Week 134: Meat Puppets

In an article in Playgrounds Magazine, Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets talks about their new release, Sewn Together. Talking about the release of the record on a major label, he says that “It’s kind of a stretch, and I think it always has been a stretch. I think now, more than ever, anything is buyable. There’s a lot more wiggle room there. So I’ve always felt like we were kind of outsiders and we were being allowed an opportunity to be involved with what seemed like the mainstream. But no matter what the media portrays it as, it’s about people playing music and that’s kind of how I view it. I’m just like anybody else – If you play music you don’t really give a shit what the motivation is. I’ve always been that way. I love the Bee Gees. I love the Grateful Dead. I love all kinds of stuff that’s real different, so I mean, I’m just a music lover, so I tend to have that kind of overall viewpoint of the whole thing. The business – that’s beside the point. There’s a million ways to sell it.”

The Meat Puppets are probably among a handful of bands that really affected the way I see music and my role in it. Even though I haven’t really paid much attention to their output past 1990. Their SST records are a testament to the adventurous spirit that music can convey. Each of those SST records tackled and presented a new perspective on new territory from punk to country to funk to disco to southern rock to metal. Some of those explorations were more successful than others, of course, and Meat Puppets 2 and Up On The Sun are traditionally accept as the more successful albums. But without that spirit of exploration, Up On The Sun would not have been possible after Meat Puppets 2 and the metal-infuzed Monsters, one of my favorites still, would’ve never seen the light of day. Unlike bands like AC/DC or the Ramones who found their little plot of land and stayed, the Meat Puppets explored the musical landscape and found that they didn’t have to settle in one small part of it.

To me that is still one of the great contributions of those early 80s post punk bands, from Black Flag to the Butthole Surfers to Sonic Youth to the Violent Femmes to the Meat Puppets – play music because you love it. It’s a personal relationship with the material. If others like it, great, but for the musician creating it, it’s a bond, it’s first and foremost an exploration of his/her relationship to music and the other musicians creating it. As Curt says, “the business – that’s beside the point.”

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On a slightly different note, the Ballad of Stayed and Gone is done and out. For the handful of you who read this blog, you can download the mp3s and artwork for free here (please note that it is a gapless record). For others it is available for sale via our website, on most online stores and some real life record stores.