The Meat Puppets

The Meat Puppets, especially the core duo of brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood, are one of the great survival stories in American rock. The Arizona band’s second album, Meat Puppets II, surprised the college-rock world in 1984 with its unexpectedly psychedelic and uniquely Southwestern blend of country, folk, punk, and classic rock; it was one of the cornerstones of what became alternative rock in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and yet nothing ever really sounded like it again. Not even subsequent records by the Meat Puppets themselves—they never again found quite the same hazy, dream-like balance on their next few albums, tilting toward folk (Up on the Sun), psych-rock (Mirage), and classic-rock boogie (Huevos) instead of making it all fit together in a seamless, hallucinatory whole.
A decade later, the alternative nation repaid the Puppets: Kurt Cobain invited the Kirkwoods to back him on “Lake of Fire,” “Plateau,” and “Oh Me”—all songs from Meat Puppets II—for MTV Unplugged in 1993, and the band scored its own minor radio hit with “Backwater.” But things unraveled after that as the Kirkwood brothers’ drug habits ran out of control—Cris Kirkwood’s wife and best friend died of overdoses at his house in the ’90s, and he was shot in the stomach by a security guard at a Phoenix post office in 2003 and spent a year in prison.
So the return of the Meat Puppets in the last few years is just another surprise from a band that won’t stay down. That their two post-reunion albums, Rise to Your Knees (2006) and this year’s Sewn Together, have been as solid as they are is an even bigger surprise. The Puppets haven’t recaptured the addled desert majesty of 1984, but Rise and Sewn are hardly throwaways. For a group that’s been through as much as they have, that in itself is an accomplishment. (Matthew Everett)