Meat Puppets - Cow-core Elegies

Curt Kirkwood (1959, Phoenix, AZ) is one of the essential figures in rock music. His voice and guitar are, on one hand, the hinge between the metaphysical noise-rock of Neil Young and the nihilistic strain embodied first by Sonic Youth and then by Nirvana; on the other, opposite side, they're the cornerstones of a new rock subgenre we might call progressive-country. Curt Kirkwood has in fact accomplished two seemingly irreconcilable feats -- which are instead the very essence of the surrealism in his art. First: he reinvented hardcore, pushing it to the brink of death-metal or grind-metal -- Curt Kirkwood is among the first to use "larynx-shredding screaming," the hardcore equivalent of metal's guttural growl. Second: he distilled the age-old American country tradition -- both musically and atmospherically -- drawing on the mediation of country's other great interpreter, Neil Young, yet moving beyond him to arrive at a kind of rock never heard before. It consists of mid-tempo rhythms and tones marked by a crystalline, sun-drenched, full guitar sound (his weapon of choice being finger-picking), matched by an equally radiant voice. All of this serves to evoke that languid, blinding, dusty state of the American South.

In this sense, Curt Kirkwood's body of work stands as the pinnacle of refinement, lyricism, painterly vision and imagination within the so-called "southern rock" strand of the '70s, which drew its thematic impetus from Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and its formal character from the sound of certain Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival records (The Allman Brothers Band, Eagles, Jackson Browne), eventually spilling over into a peculiar brand of hard rock (ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd), which, broadly speaking, is also part of this same movement. The whole thing's starting point -- thematically too -- can be called blues, but its destination is pure rock -- just listen to the tightly marked tempos. "Southern rock" played the same role that white folk music had played decades earlier in relation to Black blues: carrying into the private and existential sphere -- and into the society in which that private, existential life unfolds -- the expressionistic, atmospheric and epic voice that had previously found its expressive vehicle in the sounds of Black blues musicians.

The two labels "cow-punk" and "southern rock," applied to Curt Kirkwood's two-faced revolution in rock, seem both apt and reductive at once. After all, he managed to reconcile Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and the Germs with a versatility worthy of Frank Zappa.

The Meat Puppets went on to represent the comeback of the South and of the provinces (but also -- and just as much, if not more -- of the countryside) at a time when rock-underground was dominated, more than ever, by the two poles and metropolises of Los Angeles and New York, worlds apart in everything except this particular hold on the scene.

Whenever the word "avant-garde" comes up in rock, it's almost always attached to bands that aren't really rock and only seem avant-garde because they don't play rock at all. The Meat Puppets -- like the Minutemen, the Velvet Underground or Metallica -- are a towering avant-garde rock band: they invented at least three distinct styles and have a wealth of ideas, as even the excellent tracks left off their album sessions attest -- all of it achieved with just three instruments, three members, and always recorded live.

In A Car (1981) EP, 5 tracks, 5 minutes.

The Meat Puppets' debut single-handedly reinvents the whole of hardcore; positioning itself not as post-hardcore but as an evolution (through sheer intensification) of hardcore itself: "In A Car" [- 1:20] is one of the wildest, most dissonant rackets ever put to tape; "Dolphin Field" [- 1:06] doubles down, sharpening, if anything, the drums' ferocity, the guitar's abrasiveness, the near-death-metal vocals; "Foreign Lawns" [- :36] dissolves into total unintelligibility (the same kind found in "Hate Me" by Die Kreuzen, "Joshua's Song" by Bad Brains, or "Punch Drunk" by Husker Du: all tracks from the same era, all verging on grind-metal, Napalm Death or hyper-core territory, DRI-like; though it's worth noting that unintelligibility also means cacophony, and that lineage traces back to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart on one side, and the Velvet Underground and the Stooges on the other).

On vocals, the ferocious style of a twenty-two-year-old Curt Kirkwood is what's known as "larynx-shredding screaming," which renders the lyrics unintelligible. Kirkwood is among the first to use it -- it's a hardcore lesson that would go on to be copied by virtually everyone, from metal onward.

Five minutes are also enough for the Meat Puppets to invent yet another musical genre, another strand of rock: "Big House" [- 1:05] is the first track -- entirely instrumental -- pointing toward the future Meat Puppets and their surrealist, progressive country sound; "Out In The Gardener" [- 1:00], meanwhile, sits halfway between a hiccupping, core-inflected passage and a fully country air.

Meat Puppets (1982) LP, 14 tracks, 21 minutes.

This is a splendid continuation of the journey just begun. At times it's new hardcore (hyper-hardcore), at times new rock (hyper-country). Compared to later Meat Puppets records, here the dissonance and noise run through both the core side and the country side -- later, the former would be disowned, the latter elevated, formally too, to the level of transcendence and classicism. Masterpieces abound ("Reward" [- 1:11], "Walking Boss" [- 2:52] -- above all this cover of Doc Watson, though the song is traditional and the Meat Puppets turn it into one of the greatest in all of rock), as do excesses of unintelligibility ("Blue-Green God" [-1:22], "Melons Rising" [- :53], "Electromud" [- :47], "The Gold Mine" [- 1:02]), but also melodic ballads twisted and bruised ("Our Friends" [- 2:11], "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" (Nolan) [- 2:02], "Litterbox" [- :50]), instrumentals that hit straight to the heart ("Saturday Morning" [- 1:30], "Milo, Sorghum, and Maize" [- 2:15]), and dissonances carrying every kind of animalistic rage, at once feral and childlike ("Love Offering" [- 1:28], "Meat Puppets" [- 1:38], "Playing Dead" [- 1:28]).

It's an unsurpassed diary of shattered dreams, memories, and startling screams, systematic yet utterly gripping in their adolescent rawness. It's an ode to a cursed existence and a lament over that very curse.

At twenty-two, Curt Kirkwood already deserves a place among the most important and revolutionary guitarists and singers of all time. His guitar playing is a continuous torment, shapeless, much like his vocals, which amount to full-throated howls. Whenever a riff emerges -- or a melody, or lines sung and pronounced clearly enough to understand -- it gets so mangled and disjointed that the result feels like an even more radical rupture than the unstoppable cow-punk chaos of the 30-second tracks.

The Meat Puppets' hardcore is music for the cosmos and its conflagrations, which they try to recreate through sheer sonic brutality, in a shared state of blindness, ignorance, anti-aestheticism, ugliness and inhumanity -- capable of uniting and justifying both man and universe, life and inert matter, through a truth that amounts to indistinction, or sterility.

A glimmer of value or reflection emerges only when the tempo slows and the hardcore turns toward country culture, relived in surrealist, existential terms. But even then no real dualism takes hold, and the coexistence of loud and soft, of human understanding and life alongside natural ignorance and materiality, exacerbates every track, tragically torn between these opposites -- opposites that are finally made to annihilate each other within a truth capable of subsuming them both.

After the void and the destruction of everything, all that's left is to reflect on it. That's how the future Meat Puppets will come to conceive their peculiar post-hardcore: sometimes returning to a meditation on the harrowing nihilism of their early youth, but more often — bracketing it off, as if prescribing, as an antidote to the ignorance inherent in the lack of universal meaning, a human ignorance that, in order to face that other ignorance, must actually think.

Meat Puppets II (1983) LP, 12 tracks, 30 minutes.

If the Meat Puppets' debut was already a masterpiece of fundamental historical importance, this is a masterpiece within the masterpiece, carrying forward the discourse the band had begun, right up to their eventual shift into progressive-country. By now, formally, almost nothing of hardcore remains, but its spirit and desperation still permeate everything. Later, once progressive-country was fully underway, even that component would have to give way to the band's new aesthetic. This album, though, precisely because it's caught between a form that largely clashes with its substance, carries a value that is moving, sublime, absolute. It contains three of the greatest rock songs of all time — as Cobain would later attest on "MTV Unplugged in New York". Here are the tracks — seven minutes in all — that make the twenty-four-year-old Curt Kirkwood one of the greatest songwriters of all time: "Plateau" [- 2:22], a delightful orchestrated lullaby poised between the harshness of existence and the surrealism of dream; "Oh, Me" [- 2:59], a psalm that, with a wonderfully understated rhythm section and a precious guitar, pierces country music through the troubled, suicidal adolescence of the early '80s — and revolutionizes the way such bleakness is portrayed: not dark, not metal, but country — only the Violent Femmes, with their contemporaneous "To The Kill", would come close; "Lake of Fire" [1:54], the sublime of the sublime, where the instrumental plane finds its most heart-wrenching contrast against the violence of a desperate voice: melody against distortion, composure against abandon.

"Split Myself In Two" [- 2:22] still carries an almost-hardcore streak and effectively lays the groundwork for the modes and content of indie rock (from Dinosaur Jr. to My Bloody Valentine and countless other, often great, artists of the final era of rock — the second half of the '80s).

"Magic Toy Missing" [- 1:20] is a power-country instrumental that embodies a style invented from scratch by the Meat Puppets — and in some ways more radical than Young's own innovations, since he, after all, often either followed tradition or innovated it from within, via noise.

"Lost" [- 3:24] brings out every hallmark of power-country: a rhythm section marching like a fanfare, a guitar that distorts to reach another world rather than to weep in this one, and a vocal that rises metaphysically — so Kirkwood completes his full climb of innovations from this angle too: after establishing the near-mouse-in-the-throat delivery, after the adolescent indie whimper, here comes the voice of the guardian angel. "Aurora Borealis" [- 2:44] is a liquid instrumental, yes, but liquid with sunlight, not water — an element never to be found in this music of the great prairies. If it starts again from Neil Young, it surpasses him through a far more radical conception of the musical work. A form enriched by content that is a weave of contemplative bliss and a symptom somewhere between nostalgic and desolate.

"We're Here" [- 2:40] is yet another thoroughly introspective, sighing confession from Kirkwood, who then seems to flee in panic, or dissolve, into a landscape of deserts and cacti. His guitar playing reaches avant-garde timbres that stand alongside the sounds of the early-'70s Canterbury scene. "Climbing" [- 2:41] is a melody enough to give you chills, a mouthpiece for centuries of folk and Southern music, enriched here with a new, modern consciousness — and needless to say, a track like this, besides being timeless, was something nothing short of unheard-of for '83 (a year between Ultravox and Metallica). "New Gods" [- 2:09] marks the second, partial return to hardcore tempos: the voice is dark, yes, but without screaming; the instruments — all three of them — then deliver one of the most precious and sophisticated passages ever committed to tape — country, blues, acid folk, psychedelia all seem like mere labels. "I'm A Mindless Idiot" [- 2:26] is, this time, a watercolor instrumental worthy of an affected impressionist painter working in Arizona. "The Whistling Song" [- 2:56] even boasts a memorable whistle, delivered now more like a narrator and survivor — however aware of all the weight that implies — than like a self-flagellator.

All the tracks are essentially fast; and yet they manage to convey a state of swoon, insomnia, hallucination, a torpor as perennial and inescapable as it is personal — and all the more touching for it — and always impeccably refined.

Up On The Sun (1985) Lp, 12 brani, 33 minuti.

With this album, the Meat Puppets' progressive-country, or power-country, reaches formal perfection — at the obvious expense of hardcore, which has now definitively faded away. Its coordinates are surrealism, impressionism, flawless execution — right up to the point where the instrumental prevails over the vocal.

"Up On The Sun" [- 3:58] is a delicate watercolor, marked on one side by unusual, chiming guitar jangle (introduced by an obsessive guitar riff) and, on the other, by a voice poised between apathy and transcendence (Dead Can Dance).

"Maiden's Milk" [- 3:17], fully instrumental, is built on scale after scale of guitar runs and manages to rise to madrigal-like melodies, before stretching out into a watery, whistled progression. The reference point of Australia's Dead Can Dance — the band behind the contemporaneous "Spleen And Ideal" — returns meaningfully in a droning rhythm section and in an effect poised between alienation and formal perfection, achieved with minimal means — pop in the case of Dead Can Dance, rock in the case of the Meat Puppets.

"Away" [- 3:30] is sung like a hymn somewhere between naïve and grunge (Screaming Trees), but played as only a church orchestra could during a pagan rite. "Animal Kingdom" [- 1:23] pairs the usual voice, torn between nausea and melody, with an instrumental bed that — thanks to its guitar counterpoints and the relentless restraint of the rhythm section — borders on the hypnotic. "Hot Pink" [- 3:22] unfolds through an orchestration that, amid a thousand devices, reveals all the care taken in arranging and producing these tracks — the guitar shifts from a mandolin-like effect to one of tempered cacophony. "Swimming Ground" [- 3:05] is the most melodic, nostalgic, moving dirge of all — immediately, as is the rule, contradicted by a pitiless guitar (pitiless in its sonic optimism). The effect may come close to dream pop, but the means — and the tempos: too fast for pop, not driving enough for hard rock — expose the narrowness of that label. "Buckethead" [- 2:19], even as it draws on a subdued funk, finds its real worth in the usual guitar flourishes — like the quick brushstrokes of an impressionist painter. "Too Real" [- 2:08] sets aside the impressionism of tracks that are incomprehensible up close but only appreciable as a whole and from a distance, to focus instead on riffs that are outdated yet so overused they barely even register as such, paired with a sincere, thoroughly existential reflection — as stifling as Ian Curtis's.

"Enchanted Pork Fist" [- 2:48] opens — and closes — with an acceleration that sounds almost like a pop version of Iron Maiden; then it disorients with jazzy digressions and Canterbury-style echoes and reverbs. "Seal Whales" [- 2:16] is an instrumental — and this too should be considered the masterpiece of the whole album — that has the feel of embryos, of foetuses: yet so many digressions, so many melodic hints, give the sense of a self-awareness unable to conceal the rationality hidden behind such painterly offerings.

"Two Rivers" [- 3:15] should be taken as the album's most emblematic track: it represents its instrumentalism — crafted with the same care as Brian Eno's ambient work, whose results it practically mirrors; it represents the otherworldly, faint voice of Kirkwood, now, like the musicians accompanying him, tiptoeing through mournful lullabies: the monumental excesses of just a few years earlier now unthinkable. "Creator" [- 2:09], after yet more multifaceted instrumental inventions, brings in a vocal capable of a melody as irresistible as it is exquisitely concealed and only hinted at — it will stand as the mirror-image masterpiece of "Seal Whales". Then everything ends without any warning at all.

The greatness of this album lies in the opposite of that — more dazzling — of its predecessor. It's built on the drone, not on oppositions. On nuance, not on contradiction. If melody is ever reached, it's arrived at, never the starting point. It's like a fixed idea with a multicolored head in its details and a blinding one as a whole. Every scrap of it is precious; but it all slips by unnoticed unless you patiently break it down, piece by piece. In composing tracks like these, only Pere Ubu can claim anything approaching a comparable closeness.

Having found their groove, the Meat Puppets carry on, riffing on the same theme and the same approach, with an album, Mirage (1987), that manages to shine with a light all its own, brimming as it is with sincerity in conveying the ineffable nature of feelings, landscapes and human relationships.

“Mirage” borders on the dreamlike sound of Rem, “Quit It” raises the pitch for a kind of sun-baked rhythm and blues, and “Confusion Fog” distills the only-apparent clarity of country music. “Wind And The Rain” even rises to a choral grandeur that has nothing to envy in the best of Buffalo Springfield; “The Mighty Zero” is the black pearl; “Get On Down” shows just how close this quasi-singer-songwriter style is to Cobain's songwriting: strip the latter down and you find the essential lines of the former. “Leaves” is yet another delicatessen – unthinkable, if not downright incomprehensible, to most. “I Am A Machine” dispenses a great, imaginative piece of instrumental work, steering clear of the rhetorical trap of the chorus. If “Hundred Miles” shows a grain of anger, “Love Our Children Forever” is a masterpiece of epic folk-blues capable of sweeping away most of today's post-rock-flavored folk revival. “Liquified” is the electric, powerful closing anthem – as if to shake off all the dust, golden as it may be, accumulated so far.

Huevos (1987) partly reshuffles the deck, cranking up the volume and moving from introspection to extroversion, to the point of being almost straightforward American rock: the voice turns from crystalline to raspy, the guitars dart around fast, incisive and distorted, though never quite diving headlong into the hard rock riff. “Dry Rain”, “Fruit”, “Automatic Mojo”, “I Can't Be Counted On” are the touchstones here. These are songs that could have climbed the charts, if only Kirkwood had been mean enough to bend to easy melody; instead, once again, his music ends up elusive, and therefore incomprehensible to the masses. Worth noting are the guitar fireworks in the Up On The Sun style on “Crazy”.

Monsters (1989) opens, to general disbelief, with a heavy-metal panzer, “Attacked By Monsters”. It's a continuation of the path set out on Huevos, but that doesn't take away the effect of a Pollyanna playing at being a punkette. Once the shock wears off, all that's left is to admire and applaud Kirkwood's audacity. The guitars, flattened out but still paired with that same angelic voice, carry on through “Meltdown” and especially “Void”, six minutes of guitar ecstasy independent of any vocal declamation. “Party Till The World Obeys” doesn't put an end to the astonishment, with a dark, unwholesome tone that, at a different tempo, could even recall the Misfits. “Flight Of The Fire Weasel” is yet another great instrumental number: if there were chambers in the desert, this would be the fitting score for an ensemble to play there. “Strings On Your Heart” and “Like Being Alive” close out the album in style, just as it began, confirming that, as usual, the Meat Puppets' musical skills and vision are such that they can do without rock's traditional center of gravity: the voice. The first track, with its screech and its halting rhythm, would have quite a bit to say to grunge; the second pairs this new dissonant key with the angelic quality of Kirkwood's near-falsetto.

On Forbidden Places (1991), those who can also be counted among Nirvana's main inspirations offer further proof of just how true that is with “Open Wide”. The album once again holds up well above average.

On Too High To Die (1994) there's the aching ballad “Roof With A Hole”, which, without wanting to take anything away from it, is starting to feel a bit too easy by the band's standards. “Backwater” and “We Don't Exist” are well crafted, very much in step with the grunge era; though, on closer inspection, their frenzy is restrained, and they're never cathartic or shouted, as if that world which the Meat Puppets unwittingly helped create wasn't really meant for them. The album as a whole is pleasant, rich and streets ahead (if nothing else, for the superb way it's played, as usual) of plenty of other records that are often praised precisely for their meanness. The problem is that you can sense the fish out of water, and it doesn't feel entirely under control.

No Joke (1995) contains a few more swerves toward harder tones, a bit like the ones only Young, with his acoustic-and-electric approach, can get away with. As usual, nothing here is throwaway; there are no real peaks, no songs where everything is on the line, but that's never been what Kirkwood was after. Instead, they end up playing around with titles like “Vampires”, “Predator”, “Nothing”, which, despite their aggressive edge, conceal the usual ballads – more spacious, airier, coarser, but ultimately always self-contained. The detached, apathetic, monotone, dull voice of the aging Kirkwood seems to take real pleasure in clashing against instrumental rampages, like a world collapsing while he just about holds himself up.

The tenth album in 18 years, Golden Lies (2000), featuring only Kirkwood from the original lineup, comes across, for the first time, as overly slapdash and self-indulgent, even though – or precisely because – it's not short on inspired, provocative ideas like “Hercules” or “Batwing”, as well as easy-appeal ballads like “I Quiet”. The problem is that while “Take Of Your Clothes” pokes fun at nu-metal, “You Love Me” seems to be poking fun at itself.

But the drug addiction of Cris, Curt's brother and the band's bassist from day one, badly undermines the Meat Puppets' stability, and shortly afterward the band breaks up. At that point Kirkwood starts a partnership with Krist Novoselic, former bassist of Nirvana, with whom the Meat Puppets shared the stage on the legendary “Unplugged In New York”, the show taped for MTV and released posthumously after Kurt Cobain's death. In 2002 the Kirkwood-Novoselic duo released an album under the name “Eyes Adrift”, which, however, would have no follow-up.

Following the Volcano experiment (with members of Sublime and the Ziggens), Curt arrived in 2005 at his long-awaited first solo album: “Snow”.

In 2006 the Kirkwood brothers reunited, and together with drummer Ted Marcus re-formed the Meat Puppets. The new chapter began with the release of Rise To Your Knees in 2007, followed in 2009 by Sewn Together, both albums lacking any real standout moments. In the meantime, Shandon Sahm had taken over on drums from Marcus.

In mid-April 2011 Lollipop hit the market, reprising the well-established mix of rock and alt-country that the Texan band has by now mastered. It moves effortlessly from the spicy alt-country of Roy Orbison (“Incomplete”) to more traditional ballads (“Town”), from no-holds-barred rock (“Vile”) to its more stars-and-stripes variety (“Damn Thing”, “Way What It Are”), from the lovely guitar weaving behind “Hour Of The Idiot” and “Lantern” to the off-beat leanings of “Shave It”. There are, without doubt, a few weaker tracks, and at times the album loses some of its verve too, with the vocals tending toward a terribly flat monotone. But the craft is there, and the record stays afloat.

Music that keeps digging its roots into American tradition, light years away from the reckless hardcore of their early days.

Confirming their newfound productivity, two years later it's already time for a new record: Rat Farm.

In 2019 the Meat Puppets released Dusty Notes, returning to the original lineup with Derrick Bostrom back on drums alongside the Kirkwood brothers, joined also by Elmo Kirkwood, Cris's son, on second guitar, and by Ron Stabinsky on keyboards.

The album opens with “Warranty,” perhaps the “most Meat Puppets” track on the record. The Kirkwood clan's guitar and bass interplay proves as complex and compelling as ever, as does the blend of acoustic and electric textures, but “Dusty Notes” comes across as a kind of “by-the-numbers” alt-country, hardly alternative at all and closer to the recent work of bands like Calexico. Amid the tex-mex style of “Dusty Notes,” the southern rock of “The Great Awakening” and the country ballad “Outflow,” the baroque-tinged harpsichord of “Unfrozen Memories” and the metal-prog of “Vampyr's Winged Family” peek through, standing out as the album's most original elements.

“Dusty Notes” isn't an album steeped in nostalgia, but we're a long way from the fiery, exhilarating cow-punk energy that first brought Meat Puppets to prominence.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia and Maria Teresa Soldani (“Dusty Notes”)

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