Meat Puppets have seen and been through a lot in their almost thirty year career. From drug addiction, jail time, and even a band member being shot twice; the core of the band, brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood, are holding the band's legacy in tact. They're persevered and continued to inspire countless artists around them, while only finding marginal mainstream success personally (although the band did have minor hits with the albums Too High to Die in 1994 and No Joke in 1995). Playing a unique blend of rock that incorporated country, punk rock, and psychedelic music, the band wasn't able to simply draw the line at musical experimentation. By1996 drugs had ravaged the band, and began a decade long estrangement between the brothers Kirkwood as Cris spiraled deeper into heroin addiction.
After a 2006 reunion, the band released a highly praised come back album called Rise to Your Knees. Today, as I sit down to talk with Curt Kirkwood, the band preparing to release their twelfth album called Sewn Together and about to embark on a nationwide tour in support of the record. Today we talk about everywhere they've been that has finally brought the band through the fire, and left them still standing today.
Do you enjoy the live process or the studio process more?
Curt Kirkwood: Live is probably the most comfortable because once you get done, that’s it, ya’ know? That kind of commitment is kinda like going off a diving board, or rock climbing, or whatever, where half the thrill of it is just the process. And if you can get out of your headspace and get out of the critical realm in the studio, that’s desirable too; at least by my standards. I have a real good time in the studio, if nobody’s around dickin’ with me.
One thing people seem to overlook with you in particular is how innovative of a guitarist you are, who did you admire?
CK: Oh, anything that’s guitar oriented. String instrument oriented. I’m game to listen to any of it. I’m trying to do whatever; I’m trying to do [anything from] mandolin runs to saxophone lines on guitar. Miles Davis was a big influence in terms of: “if you make a mistake play it again and people will think you’re a genius.”
I also try to be conscious of trying to make it swing for a live audience. That’s probably my biggest influence in a way – [because] if I’m going to play music live, it’s going to be in consideration of the audience.
How does it feel playing songs that are now 25 years old? Do they evolve, or are you all still playing them the same way?
CK: Nah, they evolve. They evolve heavily at some points and then I’ll try to kinda re-evaluate and throw in some of the old way [again]. But we’ve always been pretty loose with that. Truth be told we never really tried to play any of the albums the way that they sound. We’re more like that these days, where we sound like we sound. But in the early days we would do one thing in the studio, we’d be all messed on some thing or another, and then you go out live and you’re messed up on somethin’ else.
We were making studio albums, and then playing punk rock shows. We were making something like Up on the Sun and then having to go out and open for a lot of punk rock shows. We’re [now] starting to play with Los Lobos and bands like that, but it was kind of a weird thing to make albums the way that we did and pull those off in front of people, like they [sounded on the album].
You all have always had what seems to be an inherent optimism in your music, even in the midst of the grunge cynicism of the 90’s, and amid personal turmoil and tragedy – where does that come from?
CK: The Beatles. Elvis. Bach. Ya’ know, they’re our seminal influences. because even in the passion and sadness of a lot of this stuff, you try to find the beautiful aspect of it.
Do lines get blurred between Cris being your brother and also being your band mate?
CK: Not really. Actually, it helps because I can tell him stuff in a really easy way. I can be myself, I don’t have to sugar coat anything, and that really helps when you’re working with me. It’s not like I’m a control freak, I’m just not very good, a lot of times, with people’s emotions. And Chris is real easy that way. He doesn’t get offended.
Cris came very close to the fire, didn’t he?
CK: Oh yeah, it’s crazy. It’s hard to believe when you talk to him because he’s still pretty courageous, and he’s retained a lot of what made him a decent person in the first place. He’s a good soul. He just had really bad drug habits, probably stemming from chinks in psychic armor, who knows? But it was completely horrid. I’ve plenty of drug addicts in this business, and anyone worse has died a lot quicker, and I just don’t know anyone who has gotten as bad as [he was] and figured it out. But he got shot [in regards to a 2003 incident where bassist Cris Kirkwood was shot twice by a security guard and later sentenced to 24 months in jail] and it straightened him out. That’s something that’ll happen too, if you can hit rock bottom like that, so that it kind of makes sense to you.
It’s pretty insane though.
He’s a lot different person than I am. He’s got a lot more heart than I do. That’s one of the things that make us work well together; he’s a big heart, I’m kind of a little black heart.
Did you really go years without seeing him?
CK: Yeah I didn’t see him for…I don’t know, I can’t tell you. I saw him once in ’98 [after they originally broke-up in 1996] and I didn’t see him again until we started the band back up [in 2006]. Yeah, it was a really long time. I wrote him off for dead. I didn’t make any attempt and he didn’t either. He was a completely sick fucker, ya’ know? He was completely gone, it wasn’t like a dispute or anything, anyone can tell ya’ that. It was a tragedy…a pure tragedy. It’s a miracle that he’s back.
How is producing a record yourself differ from when you have someone else, such as Paul Leary producing for you?
CK: I don’t get my ass kicked at pool all of the time, when Paul’s not around. I don’t know, it’s subtle stuff. I mean, everybody’s kinda going for the same thing. The big deal with me is that since I’m me, I know myself really well.
I know I can make good records this way, because I’ve made a lot of good records that way, too. This was kinda like Meat Puppets II or Up on the Sun, where basically I know what I wanna do, I work on the kind of boards I really like, which I like old analog equipment and I like two inch tape. It’s been hard to get that for a really long time. This is the first time where I really got exactly to what I needed for many, many years. A lot of the production was just giving the band that opportunity to work on that gear. At that point I just let it go. I get everything up, get the mics setup, and then there’s not much that really needs to be said. I feel that humiliation is really great motivation and that’s a big part of how I like to produce. Debasing and humiliating and then seeing what the self-righteous, beautiful little artist has to offer then. I have Elmo, my son, come in there to kind of back me up on stuff I thought sucked, so not only did the people I was picking on feel beaten on, but they felt doubly beaten on.
I don’t feel a need to mean or anything, but it’s like my son told me the other day, “The joke’s not funny and the truth is mean.” I told him that’s a great fuckin’ name for an album…but it’s true though.
The opening song and title track to Sewn Together kind of seems like the mission statement from an older, wiser Meat Puppets, was that the intention?
CK: I don’t know if there’s any more wisdom honestly. I mean, I’ve always just been like: onward through the fog. My ethic has always kind of come from the seventies to a degree, [with the mindset of]: “It’s already too late. Are you kidding?” That’s where punk rock came from, Devo or whatever…it’s de-evolution. So I don’t know if there’s anymore wisdom, I just move on, I keep going, that’s what I’ve always done. Even though I was construed as a punk rocker, and weirdo, or alternative, or whatever, I just kept going.
The music is the motivation and I wanna play music until I have to stop. I’m really thankful that I keep being involved, and I feel really lucky when an album comes out as good as this one did, to me. Because I don’t have to look at it with any regrets and go: “well, I had to accept that…,” or “I didn’t have the money for this…,” or “I didn’t have the time to do that….” It came out cool and I’m glad I made it and I’m glad I can get behind it. But it’s a pretty weird fuckin’ album if you ask me.
The naming of an album and all of that stuff is also kind of the fun stuff about music. Because it can stand on its own whether I called it Sewn Together or whatever, I mean I could put just about any words to it. I’m conscious of the words, to a degree, only to having to serve the mood that music has already set. I don’t wanna go in there and put some horror rock shit on Sewn Together just because it’s kitschy. There’s a lot of wiggle room when you’re writing lyrics, if the music is what it is – it doesn’t necessarily demand explicit stuff. And I don’t really write that way anyway.
Is there any music that’s out today that excites you?
CK: Oh, all the time. We did a tour with Built to Spill which was a lot of fun, and they had a band from Australia out with us called The Drones who I really, really liked. And we played with a band called The Shaky Hands recently that I thought were fun. I know it sounds like I’m going to pitch these bands because they’re my buds, but that’s also how I get turned onto music, is live. It’s pretty hard for me to get turned onto a band through its records anymore. I used to do that more when I was teenager, like when I got into Can [European Art-Rock Band] or Zappa, I was intrigued and I wanted to see the live shows. Now that I’ve been a musician for a while, I really get off listening to live music and I see most of it when I’m playing with these people. So that’s what it is.
I tend to go back and listen to Bill Monroe and stuff, just because it’s comfortable. I like bluegrass, I like country stuff a lot of times. I like Buck Owens, Waylon Jennings, that’s what’s comfortable for me.
I heard a lot of that country and bluegrass influence on “The Monkey and The Snake”, I suppose that’s where that comes from?
CK: Yeah, it’ll get in there. I mean, we’ll never do straight country, or straight bluegrass, or anything. But some of it is really great music, and it rocks in its own way. I’ve always liked that kind of stuff. We’re from Phoenix, we grew up around the horse track and we heard this stuff played on the radio since I was five or six, if anything. I mean, that’s what I remember, is country music. Deliverance was big deal to Chris and me, I used to love that soundtrack, and I still listen to it, there’s lots of really well played stuff by Norman Blake on there. I’ll just put on a Bill Monroe or Louvin Brothers compilation, and I love that stuff because it’s what I grew up listening to. Oh, and Hank Williams, too.
I remember seeing the Andy Griffith Show and they used to have this band come on that was the real deal, and it turned out to be one of those bands you would see at hippie bluegrass festivals in the seventies [referring to The Dillards who appeared on The Andy Griffith Show as fictional group The Darlings]. Kinda like when they dug up Vasser Clements to play Old and In the Way [an album recorded by Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and John Kahn which featured Clements]. Some real deal bluegrass artists became main stream once the hippies got into it.
I don’t listen to a lot of rock music, honestly. If I do listen to rock music it’s probably Led Zeppelin a lot of times.
You probably get this all of the time but I can’t talk to you and not ask about the Nirvana: Unplugged in New York experience. Certainly in my opinion, and I don’t think I’m alone, it’s one of the greatest live documents in the history of rock n’ roll, and you guys were kind of a focal point of that. What was that like?
CK: Ya’ know, it was a lot of fun. I actually remember a lot of it, which is weird for gigs, and in a lot of ways it [was] just another gig. I was real conscious of their status and the status of the whole process in terms of, whatever the limelight means and whatever cultural influence was going on at the time. Because that was part of the thing, people didn’t have to wait to find out that this was a huge cultural influence.
We already knew that.
But what was fun about that is that they were a lot like us, and it’s not like they gave a rat’s ass that they were a cultural influence. We really liked the music we played in both bands, and we did a lot of the same stuff, and we liked to play the kinda shit that we liked to play. So, we had both gotten there by that means, and they asked us [to play] because we were both kinda the same band at the time. Ya know, it’s the Meat Puppets, you’re not going to get anything other than that.
But we’ve done a lot of crazy shit that people don’t even know about. We did a commercial for radio that they didn’t get to use our name on, and it was like one of the most played things that year. But nobody knew because we just played the song that they wrote: “Heads up now/here’s to you/no one does it quite like you do” – and it was kinda right before that.
[Nirvana] just wanted us to play it like we do, so I wasn’t really distinguishing it from anything else that we did then. And all the guys in Nirvana worried that they really wanted it to be good music, but no one was going: “Oh God, we’re a huge cultural influence…so what’s the next step?”
The real joy of it was, and it’s so obvious, is that we all snuck under the door like cock roaches, both bands. That’s part of why people were going, “Look at this grunge. Look at these shit heads.” It was beautiful and it was getting huge, but eventually someone had to ask: what’s next? And we were like: yeah we’re huge, it’s great, there’s lots of money – but there were too many devices there at that point.
What made it fun though was being the turd in the punch bowl that everyone was vying for; and to know that it wasn’t being dressed up as anything other than a turd in the punch bowl.
Sewn Together, the New album from Meat Puppets is in stores May 12th on Megaforce Records.
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