Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II
Rediscovering the Arizona post-hardcore trio's seminal sophomore album
On a grey and rainy November day in 1993, Nirvana arrived at Sony Music Studios in New York City to record for MTV Unplugged.
The band had assembled a tracklist of lesser known originals and some cover versions, including three songs by one of their favourite bands, the Meat Puppets: “Plateau”, “Lake of Fire” and “Oh Me”, the latter being excluded from the official album release in 1994.
MTV execs, who’d already expressed worries about the lack of hit songs in the tracklist, weren’t particularly fond of having an unknown “cowpunk” band from Arizona as stage guests. They’d hoped for Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden.
Kurt Cobain didn’t care. He’d declared his love for the Meat Puppets in interviews and invited them on the In Utero tour. He wanted them on stage.
For the three Meat Puppets songs, brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood replaced Nirvana’s second guitarist Pat Smear, while bassist Krist Novoselic played along and Cobain focused on getting the vocals right.
It wasn’t an easy job. You can hear him struggling to reach the high notes, especially on “Plateau” and “Lake of Fire”. The show producer proposed to change the key, but Kurt wanted these songs to be a strain. Listening back to the originals, Cobain’s raspy croak is an apt interpretation of Curt Kirkwood’s warped vocals on the Meat Puppets’ 1984 album II.
Meat Puppets II wasn’t included in Cobain’s infamous Top 50 albums list, but it provided an early blueprint for the alternative rock movement, blending elements of psychedelic rock, hardcore punk and country music. Aside from Nirvana, this record deeply influenced bands like R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh.
“I was tripping out to II before Soundgarden formed”, Kim Thayil has said in Rolling Stone. “I would just play it and watch the sun rise, I would play it and watch the sun set. That album tripped me out – it seemed to be heavy and wild in these other ways. (…) [It] became not only my favorite Meat Puppets album, but perhaps one of my favorite albums of all time.”
Even if many listeners – myself included – were introduced to the Meat Puppets through Nirvana, the band had already been recording for over a decade when they went on stage in New York City.
Born just one year apart, in 1959 and 1960, brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. They were into all things ‘Z’ – Zeppelin, Zappa, ZZ Top – and started playing music together in their teens. As for their country influence, it came through listening to Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Byrds.
The Kirkwoods were real stoner hippies. When punk came along, they didn’t get onboard with it right away. It wasn’t until they met their future drummer Derrick Bostrom that they leaned into the new style of hardcore punk that was conquering the west coast. Bostrom was into The Stooges and The Germs, owned a vast collection of 7-inches and had tried to assemble punk bands around Phoenix and Tucson.
Founded in 1980, the Arizona trio quickly made fans in the burgeoning hardcore punk scene. Technically, they were just much better than a lot of the other bands – most of all, they could play really fast and still sounded good.
Soon they signed to the independent SST label, operated by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, and recorded their first album over three days in Los Angeles. Released in 1982, their mediocre debut showed just slight hints at their idiosyncrasy – especially on the B-side, which included some slower, more psychedelic parts.
The Meat Puppets played many shows at the time, often opening up for their label mates Black Flag. Because of their long hair and hippie looks, they regularly got booed and spat on by the Black Flag fans.
The stylistic shift on their second album was the bands’ reaction to their experience of intolerance and bigotry in the hardcore punk community.
Recordings lasted from March to May 1983, but the album didn’t come out until April 1984. Derrick Bostrom has speculated that SST were not too fond of the music and might have intentionally delayed its release.
In hindsight, 1984 was an outstanding year for SST. Black Flag had released their sophomore album My War – much slower and heavier than their debut – a month prior to II. The Minutemen and Hüsker Dü would push into similarly experimental territory on their respective double albums Double Nickels on the Dime and Zen Arcade, both released in July of that year.
The Meat Puppets’ second album was a pivotal piece of that movement, breaking the self-imposed rules of the hardcore punk scene as they started mixing influences of their beloved country rock into their lo-fi sound, even defining a new subgenre dubbed cowpunk.
Their new material was slower and more melodic than their debut, including finger-picked melodies and actual singing instead of Captain Beefheart-style growling.
“The first album, I was high when I did that, so I screamed a lot”, Curt Kirkwood is quoted in Greg Prato’s book Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets. “And then I started chilling out.”
Drugs were an important factor in the band’s musical progression as well. During the recordings of II, the band still smoked weed, but also got high on acid and MDMA – which evoked their arty, creative side.
“It wasn’t ‘rock’ really, it was peer surrealist art for us, like we get to do this and emulate our heroes”, Curt Kirkwood is quoted in Prato’s book. “We were trying to find some sort of forum for high art. And also just trying to integrate our psychedelic experience into it intentionally.”
The cover for II was a Van Gogh-inspired acrylic painting by Curt which, according to Cris, “took him about a minute”. He’d created it a couple of years earlier while getting stoned in the bathroom of his mom’s house.
II received some good press, including a favourable Rolling Stone review.
The Meat Puppets would tour with Black Flag again, but reactions from the crowds became ever more hostile. The Kirkwoods responded by launching into meandering instrumental improvisations in the style of The Grateful Dead. Moving forward, they would choose to book their own tours, outside of the hardcore punk circuit.
The relationship to SST eventually turned sour, but they stayed on the label throughout most of the 1980s. The band didn’t blow up, but sold enough records and tickets to stay afloat. After all, their self-expressed goal was just to never get a day job.
Like many of their peers, the Meat Puppets signed to a major label in the alternative rock boom of the early 1990s. Their sales didn’t exactly explode then either, even though they surely tried to write more mainstream-ready material.
Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York would become the biggest incubator of the Meat Puppets’ career.
Kurt Cobain was 17 when II came out. “That kid really got Meat Puppets II in the way that I didn’t realize people were getting it back then like that”, Cris Kirkwood is quoted in Too High to Die. “I didn’t realize that anybody noticed at all, because all the more straightforward punker stuff had an easier time of it in a way.”
A few months after the Unplugged recordings, Cobain committed suicide. The resulting album, released in November 1994, became a huge seller, and it introduced the Meat Puppets to a generation of new listeners.
Their own 1994 album Too High to Die went gold, but that title proved a bad omen. Cris’ drug habits spiraled out of control in the second half of the decade. The band soldiered on, until Cris was shot in the back and arrested after attacking a post office security guard.
Cris went to prison and cleaned up. The Meat Puppets reformed. In 2008, they played II in its entirety at All Tomorrow’s Parties. They never regained mainstream success, but assembled a loyal fanbase over the years.
The Kirkwoods are still out there, recording and playing to this day – in 2018, they even reunited with their original drummer Derrick Bostrom.
In 2023, they received back their rights to what stands as their best and most defining work, the SST catalogue. Since then, they have been reissuing their early albums.
Meat Puppets II has definitely stood the test of time.
Media Diet
Listening: Bill Laswell / Terre Thaemlitz – Web (1995)
Discovered this through a recent recommendation from
. Three crackling, textural ambient soundscapes, created by Thaemlitz from field recordings and electronics, and then overdubbed by Laswell on electric bass. Especially the third piece, “Transfer Complete”, is totally captivating. The perfect companion for staring out of your bedroom window into the darkness of the neverending Berlin winter.Reading: – Lawrence English on 25 Years of Room40 (2025)
In-depth interview with one of the most important figures of the ambient/experimental music world. Ryce manages to coax loads of little gems of wisdom out of English, like this one: “The idea that things need to get bigger is something I reject, and I reject it from a label perspective as well. Big is not always better. What music needs is to get deeper.”
Watching: Werner Herzog – Bells From The Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993)
I stumbled across this in
’ newsletter. Herzog is one of my favorite directors, but I hadn’t yet seen his documentary on Russian mysticism. The first half is based on interviews with faith healers and performances of Siberian throat singers; the second half is centered around the legend of the lost city of Kitezh – according to myth, it is located at the bottom of a deep lake in Central Russia and locals will sometimes hear the bells of its church. Stunning stories and eerie pictures.
Werner Herzog and Yuri the Bell Ringer, forever <3