Meet the Meat Puppets
The Meat Puppets
The Meat Puppets are one of the most influential rock bands in history.
Their unique sound helped pave the way for the alternative music revolution of the 1990s. Formed in 1980 by brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood, they made more than a dozen studio albums, including the 1994 album “Too High to Die,” which was certified gold. They played with Nirvana on the band’s famous MTV Unplugged in New York appearance in 1993.
The Meat Puppets will be playing at Birmingham’s Iron City with Soul Asylum on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
The following are excerpts from an interview conducted by Alabama News Center with Cris Kirkwood, the band’s bassist and an accomplished artist.
Kirkwood: It seems fitting that we should do an interview with the power company, because our trip is so exceedingly dependent upon power at our disposal, electrical power in particular. There’s no doing the shows that we do without electricity. Way to go for keeping that stuff flowing.
NewsCenter: But I have a bone to pick with you. You participated in MTV’s “Unplugged.” You were trying to get everybody to unplug! What’s up with that?
Kirkwood: I was asked to do that, I wasn’t trying to get anybody to unplug! It was recorded on TV, there were microphones … You’ve got maybe slightly different guitars, but there’s power aplenty. And it’s a wonderful thing. I’m a huge, huge fan and exceedingly impressed by people’s abilities to keep things like the electrical grid up and running … It’s something that I was aware of as a kid, doing what we did with our lives, making music.
NewsCenter: What was the first instrument you ever picked up and really got serious on?
Cris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets
Kirkwood: I had guitar lessons as a very young kid, and I didn’t like that that much, it just didn’t catch my fancy. Then I had piano lessons; that was my mom’s doing … Then in the early part of the 70s, I saw the movie Deliverance, and I was turned onto the banjo through that movie. I actually went and got a banjo when I was about 13. That was the first thing that really grabbed me, and it grabbed me really deep down.
After a while practicing on the banjo, [learning] some of the rules—a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs in bluegrass banjo—suddenly the thing kind of sang to me. I was like, I’ll be damned, there was a melody hidden within, not hidden but implied through these grace notes and these hammer-ons and pull-offs. It was an eye-opening experience as a little kid. And I’ve been chasing that same thing for decades now.
NewsCenter: You’re coming to Alabama, and you’ve been to Alabama before, on tour, I’m sure, and Birmingham.
Kirkwood: Yeah, lots of times. Been to B-ham lots of times, plenty of times, got good friends there….
NewsCenter: You experienced the alternative revolution, when all of that alternative music became mainstream, including you guys… What was your perspective of that whole five- or six-year period?
Meat Puppets band
Kirkwood: Our biggest record was that one record, “Too High to Die,” and that was such a Meat Puppets record, we didn’t do nothing different … That record happened to blow up to [be] fairly big in terms of record sales … And that is how I experienced it. Suddenly people were actually coming to us, we didn’t go out of our way to get to them … I thought it was bitchin’, I thought it was cool.
NewsCenter: You’ve had some ups and downs, and they’re well-documented. I wanted to know from you a hopeful thing: what was the single best thing, looking back now, that helped you turn the corner?
Kirkwood: Getting shot by that guy at the Post Office. That really did it. That was the thing. It put me in prison for a lot longer than I’ve ever been before. I’d been to jail a lot of times. That put me in for quite awhile. And ultimately it was the turning point. That and the restorative and healing powers of time … I had enough time to process what I had done to myself, you know, and I have to make that a real clear point, that I did that to myself. And I wish I hadn’t. But in that I did, I just managed to get to the point where I knew when I get out, I just wasn’t going to keep doing what I had been doing.
NewsCenter: Let me talk about music. You were talking about 1994 and your album. During parts of my life, I would have certain theme songs that kind of encapsulated what my life was like at certain points, and Backwater was one of them that year, along with “Flies in the Vasoline” [by Stone Temple Pilots] and “No Excuses” [by Alice in Chains]. Have you ever had theme songs during periods of your life from a favorite band?
Kirkwood: I don’t know if I could remember specific theme songs, but definitely music’s been a very, very big part of my life. There are artists who mean a whole helluva lot to me … We did a lot of shows with STP back then. Scott Weiland told me one time that that song, “Flies in the Vasoline,” he got that lyric off of the Eagles’ song “Life in the Fast Lane.” When he was a kid and he heard that song, he thought “life in the fast lane” [was] “flies in the Vaseline.”
Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets.
NewsCenter: Do you guys get asked for clearance rights a lot—maybe from rappers or DJs who are now very popular?
Kirkwood: No, not that much … We got asked by Pharrell if it would be okay if he wore one of our t-shirts on his TV show [“The Voice”] … He didn’t have to ask us, we’re not like that.
NewsCenter: Do you have children or relatives in the business or trying to get in the business?
Kirkwood: I don’t, but my brother’s son Elmo plays with us … He just got into playing on his own, and I think he actually studied the guitar, because he’s a … good guitar player, in a different way than me and his dad are … It just works out really, really well. Suddenly we’re a four-piece now, whereas we were always a three-piece. It’s just really special … Where we’re at now is very, very satisfying. Elmo really brings a helluva lot to the band and gives his dad some more room … It’s cool, it’s fun. We’re having a helluva good time.
NewsCenter: We’re talking about Alabama here. Alabama is famous for the Muscle Shoals sound… Have you ever been up to Muscle Shoals, do you have plans to make a little drive-by up there?
Kirkwood: I don’t think we have … But my girlfriend has family that lives on Lake Martin.
NewsCenter: That’s one of our lakes that Alabama Power created.
Cris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets
Kirkwood: And the house that they live in was part of the creation of the dam. They were making the dam, and the folks that were working on it got to build little houses on the edge of the thing.
And my girlfriend’s aunt’s husband’s father worked on the creation of the Lake Martin dam. Eventually he, the son—my girlfriend’s aunt’s husband—became the owner of that property and built it up a little bit more; it’s a nice house now, it’s right on the edge of the lake there. It’s right outside of Montgomery, which is Hank Williams territory.
The wooden Indian that inspired “Kaw-Liga” by Hank Williams still is there, it’s at this restaurant right on the lake. I’ve been to the Hank Williams Museum, I went there a couple years ago. It’s a beautiful part of the country.
