There is a joke that one of my favourite university professors, Tirthankar Bose, told once in class that I remember well. He told it about Bengalis, because he was from Bengal, and thus allowed to crack a joke at his own group's expense, but it could as easily apply to any group that you want to target.
Since I identify still, sort of, as a punk - at least an old one - I will tell his joke, but repurpose it to be about punks:
A man (nevermind why) is being treated to a tour of hell. (In my mind, as Dr. Bose told his version of the joke, I imagined the man and the Devil in a sort of golf cart-like vehicle, driving through red-hued caverns). Satan, serving as guide, is pointing out different fates people are suffering: drowning in feces, roasting in flames, hanging from hooks, that sort of thing. Most are shackled; all are miserable. Then suddenly they pass enormous vats of boiling oil with no lids on them, and you can see the arms and legs of the condemned splashing around at the top. The man looks to Satan and says, "hey, everyone else here is shackled, but they seem to be free to try to escape; why are there no lids on that pot?"
Satan grins: "oh, they're punks. As soon as any of them start to climb out, the others pull them back."
...which brings us to my wife Erika, and a step closer to my writing about the Meat Puppets' new album (I'll get there eventually). Whenever Erika has to listen to me rant about the shittiness of this hit song or that, or the bafflingly persistent lameness and conservatism of commercial FM radio (the only place in the world where Aldo Nova's "Fantasy" is still relevant or remembered), I know (or suspect) that part of her is judging my crankiness skeptically. Because for her - as an outsider to the subculture, exposed mostly only to it through the filter of, uh, me - punks are hairshirt-wearing weirdos, who disguise powerful and important messages in perversely inaccessible packages. Compare, say, Drum and Bell Tower's version of "
Pride and Prejudice" to
the Rebel Spell's original - or compare, say,
Crass to Jeffrey Lewis doing
covers of the same: she'll vastly prefer the folkier, more accessible, more-listener friendly version, and has been heard to say things like: "If you have a message that powerful and meaningful, wouldn't you want to package it in a form that has the widest appeal imaginable, to get your message out there? By making it so aggressive, strident, and noisy you're limiting your message to just a narrow club, aren't you? It's like they want to be heard, but only by people who are already part of the club."
I'm paraphrasing, but of course, she has a point. I do see it. I generally rebuff it a little, saying that the noisiness and aggression of punk are best understood as a reaction against bloated, self-indulgent "Comfortably Numb" bombast of classic rock radio, on the one hand, and the sort of perverse mutations of popular music that happen in radio land - which I think of as a sort of bizarre parasitic tributary (if you don't mind some badly mixed metaphors) off to one side of the enormous flows of human creativity and music.
It wasn't always that way, for me. Like, I think, Erika, I used to think of the world of music as being some sort of subcategory, some sort of function or subset of, the world of the radio. Radio was the primary source, the umbrella overhead, the "heaven" from which the angels of song descended, if you will. A generous host, it offered you a range of options, and you chose among them: and that was the world of popular music. I think some people - maybe mostly people who came of age before the internet - still think that way, which – I think - is why when "straight" friends of mine hear some fantastic song that they've never heard before, by a band they've never heard of before, their reaction is (sometimes) “why isn’t this on the radio?”
The answer, I suspect, reveals some degree of confusion on their part. It isn’t on the radio because the radio is not a benign monarch over the realm of music, is not a hallowed hall of learning and beneficence, devoted to offering its listeners the widest possible range of musical knowledge. It can be that, in its more public-spirited forms, but most generally, speaking specifically of commercial radio: it’s not about “playing good music” at all, at present. Radio as we know it now is closer to being a parasitic growth off one tiny limb of the realm of popular music. Over time, the parasite has developed an odd symbiosis with the host organism. Both have mutated, and mutated each other, while striving further to mutate those – the third party to the symbiosis – who enter into the sort of trust relationship, as listeners, with them, accepting the radio’s confirmation of their identity and values, and being soothed by it. You have to accept the range of options offered – you have to agree to the deal, which may come at a cost - but if you do, the radio will serve to bolster your limited choices and affirm that they are right at all turns by offering you nothing that challenges them. You will belong. You will be able to answer phone-in trivia questions about all the same bands, and feel yourself superior to people who can't answer them. You will, if you phone in to request a song, have the good sense to request a song that is already on the radio, and not one from "outside;" don't waste the DJ's time by requesting Big Star or some other band that has been written out of radio history, because no matter how pretty or poppy the song is, it's not going to get get airplay. Instead, you will accept that Aldo Nova's "Fantasy" is still relevant, and maybe request it, or perhaps some Billy Squier. In turn, the radio will cater to your tastes: you will hear nothing offensive – nothing too noisy or abrasive, nothing too political or outspoken, nothing too foreign or thought-provoking. You will be guarded over by Bob Seger and Corey Hart and Aldo Nova and Bon Jovi and Nickelback, who will set an outer limit on your tastes and expectations; you might get the odd bit of classic rock, maybe even a few songs from back in the day when real music actually made it onto the radio, but not so much to keep you from hearing the Police sing “Every Breath You Take” on a weekly basis. As long as you streamline your tastes to fit within the radio's parameters, as long as you accept its conditioning, it will affirm, celebrate and nourish those tastes. You will belong, you will fit, you will have a comforting sense of fellowship with everyone else who listens to the radio along with you, and erase all other genres, bands, and music fans from your field of vision. You will never, ever know what you're missing - because if you do, you might jump ship.
I mean, I was there once, myself. I know people like that, I remember being - when I was a suburban kid of 12, like that too; and I remember the trauma of discovering (at about age 14) that the radio was not what I thought it was, at all, that it in fact had been betraying me. I remember phoning CFOX, for example – a Vancouver radio station, for those reading this in other cities - back in 1982, to ask why DOA’s War on 45 didn’t get any airplay. The album had just come out, and was fantastic, and I was having to fit my head around why you couldn't buy it at chain record stores (which were all I had access to in the 'burbs), couldn't hear it on the radio, could be forgiven, even, for not knowing the band or the genre it represented even existed (which was the case for me, up until age 14). I earnestly asked whichever DJ answered to explain the situation to me. “It’s great, they’re a local band, they’ve got a lot to say, and the songs are terrific, so why not play it?” The DJ explained (off air, of course) that the music made by independent bands wasn’t up to snuff in terms of production quality; it just didn’t sound good enough to play on the radio. Even at 14, I was pretty sure that that was a crock of shit. War on 45 sounded pretty damn good to me (and you do sometimes hear songs off it on CFOX, now, to boot, if they're having some weird special program that allows for it). The lesson I was learning at the time was that radio wasn’t to be trusted, that it was NOT the benign library of musical knowledge it presented itself as being, and that, in fact the world of music was the larger “umbrella” category, with radio being a tiny subset. I’d mistaken the tributary for the ocean, the parasite for the host.
In a way, saying of a song, now, "this is great; why isn't it on the radio," seems as naïve as suggesting surprise, confronted by a singularly delicious or exotic food, that it is not sold at McDonald’s. The answer is, "because it's McDonald's, stupid."
The idea that there are market-driven cultural institutions that siphon off, channel, and distort offshoots of the flow of human creativity – however we should call it – has various implications that are begging to be explored. Because
T-Bone Burnett’s superb and essential SXSW keynote address is still echoing in my head, I’m inclined to apply this understanding to the internet. Like music before commercial rock radio took its present form, like cinema before network television, the internet WAS once a vast, complex, flowing thing. Various corporations – Burnett calls them “surveillance capitalists” - have found a way to channel and siphon that flow, in ways not dissimilar to the ways that commercial rock radio has channeled and siphoned the flows of human popular music, so the diverted energy – it’s kind of like building a dam, really – can be used to benefit them. As Burnett observes, we’re not even really on the internet anymore, we’re just on Facebook or Google or whatever narrow tributary we've been directed into; the idea of a vast and free realm you can explore and find different information in and connect with different people through - the "ocean" of the internet - has been replaced by these narrow channels, these for-profit corporate websites and apps where we are no longer the kings, but the serfs. And just like with commercial rock radio, the people who have assented to the symbiosis with Facebook and Google and so forth - who grew up with it, without having been jolted to question it - accept that it is a benign sort of “parent,” a given, a fact of life. John Oliver, in a rant about Facebook, noted that in some countries (Burma, I think, is the example he used), "Facebook" is now synonymous with the internet: and really (for me, too), on a de facto level, that's the case everywhere. It's deeply disturbing, and - I agree with Burnett - something needs to be done about it.
That said, I came here to write about the Meat Puppets, and I'm going to. The thing is: when I'm engaging in rants like the above, bashing the radio, in particular, I think that Erika - who listens to the radio vastly more than I do - suspects that I'm one of the punks in the vat of oil, mentioned above. When someone from the world of punk gets signed to a label, modifies (or "commodifies") their sound a bit, and tries for a hit, she thinks my railing against it - my growling about sell outs, commercial compromises, watered-down sound, or whatever - is mostly perversity; I'm grabbing the person climbing over the lip and dragging them back into the vat with me. And it is true, of course, that there are a lot of examples of bands I loved at one point, who began at least with a toe in punk, who changed their sound to get on the radio and please their corporate masters, who I then stopped listening to. I was part of the dogpile on X's
Ain't Love Grand, for example - not their first album on a big label, but the first that really reached for (and, if I recall, briefly achieved) the brass ring of radio play (I
think "Burning House of Love" played on CFOX back in the day). I genuinely liked some of the songwriting on that record -
the live version of "Burning House of Love" kicks ass, say - but I hated the way it sounded. It's not that I was a Manzarek loyalist, because I actually didn't like the production on
More Fun in the New World that much, either, in different ways; it's X's masterpiece, in terms of songwriting, but it has a thin, tinny, under-developed quality to it, not fully capturing the liveliness or richness of the music (or so I thought at the time; I'm repeating a feeling I remember from when the album came out, without having really done the work to check if it is still valid, but I suspect strongly it is). And even still,
More Fun in the New World still sounded way better than
Ain't Love Grand.
There are other cases. From every band (Sonic Youth, say) that made a painless transition to a major label and kept putting out quality material, with little or no appreciable change, there are probably five I can name whose bid for radio success turned their music into watered-down drek. I mean, compare the Payolas' "
TNT," for example, to any of their hits. Compare Doug and the Slugs' "
Not on the Corner" to the songs of theirs that you'll hear in the waiting room of the dentist's office. But the thing is: that doesn't mean I didn't WANT to hear those bands on the radio, that I didn't want them to have hits and houses and "commercial success;" I just didn't want it to come at the cost of EVERYTHING I LIKED ABOUT THEM. I remember struggling for a whole year to find a way to like the Replacements'
Don't Tell a Soul - but it wasn't that they'd gone over to the majors or tried to write songs with some hit potential that was the problem, because they'd done that with
Pleased to Meet Me, too, or even
Tim, and those are probably my two favourite Replacements records. So the difference isn't the label, it's that Pleased to Meet Me still sounds like the Replacements, whereas
Don't Tell a Soul - is like a glass of gin that you've added milk to, to make it easier to digest. It was like after
Pleased to Meet Me the band pulled up their suspenders and took stock: "Well, we made our most commercial record to date, and it still didn't get us any airplay. Guess we'll have to start listening to the label, maybe
they can make us some money... Maybe we can just compromise a
little..."
(Remember that line from Paul Sorvino in The Gambler? "Once you ain't a virgin, you're a whore?")
I mean, when X sings, "
Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag," and namecheck DOA, Black Flag, the Flesh Eaters, the Minutemen and the Big Boys - or when they write a song about punk called "The Unheard Music" - they're not saying they don't
want their music heard on the radio; they're not celebrating
that they're living in a musical ghetto, saying that the vat of boiling oil is where they belong. They're
complaining. They feel like they have every right to have the music they love (and the music they make) heard on mainstream broadcast media, without substantially changing it (as they would eventually do, but no matter). It's not the punks' fault! It's not that they delibrately make inaccessible, poorly produced, noisy music, designed to alienate listeners; I mean, in some cases, that's true - it's not like I'm saying CFOX, say, should play GG Allin or Flipper or such - but there are tons of bands - X included - that make music that is very easy to listen to, that COULD have a mass mainstream audience, if they were given the opportunity, that you'll simply never hear, then as now, on mainstream rock radio, and it's not a matter of the music at all; it's because mainstream rock radio is hopelessly conservative and run by coin counters who won't risk playing anything that could upset their safe little deal. As soon as you start playing real music, you risk breaking the spell of recycling the same old shit over and over. The trance created, the soporific bland safety of Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," is actually a delicate one, that can be broken, and radio execs know this. I mean, I remember liking that song myself, when I was 12. I owned the single. I believed. Two years later, I discovered punk, and never looked back, and wince that I still hear that fucking shitty song playing on radio stations in public.
Anyhoo, let's come to the point, shall we? No band I love, associated with punk, has had as complex or strange a history regarding making music with commercial appeal as the Meat Puppets. While it is no surprise that their first album didn't get them much commercial radio airplay, or even, masterpieces that they are, their second or third, starting with 1987's
Mirage, the band began an on-again-off-again romance with the idea of making music that at least
could have commercial appeal. (When Curt Kirkwood sings on
Rise To Your Knees about stupid stars that kept getting in his eyes, that's what I've always taken him to be referring to).
Mirage is a quantum leap from the trippy, tingling, southern-fried acid folk of
Up on the Sun towards polished, glistening
psychedelia, of a kind unrelated to other musics usually described as
psychedelic (except maybe some of the more countrified output of the Grateful
Dead, but even that’s not quite right). I've never fully been able to embrace the album - it is too clean, too polished, and I'm glad they took a step backwards with the follow up,
Huevos, towards something rougher and rawer and more in keeping with their live sound. But I never regarded
Mirage as a "sell out" or anything. It was more polished and mainstream-sounding than their previous output, sure, but it didn't really seem like the band was compromising its vision, since it was still plentifully weird and unique, enough so that there was never much threat that it would get radio play. Without that possibility - reinforced by the fact that they were still signed to SST at that point, when everyone knew independent labels like that just couldn't get their stuff on the radio, no matter how good it was - it seems more of a conscious experiment with a cleaner sound than it does a dilution of vision. Their songwriting is preserved, and the cleanness and crispness of the production is actually in keeping with the band's MO of reinventing itself every few years, since no two Meat Puppets albums ever sound exactly alike, anyhow.
No, the album of the Meat Puppets that seems to show them starting to compromise their presentation a little is
Forbidden Places, their 1991 major label debut, which, while still remaining weird - I mean, there wasn't much threat of "
Sam" getting on the radio - does seem like they're deliberately digging into classic rock roots at time. The monster riffing on "
Nail It Down" makes it sound like it was written after a marathon session of listening to ZZ Top, Aerosmith and Skynyrd and drinking tequila. It sounds like rednecks in a pickup truck could blast it on their way to the construction site - like it would fit right in on a mixtape between "Walk this Way" and "Just Got Paid." It's about the furthest, to that point, the band had gone in that direction, and while it's still enjoyable, I have to admit that I struggled with
Forbidden Places. There are some giddily great moments on it, but in 1991, it raised questions about integrity and direction. Were the Meat Puppets on the cusp of selling out? Would their next album do to their legacy what, in 1992, Soul Asylum's
Grave Dancer's Union - the shittiest of all the major label/ radio hit sellout albums, and ironically maybe the most commercially successful - did with Soul Asylum, and retroactively sully the band's entire back catalogue? (It took me 20 years before I could listen to Soul Asylum again after
Grave Dancer's Union, and I'm not talking about their "new material," but albums of theirs I actually had loved previously. "
Runaway Train" suddenly managed to travel back in time and taint "
Cartoon," which was one of my favourite songs when it first came out:
oh, is THIS what the band was aiming at? Suddenly I could hear things in "Cartoon" that I hadn't noticed before, the "incipient sellout," percolating under the surface.
What have I been party to? Guhhh....
Neverminding that Forbidden Places actually came out before Soul Asylum's sell-out, I was very afraid that if I stayed with the Meat Puppets, if I let myself accept "Nail It Down," I would be participating in a process of dilution and diminishment, and that, if they followed the album up with a commercial sell-out, I would have been somehow complicit in the process, and feel even more disgusted with them and with myself. I didn't want to ever lose respect or love for the Meat Puppets, and Forbidden Places made me nervous that someday I would... it worried me, even though I liked a lot of the songs on it.
It was
never that I didn't want the Meat Puppets to succeed, though - to climb out of the vat. It was that I didn't want them to succeed by substantially compromising their values. It's a different thing, and the proof I can offer is that
Too High to Die, their next album, is actually even more of a commercial-sounding, radio-friendly record than
Forbidden Places, and yet it's actually a kind of masterpiece. If I were doing a Mark Prindle survey on Facebook about the most successful attempt (artistically, not commercially - we're not talking about
Nevermind, here) by an underground band to reframe their sensibilities, in order to court a more mainstream audience (including radio play), I think I'd pick
Too High to Die as the album (after which I'd probably give a nod to the Butthole Surfers for
Electric Larryland, which in a way is more impressive, because it's so much more unlikely). While I am not wild about every song on it (I've somehow never gotten into "Violet Eyes") on a whole, the popcraft on
Too High to Die is so engaging and charming (and still so true to the band's quirky aesthetic) that, had it somehow worked to get them noticed - and it sort of did; it got them closer than they've ever been before or since, I think - I would have been overjoyed. I mean, the single "Backwater" is one of the least interesting songs on the album, but I was delighted to hear it on the radio occasionally and see the video on MuchMusic, and when, shortly thereafter, Kurt Cobain brought the Kirkwoods onstage for "Oh Me," "Plateau," and "Lake of Fire," I was really, really, really happy for them, and really pleased with Kurt; I was no fan of
Nevermind by that point and had sort of tuned Nirvana out, but I thought that was a stellar, and really touching, use of his celebrity stature. It was fun to hear "Lake of Fire" on the radio, even if it wasn't one of the Pups' recordings of it. (There are two - one on
II, and a hidden track after "Comin' Down" on
Too High To Die, which I'm guessing the band deeply regretted not listing on the back cover, once Kurt made it an unexpected hit).
Things got complicated after that, of course. Cris developed his drug problem, the band put out an album (
No Joke) that I somehow never bothered with, then kind of fell apart and reformed in a very different lineup in 2000 for another album,
Golden Lies, which I ignored at the time and am only just now getting into. It seems a pretty odd, ambitious record, incorporating even elements of rap; I've read Chris Walter, also a huge Pups fan, saying on Facebook that it's his favourite Pups album, and that has perked me up to check it out. It didn't capture my attention back in the day, but I was in a weird place, musically, at that point, living in Japan and dividing my listening between avant garde jazz and noise, on the one hand, and reggae, and, as far as punk went, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. I probably would have ignored whatever the Meat Puppets did, but it didn't mean I didn't like it; I just wasn't in the mood.
No: the real return to full on pups obsessiveness began with Rise to Your Knees - the CD that reunited the Kirkwood brothers, even if Derrick Bostrom wasn't on board anymore. I love that album, and reviewed it when it came out for the Nerve Magazine thus. I was feistier then, bit of a cunt, really, but I'll stand by it. This is the long version, that never saw print:
Meat Puppets: Rise
to Your Knees (Anodyne)
In the name of love for what is great,
let’s be ruthless, shall we? The Meat Puppets, before now, in their whole
sizeable catalogue, have put out two AND ONLY TWO great albums, Meat Puppets II and Up On the Sun, on which their entire importance hinges (I’d be
prepared to concede Meat Puppets I has
greatness in it, for all its sludgy singular
sputter, but, uh, great meals generally have to be cooked, and it ain’t, so I
leave it off the list). Yes, there are other moments in their back catalogue
that I am fond of. I’d be willing to
concede in a minute that “Forbidden Places” or “Evil Love” or “Look at the Rain”
or “Liquefied” or “Not Swimming Ground” or so forth are damn good rock songs,
if the competition is Nickelback or, say, your standard advertising jingle; but
if you compare them to Meat Puppets II
and Up On the Sun (and mebbe Meat
Puppets I), you’ve got (on the one
hand, like) great vital people’s culture, raw and authentic and heartfelt and
worthy of the attention of a 22nd century Harry Smith; and then, spread
like pieces of silver across the other hand – the one you jerk off with,
perhaps – you’ve got some stuff that mighta shoulda coulda been on FM radio,
almost, or, say, the Left of the Dial
compilation. Which you’re free to like or not, and sometimes I do, and silver
is nice, and I jerk off too, but in the long view, who fuckin’ cares? If it
weren’t for mebbe I and cert. II and Up, I wouldn’t, probably. Whether it hurts to admit it or not, most
of the Pups later discs are, face it, TAINTED BY THE MARKETPLACE, period. They
are Ain’t Love Grant compared to Wild Gift – or, sigh, Three Way Tie (for Last) compared to Double Nickels; they ain’t toxic, but they ain’t that great,
either. Judged by recorded document alone, it’s the gargantuan undisputable
greatness of their second two albums that, up til now, have made the band worth
noticing at all.
Now: my great joy that Cris Kirkwood has
cleaned up and reunited with his brother PROBABLY biases me, dig? I’m a
sentimental schlub at heart, and I don’t 100% trust my own judgment on this’un:
BUT it sure does seem like the reunited (if Bostromless) Pups, having actually
LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE – a joyous but impossibly painful thing, as anyone who
has “risen to their knees” will affirm - and having taken similar stock of the
situation, decided they really don’t give a fuck about that ever-promised
commercial breakthrough that never quite happened, blown a whole bunch of shit
out their asses and, revitalized and rejuvenated and ten pounds lighter and grateful as hell that they can make music
again, have recorded a third (or fourth, if you count I) great album, perhaps as good as or (yes, I’m willing to say it) maybe even better than those others. The
album is Huevos-direct (no endless
fuckin’ around with songs to polish’em up), but with better sound and better songs; and the lyrics have that epic Blakean quality that sometimes taps so deep it makes you
wanna weep. In "Island," Curt sings, “you’re the grass, you’re the trees/ you’re the thing that makes
the wind/ you’re the roots of the sky (?), you’re an island;" there are
other songs about spitting into the wind and such that seem to put more on
their sleeves than their crypto-mystical lyrical tendencies normally allow for,
which may account for the slightly melancholy tone of much of this disc. The
solos are spacy psyched-out desert-scorched journeys; and the general feel is
like somethin’ you might hear comin’ out of Mescalito’s ghetto blaster as he
dances around a cactus, with his genitals out, kinda like the strange
prehistoric bird ref’d in Zabriskie Point,
soaring through the canyons o’ yr. soul. I bought it (only $11.99!), and I
stuck it in my Discman, and I listened to nothin’ else for four whole days;
when I finally gave it a breather, it was to put in a different Pups disc for
the purposes of taking stock, and now I’m goin’ back to Rise and being staggered all over again. The Meat Puppets have, as
they sing, taken the “stupid stars” from their eyes, and, doors of perception
righteously cleansed, are staring out at you with this album, completely open
and accessible and THEMSELVES, man, makin’ music from their cacti-fed souls.
Whether the world is brave enough to meet their gaze remains to be seen, but I
sure hope so, because I LOVE THIS ALBUM, full stop. I am so happy. It is better
than anything you were expecting, and maybe even better than anything you were
hoping for.
It’d be a happy irony if THIS were their
breakthrough, eh?
That commercial breakthrough never happened; the album was probably a bit too artful and odd and demanding to ever have much of a chance. While I don't listen to it as often as I do than Too High to Die (which I weirdly don't even mention in that review), it's still a near perfect album. It kinda reminds me of my favourite Neil Young album, Zuma, actually - seems of that era, that sensibility. And if it's maybe a bit to blame - by setting the bar a bit too high - for the fact that it didn't "break" the band - that is not true for anything they've done since. Sewn Together, Lollipop, Rat Farm, and now Dusty Notes are all beautiful records, worthy of vastly more notice than they've gotten, carrying forth the torch of 70's rock and roll in an intelligent, rich, creative, and playful way (with maybe a smidgen of roots and country music creeping in around the edges, not that that's anything new for the band). It no longer feels like the Pups are consciously trying to get on the radio with any of these records, so they're, none of them, remotely describable as "sell outs;" it feels like they've accepted their lot and have resolved to just be the best Meat Puppets they can be, but (especially with Dusty Notes) they're now (apparently effortlessly) crafting stuff that COULD be on mainstream rock radio, or in some cases mainstream country radio, without diminishing their identity in the slightest. They've learned exactly the perfect balance of elements, and they SHOULD be filling arenas with music this good.
The ongoing neglect of this band - the degree of divergence between critical esteem (and actual stellar musical accomplishment), on the one hand, and commercial neglect and listener indifference on the other - continues to astound me, but none of it is the fault of the Meat Puppets. And as often is the case, I find myself cheerleading wholeheartedly, with Dusty Notes: maybe THIS time, the mix of elements will be right, the stars will line up, and suddenly the Meat Puppets will be elevated to superstar status, and get the payoff (and comfy retirement) they so richly deserve?
I mean, to hell with the vat joke, I'd be delighted if that came to pass, especially if it happened around an album this good.
Dusty Notes captures pretty much the entire range of the Pups' musical expression; from the delightful, bouncy twang of the opening rock tune, "
Warranty" to the Hal David/ Paul Hampton cover of "
Sea of Heartbreak" - the best "country" song on the album, which mostly faithfully captures the flavour of
Don Gibson's original (which is actually several magnitudes weirder than what the Pups do), there's not a remotely compromised moment on the record, and only one song that is actually probably too heavy for radio play ("Vampyr's Winged Fantasy," which, after a
Crime of the Century-esque keyboard intro from new member Ron Stabinsky - goes full on "Attacked by Monsters" or something, giving the album its sole trip to the land of heavy riffage). Other favourites include "Nine Pins," with Cris on banjo, and the mellow, Dead-like "The Great Awakening," "Nightcap," and "Outflow," which almost sounds like some sort of traditional folk song, so effortlessly perfect are its rhymes and choruses. There's an ethereal, noisy, plateauing grandeur to the Curt's solos, too, that takes me right back to
Rise to Your Knees. There is so much sheer pleasure to be had from this album - even if it's a bit mellow and melancholic at times, and maybe gives a hint that the band are getting, like all of us, older - that it deserves every ounce of commercial notice that it gets, and probably quite a bit more than that, too.
And DERRICK BOSTROM is back! He left the Meat Puppets for the longest time, even ran a competing website; I never really got to the bottom of why that was, but he's amply welcome back in the fold (and I'd like to thank him for having the sense not to grow a beard to rival the Kirkwoods; it would just be too much hair for one band, if he did).
Anyhow, there are a few great rock records out now for old punks like me - the Flesh Eaters'
I Used to Be Pretty and Bob Mould's
Sunshine Rock are two others that I've been enjoying. But the band I'd most like to see get notice is the Meat Puppets. It's long past time for them to be widely regarded as one of the greatest American rock bands of the last four decades. If you've somehow missed out their recorded output (or if you've been neglecting them for the last while) starting (anew) with
Dusty Notes would not be the worst move you could make. And if you like the Meat Puppets, you'll probably agree: this is one of their best-ever albums - maybe not up there with those aforementioned landmarks, but at least in the top five albums they've recorded (
II, Up on the Sun, Too High to Die, and
Rise being the others, by me, though the exact order I'd stack them in depends on my mood of the moment).
Now all we need is a Vancouver show...
