Meat Puppets, "Two Rivers" (1985)

(listen)

I think most Meat Puppets true believers tend to prefer the breakthrough Meat Puppets II over the follow-up, Up on the Sun, which provides the home for this. Fair enough, that's true enough, it's probably the better album, and certainly the bigger and better surprise. But I have to say this is my one favorite song by the band, if forced to pick a single favorite (which, I know, these things never happen).  It's another one of those more or less obscurities—never released as a single, always occupying the #11 spot in the sequencing (deep into the vinyl side 2), etc. But wow, once cranked up, it just sparkles—a word I choose deliberately, because "sparkles" is exactly what guitarist/songwriter Curt Kirkwood manages with the beautiful, haunting noise he makes with the guitar, the hook that makes this song, which glitters across the surface passing through like the self-same waters of the title, reflecting sunshine. That sound somehow encapsulates a lot of the themes the whole album implicitly (and explicitly) plays with, hard flat desert sunlight, the feel of an epic landscape, stripped down and harsh, but lushly beautiful with fantastic colors. The geography they lived in and knew. Out of that this Arizona power trio concocted the studious country-inflected groove so familiar from their peak. Remember, the first album was a bit of a hardcore punk-rock exercise. So they covered a lot of ground to finally arrive at this quasi-Grateful Dead quasi-R.E.M. brooding style of feeling one's way through a jam, tightening it up and focusing it sharp. For the moment anyway they are verging on territory of acts such as Neil Young and the Band, tapping deep into veins of American experience in a way that's hard to explain. It's another absolute beauty.