Meat Puppets

From left, Cris and Curt Kirkwood, and Ted Marcus

I will confess that I was never much of a Meat Puppets fan. I had heard songs by them during the latter years of high school, but they never made much of an impression on me. Later, I was exposed to many of the band's defining albums when I worked at a record store in college (I'm dating myself, lol). The only one that struck my fancy at all was "Too High To Die," chiefly because of the Puppet's breakout tune, "Backwater." That album is probably still my favorite and was, for a long time, my only tether to a truly brilliant band. Considering that the Puppets live a mere 100 miles away from me, I must also confess more than a little shame for having waited so long to fall in love with them.

I always enjoyed the twangy, guitar-driven sound of cowpunk. Some of my early favorites included X, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, The Dead Milkmen, and Guadalcanal Diary, to name just a few. The Puppets were an almost impossible sell, though. Something about their sound baffled me. In hindsight, I can now say it was because I was too young and narrow-minded to appreciate the musical complexity of a band like the Puppets.

I have found this to be a common theme among many of the albums that have collected dust on my shelves for the past couple decades. Back then I bought a lot of music, owing to a pretty generous employee discount from the aforementioned music store. Many of the albums I bought were based upon recommendations from my coworkers. I had the good fortune to be surrounded by many experienced aficionados of music at that store, and consequently bought a lot of music sight (or sound) unseen. Many of my coworkers were in local bands, others were merely older and more hip to styles of music I had never experienced.

I loved working at that store. It broadened my interests across all genres of music, from country to rap. Despite my expanded musical horizons, though, some albums and artists in my collection have slipped through the cracks over the years; the Puppets are among these. As I mature, I find myself increasingly attracted to bands that straddle many musical influences, and I now find myself revisiting bands that puzzled me many years earlier, like the Puppets.

My current infatuation with Puppets began after a friend posted a link on Facebook to an in-studio session with the Puppets at NPR. Hearing "Plateau" for the first time since I last listened to Nirvana's "Unplugged" album was a revelation: I missed the point of this band the first time around. Obviously, I had some appreciation for the band from earlier experiences and because of Nirvana's album, but I resolved to relisten to a bunch of the Puppets' back catalog. I replaced "Up on the Sun" and "Monsters," two albums I had sold off in college to pay rent during a couple lean months. I also picked up "Meat Puppets II," "Huevos," and "Mirage." And, of course, I still owned "Too High to Die."

The Kirkwoods' drug problems and run-ins with the law have not taken anything away from these hard workin' Phoenix boys. "Sewn" is, in my opinion, far more accessible than some of the Puppets' previous work. Perhaps it's slightly more polished production, or maybe it's just that I'm older. I dunno. That being said, much of the material on this album is pretty reminiscent of earlier albums. "Nursery Rhyme" cadges a few licks from "Up on the Sun," while "I'm Not You" and "Rotten Shame" are plucked straight out of classic Puppets' fare. Virtually every song on this album is good. Curt Kirkwood's guitar work is as brilliant as ever, which is to say, awe inspiring. And the lyrics ... weird as ever. Some of my favorites:

• "if frogs fell from the air i'd have to say i didn't care/i'd have to put them down and move off to some frogless ground" ("I'm Not You")
• "say you want nothing, that's all right/cause nothing is easy and nothing'll last you all night ... not saying nothing, that hasn't been said/and nothing is easy to say so i'll say it instead" ("Go To Your Head")
• "the rabbit hole opened so in they all went/and the height of the evening was when you said/we got computers inventing the perfect head/so we all put on our gowns and a truck brought loads of hay/and out of the fog flew a rubber baby" ("Nursery Rhyme")
• "this is the story of the history of night/from the beginning it has never seen the light/it takes a while to never understand/it holds the gift of darkness in it's hand" ("The Monkey and the Snake")

"Sewn Together" has been in constant rotation on my iPhone for at least five months now, and I have still not grown tired of it. God willing, these boys will keep cranking out the albums for another thirty years.