So if you follow the Meat Puppets on their website, if (like me), you peek in there every now and then to see if anything is happening, you'd have no idea that a new live album of 1990's Meat Puppets recordings, Camp Songs, recently came out. If you follow them on Facebook, you're okay. Observation 1: the Meat Puppets are not updating their website much.
Good to know! (I have now followed them on Facebook).
Also, if you bought the album for their cover of "Blue Moon of Kentucky," listed on the back, you might be kind of annoyed. Because it's not on there. Apparently by way of compensation, they're giving that song away (or, well, it's a name-your-price situation) on their bandcamp. Luckily, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," fun as it is, was not a make-or-break song for me, anyhow.
On the other hand, if you DIDN'T buy Camp Songs -- if you saw it at the store and walked away in a petulant huff because they did not have "Blinded by Turds" on it -- a hilarious, rude, under-appreciated song by Canadian-born folksinger Oscar Brand, which appeared on an old Meat Puppets performance DVD under a different title ("Wonderful Song"), and which perfectly fits the album's apparent mandate of playful, goodtime cover songs, well, rush back to the store and buy the album forthwith, because IN FACT, "Blinded by Turds" is on it, where "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was s'posed to be. I actually bought it without closely perusing the tracklist, then thought, "Oh, maybe 'Blinded by Turds' is on it," flipped it over outside Neptoon and felt sad that it was not there, then got it home, slit the shrink, and did a happy little dance to see that it is in fact, the first song on side 2. (I didn't even notice the absence of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" til I saw them post about it on Facebook).
Observation 3 (not particularly Pups-centric): I guess that's just the kind of music fan I am: Moon meh, Turds yay. Love the vocal echo that kicks in when the lady sticks her ass out the window; Geoffrey Chaucer would approve.
But Observation 4: This album is (maybe) not an attempt to attract "new" fans so much. It's pretty bare bones, all-round: there's no download card, no liner notes, exactly one photo of the band on the back, an error in the track listing... maybe it's just a budgetary issue, but presentation-wise, this album is showing up for the job interview in a jean jacket. It appears to be assembled for fans who have been file-sharing Meat Puppets shows for 20+ years, who are going, HOLY FUCK NOW I HAVE THESE SONGS ON VINYL!!!! It's like (maybe) a thank you for the faithful? Noobs need not apply. You won't understand, noob. Go buy that Taylor Swift album over there, or something. That's what you really want, right? (Apparently).
Which is fine. Those of us on the Pups train have been here for awhile and we don't need them bells-and-whistles. But the fact is, I bought my first Meat Puppets album, Up on the Sun, BECAUSE of the terrific cover painting! (This album is subject to a recent re-release, as well, note). That was in 1985, the year of its release; I was 17, shopping at Odyssey Imports, and given to the odd blind buy. What's this? Cool cover, cool band name, it's on SST... maybe I'll like it?
Boy, did I. It didn't immediately make sense to me, but it inspired the curiosity to listen again and again. Nearly 40 years later and I still love it.
But if Up on the Sun (and Huevos, another favourite, not reissued as of yet, but I have hopes) have some of the greatest cover paintings ever (both by bandleader Curt Kirkwood), the cover art on Camp Songs -- though designed by drummer Derrick Bostrom -- is really no big deal at all. It's not a BAD cover, but, like, it's MOSTLY WORDS. The cartoon racoons are cute and all, but, like, no one goes "Hey, I'm going to buy this record, it has racoons on the cover!"
(Well, maybe Doc Corbin Dart does, who knows. Does Doc Dart buy records, even? Hope he's doin' all right out there... but I digress.)
This is a marvelous live album. It kicks off with "Walking Boss," which is deeply associated with the Pups, appearing on their first album; while the band was recording much more musically sophisticated and polished material by 1991 (the year of this performance and of Forbidden Places), live, the song is quite in keeping with the rough, raw-and-ready feel of their 1982 debut; it could be from a show ten years earlier. BTW a "walking boss" is kind of a foreman, and the song -- a traditional -- was first recorded by Clarence Ashley (or so I believe), also known for a very early recording of "The Cuckoo."
That track is followed by a spacy, swirly cover of "Amazing Grace" (a great song I've had enough of, generally, but which has been insufficiently psychedelicized in its prior history, so that's nice; who says "Amazing Grace" can't involve swirling patterns in the carpet, attaining dimensionality and rising up into the air? THIS IS A MOMENT OF GRACE, TOO, innit?). "I Saw the Light" is pretty straightforward and also amply-covered (hell, even ANTiSEEN do it), but it lends itself to psychedelic interp, here involving mostly blustery burbling vocal effects and a fall-apart weirdo ending. With or without these acid-soaked interpolations, it's one of the greatest moments in Hank Williams body of work, so anyone can cover it anytime and that will make me happy, I think ("I Saw the Light">"Amazing Grace," by me; who knew?). Meanwhile, the next track, "El Paso City" is a Marty Robbins tune I don't know (and want to read the lyrics to, because I can't follow the story as delivered by Curt without a lyric sheet). This is not the "El Paso" that was Robbins biggest hit, but (apparently) a later meta-level reinterpretation of the song, which actually begins with a present day narrator remembering the song "El Paso" as he flies over Texas. What?
I'm going to have to spend more time on this one. I did not realize that Marty Robbins went meta.
What's interesting here (Observation 5? Am I keeping correct count?) is that the band would choose to represent THREE Marty Robbins songs but only ONE Hank Williams one. That's kind of piquant, eh? (And while it involves stepping out of sequence, the other two Robbins tunes are "White Sport Coat" and, best of all, "Big Iron" -- some Vancouver fans will know this from seeing Petunia and the Vipers cover it, though I'm a big fan of the album it's on, and it was the standout track on the back cover before I realized that "Blinded by Turds" is actually present).
I am going to abandon the track-by-track approach now (I can hear my wife stirring), save for noting that "The Wayward Wind" is the song on the album that is already the most like a Meat Puppets song, and that this has got to be my favourite interpretation ever of (Butthole Surfers guitarist) Paul Leary's (unfortunately autobiographical) "The Adventures of Pee-Pee the Sailor" at least done by someone other than Paul Leary himself. It thus beats out the previous recording of the song by the Pups (whose Too High to Die was produced by Leary) and the one by the Bad Livers. Those are both great, but the live energy of the delivery on Camp Songs cannot be beat.
Incidentally, Leary explained about "Pee Pee," when I interviewed him for Big Takeover a few years ago, that it was "a real self-reflective song: we did a lot of partying and drinking and carrying on back then, and in the back of my mind was always, 'Where does this lead? Am I gonna end up sleeping in the gutter, peeing my pants?' That’s kind of where that song came from." Ouch!
There are a few other songs on the album but I don't have much to say about'em, anyway.
And as for winning friends and influencing people, if the cover art for Camp Songs is not likely to attract a lot of new ears, there's a pretty cool animated video for "Up on the Sun" that just came out that's just wonderful (watch it on acid at your peril). Bostrom seems to be the artist at hand, this time, too. I've always been under the impression that most people have a very poor understanding of what "psychedelic" means in art. This video is a fine corrective: THIS is the kind of imagery that a trippin' young man, stuck in the suburbs, might see behind his eyelids when listening to Up on the Sun (but don't ask me how I know), though it also reminds me at times a bit of the paintings a friend used to do to represent the experience of his migraines. Given the shifts between images, one wonders how much of this was accomplished digitally, and how much of it was based on individual paintings Bostrom did? It must have taken hundreds of hours, no...?
So what are the Pups going to do next? I love that they have put Up on the Sun out before II (II is over-represented; it's a great album, but just because it got a well-deserved boost from Kurt Cobain doesn't mean that it's the best thing they ever did. The best thing the Meat Puppets ever did is to BE THE MEAT PUPPETS, but the best album they ever released was probably Up on the Sun. Though Huevos and Too High to Die (their most successful "mainstreaming" attempt) and the under-sung Rise to Your Knees are all way up there, for me, too.
Here is what I would love to see happen, once II is out there (besides a new Meat Puppets album, of course; there is always room for that).
1. Vinyl reissues of Too High to Die and Forbidden Places. They're just too darn expensive and hard to find. Hope that there aren't rights issues. Of the many things that happened post-"the year punk broke" to dig into the underground and turn it into topsoil, Too High to Die is by far my favourite. If I were to pick my top 10 albums of the 1990s, this is up there with Eight Way Santa, and well above any of the other comparable discs of its kind by Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, or, well, Nirvana. I still listen to all those bands, but Too High to Die, especially, is a favourite-rock-album-of-all-time, by me (though I have not always been so appreciative; see below).
2. A first time vinyl release of 2007's Rise to Your Knees. This is the one that I reviewed at the time in Nerve Magazine by riffing on Zabriskie Point. The full review went unpublished, as I recall. I write less like a rock critic, now (thank god -- I actually softened this a bit, because it was just a bit too prickish) and have warmed up a lot to the Pups more polished efforts -- apparently I wrote this at a low ebb in my enthusiasm for Too High to Die -- but the review in full read:
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 on the other hand, 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, but in the long view, it's not epochal, not the stuff that makes you LOVE a band. If it weren’t for mebbe I and cert. II and Up, I wouldn’t LOVE the Pups, 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 - have 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; the lyrics have that epic Blakean quality that sometimes taps so deep it makes you wanna weep (“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”; and 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?
(...It wasn't).
3. A vinyl reissue of Huevos (not as hard to find but I don't have it).
4. A vinyl (re?)issue of Live in Montana, because I don't have that one, either, not in any format. Ditto Rat Farm, which came out in a period of peak productivity that just exhausted me: "Jeezus, guys, I still haven't caught up with Lollipop! (I'm ready, now).
5. A tour! Can Cris get into Canada? Is it too expensive? I really, really want the Meat Puppets to play Vancouver. I've never seen them live! (I considered it when they opened for Soundgarden but I just didn't have the resources or the stamina. Sure shoulda done it. Ah well: at least I have Camp Songs). What are the odds that the Meat Puppets would play a venue like the Rickshaw?
Goddamn, that would be perfect.
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