22. Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun (1985)

[2012 review of “Two Rivers” here.]

Surprise—it turns out the Meat Puppets have a much bigger catalog than I remembered, including the 1987 Huevos which I’m sure I owned at one time. I count at least six or seven albums before Kurt Cobain reached down and gave them a hand back up in the ‘90s. It’s possible I lost track because I never felt the need to go far beyond this album—in many ways beyond just the song “Two Rivers,” which hits like sunlight glinting on water. I can feel the heat of the desert and the glare makes me want to reach for sunglasses. Stepping back on more recent revisits it’s not hard to make out the psychedelic intentions across the length and breadth of Up on the Sun, starting with the cover art, reminiscent of pre-psychedelic visionary Van Gogh’s naked lunch style. A more recent video on youtube of the gentle, rambling title song, created by the Australian video artist SPOD, updates the vibe to this century (and emphasize the psychedelia). So you know, at the moment there’s a certain parade of Meat Puppets rereleases going on. Make Record Store Day special this year. If you’ve always been curious, now is the time. The Kirkwood brothers Curt and Cris, MP mainstays, hail from Phoenix, Arizona, but their hearts seem to lie in a canny blend of country strains ever so slightly inflected by hallucinogenic experience and distant memories of hardcore punk. They sing off-key, miss notes all the time, but the play of guitars is rich and intricate. The mood is somber and soaring at once, as if on a quest for a spirit animal. The songs are short like punk (their origin) but they warp at will as if the recording itself has a tremolo bar attached. I see this compared to the Byrds—sure, I’ll go along with that, but the country is more fully absorbed and the Byrds never had much punk in them. But this is equally the place, eight miles high, where the sights and the sounds may become overwhelming. Sometimes you sense the music is just a dim echo of the sources, of what was experienced. In this case, a dim echo might be as much as you need.

Meat Puppets II (1984)

At the time I thought the Roman numerals gambit in the title was strange, especially for a hardcore punk act on SST. Full disclosure, I was not aware of the Meat Puppets until this album but going back for a listen to the first like everyone else disclosed basically what everybody else also agreed: uninspired generic thrash (see also Land Speed Record and a thousand more). So maybe the Roman numerals signaled some kind of conscious reset, as these Arizona punks turned their blear-eyed gaze more in the direction of the Grateful Dead. That would not really see full fruition until the next album, Up on the Sun. Meat Puppets II is more like their Harry Smith phase—the vocals by the Kirkwood brothers are yelpy, mumbly, weird. They miss a lot of notes, which doesn't always work. Coming back to this album for the first time after many years was a shock to the system. I was not one who was ever impressed with their '90s work with Nirvana (indeed I was embarrassed for them in 1994) and it brought back memories of that. Later I remembered it was my experience the first time too in 1984. Meat Puppets II has a lot of enduring charm and surprises but it is an acquired taste. You might have to give it a couple tries. Or maybe it'll hit you right away. The production and guitar play are coiled and aggressive and often surprisingly beautiful but skittish, pulling up a lot just when they seem to be hitting something. Their punk instincts are still winning handily over their GD "country-rock" instincts and most of the songs are under three minutes, a couple under two (including a 1:21). They're not songs so much as they are essays at moods, fragments of rehearsal jams given ramshackle homes. The vocals are often a mess, smears and fat brush strokes like the cover painting and lots of mistakes—or "mistakes," but I think in this case there's no need for scare quotes. The glowing budding imposing guitar play is reflected in the cover painting too. The singing counterpoints the intuitive muscle of this oddball power trio band set free on these sprints. Some of the songs are instrumentals—good move. As usual with latter-day rereleases of albums (this one circa 2014), there are extra tracks of some interest now but nothing you couldn't live without. In 1984 SST seemed mad with instinct the way they were turning up bands.

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.