Spirit is in the notes, dusty, used, but not used up, rusty but still beautiful, and anything but ornamental.
Opener “Warranty” is a bouncy and lovely song with a simple but bewitching melody and some great psychedelic guitar running through it. It makes my soul smile. Kirkwood tosses off crypto-mystical lines along the lines of “When you first saw/You should’ve known/There was no more/Than what was shown,” sings in homely harmony with brother Cris, and in general sounds like a wise man at home in a world that is shot through with transcendental beauty. Best song I’ve heard all year.
“Nine Pins” is just as great, a calliope- and banjo-powered country romp that will make you want to do a crazy dance. The guitar solo is clear mountain stream sweet, Curt’s walking a path through the woods with the moon shining down, and he makes the destination sound every bit as much paradise as he did that swimming ground on Up on the Sun:
“To drinking we are bound
To drinking we are bound
Enough to go around
Enough to go around.”
It’s a slice of bucolic perfection, “Nine Pins,” and it makes even a nature hater like me want to take some mushrooms and commune with the trees beneath a summertime moon.
“On” is a lazy, mystico-honky-tonker with sweet piano, some half-buried organ and a melody you heard once in a dream. As for Curt, he hears it all the time:
“Somewhere in my empty head
I hear a distant song
And it sings to the end of day
And after the day is gone
Like an old broken record
It just keeps on playing on.”
“Unfrozen Memory” is all harpsichord and power chords, but the power chords don’t signify heavy metal—they’re overpowered by a melody you remember perfectly because it’s been inside you all along. And gradually the song builds to a kind of magical castle in your mind, with that guitar turning crazy circles while Curt sings, “The window is broken/And the shadow disappears into the night/The memory unfrozen/And the shadow greets the morning light.”
The title track is jaunty South-of-the-Border campfire music, and practically reeks of Mexicali weed and Mescal. You get some nice picking on an acoustic guitar, a punchy and welcoming melody, and the whole affair has a weathered feel—this song’s been hanging in the desert air since before the white man showed up and it’s like Curt didn’t so much write it as pluck it out of the musical ether, fully written. Which is what all your best music sounds like. And Curt sounds just as dusty as the song—like he’s some kind of weathered prospector walking into a cantina at the parched edge of eternity and shaking the dusty notes off his boots.
“The Great Awakening” is a more complicated beast, less like an awakening than something you’d hear in your sleep. Distant, just out of reach, a lullaby of sorts with a couple of breaks that get kinda proggish before you fall back into this dream we call life. Curt’s trying to get somewhere, Eden to be precise, as he sings, “Chanting an ancient rhyme/Trying to cross the stream/Kicking at the door/To break into wonderland/To wonderland.”
The Meat Puppets’ cover of the 1961 Don Gibson country classic “Sea of Heartbreak” easily ranks amongst their best covers ever. It’s damn perky for a busted heart song; you get an upbeat shuffle beat, a lot of sweet acoustic guitar, and a piano that is pure bliss. The dreamy “Nightcap” features some ethereal vocal harmonies, and the melody veers from the lovely and the elegiac to the positively transcendent, thanks to some rising power chords that add just the right oomph to the song. And Curt somehow manages to give even the process of turning grapes into wine a mystical cast:
“They hung the grapes upon the line
In ’51 or ’52
And they could see the sun
Shining all over”
On Dusty Notes the Meat Puppets largely steer clear of the heavy metal heroics they’ve engaged in on and off since 1989’s Monsters. The exception on the LP is the prog-metal assault “Vampyr’s Winged Fantasy,” which opens with some jazzy electric piano before morphing into a tortured guitar freakout that doesn’t fit the album’s pastoral mood at all and would have been better off on another LP. That said, it proves that when it comes to playing guitar gods, the Meat Puppets can still let loose and let rip.
“Outflow” is a slow country number and mystical meditation on nature; you can practically hear the waves crashing on the beach in its rhythm, and the melody is just as inexorable. Kirkwood sings, “Let the wind and rain and the water take the ocean/Let the stars melt down from the sky/Let the rocks roll back to the top of the mountain/Until the beginning of time.” Kirkwood is a mystic viewing eternity in reverse, because he knows time moves in all directions and is an illusion to begin with.
The Meat Puppets have traveled a long and dusty road since they released their debut LP at the dawn of the eighties, and the fact that they’re still producing transcendent and vital new music is nothing short of a miracle. In one sense they remind me of Neil Young, one of their heroes. But they remind me more of the Grateful Dead—over the years they’ve become a spiritual entity as much as a band. But unlike the Dead, who stopped producing good studio music and became primarily a touring act, the Meat Puppets are still making new music that to me is an expression of pure spirit.
Robert Christgau, who is sparing when it comes to superlatives, has called them “Amerindie at its most blessed.” Me, I’m the one who feels blessed. The Meat Puppets are everything I’ve always wanted in a band. There’s a line in “Look at the Rain” (from 1985’s Huevos) that goes, “I got a shirt that cost a dollar twenty-five/I know I’m the best dressed man alive.” I don’t know what it is about that line that makes so happy, but I suspect it’s simply that Curt Kirkwood’s high humor and gratitude for the simplest things is contagious. I feel like the best dressed man alive just listening to them. They’re like that swimming ground they sing about. Paradise is just around the corner on Dusty Notes, and all you have to do is jump right in.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
