An "Up on the Sun" Interview with Cris Kirkwood, February, 2012

Interview with Cris Kirkwood

Bassist/vocalist with Meat Puppets

February 19, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

Cris- Just for honesty’s sake let me say up front that, even though I know who you are, you might have to introduce me to yourself to me the next time we meet again.  I have what is known in the literature.  .  .it is called brain damage.

Matt- Is that a technical term?

C- No, it’s a hobby.

M- I understand.

C- I may be majorly spaced, but I know who you are.  After you say, “It’s me, Matt,” I’ll go, “Oh hey.  Hi.  Good to see you again,” and we’ll recall that we actually had this conversation.

M- Last time we had a formal interview was back in 2010, and we talked about Meat Puppets II.  I’m onto the next chapter of my book, Up on the Sun.  In the book I’m focusing on these two, and then I’m going to skip your middle career, of the original band anyway, and go to Too High To Die and No Joke.  I’m focusing on these two because they’re considered the classics to people who write and pay attention to such things, and fans as well.  You guys recorded Meat Puppets II in early 1983.  For whatever reason Spot holds onto the tapes for eight or ten months before releasing them.  So Meat Puppets II comes out in early 1984, and then you don’t record Up on the Sun until early ‘85.  What are you doing in those two years?

C- Jackin’ my shit.  I don’t know, it was a long time ago.  Nothing.  The reason I got into punk rock.  Lay around listing to the hair grow out of my nostrils.

M- How about as a band, what are you doing?

C- We continued to play.  We were all young.  Curt had kids in there.  His kids were born.  We moved into another house.  We were just playing.  Doing that kind of crap.

M- So you stopped living together.  The three of you, right?

C- No, we were still living together.

M- Doesn’t Derrick move out at some point?

C- When did Derrick move out?  No.  He didn’t move out until we went down to Tempe.  We were definitely working on Up on the Sun stuff.  Did Derrick live at that house?  I can’t fucking remember.  You’d have to ask him.  We moved out to another house.  The house I associate with Up on the Sun with was up in, like north Phoenix.  Meat Puppets II happened out on the West side; the house that the babies were born at.  Meat Puppets I was at a little house down in central Phoenix.  Up on the Sun we were moved out of this house, when that material started to come together, I think Derrick lived there, or maybe he didn’t.  Maybe he was living back at his mom’s.

M- Derrick claims that he moved back with his mom.

C- He did, he moved with his mom.  That’s what it was, and we moved to the West side.  What did he say?

M- That you and Curt and the kids and maybe the kid’s mom were all living together somewhere.

C- Yeah, and my girlfriend Kelly.  We moved back to north Phoenix, and that’s what I can actually remember about that.  As far as what we did day-to-day, what does anybody do day-to-day?   Curt was busy writing material.  I was writing some stuff.  One of things that we did was in-between Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun, you know, Curt had the kids, and we were just looking to work on the next project, and we actually decided we’d just make it at home, so we borrowed a sixteen-track tape deck.  Fostex used to make a quarter-inch or a half-inch sixteen-track, maybe it was only a quarter-inch tape.  We borrowed that from a guy down at a music store in town here that we knew, and started recording Up on the Sun.  It wasn’t called Up on the Sun then, but it was basically the same material.  A lot of that has seen the light of day since, like on that rerelease.  What led us to not pursuing that project was that the guy sold the tape deck and we had to give it back to him. 

M- So where were you recording?   In a garage or what?

C- No, I think it was a house.  Whose house was that?  Was it Darrell’s house?  It might have been our old sound guy Darrell’s house.  Quite a bit of stuff got recorded.  And Darrell DeMarco, our first sound guy, who’s a friend of Derrick’s from high school, was doing the engineering on it.  Up on the Sun was an easy record to make and was a really fast record to make.  Because for one, we were young and on top of our game and all we did was play music together.  The record has gone on to be a classic for a reason.  The material was particularly giving.

The arts are an odd thing and it’s a little off putting to have classics because it means the rest of your work is what, shit?  I like them all.  People can keep their fucking opinions to themselves for all I care.  But one of the reasons I think things rise out is because the material itself is particularly giving.  You’re just at a special place, the place where we were at at the time.  We were a really fucking agile band at that point, had been about the same thing essentially for years and continued to pursue it, and still are.  It was easy to make the record because all the songs, the arrangements, were done.  We actually worked on the stuff in the studio.  If you listen to the thing, the songs from the session, they’re a little more wastey from the home studio session.  They’re a little more stoney.  They’re a little slower.  Little bit more psychedelic.  The only one that I can recall actually hearing, and that I’m speaking about specifically is, the version of “Up on the Sun” that we did.  It was definitely real wastey.

M- Where are you rehearsing?

C- We rehearsed at mine and Curt’s places.  You know where the band lived.

M- And you’re pretty serious at this point saying that you’re going to be a career rock n roll band.  So you have a schedule or what?

C- No, we never did that.  No.  Curt and I were brothers.  We weren’t that particularly close, but our lives started drawing in around music together at a particular point.  Kind of in the way that they had drawn in around motorcycles.  The things that I had been drawn into with Curt are kind of more his lead.  He was a little older than me.  So motorcycles, I can’t remember if I ever really gave a fuck about them, but once we had them I thought they were neat.  The music I came to on my own.  Curt and I started to coincide on a musical level.  But as far as it ever being a fucking career, we never sat around and went like, “Here’s the plan,” much to my chagrin as an older poor person.  Cuz back then especially, the music industry could earn you a lot of money.  Have you ever seen that movie?  What is that one about heavy metal?  The decline of

M- The Decline of Western Civilization?

C- Yeah.  And all these bands are talking about, “We’re gonna make it.  We’re gonna make it.”  It just was never really a part of what I was doing this for.  I never was that big of a fan of rock and roll as a kid.  I got into playing music when I saw Deliverance.  The banjo I just thought was fascinating.  I went and got a banjo and suddenly realized what the arts meant to me, what they could mean.  It was my touch to humankind, if you will.  Just how some people get into math or money or whatever.  I’ve never thought I want to be a rockstar.  It just seemed dorky.  And I thought rock ‘n’ roll was fucking dorky, but I really enjoyed playing music.  No, we didn’t have band meetings.

M-How did you enjoy your relationship with SST and those guys?

C- It was a gas.  We did whatever the fuck we wanted.  We’d record a record and then give it to them, and go, “Here’s our new record,” with all the artwork and everything and they’d put it out.  They were buddies at a certain level.  They were odd folks on a certain level as well.  It was fucking Black Flag!  It was just like, “Whoa, hard core, far out!”  And I dug Flag.  They’re a fucking good band.  And I dug some of the other bands around there a lot.  I really dug The Minutemen.  I really liked the people in the band.  It started with people doing similar things, and doing neat things as well.  It was all part of the cool side of punk rock.  It was like, “Oh yeah, I guess you can just go out and get records made.”  It’s just a question of paying somebody to do it.  Do it yourself, that kind of a thing.  It was interesting.  It was all such a hands-on sort of affair.  It was fun.

M- Was it frustrating at all that it took so long for Meat Puppets II to come out after you recorded it?

C- No.  It seemed natural.  We started recording the instrumental tracks, and I remember driving home from that session, and being so pleased, because I was high as the dickens when we made that.  That was our MDA record.  We went into record Meat Puppets II with a fat sack of MDA; had a hook up with the guy that made it.  We were fucking plowed out of our gourds putting down the instrumental tracks to that thing.  And I remember driving home across the beautiful eastern half of Southern California, and listing to the thing going, “Oh neat,” because I had some of my faux-hippie-stoner improv bass riffs to listen to.  We recorded the instrumentals and eventually went back.  Curt sang the thing later.  It was just the amount of time that shit took to get out.

M- Because with Up on the Sun you end up doing everything in three days from start to finish.

C- Yeah, that thing was recorded and mixed in three days.

M- Three days.  I’m wondering if you didn’t want to wait around for that one to be done.

C- No, that wasn’t what it was.  If Derrick said that he’s right.  I don’t know.  The three days thing was right but, no, that didn’t have anything to do with it.  Like I said, we were really well practiced.  No dicking around.  It’s a particular way of making a record as much as anything.  At this point we had made so many records.  It’s just one way of doing it.  Get the material down first, and then demo.  Ultimately what’s going to be Up on the Sun turned out to have been demos.  Then you get the material down and you just go and record the shit.  It’s not that big of a deal.  It’s just a little bit of music.  But it wasn’t about, “The last record took so long to get out we’re going to record this one real fast so we can get it out fast,” or anything like that.  This stuff happened as it could.  SST was doing it in the same way that they were doing Black Flag.  It was a fucking art project, and it was a business consideration as well, but they weren’t businessmen; bunch of fucking lefty freaks!

M- So another thing you did in between those two records, Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun, is you went on that tour with Black Flag and Nig Heist.  This is one of your first major tours, isn’t it?

C- No.  I mean all that stuff at this point could all be considered one of the first, but we went on our first tour alone in ’82.  Our first national tour.

M- And how was the tour with Black Flag.  Any remembrances?

C- It was fine.  It was interesting back then.  It was definitely neat, you know, as a kid, grew up in Phoenix, to be able get to these different cities.  The first tour was a trip, when we were really young.  I had never been to the East coast before.  By the time we did the Flag thing our relationships with a lot of those people had already been developed, through the scene itself.  Flag is struggling to meet the rigid requirements of the discerning punk rock audience and they got Rollins on vocals.  That was in play.  The dudes that like to dress up in the punk rock fashion come out to the Black Flag show in force.  It was fun.  It was neat.  It way before, any real commercial considerations were in play.  It was an interesting route to take to go out and make music.  To me it seemed like how it must have been for the first rock bands.  Elvis touring around in a station wagon.  People just making their thing.  It’s music being made because people want it, as opposed to it being a business model that eventually develops out of that.  It’s the nascent phase of it all.  The beginning of it all before it becomes, like, “alternative.”  It’s just a bunch of people in different places making things happen as they could. 

M- How did the Black Flag audiences react to your show?

C- I don’t know.  I can’t remember.  It was a long time ago.  We never went over in punk rock.  The punkers always hated us.  But those were the only places we played shows.  It was weird.  We got into the L.A. scene through Derrick knowing some people that moved out there from here, that got in there early, real early, late seventies L.A. punk scene.  Namely David Wiley, who was the singer of The Human Hands and was in a band from here called The Consumers.  And the guys in The Consumers went on to be the guys in 45 Grave.  Jimmy Giorsetti’s from here, who’s Don Bolles, the drummer for The Germs.  So David got in a band out there and then kept in touch with Derrick and once we started playing Derrick got him some tapes and that’s when we wound up going out to L.A.  and that’s how our first seven-inch came out.  That was the arty side to the punk rock scene.  And David was gay.  That gay contingent was well-represented and just less of the hardcore thing.  The hardcore thing hadn’t quite become so formulized or solidified as it became a few years later.  Black Flag, weren’t that, they didn’t dress that way, they didn’t wear their hair like that, but that’s who came to their shows, though, in droves, was that batch of kids that suddenly came up who were all into Doc Martins and skanking and being bald.

M- And these are the people you were playing for, right?

C- Well, no.  Those people we were playing for, like, the Black Flag thing, but before that we got into kind of the arty L.A.  punk scene.  It was an interesting time.  Shows just happened and there would be these different kind of bands.  We were able to go all around just how we still do.  It’s just that punk rock allows a band like us the opportunity to play shows out.  Especially back then it was like, “This is attracting an interesting cross cut of somewhat like minded people.”  At base the likemindedness was to have the shows happening and put records out.  And it was neat.  The shows with Flag after that were not the arty style of shows.  They were fucking punk rock shows flat out.  And Flag was fucking good at it.  It was fucking hilarious.  And occasionally the cultures would mix, the worlds would mix, or were starting to at some points.

One time we played at The Rainbow in Denver.  It was Barry Fey’s club, he’s this promoter.  I don’t know if he’s still around, probably is.  It was Feyline Productions.  I remember that shit from in the seventies when I was going to shows as a kid.  Feyline presents.  It was a pretty big promoter in the Southwest, and the Rainbow was his showcase club in Denver.  So we were booked in there with the Heist and Black Flag.  Nig Heist is, like, fucking Mugger.  You just won’t meet a more fearless person, a cool representative, especially now to look back on how it all played out, just an interesting character on the punk rock scene.  He was a fifteen-year-old runaway that just became a part of SST, and ultimately wound up being one of the owners, and has fared the best, financially at least, out of Chuck, Greg, Mugger, and Joe Carducci, the guys that were the core of the thing.  Mugger actually took what he got out of, I think, his settlement with Greg and went to school and became a financial guy, and he’s retired and wealthy.  You’re talking about the dude who didn’t finish high school!  He was the lead singer of the Nig Heist right?

Mugger would come out and he’d wear fish net stockings.  Mugger was a little hardcore dude.  He didn’t wear Doc Martins but he was a little baldy.  So he’d put on this long hair wig and fish nets and he’d wear a dildo holder with his dick and balls pulled through the hole.  “Well that’s pretty much, I guess that’s a sexual innuendo of a kind.”  Davo was drumming.  Trocolli was faking bass and Dukowski was playing bass behind the curtain, and Billy Stevenson was playing guitar and Billy would wear a long haired wig.  He wouldn’t show his junk though, but he was the drummer from Flag.  Billy would play guitar with Nig Heist.  And Davo who became our sound guy after he worked with Flag, and then he worked with Firehose.  Another one of the guys that Flag attracted, that SST and Flag attracted, these lost souls that found a home.  And they all had a pension for being cut.  Davo still is just cut to the walls and alienated as fuck and I haven’t talked to him in as long as I haven’t talked to Derrick.  So anyways. . .

So Trocolli would come out naked.  From the start of the show you’re talking about at least public nudity.  I mean, I don’t know, is that legal if the club says it’s legal.  Is a club that lets kids in allowed to show wieners?  And the pigs were around the punk rock scene a lot, for sure, and Flag was no stranger to run-ins of a legal nature and was no stranger to having their shows turn insane.  Those guys were involved in that riot in Hollywood.  That notorious punker riot.  The thing grew out of one of their shows.  So they’re definitely pushing the boundaries artistically and socially and what naught.  You know, showing your wiener is something, right?  And the songs were like “Tight Little Pussy”:  (singing) “She’s got a tight little pussy.”  Heavy metal.  About fucking, “Tasting my meat.”  Just really gaudy shit and Mugger was just fucking fearless and ribald and would sit there and tell the punkers who were flipping out, he’d like, when they’re lugying at him he’d tell them to make sure to aim for his butt hole cuz after the show when he’s getting booty raunched he wants to have plenty of lubrication.  He backed it up.  He was a stout little fellow, and it was some interesting shit.

There’s an interesting, telling part of the whole thing: Black Flag’s relationship to their audience.  For one thing it’s a business consideration that’s telling in terms of the do-it-yourself ethos and where everybody was coming from back then, not having some local band be on the bill.  You’re dictating the actual content of the entire evening, plus you’re not having to slice off the extra money to pay your roadies to open for you.  Because that was essentially Black Flag’s crew.

Let me finish the story.  So those guys are playing their show.  Oh yeah, and it’s telling that Black Flag would want to have not only that side, the financial reasons, but then also what they wanted to do to their audience.  Because they purposely were goading the punkers.  By that point, Flag had really drew-out the hardcore guys.  Suddenly hardcore happened and that was like a very clear cut kind of a movement.  It had its own look, its own sound, its own macho stance.  And that was a big part of it.  It really was to get those guys to go off.  You were asking how they responded to us.  Nig Heist was a purposeful “fuck you” to those people.  Artistically it’s neat to go out and have the people that work for you purposely go out and goad your audience before you play.  And they were good at it.  That night, anyways, they’re up there and they’re doing their thing.

M- Nig Heist?

C- Yeah, and then at one point they pretend to butt fuck, and they’re both naked.  It’s a couple of dudes completely naked pretending to butt fuck.  It was all totally fine with me.  It’s just like, “neat.”  I mean back then I recognized that artistically, “This is fascinating.  Socially there’s all sorts of interesting elements going on here.”  What the fuck else are we if not little thinking bots.  Right?  It’s like, “Here you go mind, here’s some input.”  You don’t see that every day.  It’s easy to imagine.  How is it that people don’t butt fuck on the street constantly; thin veil of civility.  It’s just like, “Well pish-posh good.  Keep that up.  But as soon as I get my pet home and that door closed oh-ho-ho the things I’ll do to your children.”

So Fey gets wind of it and he’s bummed.  He’s not happy at all.  And the fact that everybody’s younger, but no body’s a kid, and we’ve all been doing this for a while at that point, but we’re in his club and we’re back stage waiting to go on and suddenly Barry Fey comes in.  He’s this middle-aged business man who’s been a rock promotor for years.  Definitely not unsuccessful.  You know, used to being the boss, especially at his own shows, and especially at his own fucking club which, you know, is a nice medium-sized club in his home town.  And he bursts into the back stage and he’s like “Uh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.” And were just like “Whoa.”  He’s pissed!  He’s like, “What’s up with this fucking band!  Get them off!”  And were like, “Get them off?  We’re just the next band.”  We couldn’t get them off.  Like we were in charge, right?  And as he walks out we were like “I think that was Barry Fey.  That was Barry Faye.”  And he hears us and he comes charging back in there and he’s like, “I’m Barry Fey.  Got a problem with that?”  And it’s like, “Settle down.”  So he calls the pigs and they arrest Mugger and Trocolli for simulating anal sex right?  So the next day in the paper, this is the whole long story that you said earlier, do I have any tales from then?  This is hilarious.  The next day they get out of jail fairly easily.  But the next day in the paper as we’re all convening we look in the paper and there’s an article talking about “Black Flag at The Rainbow Last Night.  Winds up with arrests.”  And it says in the paper, “Members of The Meat Puppets were arrested for simulating anal sex on stage.”  It’s just like, “Yeah!  Fucking classic!”  It’s just the kind of thing you just, I mean look, I’m telling this years later.  Funny enough that they’d have a band that far out that actually does that and funny enough that the pigs would get involved.  And what a hoot that it gets misreported in a funny way.  Our stoner little pseudo-hippie asses were like, “What?  We didn’t do that.  We play tweedy pop, haven’t you heard?  I mean we just got a little bit of a glitch in the band naming process otherwise we’d be “The Beloved.” 

M- We don’t hear much of this hardcore punk rock thing anymore on Up on the Sun.  There’s a little bit of it on Meat Puppets II but not really on Up on the Sun.

C- None of it sounds like punk rock to us.  It was just so entirely and completely material that we wanted to do.  For sure punk rock had a freeing influence on Curt and I.  Derrick was already there and turned us onto it to the degree that he did.  It had been around for a while.  I kind of was at a different place to not quite be able to get to some of the shit that was happening.  Some of it I really dug and I got to on my own.  Derrick had the singles and that kind of shit.  One of the things that you can do is just fucking scream as hard as you can and I found it to be interesting artistically to play like that sometimes, but we were always doing different things.  The first record established that.  We put stuff like “Walking Boss” on there for a reason.  Just purposeful.

We’ve always been very protective, really possessive, of our insistence of doing whatever the fuck we want to.  Why else to be in the fucking arts?  Cuz that’s the kind of the band that we were.  Talking about whether we had band meetings and what naught.  We definitely did, but they had to do with us sitting around on acid talking about how great we were to each other and how much we only wanted to do whatever we wanted to do.  We didn’t even need to say that, but just to tell each other how totally great we were.  So what we were doing just wasn’t hardcore punk rock.  The faster kind of grindy shit was what it was.  Then the next album, Meat Puppets II, the whole record is stuff slowed down but still kind of fast paced.  Back then it was more of the thing to go, “God, everybody else paints stuff into a small little corner, and I just don’t want to it.”  I didn’t get into playing music to do that.  It’s the realm of the imagination.  It is only limited by my ability to imagine it, at least to think of it, to realize your ideas or whatever.  And then you have to figure-out how to do that and what naught, but that’s called making art.  Thinking about it’s fucking limitless, and that’s what drew me to it as much as anything.  The sciences are too fucking hard, math is like whatever, and school smells funny, and I don’t like other people.  And it’s just like, “Where am I going to go?  The military looks kind of cool.”  But I would want to go in as a ranking officer of some note.  I would insist on going into battle on a white charger.  But it’s other people’s opinions going, “This record is this and this record is that.”  But it was us playing the music that we were playing at that particular point.  And our music just came to us.  That was the cool thing about it.  “Meat Puppets” was a song Curt wrote before we had a band name.  We were a band but we hadn’t figured out what to call ourselves yet and started writing some material, and Curt wrote a song called “Meat Puppets” and that’s where the band name came from.  As cool as anything, and Curt probably said this, and I know he doesn’t mean that’s what the band name means or anything, but the concept of the music playing us.

M- It seems like on Up on the Sun you guys are really coming into your own as musicians.

C- Oh yeah, definitely.  That’s a sick record for sure.  And it’s interesting to see pictures of us back then.  One of the things I like about the arts is, again, some of the stuff I can tolerate about humans.  It’s like a framework I can use to look at human kind, meaning me, and be able to stomach it in some fucking way, and one of the things that does that is the way the arts relate to the artists that make them and how their circumstances effect the art that’s made and how the art moves you and how it was made under particular circumstances, and what goes into art, and what are we as creatures.  Back then we were all in our mid-early-twenties and on our game and we’ve been playing together for a while and suddenly Curt was writing some really really neat sparkly things.  And he and I would collaborate, or he’d write something and he’d let me come up with something and stick it into his songs and just cool, trippy, organic waves.  He had his babies.  He had twins, a boy and a girl.  And it was a neat time.  And we were good players, but the players thing has always been there, but that record that has got some great playing on it.  And on the subsequent records it all continues to develop along those lines.

M- Did you ever think that you guys would become a popular band?

C- I really didn’t notice.  I never really kept track of certain indicators.  I’m kind of surprised now with the level at which it was reaching people even back then.  I remember we went on tour with Flag someplace back East and a review from Meat Puppets II came out in Rolling Stone that Kurt Loder wrote and it got four stars.  And it was like, “Well that’s nice.”  It was a good review or whatever, but, the fucking amusing thing was just like, “Oh, it’s in Rolling Stone.”  One of the hallmarks of the whole thing had been its absolute complete disregard by the mainstream music world.  It certainly wasn’t intentional, though, to be unpopular.  It’s just wasn’t the side of it that I was aware of.  I definitely started to become more aware of it somewhere in there.  We were doing the things that you do to be a band.  We got fairly popular somewhere in there.

M- Starting with critics.

C- It continued to be a critical sort of a thing for a long time as much as anything.  It’s what our bones are made of.  And then we sold more records and had the hit record later and got on TV with Nirvana and so those are the things that are real visible, like commercial, sort of markers or high points, legitimizers or whatever.  But for me, I made a lot of fucking music.  Which is what I set about to do.

It was somewhere in there that things started to kind of burble along.  Things that I couldn’t relate to started to happen with other bands who were suddenly getting noticed.  Hüsker got signed to Warner somewhere in there.  REM started to do really good.  Bands that I thought were really good and it’s just like there’s no reason for it not to happen.  Somewhere we went and met with Geffen.  Maybe after Meat Puppets II, before Up on the Sun, maybe after Up on the Sun, somewhere in there; Gary Gersh, who’s still around and definitely has done well.  And Gary told us he had just signed Gene Loves Jezebel and showed us pictures of them and stuff, and they’re like limey brothers, and Curt and I are brothers and it’s just like, “Well, dude, we’re from fucking Sunnyslope, you know?  It just totally isn’t as styly as London.”  But he told us at that time that we were too unfocused and it was like, “I understand what you’re saying.  We’re not an easily marketable single thing that you’ll use for a couple of years.”  The business had already come down to that.  Then MTV happened and it became even more of that.  Definitely the business side has to be attended to and you hope to not starve.

M- So was the actual recording of it much different then Meat Puppets II?

It was the same place and the same guy engineering it.

C- Yeah it was back at Total Access.  And Meat Puppets II came out sounding really nice.  Spot did a really nice job.  The studio sounded really good;  captured the band in a way that sounds really appealing.  Just a really appealing sounding studio.  You know what else was recorded there was Great White’s big hit album.  It was a nice board, at the time that analog was all there was, and Spot did a great job, and the band was well practiced, so it was an easy record to make in a way.  I remember Derrick got pissed off at one point and left or something.  Maybe that was Meat Puppets II but I think it was Up on the Sun.  He left for like five hours or something and came back and banged the whole thing out real quickly.  But that was all part of it because, back to SST not being that financially solvent, just making the records that we could.  Those guys could come up with some studio time, you know.

Here’s some fodder.  I recorded Meat Puppets II on my Jazz Bass that I got when I was a kid, and Meat Puppets I and our first seven-inch are all on my Jazz Bass, which I lost when I got shot and had to go prison that last time.  I had my shit pawned and I lost my fucking first bass that I ever got.  Then I played a P Bass on Up on the Sun.  It was bitchen.  It was like one of those ’57 reissues with the sunburst, the dark sunburst reissues.  I started realizing what I was going for.  I was getting better and better at copying my heros.  I was copying hipper guys.

M- Which hip guys are you copying?

C- I thought Mills was great.  I really dug what Mills was doing in REM.  It was just a cool use of the bass that was reminiscent of the bassists that I love.  There was the McCartney element there.  It was singing bass lines.  Melodic bass lines that are a little sub-melody support thing within a standing chord that the guitar players arpeggiated or something.  It was just cool, a cool approach that reminded me of stuff that I really liked.  Meat Puppets II is stoney.  That’s like Phil Lesh, wastey, jammy shit.  Any of the bass runs on that are improvised.  Improvised knowing what the chords are, but as far as the little doodads that I tossed in, that’s coming from that place.  And I still play that material that way.  It doesn’t have specific little set parts, whereas by Up on the Sun it was written parts.  Some of the stuff on II has written things, just little things tossed off here and there, whereas Up on the Sun was constructed.  And you know who else I really dug was John Taylor from Duran Duran.  So you listen to some of that funkier octaving, you know, I’m going for root octave and I’m going “[makes bass noises].”  There’s a bit of John Taylor in there.  And still back then that was all picked.  Just going for a pick and started to customize my basses a little bit just styling the shit that I liked.

M- So the songs were all set then when you went into the studio for this one?  Not a lot of improvising.

C- No, they were all right up against it:  real tight little fucking finger toy pop songs, with middle-parts and cool little instrumental intros.  Those are things that make songs easy to play.

M- You get writing credit on two of the songs.  Did you contribute more on those two, on “Animal Kingdom” and “Maiden’s Milk”, than on the others?

C- Yeah, that would have been specific parts.  “Animal Kingdom,” I got song writing credit?  I wonder which part I wrote, probably that intro, “[sings/hums the intro]“.  And I could tell you what I wrote on “Maiden’s Milk”.  I wrote the whistling parts.  But that was a cool collaboration.  That happened when we were doing the sixteen track stuff.  The song had been recorded and there was that whole pretty kind of instrumentally part, well the whole thing’s instrumental but there’s the parts that aren’t the. 

M- Before the whistling came in.

C- Well it’s those chords.  Before the whistling came in there was no whistling.  Right?  So it was just those chords.  The C, whatever it is C A, whatever the fuck, F G, something like that and, oh no, it’s G F C A.  I think.

M- You’ll remember the next time you play it.

C- Yeah.  Oh yeah.  No, it’s G F C A, that’s what it is.  So I was like, “I got an idea,” and I put a guitar part on, and put the other part on, the two little guitar parts.  Then when we got around to making the record Curt was like, “Well how about we whistle that?”  It was a cool little collaboration.  That’s what it.

By that point Curt had already filled the role of the songwriter by fucking ability.  It happened on Meat Puppets II.  Just suddenly.  I’m still at bar chords land and he suddenly started writing guitar-based little chordal things where you break the little things down into the chords, little finger pick things that suddenly give the song, you know, that was the song.  Like, “[sings/hums first seven notes of ‘Oh, Me],” on “Oh Me”.  And it was like, “Oh, you’re writing riffs and things and lots of them.  Damn, that’s a fucking cool song dude.”  And then Up on the Sun started to happen and it’s just like, “Yike!”  It was apparent that he was going to allow us to make more records by coming up with a lot of material and really compelling, interesting shit.  So my writing credits are things that I kind of honed in on his crap.  Unless it’s got my name on it alone, then I wrote it.

But we’re different people.  I mean look what I wound up doing to myself.  I mean, if talent is the thing, both of us could do this.  Just like anybody can do anything if they apply themselves, we applied ourselves to this in doing it a particular way.  But he’s somebody that has the ability to write songs.  He says he made himself do it back then.  He had kids and there was no reason not to.  He wanted to support his family.

I remember reading a quote by Keith Richards talking about the bass player in that band, a great bass player in a great band.  It has something to do with Wyman wanting to write more material or something, but it was Richards talking about it, someone who’s written half of the rock cannon.  That’s all fine and good.  You would like to do that, but he’s the guy that actually does it.  Somebody actually has the wherewithal to come up with this shit in bands, and who does it?  In our band it became really apparent that it was Curt that did it.  And I’ve said this for years.  It was Curt that allowed us to continue to put out record after record, year after year.  And that’s why I’ll get a little defensive.  “Oh, our classics.  What the fuck ever.”  All of it’s fucking completely and totally great.  “You do it Mr. Opinion haver.”  The idea that some of it’s not as good or whatever.  Have an opinion.  I don’t care.  I have an opinion about it and I’m in the band.  This is what Keith Richards was saying.  You come to have these opinions about Curt’s work.  It’s like picking through somebody else’s shit.  Like, “Oh, you made this now let me tell you what I think of it.”  The thought that you have about the thing happens after the thing is made, and he’s the guy that was making the stuff.  And that’s basically where Keith Richards is coming from.  And that developed with us.  I can see that.  And he’s the one that continued to make the fucking things.

The cool thing about the Meat Puppets is that we were a band.  The three of us is what made it.  Definitely.  Derrick was integral.  And I haven’t even talked to the guy in fucking fifteen years.  Not a word.  It’s compelling.  He’s a serious certain kind of a guy, just like Curt and I are.  And that’s what makes good bands.  We were a cool band and Curt’s a cool songwriter regardless, and can be taken as separate from that, but what allowed him to be, it might have gone differently, but what allowed him to be this long of and as storied of a writer as he is, is having a fucking band to play his shit.  And what drew the songs out of him was having the band, and the band was definitely the three of us.

That’s one of the things I like about the arts.  Back on careers, it’s interesting.  I love reading about the lives of artists.  I read such a neat book.  It was a couple years ago now.  I found it in Oxford, Mississippi, in a little coffee shop.  The first time we had ever played in Mississippi after all these years, and there was a book store open and we go to get a coffee, browsing the racks and I find this book about Michelangelo.  And it’s written by these two Jewish scholars who are both art historians, but they’re Jewish, right?  And they’re familiar with Jewish art history and so the book essentially is their take on his work in the Sistine Chapel, and what they’ve decided after studying the art in there was that Michelangelo used his neo-platonic education at the hands of the Midici’s to insert all the cabalistic imagery in art at the Sistine Chapel which had to do with Michelangelo’s resentment towards the Pope and the powers that were that made him do the arts that they made him do.  And it’s fucking hilarious.  It’s stuff like this particular symbol has a leg cross like this, right, and it’s just in the exact shape of this certain Hebrew letter that means “fuck you” to the Pope.  Shit like that.  Really hilarious book.  So looking back over the career of the band is interesting.  And I’m not surprised that at this point people are interested in writing about it.  Cuz what else are you going to write about?  Some other fucking artist?

M- Well okay, Cris.  I appreciate it and I’ll get in touch with you again some time.  Good luck in Italy.

C- Oh yeah.  We’re doing that.  That should be fun.  Italy is a neat place.  It’s gonna be wonderful.  Speaking of Michelangelo.  Oh God, were going to Rome.  I haven’t been back to Rome since we got back up.  The first time I went to Europe was in ’75 with the Jesuits.  Curt and I went to a Jesuit college prep for our high school years.  And I live right around the corner to it now.  The school we went to in central Phoenix.  It’s Brophy College Prep.  And a couple of the priests there had a summer tour of the humanities in Europe that they did every year so I went on it after my freshman year, and when I was in Florence I was reading Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, which is a novelized account of Michelangelo’s life.  Historically accurate as best they know.  But it was a great book.  And I would, as such a cool little kid, read about this particular church or this or that mediaeval palace or that kind of crap and then actually go suss the places out.

It was Brophy that got me playing music actually because it was the summer after, let’s see, the summer after my eighth grade, because it was the summer after my freshman year, so yeah, the summer after my eighth grade.  Curt would have been, it would have been the summer after his sophomore year, and so it must have been the beginning of the next school year.  Maybe he was a junior, the end of his senior, sophomore year, whatever it was.  Maybe it was his junior year because they were reading American authors, no that was English authors, that would have been senior.  Anyways they were reading A Clockwork Orange.  I think Burgess is English.  And then the movie came out so he was supposed to go see the movie for an assignment.  So mom took us to go see A Clockwork Orange.  It was a double feature and the first movie was Deliverance and I saw that and I just went, “Hey neat! I gotta get a banjo.”

Well, cool man.  I hope you got the info that you were looking for. 

M- I think I got that and more.

C- Well thanks for taking time to write a book about the band.  How neat.  And I hope that you get it made and actually out. 

M- I do too.  I have a publisher.  I teach full time so the plan is for summer of 2013 to have it finished, so I still have a little ways to go.

C- Well that’s neat.  Ultimately I think that the band as an entity is deserving of the attention considering the shit that this culture promotes, especially these days.  God.  When we started we just didn’t think about it much.  But these days it’s like, “Oh my God!”  I absolutely think that Curt as a songwriter and lyricist is deserving of whatever acclaim has come his way and has yet to.  I think Curt’s a fucking American classic at this point.  He’s right up there with Vonnegut and Twain for me.  And all my favorite rock writers too.  Somebody like Robert Hunter.  Shit that I can sink my teeth into.

Audio Interview with Robert G. Pielke

Here's an audio interview I did with Robert G. Pielke, author of Rock Music in American Culture:  The Sounds of Revolution.

http://newbooksinpopmusic.com/2012/03/13/robert-pielke-rock-music-in-american-culture-the-sounds-of-revolution-2nd-edition-mcfarland-2012/

An "Up on the Sun" Interview with Derrick Bostrom, February, 2012

Interview with Derrick Bostrom

Drummer with Meat Puppets (1980-1995)

February 18, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

Matt:  The last time we talked which was a little over a year ago we talked about Meat Puppets II   you’ll remember.  Let’s do just a slight bit of overlap then.  You recorded Meat Puppets II in early 1983, then for whatever reasons there are, Spot holds onto the tapes for eight or ten months.  Right?

Derrick:  More or less, yeah. 

M:  And it comes out in early ’84 officially, Meat Puppets II  . 

D:  Correct.

M:  Up on the Sun comes out in early ’85, and I’m looking at the sleeve.  It’s recorded, engineered, between January 26^th and 28^th, 1985.  What do you guys do in those two years?

D:  We start recording Meat Puppets II which actually I believe it was three sessions.  It might have been two sessions.  No.  I think it was three because we did the basics, we were very satisfied with that.  We went back to California and, I think I might have touched on this before, it took a couple of sessions to get the vocals done because the first one Curt went in with one strategy which was kind of based on his earlier, you know, growling what-naught.  Once he started recording the vocals he realized he kind of needed to rethink his strategy around how he was going to get the effects he was looking for which were, he was basically needing to stretch.  So he had to clean up his performing, his singing style a little bit, so that he could hit all the notes he wanted and to hit all the spots he wanted.  So you’ll see that in, for instance, “Plateau” where he, like, needed to sing some of the parts low and some of the parts high.  So the first time he went in he was just kind of going in cold, then he realized that he was going to need to woodshed a little more.  I believe it took a second session to get the vocals done, and then came the usual, “How do we sequence it?  Are we happy with this?”  Because it was a big departure, so there was a certain amount of second guessing and concern, not just on our part, but on the part of other people.  I don’t know why it took so long to get it done.  Either Spot was working on another project or there were things internal to SST that we weren’t a party to, but either way we got the thing mixed in the Fall of 1983.  During the summer we basically sat around and smoked pot and didn’t work and worked on our music.  A lot of the stuff that came out of Up on the Sun was conceived during that period.  We had a lot of really cheap shitty demo’s using two cassette recorders.  There’s like a couple surviving ones still.  Curt was writing.  Curt was exploring whatever his vision was.  And then it came out and we planned a tour with Black Flag which we did, a six week tour, in the spring of ’84.

M:  And Nig-Heist right?

D:  And Nig-Heist.  And that was reasonably well documented.  During that time both Black Flag and Meat Puppets were trying to stretch and expand their musical vision.  It was the typical grueling Black Flag tour.  I remember we were jamming to long jams of things like “Poke Salad Annie” and “New New Minglewood Blues,” the Grateful Dead song, so we were still playing way against type.  We weren’t necessarily out there promoting Meat Puppets II.  We were finding it hard to get.  We were going to record stores and not really seeing it in a lot of the towns we were playing in.  Shortly after that tour we decided we would rent RV’s and start touring in RV’s, and we did maybe two tours in ’84 in RV’s.  In 1984 we rented a half inch eight track machine or maybe it was a quarter inch eight track machine.  We rented a machine from our local music store and began laying down demo’s for Up on the Sun.  We were actually hoping to flat out record the album ourselves in our own homes using the, at the time popular, DIY ethic, because we didn’t like the fact that SST had made us wait eight months to mix our record, six months or whatever.  So our plan was to finish the record in our living room.  We started getting into fidelity problems.  I didn’t like the way the drums were sounding.  I tried one strategy, which was popular at the time, which is to record the kick drum, and then record the snare drum, and then record the hi-hat, and the other guys didn’t have patience for that, and it didn’t work out very well.  Basically, it was just too lo-fi and too cheap an approach and we got a lot of really great demo’s out of it, some of which got completed, some of which didn’t, and it’s all pretty muddy as you might expect.  So eventually we were like, “Ok, we know all the songs.  We’re going to rehearse really well and then we’re going to go in and do a three day blackout,” which is like Friday through Sunday.  That was the January sessions.  The first thing that I encountered was getting everything post-miked, and everything sounding right.  You’ve got to take your live performance and figure-out if it works in the studio.  We wanted to go for a certain clean kind of sound and once we miked up the drums I was having trouble getting the sounds I wanted.  And once again I encountered, as I did throughout my career, that nobody really wanted to wait for me to get my parts right.  They were like, “Get your drum parts done so I can move on to my parts.”  So I had to leave the building, take a walk around the block for a half an hour until I could get my head around it.  And then in the process I had to simplify a lot of my parts down, specifically a lot of the kick drum parts, because I needed to get consistent audio quality.  Once I was able to get my parts rearranged on the fly, while the clock was ticking, we were able to move forward.  And the record benefits from the streamlining of the arrangements because it’s got a lot more of an immediate kind of up-tempo and spontaneous feel to it.  But there was a certain amount of on-the-fly rethinking of what I was going to do.  And I was able to get it done and we were able to get the whole thing done by the end of Sunday night:  basics, overdubs, vocals, mixing, cutting, sequencing and it was fucking done.  That was definitely an incredible thing for us to do.  So the space between the two years was just sitting around either touring or working on the other songs.  And Curt had his kids.  So from the fall of ’83 that was his main focus.

M:  At what point do you all stop living in the same house?

D:  Right about the time the kids were born.  As the kids were being born we were getting a little bit more tense.  Things were getting a little bit weirder.  The party scene was kind of breaking down and I finally moved back to my parents, probably about a month before the twins were born.  It really came down to their mom, who paid for the house, pulled me aside and said, “Look, you’re going to need to go back.  We’re going to shut this party scene down.”  Basically she sold the house and she’s like, “Listen I’m selling this house.  I’m going to set Curt and his kids up in another place that’s not going to have room for you.”  And I was like, “Thank you.”  So I’m out of here.  I went back to live with my mom which was, I was twenty-four.  By the end of summer 1985 we had done well enough with Up on the Sun and with touring to be able to afford to. . .We all moved down to Tempe.  But from the fall of ’83 ‘til about mid-’85, I think, those guys lived in what was essentially converted trailer kind of a place; a very inexpensive, not good area where they raised their twins for the first year and a half of their lives before we started making money and moved down to Tempe.  At which point Cris and I lived together for a little while.  And then Curt and his family lived in another place a couple blocks away and then I eventually moved out of Cris’s house and by’86 the two guys lived in houses next door to each other in Tempe.  I had my own place with my own roommates, and we practiced in the back of Cris’s house in a converted garage, which we had covered with mattresses and carpet and put in an air conditioner into and all that stuff.

M:  Curt goes and lives with the kids’ mother, does Cris go with him, or does he go somewhere else?

D:  They lived together until 1985. 

M:  And you’re living with mom?

D:  Yep.

M:  So how does this change your rehearsing?  Where are you rehearsing at this point?

D:  We were rehearsing at their house, and I don’t think I had a car.  When we started we were living in Paradise Valley off the fruits of my mom’s impending divorce, in a guest house that used to have my step father’s study in it.  Once the whole divorce thing had become settled there were no extra cars lying around and my mom was working and she was looking for a new husband, so I didn’t drive.

But there was an interim step.  They were living in this converted trailer and then they moved just next to the Paradise Valley Mall and I used to actually take the bus.  It was maybe ten minutes away from where I lived, but sometimes I would just jump on a bus and go over there or get a ride from my mom or they would drive me or whatever.

We still rehearsed.  In fact our rehearsal got more targeted once we weren’t living together.  That’s a key point.  When you can rehearse anytime you probably don’t rehearse as focusdly.  Once time was a little bit more dear, our rehearsals got more intensified.  But we really didn’t get into a good rehearsal workflow until we all moved to Tempe, and when we all lived close enough and we all had vehicles and had a set place that we worked in.  Once we moved to Tempe we were no longer rehearsing in a place where Curt was living, so we were rehearsing someplace other than where his kids were living.  They may have been next door, but we were able to have our own space aside from Curt’s family so he could kind of create a little separation there.  And then we were able to focus more on our performing.

M:  So do you immediately start thinking about a new album even though Meat Puppets II isn’t out yet?  You’ve finished recording it but it’s not out in these months. 

D:  That’s a good question.  Obviously Meat Puppets II did well.

M:  But it’s not out yet.  In the period before it’s out. 

D:  Curt was still writing.  That was really a fertile period for the writing.  The writing period got less fertile as we moved forward, but at that point up until probably the end of ’85.  A lot of it, you factor in things like having to work with the spotlight on you, once you’ve seen a bit of popularity, and suddenly the whole indie movement has become kind of a horse race.  Who’s going to get a hit and who’s not?  It becomes a different environment by the mid-eighties when suddenly we’re part of a national scene instead of a series of local scenes.  And suddenly you get your Replacements, your Hüsker Dü, your MTV.  What was the name of that show they used to have on?

M:  Hundred and twenty minutes.

D:  I think so, yeah.  So there was all this pressure on us.  Suddenly you’re like, “Oh, these bands have to get out of the ghetto.”  And there was only one answer: “You have to make it on our terms.”  There was no remaking the industry.  There was either joining the industry or failing.  And then the dynamic comes between independent distribution networks, like the one SST was involved in, and bands like The Replacements and Hüsker Dü jumping ship and joining the mainstream distribution and therefore depriving the indie distribution network of revenue.  So you’ll hear stories of the tension between SST and the bands that moved on, or the tension between The Replacements and their old label and their management as they moved on.  So some of that was playing out as well.  It was just a whole uncharted area where people didn’t really know what they were doing, and your indies, like the SST people, were trying to say what we’ve got is good enough, and of course the bands just want what bands want, which is to be as big as Madonna.  So Curt, you see it in his interviews with you, “I felt that I could be as good as David Bowie,” or, “I listened exclusively to Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen albums.”  The artist doesn’t want to apply what he considers to be arbitrary constraints, whereas the indie network was like, “we got this,” and the bands were like, “you don’t got this, we’re going with these guys.”  So that has an impact on how the bands conceive themselves and on the work, which you do see in our band.

M:  I’m trying to get you to think specifically about this time, because Meat Puppets, the first record, comes out what ’81?  Right?

D:  Yep.

M:  And then you record Meat Puppets II in early ’83 and it doesn’t come out until early ’84.  So you guys don’t know that you’re going to be successful yet for a while, do you?  You’re not sure that this is going to work, especially in 1983 where you don’t have a record to tour on.

D:  We felt that Meat Puppets II was definitely gonna be successful.  Even Meat Puppets I was considered successful, and we thought that Meat Puppets II was gonna be great and that’s one of the reasons we were so chaffing at getting it out.  And then when it came out we were on the road with Black Flag.  We must have talked about his on the last interview.  It came out while we were on tour with them.  It got a four star review in Rolling Stone.  They’re kind of miffed.  We’re seeing tons of their records in the stores and almost none of ours, so we’re kind of miffed.  And then we’re getting lumped in with Nig-Heist and Black Flag and we’re feeling kind of constrained.  No, we thought we were definitely going to be real successful and the focus pretty much from the beginning, but definitely once we got Meat Puppets II out and we had gotten the success we had wanted, we were definitely looking to move as far ahead of the pack as we could.  There was a competitive zeal in the band and as far as Up on the Sun goes, Curt will tell you that was very influenced by Duran Duran or something like that.  I’ve never seen that.  I don’t know if he still thinks that, but definitely at the time we were like, “We’re going to make indie dance music with Meat Puppets flair.  And we're going to be clean sounding and we’re not going to be alt-country.  It was post-Duran Duran, post-REM kind of record.  The Up on the Sun one is us feeling very confident that we could play the game.

M:  So in this period of ’83 after you’ve recorded it, before you’ve released it, you’re already focused on making a new record.  Curt’s writing new songs focused on a record.

D:  We’re just in an environment where we’re always working.  Curt was always working on stuff.  In terms of what he was listening to or what he was thinking, I remember that Thriller had come out during that period, and he was definitely into Thriller, and there was a period when it suddenly clicked in his head how that related to what he wanted to do.  He was woodshedding and woolgathering as they say in the writer’s world.  He wasn’t necessarily putting everything down on paper.  We weren’t necessarily getting together and focusing on stuff.  We were just learning songs, one at a time, and he was formulating his next moves.  But the thing about it is as he was becoming a father he was kind of separate from us.  And he was dealing with stuff that was based on what his plans were going to be for fatherhood.  He wasn’t married to the woman.  So the first thing you gotta do then, “Am I going to stay with this woman?  This is happening to me.  I gotta get right with it.”  You know, at one point you have a girlfriend.  The next thing you know she’s pregnant.  Next thing you need to decide, “Is this a family?”  So a lot of what was going on in his mind is reinventing himself as a father of twins.  That took an awful lot of energy.  It’s easy to just say Up on the Sun has all these fatherhood themes, and I know that there are definitely a lot in there, and it’s true.  But on Up on the Sun you see a lot more of Curt holding his own council.  And it’s much much less of a group thing.  You’ll see us make our own specific contributions. Curt’s vision is, he’s not just a guy who’s contributing songs to a band.  He’s stepping into a, I wouldn’t even say it’s a leadership role because for Curt it’s really about Curt.  To him, he wouldn’t say that there’s a difference between Curt Kirkwood and The Meat Puppets.  He wouldn’t say, “I’m a member of The Meat Puppets.”  He would say it’s one and the same.  He talks this way.  I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s like, we don’t really give a fuck about things outside of us.  We don’t really give a fuck about the world.  It comes very naturally to just be very, very self focused.  And you get more of that in the Up on the Sun songs.  They tend to be very personal, whereas the Meat Puppets II songs do, we’ve talked about this before, were all about the notion of young men growing into their careers and figuring-out what they want to do with their lives.  But Up on the Sun tends to have a lot more personal kinds of themes that are personal to him.

M:  He starts moving to what he calls “oblique,” putting images together where a lot of the songs on Up on the Sun it’s hard to get a theme to them.

D:  Here’s what he used to tell me.  He would write a bunch of stuff, and this was obviously his way of oversimplifying for humorous effect, but he would write things that meant something to him and then he would change the words around so that nobody but him would know, so that his original meaning would be obscured.  And I try to describe the way I understood the way he used language the last time.  Just a very plastic thing.  Words are tools and we can do with them what we please.  He will change the words around and they will retain their meanings.  And everybody has their own limitations.  It’s not like he’s one hundred percent successful in that.  Somebody with a greater mastery of words might have had something that was both oblique and made sense.  Sometimes it was enough for him just to obscure some of his meanings, and just experiment with words.  What happens, then, when you’re not a master, theme becomes word play instead of something larger.  Sometimes when it’s not as successful the theme becomes word play.  I think that “Two Rivers” is one of the best things we ever did.  It still knocks my socks off.  A song like “The Whistling Song” and “Two Rivers” are probably the best things we ever did.

M:  What is it that you like about “Two Rivers?”

D:  I think it really comes together well.  I think that the music is unique and hard to categorize.  It has a sublime non-categorized quality.  I think that the themes come together in the music and still retain that sense of word play, and I don’t think that he tries to cut any corners on it.  Not everything in life is successful and if you can have one or two really ‘A’ things on your plate that’s pretty good.  A lot of life isn’t like that.  I always pick my favorite thing of any one of our records and that’s my favorite thing on that record, and it’s one of my favorite things we ever did.  Whereas something like “Enchanted Porkfist” was a fun jam to play, but I don’t take to much solace from the lyric.

M:  That’s one of the hardest to try and figure anything out lyrically.

D:  It’s supposed to be like “Liquified” or something.  It’s just supposed to be kind of fun.

M:  I read some old interview of Curt’s where he says Up on the Sun is like your Beach Boys record with your multi tracking.  Do you see that?

D:  One of the things you got on Up on the Sun is Curt had gotten a Rockman, so he had invested heavily in the Tom Scholes compression Technology.

M:  So tell me what a Rockman is please.

D:  The Rockman?  You remember the band Boston right?

M:  Yeah.

D:  And Boston’s leader Tom Scholes was an engineer and he developed a technology that would allow for a purely electronic compression algorithm that would sound like a Marshall Stack, you know, a wall of stacks.  If you look it up you’ll find a much better explanation,

but what it allows you to do is to have a lot more control over your guitar sound in terms of how dirty it is, how clean it is, so you can get a very clean dirty sound.  Listen to some of the Boston albums and then go back and listen to Up on the Sun and you can’t miss it.  It’s really obvious.  It allows you to have a greater control over a wider range of guitars because you can have a finer control over the color, the sound, rather than having it all just mushed together.  Cuz you put a mic up to a speaker.  So if you listen to the record on headphones you can see how compressed it is, how compressed that signal is and how it allows you to have three distinct guitar tracks that are, like I say, distinct.  So, when he’s thinking of Beach Boys he’s also thinking that’s the first record where they tried to do vocal blends as opposed to, say, country harmony.  You’re gonna see more than just two voices.  He’s going for the blend and the Beach Boys thing is all about blending five voices into one.  So you’re going to get a vocal theme that’s supposed to be a blend instead of a single voice.  You hear it on “Maiden’s Milk” for instance.  There’s a good example of it.  It’s not like all the songs do that, but you definitely get it on “Maiden’s Milk.”  You also get that more on Mirage and after that we kind of let it go.  They had me singing on Mirage and it’s like, “Oh we got three voices,” and I was like, “Whatever.”

M:  When you wrote about Out My Way you brought up the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Cris and Curt flexing their musical prowess.  They seem to be doing that on this as well aren’t they, on Up on the Sun?

D:  More or less.  But the songs are still real short and have more of a pop structure.  They have intricate parts but they’re not so much designed to showcase.  It was just better integrated so you got interesting instrumental parts budded to songs that they fit in rather than having like a five minute solo song or something.  They get back to it in Mirage where the song structures are basically more pop oriented, and they try to integrate the playing into the pop structure.  A lot of the songs on Up on the Sun underwent a lot of transformation.  If you listen to the bonus tracks you can tell that the songs started out as a kind of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath vibe and they were more slowed down, a little grungier, a little heavier, and then once we ditched that and honed them down to a three piece core that was more up tempo and not quite so, God I don’t even know, just not quite so heavy.

M:  This is not a heavy album.

D:  No.  But it was kind of conceived to be heavier than it ended up being.  Because we were listening to a lot of Zeppelin and guitar seventies bands and then, again, the more danceable sound of the mid-early eighties.  Your Duran Durans and Michael Jacksons begin to penetrate more.  Because we were really into a seventies rock bag in like ’82, ’83, ’84.  You listen to My War and you see they’re heavily Black Sabbathed out.  By the time we’re actually recording Up on the Sun we’re not into that bag anymore.

M:  And you’ve left punk rock behind completely.

D:  Well we haven’t left punk rock behind completely because we’re still working in a rock ‘n’ roll pop structure.  You hear a song like the title track, which you may have come across descriptions of a show that we had done when we were opening for Suicidal Tendencies, and Curt started singing about his daughter over a rambling figure which ended-up being that song.  So Up on the Sun has its core in that tension between us and the punk audience.  We’re still taunting them, although that’s not what it’s about, obviously.  It’s about Curt and his kids and what-naught, but we were still playing a lot of punk rock shows and it wasn’t until after the long tour with Black Flag where we were like, “We are definitely going to go our own way with this thing.”  By that time we were already working on the Up on the Sun album, so you’re going to see a confluence there of the old styles and the new.  It’s transitional and it comes together really ridiculously serendipitously well when you consider how many diverse things are actually put to bear on it.

M:  Curt doesn’t think you guys did the songs justice live.  Live you played the songs a lot punkier, a lot heavier, than the songs on the album.

D:  Definitely not.  And that was a problem.  That began to become a problem as soon as we started.  Like I said, even when we had Meat Puppets II out, and that stuff was pretty rudimentary, it was hard for us to pull off shit that wasn’t rushed through, speedy, get it out of the way kind of stuff, and a lot of that is due to my own limitations. Because it’s real hard not to play too fast.   I was still struggling to learn how to not rush the tempos to the very last day of the band.  It was only in 1995 that I was starting to say, “Alright, I really need to know how to not rush tempo’s.”  But back then it was like, you know, we get into situations where the other guys drive all the way to San Francisco and I’m lying in the back and they’re tired from driving and they can get it up and I just don’t have the energy to get through a whole show and they’re just like, “What the fuck?” And I literally, part of what I had to do to get enough energy was to start doing aerobics and start exercising and getting my lung and heart capacity up and working out to try to be strong enough to put the power into the material that it really deserved.  It really became apparent in around 1985 that we did not have a live act that we wanted.  We were still doing a lot of fucking Elvis covers.  We were doing a lot of hippie seventies covers and we didn’t really have a handle on how to do the material that we wanted to do, that we were recording, live.  And it wasn’t until Huevos that we were really able to put it together where we could record what we were doing live and perform live what we were recording.  And it continued to be a struggle for us until the very end.  It just wasn’t that easy.

M:  This seems to be about the most upbeat and happy record you guys put out.

D:  Yeah.  It’s funny.  You think of The Meat Puppets as quirky and you think of some of the records as darker than others, but they’re all pretty dark.  And that one seems to be lighter in a lot of respects.  Certainly we were probably taking a little less acid with the infants around.  You  have to assume that the biggest drug that Curt was on during that period was lack of sleep.  There’s just no way.

M:  I was doing my research on this record, I’m thinking of the cover now: the painting, the coffee mug.  I had never seen that as a marijuana leaf on the coffee mug.

D:  It’s not. 

M:  No.  But the people who want you guys to be marijuana smokers see a marijuana leaf on there.

D:  And then there’s some people who’d rather focus on Ron Paul’s presumed racism rather than his crazy foreign policy.  People pick and choose.  There’s no accounting for tastes.  No.  Curt’s mom’s father had a resort down in Mexico.  We had a lot of Mexican crap around that she would bring back.  She later became an importer of Mexican furniture and stuff.  That’s just a standard garden variety Mexican ceramic cup that she had brought back from somewhere and he did a painting of it.  It was just a still life.  That’s the exact cup that he had in his house, sitting on his counter.  It’s supposed to be mundane.  It was just a lark to put it on the cover.  Just a fun idea.

M:  What you guys seem to be telling me kind of flies in the face of what a lot of us believed, that Meat Puppets were always stoned and irresponsible.  It sounds like you were pretty responsible human beings.

D:  We were always stoned and we were always irresponsible compared to people who aren’t stoned and are responsible.  I mean Curt was the kind of father who, during the time he had infant kids, he had long blond and green hair, wore women’s glasses, and they used to feed their kids food coloring so that they would shit different colors.  And Curt never curtailed his smoking around his kids.  They grew up watching him do bongs.  Kind of freaked out some people that new us and others didn’t care.  We believed that we were going to be successful career musicians.  We were responsible in the sense that we were going to do what it took to be responsible rock musicians.  We were certainly no less responsible than your average rock musicians.  So within that framework we were responsible.  We cared about our art and we treated it as a career.  To the extent that we knew what that meant is another story.  We weren’t necessarily good at it because we were making it up as we went along.  We didn’t have a manager.  We didn’t have a plan.  We didn’t have a consensus.  We shoved a lot of shit under the rug and moved forward, and when things blew up we dealt with it then.  It’s funny.  We were no less responsible than my current employer.  Or any other fucking business.  You can’t say that we were irresponsible and then look at the shape of the American economy.  If we were irresponsible what does that make them?  At least we didn’t throw the whole thing over the toilet and off the cliff. 

We had investors.  The Kirkwood’s grandfather left them a decent inheritance which allowed us to keep the world at bay and it wasn’t really until the inheritance started to run out that we started to buckle down a lot more, but that wasn’t until probably ’86, and from then on we were either out on the road or working on our next record.  We had very, very few breaks.  We worked almost as hard as a regular job.  We didn’t work as hard as I work now, by any means, but we focused on the music as our career.  So we were responsible in that respect.  On the other hand that means that we were focusing on how to fuck shit up and get out there and drive people crazy, but that was how we made our bones. 

M:  On “Two Rivers” it seems like he starts writing about nature, which continues through on a lot of other albums.

D:  Yep.  Well, it’s obviously about relationships.  It’s obviously about joining two things.  There’s the metaphor of the river joining and what-naught.  It’s spiritual relationship stuff.  Well executed.

M:  A lot of escape kind of songs on here.

D:  (Laughs) Yeah, that’s the flip side of the fatherhood theme, wouldn’t you say?

M:  I would say the fantasy of getting away from the family every once in a while I guess?

D:  Or the brothers. 

M:  Or the brothers.

D:  Yeah, the family, the drummer, the responsibility.  I think it’s really the responsibility.

M:  It seems like the escapes are happy escapes on this album.

D:  Well let’s go back to what we talked about last year.  If Meat Puppets II is about boys growing into men then Up on the Sun is about new men looking back at their now lost boyhood.  There’s the soundbite for you.

M:  A quote from Carducci quoting Mike Watt who listened to it and says it sounds like Talking Heads which is a band you haven’t brought up as a reference yet.

D:  Eh, I wouldn’t discount it.  By the mid-eighties the Talking Heads were already like a dance band anyways.  So I wouldn’t say Talking Heads, but what I would say, and I would say it very strongly, and somebody else we haven’t brought up, is Brian Eno.  That’s not our Brian Wilson album, that’s our Brian Eno album.

M:  Is there any Rush in there?

D:  I don’t even think I was aware of Rush in 1985.  I learned about them a couple years later and I never cared for it.  The Kirkwoods were into all of that stuff.  ECM jazz was Cris’s favorite shit.  They loved Art Ensemble of Chicago.  They loved, who are these guys?  Ralph Towner.  I can’t even remember everbody’s names.  They liked all that Miles Davis influenced fusion jazz and stuff.  That’s where they came from.  Curt really liked Zeppelin and ZZ-Top and stuff.  Cris really liked fusion jazz.  Curt listened to a lot of that stuff and it informs a lot of his playing and a lot of the way he sees music.

M:  There are a couple songs that have Cris’s name, just two of them, “Maidens Milk” and “Animal Kingdom.”

D:  That co-songwriting experiment was one that was more or less deemed a failure by Curt.  It was really Curt throwing Cris a bone.  Cris wrote a bass line for that song that was more or less prominent.  Cris tried to make a case that he had written a part of it and Curt was like, “Fine, whatever.”  What Cris did was help arrange a song, and if you want to say that the arrangement is a part of the composition, great, but really those songs were written by Curt.  Cris didn’t really actually write any of the parts so much as maybe suggest a bridge.  I didn’t get a song credit for the two or three songs that I titled on Meat Puppets II, but to me it’s like you give a song a title you give it focus.  But there was no more song writing that Cris did then I did on things like that.  But yes, Cris is coming to the fore, you see it even more on Out My Way where it’s really starting to go and when you listen to these Mirage outtakes I’ll be posting here within the next month or two, depending on how long it takes me to get the writing part of it done, you can really hear how integral Cris becomes to the sound.  And he was really starting to play that role in Up on the Sun.  Not so much on Meat Puppets II.  But if you listen to the way he’s stepping up on that record he definitely deserved, quote unquote, the credit he got from song writing, but it’s more of a reflection of his contribution than he actually wrote something in the songs.  He’s really starting to drive the arrangements, which is one of the reasons why I was starting to fall behind, because his musical vision is way different from mine, much more fusion jazz relayed.  I’m a bubble-gum guy.  I’m an Elvis rocker guy.  I had no fucking idea.

M:  I’ve asked Curt a couple times, on the album sleeves the lyrics will be printed one way and then on the vocal tracks he’ll sing different verses, different stanzas, put different words in.  In typical Curt fashion he just kind of blows it off and says, “I just sang whatever came in my mind.”  He suggests that you were the one who was responsible for getting the final album sleeve cover approved, and you probably turned in the lyrics for most of these albums.

D:  That’s accurate.  Basically you got your lyrics, they’re basically a set of words.  They’re all done.  In the studio he’s going to sing it.  What you’ve got is a performance of the lyrics which takes liberties where the performer deems necessary.  I would usually take the lyrics and draft them to be read.  They were supposed to be a take on poetry.  So I would never consider printing the same verse twice.  If it may show up twice in a song I wouldn’t print it twice.  It’s not like a drastic change, it’s just that my editing approach is to take a body of a song lyric and put it down on paper so that it reads well.  So that it’s not just cuz you’re following along and listening to the song.  And, yes, I made the conscious decision, which is the way I viewed things, that this is not the words to the song that needs to be followed along to.  This is a work in and of itself.  So part of what I’m trying to do when I’m presenting the song lyric on the paper is to say to the viewer, “This is a work.  This isn’t just a fuckin’ side thing that you do.”  You got your song, you got your lyric, you got your performance.  The whole point is that it’s trying to make it seem legit.

M:  So he never gave you a sheet?  You wrote the lyrics down yourself?

D:  I took his lyrics and retyped them.  I rarely deviated from what he wrote down.  He may be just blowing it off like, “Ask Bostrom about it, he finished the record covers.”  But it’s not like I would take his words and change them.  I guess this is the point.  When I was doing lyric sheets I wasn’t basing my lyrics on the recording, I was basing it on the lyrics that he had written.

M:  You even point us in the write direction on “Animal Kingdom” where he sings “Up in the mountains,” and you put in parenthesis “my head.”

D:  Right, cuz I think he says it twice.  That was a condensation rather than putting the entire verse down twice with two different words.  I just put it once and then put the second ones in parenthesis.  You also have to keep in mind space considerations, layout considerations.  So you’re going to go in and snip a word here, change an “and” to an “&” if you need to get space.  Avoid widows and orphans and the usual sort of thing.

M:  I’ve read where you’ve said that this and Meat Puppets II are deservedly your best and classic records.

D:  I think if Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun were removed from the equation, say if the band had come out and started with Out My Way and then moved forward, we might be as well remembered as, I don’t know, The Swimming Pool Q’s. 

M:  I remember them.

D:  There’s plenty of bands that were able to work.  And certainly we would’ve been able to work and be a fixture on the circuit, but really it’s Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun that makes a project like yours get green lighted.  You’re not going to talk a publisher into doing a book about the lyrics to Monsters.