Format: LP
Notes: Greg Prato’s Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets is a confounding book. It attempts to tell the entire story of the Meat Puppets as an oral history, but where Prato’s book leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots and piece together a narrative, the stories themselves are incredible. Too High to Die probably comes closest to being on a tour bus and listening to the band tell stories.
On the tour bus, musicians usually don’t reflect on their past unless prompted by a visiting member from another band or an old friend. That’s when you get the good stuff. Prato interviews not only the band members but their friends and associates as well. I don’t know if this provides a fuller picture, but it certainly is a more entertaining one.
The Meat Puppets are a fascinating band. The Meat Puppets went on the road with Black Flag on the My War Tour to support its second album and lots of people who would go on to form important bands who came to see Black Flag were mesmerized by the Meat Puppets. You could write a thesis on the Meat Puppets’ influence on Nirvana alone.
There’s a long anecdote in the book where Kim Thayil discusses how he logged a lazy description of the Meat Puppets first record as “generic hardcore” at the radio station where he worked. Over time his opinion of the record changed and he realized how wrong he was and how that error haunted him. His early dismissal of the band led to him becoming something of an evangelist.
This is interesting to me as a fan because Meat Puppets are a band that grows on you. I picked up a copy of the first record at Beatbox Records in Barrio Logan. The cover is pretty beat up but the record is pristine. It wasn’t a record I sought out, I’d listened to it a million times on iTunes, but there it was in the bin and I snagged it. Listening to it these past few weeks has changed the way I feel about the record, especially the trippy cover of “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds.”
It might shock you to know that the song was recorded while the singer was on some form of hallucinogen, but then again it might not. The chapter in Too High to Die about bassist Cris Kirkwood’s heroin addiction is gnarly as hell and the story about how he got shot at the post office is worth the price of admission. (I don’t mean to make light of a shooting, but he brought it on himself, and it ultimately saved his life.)
The book came out in 2012 so someone will have to write the next chapter, including the 2019 release of Dusty Notes, which features the return of original drummer Derrick Bostrom.
When the Do What You Want came out last year, I posted a video where I played the promo flexi that Bad Religion gave away. Some joker commented that I should use some of that Bad Religion money to upgrade my cheap Crosley record player. He had a point. I blew out those cheap, built-in speakers ages ago. So I finally bit the bullet and bought a new wireless turntable. I still need to get some new speakers and a new amp, but I’m happy with the product so far.
The first thing I did is spin some of SST’s early releases. The earliest original pressing I have is SST 009, which is the Meat Puppets debut. The recording of this album is infamously muddy. Both Joe Carducci and Spot talked to me about the recording of the album, and I’m saving those details for the book, but long story short: the Meat Puppets took a bunch of drugs and recorded the album in a way that made it impossible to mix. The drum sounds on the record are so muted it sounds as if Derrick Bostrom is in some distant corner of Unicorn Studios. Hard to believe these guys would be a handful in the studio, right?
That said, I wasn’t expecting Curt Kirkwood’s guitar to come through so clean and clear. It was like hearing the record for the first time. It’s not my favorite Meat Puppets record, but I like it more every time I listen to it.
The album still had the lyric sheet when I bought the record at an actual record store here in San Diego. It’s amazing to me this little artifact of the Kirkwoods’ imagination is still being circulated in the universe.
This post originally appeared in slightly different form in two editions of Message from the Underworld: 1 & 2.