No Joke!
Introduction
Meat Puppets were riding a wave of success
in 1994. Too High to Die was released in January followed by a year packed
with tour dates, some of them high profile opening gigs with bands like Stone
Temple Pilots, others smaller headlining shows.
Too High to Die would go on to
be certified Gold (500,000 copies sold).
To this date the band’s biggest selling record.
But there were signs that Meat Puppets’
run at success was to be short lived.
For one thing, even though the album and its single (“Backwater”) were
doing well, attendance at the band’s headlining gigs didn’t seem to grow in the
same proportion. It was as if people
liked the song, bought the album, but didn’t care too much for the band in
general.
Another sign of the band’s impending loss
of success was structural, the grunge era was coming to a close. Meat Puppets’ success was in large part based
on their perceived association with big-time grunge acts like Nirvana, Blind
Melon, and Stone Temple Pilots. With
grunge waning industry executives were looking to put their resources
elsewhere.
A third important reason for Meat Puppets
fall is more personal, especially for the Kirkwood brothers. Vera, the brothers’ mother, came down with
Cancer in late 1994. Cris, especially,
was devastated. He moved in with her to
help her in her sickness. At this same
time Cris developed a serious heroin addiction, thus compounding the personal
and familial problems the Kirkwoods faced.
As 1994 morphed into 1995 Cris’s drug
addiction became more and more of a problem for the band. He became difficult to work with both on the
road and in the studio. He was often a
no-show at the recording sessions for No
Joke!, the follow-up to Too High to
Die. And when he did show up he
would nod off in heroin-induced sleep.
Things became so bad that Curt, Derrick, and second-time producer Paul
Leary left for California to finish the record, without telling Cris. Indeed, it was around this time that Curt, in
an attempt to distance himself from his family problems, moved to Long Beach,
essentially separating himself from the rest of the band.
In the second half of 1995 executives from
London Records met a few times with Curt, urging him to drop Cris from the
band. Curt wouldn’t do it. Curt’s loyalty, it seems, was to his brother
and band rather than the label. London
Records promptly dropped Meat Puppets. The
final tour of the original Meat Puppets was an opening slot for Primus in late
1995; their final gig was New Year’s Eve in Chicago.
Too High to Die Success
As
mentioned in the previous chapter, some good things were happening for the band
in the Fall/Winter of 1993 leading-up to the January 1994 release of Too High to Die. In early October the band headlined the 96
Wave (96.1 WAVF) WaveFest in Charleston, South Carolina, a festival attended by
“as many as 30,000 fans” (http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2482&dat=20011009&id=NZ1IAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CAsNAAAAIBAJ&pg=1732,3429789),
including a few influential radio promoters who were impressed with the
performance and got the word out that Meat Puppets are radio ready. Soon after this they played their week or so
of shows opening for Nirvana who, at this point, were the most popular rock
band in the nation. So, again, more big
crowds and more exposure. In November
Curt and Cris joined Nirvana to record MTV’s Nirvana Unplugged which aired for the first time on December 14;
two of the three Meat Puppets songs made the final video cut (all three would
make the CD to be released a year later).
With the
looming success of Too High to Die, Nineteen ninety-four proved to be one
of Meat Puppets’ busiest years before or since.
The record was released on January 25 for which, as is customary, the
band would embark on a year-long series of concert tours to promote. First, however, some housecleaning was in
order. One action they took was to find
new management in the form of big-time managers John Silva and Tami Blevins of
Gold Mountain Entertainment. As Derrick suggests,
Silva and Blevins took some of the pressure off of the band so that they could
concentrate on their art rather than on the business.
John hired the day-to-day person who’d been working with us from
our old management, so the transition was good.
We were able to concentrate on doing shows and not have to worry so much
about that stuff. Our old manager was
picking at us. He seemed to be more
worried about getting his cut, and our new manager more like, “You guys do what
you do and I’ll do what I do and don’t worry about a thing.” (personal
interview, 2012)
At one point while “auditioning”
possible second guitarists John Frusciante, who had recently quit playing with
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, went to Phoenix to jam with Meat Puppets. Cris’s telling of this story is consistent
with the idea that London Records was encouraging the band to pick-up a second
guitarist ala Nirvana.
John came out. He quit the Chilis and he said in some
newspaper article that the only band he’d think about playing with was us. And the record label saw it. And we knew John. And they were like, “Why don’t you ask him if
he’d like to do that?” It seemed like an
interesting idea, as I recall. John came
out and jammed with us a little bit. It
was trippy. It was interesting.
(personal interview, 2012)
In
the end Curt settled on Troy Meiss, a guitarist from Kansas who had spent a bit
of time playing with the Feelies. Both
Curt and Derrick enjoyed having Troy on tour but Cris, on the other hand,
apparently did not. Cris, according to
Troy, did not like him and treated him horribly during Meat Puppets’ extensive
1994 tour schedule (Prato 2012). Though Derrick liked him as a member of the
band, he saw the addition of Troy as a causal factor in Cris’s increasingly
erratic behavior; Curt was spending more time with Troy than with Cris.
Without the structure of
being tight with his brother, with Curt going off with Troy, I’m afraid that
had as much to do with Cris getting into trouble as anything else. (personal
interview, 2012)
Too
High to Die was released on January 25, 1994,
and the band immediately hit the road to promote it. They began the year with what they titled the
“Munchies” tour, a two-week acoustic promotional jaunt for press, retail, and
colleges throughout the country with lunch bags full of goodies as promotion
gifts.
(http://derrickbostrom.com/2005/11/)
The band began February by making a professional-budget video
for “Backwater,” directed by established videographer Rocky Schenck, a video
that received ample airplay on MTV. Schenck had already made a name for himself
making videos for Alice in Chains, the Afghan Wigs, and Paul Westerberg, among
others. The video caught much of the
psychedelic joy that Meat Puppets’ fans enjoyed: liquid distorted images of the band members,
disturbed looking clowns, trolls, long hair.
It was a cool video to make, says Cris.
He made these clear plastic tanks, big enough that you could get
all the way underneath, and then suspended them over each other and hung a
camera on top of it and shot down through them, and floated flowers and shit,
had us get underneath them at different levels.
It was a trip. And there’s some
cool other affects, like shards of mirrors. (personal interview, 2012)
The video received ample airplay on MTV, helping
propel the song to #47 in Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the Billboard
Album Rock Charts. It also received a
nomination for Best Editing in a Video at the 1994 MTV Video Awards.[1]
In
late November/early December of 1994 Meat Puppets embarked on a short (“five or
six shows at the most” [Derrick, personal correspondence, 2012]) headline tour
of France and the Netherlands with Alternative Tentacles band Alice Donut. Curt and Cris brought their mother, Vera,
along for the trip. It was here that the
cancer she would battle for the next couple years first became an issue, one
which play a major part in the lives of the Kirkwood brothers leading up to,
and beyond, the making of their next record, No Joke! (Prato 2012).
With
the twelve months of touring in 1994 coming to an end it became time for Curt
to whip up a batch of new songs and for the band to get to work on making a new
record for 1995. But, as things tend to
be, there were problems to be dealt with, roadblocks to plow through, life to
live. One problem, though not
necessarily a threat to the band’s existence, was Derrick’s increasing distance
from the Kirkwood brothers and boredom with the rock and roll lifestyle. It had become all business to him. He had stopped partying, doing any drugs
really, in the late 1980s, so at this point he would show up for gigs, play,
and go back to his hotel room.
The
only bone of contention there would be that after a gig I wouldn’t stay up all
night with the label hacks doing drugs.
I would go back to my room and try to get some rest so that I could
continue on. I do not do well without
rest. I learned that on the road. If I don’t get enough sleep, I can’t
function. So after a certain point I was
like, “You’re gonna do the 4:00 am record promotion.”
And Curt used to try to pretend that it
was a huge burden. Like, “You need to be
there!”
And
I’m like, “If that’s what it’s gonna take, I guess we’re gonna fail. I’m not doing it.” (Derrick, personal
interview, 2012).
But overall,
Derrick liked his job and was happy being in the band. When asked if he enjoyed his time in the band
in 1994, he responded
More or less. More so than the late-eighties. I liked working with Tami. I liked having the accountants to help us
with our stuff. I liked having our
finances more or less in order. I
thought we were doing good shows. I
enjoyed having Troy around. I very much
enjoyed working with our tour manager, Ben Marts, during ’94. (personal
interview, 2012)
The
main problem for the band at this point, it seems, was Cris’s drug use and its
concomitant tribulations for himself and for those around him. The scene Meat Puppets were playing through
1994 was rife with hard drugs, heroin and cocaine were readily available. A number of the artists Meat Puppets played
with at this time are now well-publicized cases of drug addiction. It was no secret that Kurt Cobain used heroin
regularly. And though he died from a
self-inflicted gunshot wound rather than heroin in April of 1994, many feel
that drugs played a significant part in his ongoing depression. Stone Temple Pilots front man Scott Weiland
is said to have started using heroin with Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes on the
bands’ 1993 tour together; Paul Leary, the producer of Too High to Die and the upcoming No Joke! being Haynes’ bandmate, had this to say to Greg Prato
(2012): “Everything I had my hands into
was turning to shit because of somebody’s fucking drug problem” (p. 279). Additionally, Shannon Hoon, lead singer for
Blind Melon (the band Meat Puppets toured with in February, 1994) had serious
drug problems and died of a cocaine overdose in October, 1995.
Mix
together the fact that hard drugs were rampant in this particular scene, that
Vera, the Kirkwood’s mom, was battling cancer, and that Curt and Cris had never
been ones to shy away from drug ingestion, and you have a perfect recipe for a
Meat Puppet to come down with an addiction himself, and it was Cris. Furthermore Cris was now dating Michelle
Tardif, a woman who had a taste for hard drugs herself,[2]
so now he had an intimate with which to share his addiction. Top this off with the fact that it was Cris
who moved in with Vera to provide hospice as she died, and you end-up with one
sick Puppet.
According
to Derrick, it was par for the course that Cris would become increasingly
unstable as Meat Puppets’ tours progressed.
The first week or so of any
tour throughout our career was fine until one of Cris’s tent posts came undone
and then his tent flaps started flapping in the wind and then all the posts would
come undone and the next thing you know he was a freakin’ mess and unbearable
to be around. (personal interview, 2012)
The addition of Troy to the band’s
touring line-up didn’t seem to help the situation. Troy gave Curt someone other than Cris to
hang-out with on tour, leaving Cris to his own devices, many of which involved
hard drugs. One result of Cris’s
estrangement from Curt was that Cris did not treat Troy well. Indeed, according to Troy, “the guy fucking
tortured me” (Prato, p. 260).
The
combination of coming off a year of intense touring, Curt writing songs for a
new album, taking care of Vera, Cris’s disabilities due to drugs, and the Unplugged in New York payday, led to a
relatively quiet early 1995 for Meat Puppets.
Curt, who had had enough of Cris and his habits, and was not dealing
well with his mother’s illness, moved to California after the recording of No Joke!, ostensibly to find a new
touring rhythm guitarist, and stayed, living by the beach in Venice, for two
years. He did eventually hire Kyle Ellison
to play on Meat Puppets’ final tour with their “original” line-up, with Primus
in November, 1995.[3]
According
to Derrick, Meat Puppets were looking forward to making a “proper major label
record with lots of money and lots of big nerdy engineering stuff” (personal
interview, 2012) this time out. To this
end Curt spent the first few months of 1995 writing songs and the band cut
demos of these songs which they dutifully sent to London as any proper major
label act would do. Following their laissez-faire
attitude toward the band, London accepted the demos out of
hand.
As
Derrick suggests, “During the No Joke! sessions Cris’s drug problems were in full effect.”
(personal interview, 2012) There were
days, says co-producer Paul Leary, when Cris simply wouldn’t show up, putting
recording on hold until he would (Prato, 2012).
They would even schedule days just for Cris to come in, and sometimes he
wouldn’t. One day he came in, promptly
laid face-down on the floor of the studio, and slept for three hours
(Prato,2012). Sometimes he nodded off
while playing. (Cris, personal interview, 2012; Prato, 2012). In short, as Peter Koepke, President of
London Records and the man responsible for signing Meat Puppets, told Greg
Prato (2012), Cris was totally unreliable at this point.
As for the relationships between
Curt, Cris, and Derrick as band members during the recording sessions, things
were strained. The pressures of making a
record and having two seriously unhealthy family members (his brother and
mother) was taking its toll on Curt.
According to Dennis Pelowski, a long-time friend of the band (and
current manager, 2008-present), Curt was “the most uptight I’ve ever seen him
in his life (Prato 2012, p. 268). Curt
and Cris, especially seemed to be at odds with one another, Cris’s
addiction-fueled (non) activities being the main cause. But overall, according to Derrick, none of
the band members were speaking to each other much. They lived apart, came to the studio
separately, did their parts, and left.
Separately.
Despite the interpersonal troubles Curt,
Cris, and Derrick were having during the making of No Joke!, in an interview with Greg Prato for his book Too High to Die (2012) Curt actually
claims that the recording of the record was actually “fun” and “easy.” The reason being that it was the first major
label record they were able to make at home, “in town,” in Phoenix.
Fun and easy though it may have been to
make the record in town, in the end Curt, Paul, and engineer Cris Shaw ended-up
finishing the record at Westlake Studio in Los Angeles, without letting Cris
know. In Prato’s book this seems to be a
pretty big deal. Both Paul Leary and
Troy Meiss remember the move to L.A. as a fairly definitive moment in the
recording of the record (Prato 2012).
However when I interviewed Curt in 2012 he had a hard time recalling the
move, and Derrick (again in a 2012 personal interview) said, “I didn’t even
know they went to California to finish it.”
Eventually, after a little prodding, Curt said, “Maybe we did go out
there. I guess that’s true.” He continued by saying that he and Derrick
had done the same thing when recording 1989’s Monsters:
Cris was drinking a lot and
being obnoxious, so Derrick and I went out there and started Monsters, got a whole lot of it done
before we had him come out. (personal interview)
In the end, as Curt’s memory of the
event came back, he says they only went to California to do final mixes. The vast majority of the record was made in
Phoenix.
What
Puppets Say about the Record
The
general consensus among Meat Puppets is that No Joke! sounds good but, unlike Too High to Die which, according to Curt,
pretty accurately nailed how
the band sounded at the time. No Joke! was a little bit more of a
process in the recording to where it sounded like a record more than the band.
(personal interview, 2012)
It sounds like a record, they say,
which is to say it doesn’t seem to have the looseness and intersubjectivity of
feel that had come to characterize the band’s live sound by this time. It sounds, to Derrick, like a “cut-and-paste”
record, one that’s good, but “the vibe’s not there.” (personal interview, 2012)
Curt
suggests the “heavy” sound of the record is the result of the rock music sounds
that were around at the time, the sounds that Curt and the band were around at
the time: “With that album we were
playing a lot of big, loud shows, so the record came out more rock, or heavy
rock.” (personal interview, 2012) As for the content of the record,
the songs themselves, Curt and Derrick agree that it is dark, probably due to
the circumstances under which it was made.
Furthermore, the scene in which they were caught up influenced the
record’s “dark” nature,
It's really just a bunch of
my stuff filtered thru the "alternative" scene that we were sort of
caught up in...lots of hard rock with teen angst overtones. Perhaps a bit
of influence from my own band’s plight, but plight was all around as we toured
with Nirvana, STP, Blind Melon, etc. Lots of drug use around and I wasn't
using...just watching others fuck their lives up. I tried to make it
beautiful anyways but with a little sting. (Curt, personal correspondence,
2012)
What Others Say
Reviews of No Joke! are mixed, with more writers rating it on the negative
side than probably any other Meat Puppets’ release. Some reviewers fall on the side that the
record is decent, nice to listen to, average, competent, standard rock with
songs that are okay. (http://www.allmusic.com/album/no-joke!-mw0000645644, http://www.reocities.com/mjareviews/meatpupp.html#NO) The sense here is that the record is alright,
but not as outstanding a record as one might expect from such a mighty
band. Thus, it’s a bit
disappointing. Along these same lines
are writers who feel the record is not inspired, not glorious (as if glory was
expected of this band), and bland.
(http://www.reocities.com/mjareviews/meatpupp.html#NO) Furthermore, some writers accused the record
of sounding “samey,” (http://www.markprindle.com/meatpuppets.htm#nojoke) suggesting
a lack of sonic texture from song to song, resulting in a record that, rather
than challenging the listener, is something more like “easy listening” (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1995-11-17/entertainment/9511170448_1_meat-puppets-curt-kirkwood-joke)
music. Again, bland and probably insignificant.
Never-the-less, of course, there are those
who write positively about No Joke!. Mark Prindle, for instance, wrote that it was
one of the best CDs of the year, containing “nine great songs’ (out of
thirteen), and Nick Karn suggests it has “traces of greatness.” It is seen as a “fun ride” and “you will like
it.” (http://dailyuw.com/archive/1995/12/07/imported/stylus-record-review-meat-puppetsno-joke#.UNkxM6xQDHQ,
http://www.westnet.com/consumable/1995/11.13/revmeatp.html).
As with any band that reaches “legend” or
“godfather” status, and Meat Puppets were on the cusp in 1995, new recordings
are measured (artistically and commercially) against the successes of their
past. No Joke! is no exception. In
one paragraph, for instance, the reviewer for the All Music Guide suggests that Meat Puppets “didn’t mess with the
formula” of their past records, “the band’s essential sound” hasn’t changed,
and that “the tunes and riffs are cut from the same mold as before” (http://www.allmusic.com/album/no-joke!-mw0000645644). No Joke!
is variously seen as “one of your finer Meat Puppets albums”
(http://www.markprindle.com/meatpuppets.htm#nojoke), “the same great stuff”
(http://www.westnet.com/consumable/1995/11.13/revmeatp.html), “a return to
form” (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,298709,00.html), and “no exception” to the band’s immaculate
rhymes of the past (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1995-11-17/entertainment/9511170448_1_meat-puppets-curt-kirkwood-joke). A few reviews, of course, compared the new
record with its predecessor, Too High to
Die, wondering if it could duplicate the former’s success, noting No Joke! to be a “darker” version of its
more successful cousin. Finally, there
were those who wrote that this mid-1990s version of Meat Puppets had changed,
they weren’t “the same set of Puppets that roared out of the blocks in the
early ‘80s”
(http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1056613&style=music&fulldesc=T,
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.22.95/meatpup-9547.html).
Reviewers also noted that, similar to Too High to Die, Butthole Surfers’
guitarist Paul Leary was once again hired-on to co-produce No Joke!, and along with this is the mention that the record has a
“heavier” sound than its predecessor.
It’s also considered more “straight ahead” with more brisk tempos that Too High to Die.
Again, the important point to the above
comparative reviews is that by the mid-1990s Meat Puppets were already
enshrined as an essential forerunner of the bourgeoning grunge scene, and their
best records were considered to have been made a decade previous. The playing of three Meat Puppets II songs on Nirvana
Unplugged (and nothing from any other point in their career) served to
solidify this perception of them.
Reviewers, then, really couldn’t help themselves from comparing
“current” Puppets fare with their output from the early 80s.
Many writers commented on the contrast
between No Jokes!’ guitar heavy sound
and its melodic vocals and harmonies. It
is said to have “distorted chord washes,” “scorching rock riffs,” and “bone
crushing,” “lugubrious thrashing” (to emphasize its dark tone) mixed alongside
a “smooth voice” and “soft melodic vocals” that make for a “pleasing chorus” made
up of “off kilter yet on target harmonies” all, again in comparison with
earlier records, delivered in Curt’s “distinctive vocal drone.”
Of course writers, as they are apt to do,
reviewed No Joke! as it fit within
their perceptions of already existing musical genres. Most common, is the case for Meat Puppets’
records dating back to their first full-length in 1981, they are seen (heard)
to have a strong country strain: they
are written about as “countryish,” “country-western folk,” “twisted country,”
“hillbilly,” and “breezy country rock,” as well as “rootsy” and “southern
fried” (be sure to catch the drug reference with that last one). Also, however, writers made sure to highlight
Meat Puppets’ hardcore punk rock roots and how these roots link the band to the
then modern grunge and alternative movements.
Though Curt claims that at the time he
didn’t notice the dark themes within the record (though he says that now, with
time and distance from the record, he can see how others might see it that
way), many writers did. Maybe, as Cris
says, it was the influence of their dying mother, or maybe it was Curt’s
difficulties in dealing with a brother firmly in the grasp of heroin addiction,
or possibly it was the impending demise of his band at the precise moment when
they were poised to make it big).
Whatever the reasons, critics saw No
Joke! as lacking the humor of the band’s past records (again, comparing
this one to their earlier catalogue), as having a “more brutal vision” than
previous records, “brutish,” “grim”, “absurd and dark,” akin to a “Poe short story”
that contains “distorted observations of humanity.” As Derrick might say, in a catalogue full of
dark-themed songs, No Joke! is a
particularly dire sounding record.
Of course the critics didn’t avoid Cris’s
fall as they wrote about the album. One
writer chastised London for “throwing away one of the best CDs of the year”
simply because “your bass player is a drug user.” While another makes reference to the “drug
fried” Cris. On a positive note,
however, a few writers liked the contributions Cris made to No Joke! in the form of two songs: “Inflatable” and “Cobbler.”
Finally, Curt’s lyrics don’t go unnoticed
by reviewers of No Joke!. They are described as “catchy” “super-smart
poems.” As was his style by now, his
songs are filled with “bad-trip metaphors” and “outright nihilism,” seen as
“lyrically absurd.” Indeed, one
criticism of the record as a whole is that the lyrics are “getting a bit too absurd for their own good.”
Post-No Joke!/The End of Meat Puppets V.1
No Joke! was recorded in April, 1995, and
released six months later on October 3.
As Curt says, London Records was prepared to throw their heavy guns into
promoting the record (Derrick isn’t quite so sure about this). They pushed the first single, “Scum,” getting
it in rotation at a number of mainstream rock radio stations early on. Then, as Curt also says, when they got wind
that the band was “messing up on the dope” (Curt, personal interview), they
pulled the plug. No Joke! reached #183 on the Billboard 200 charts (compared to Too High to Die, which reached #62).
Between the recording of No Joke! and its release not a lot
happened. Curt moved to California to,
in his words, “detach” himself from his brother’s habit and his mother’s
terminal illness (Derrick remembers Curt going to California ostensibly to look
for a new bassist). Derrick, as far as
he was involved in band-related activities, worked on designs for the CD
insert. Cris took care of his ailing
mother and became firmly addicted to heroin.
Three days after the release of No Joke! Meat Puppet’s again played Wavefest
in South Carolina. They also appeared on
Conan O’Brien in October, playing “Scum” with new second guitarist Kyle Ellison,
and on MTV 120 Minutes. On October 21, Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon,
another alternative/indie/grunge colleague of the band, died of a cocaine
overdose, yet another reminder for Curt of the “scene” in which his band was a
part.
Soon after the record’s release, Meat
Puppets’ management, Gold Mountain, began to badger Curt to replace Cris, who’d
become too much of a liability for a label that had only a year or so before
had to deal with the drug addictions and suicide of Curt Cobain. They told Curt that either Cris goes or the
entire band goes. “That didn’t sit well with me,” says Curt, “so they got rid of us
all.” (personal interview, 2012)
In November Meat Puppets headed-out as a
support act for Primus, a tour that would be their last. Derrick says that this was the third leg of
Primus’s 1995 tour and, thus, they were playing tertiary markets. Many of the gigs played were in college
basketball arenas that held anywhere from 4,500 to 6,000 people: SUNY Albany, Western Connecticut University,
Lehigh University. Cris, in his own
words, was pretty messed-up at this point:
“That was the only tour I did when I
was actually addicted to dope. It was
hellish.” (personal interview, 2012).
Additionally, it was becoming apparent to Curt that London had withdrawn
support for the record:
Nobody even knew we had a record out even though the record
company was like, “This is getting a lot of adds” and all this stuff. It went away pretty quickly. They lost faith in us because the band was
messing up with the dope and stuff. They
could tell. (personal interview, 2012)
Curt
finally had to accept reality, he had been living in denial about Cris’s
habit. Maybe, he suggests, he was too
involved in the situation to recognize what was going on: “I was just too close to it to see it. I think other people saw it a little more
clearly.” (2012)
The writing was on the wall. Curt cancelled any and all engagements that
the band had planned for 1996. The last
show of the original Meat Puppets was on December 31, 1995 at the Hard Rock
Café in Chicago.
The actual end of the original band writes
more like a fade away than a clean break.
There was never an actual “break-up.”
As Curt sees it the band stopped working because he, its leader, let
it. In his thoughts letting everyone
cool-out for awhile, letting Cris see that nothing professional would happen if
he didn’t get his act together, would bring the band back together. But that didn’t work.
The reason the thing came to a halt for awhile was because I
just didn’t do anything about it. I quit
talking to Derrick and quit talking to Cris.
I was like, “Well, maybe this will work itself out.” And it didn’t. There wasn’t anything that was, like, an
event or something like that. I tried to
get Cris to go to rehab. He wouldn’t do
it. I figured he’d get over it pretty
quickly if I quit doing anything. But it
didn’t get any better. So time just went
on. (personal interview, 2012)
Derrick’s story of the original band’s
demise is similar to Curt’s, peppered with a bit of bitterness at Curt claiming
sole ownership of an enterprise that had included Derrick from the start.
Curt cancelled the tour and
moved to California. And it was like,
“I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”
I was like, “Great. I’ve got money from Too High to Die and I don’t have anything lined-up with the
band.” So I got on with my life. Eventually he was like, “So, uh, yea. . .,”
two years later or whatever.
And I was like, “I got other things to
do. Here’s my schedule. If you can fit into my schedule. I have a life, too. I’m not just sitting around waiting for you
to call me.” Once I put it to him like
that, I was like, “I’d love to work with you again, but here are the things that
I need to do.”
He didn’t
call me back. He just got his own band
together.[4]
Conclusion
So ended Meat Puppets version one. No
Joke! is an underrated record containing some solid songs recorded in a
professional manner. But it wasn’t meant
to be for Derrick, Curt, and Cris. Derrick,
anxious to get on with his professional life outside of music, found himself a
regional position with Whole Foods Market.
But he still had a little music left in him: In 1996 he released Songs of Spiritual Uplift and in 2000, The Sounds of Today, both under the moniker Today’s Sounds.
Cris continued to battle his family and
drug demons. In a fairly short span
after the end of the band his mother died, his wife died, and a good friend
died (on his couch). In 2003 he began a
twenty-one month prison term for assaulting a security guard at a Phoenix post
office. The prison stint did, however,
work in Cris’s favor as he was finally able to kick his habit while inside.
Curt continued on. After the break-up of the original band he
put together a new one with the name Royal Neanderthal Orchestra. However, label pressures encouraged him to
rechristen the band Meat Puppets. This
version of Meat Puppets released an EP (You
Love Me, 1999), and LP (Golden Lies,
2000), and a live LP (Live, 2002). Furthermore, he teamed up with Krist
Noveselic of Nirvana and Bud Gaugh of Sublime to release one eponymous record
under the name Eyes Adrift (2002). He
then released another album with Bud Gaugh and other friends, the self-title Volcano (2004). Finally, in 2005 Curt released a solo record,
Snow.
In 2005 Cris was released from
prison. In 2006, through Curt’s son
Elmo, he got in touch with Curt. In 2007
Curt and Cris released a new Meat Puppets record, Rise to Your Knees, with new drummer Ted Marcus. They then began a regular touring and
recording schedule releasing new records in 2009 (Sewn Together), 2011 (Lollipop),
and 2013 (Rat Farm); the last two
using Shandon Sahm on drums.
And that’s where they stand today. Meat Puppets (Curt Kirkwood, Cris Kirkwood,
and Shandon Sahm) are today a professional rock group touring and recording at
a regular clip. As always, it’s Curt’s
band. He writes the songs, makes most of
the “important” decisions, and writes the lyrics.
[1] Other videos nominated were “Everybody
Hurts, R.E.M. (winner), “Amazing,” Aerosmith, “Human Behaviour,” Bjork, “Sweet
Lullaby,” Deep Forest, “Kiss the Frog,” Peter Gabriel, and “Disarm,” Smashing
Pumpkins.
[2] Cris and Michelle would marry in 1996, she
would die of a drug-related infection in August of 1998.
[3] Kyle would also play guitar in Curt’s next
version of Meat Puppets (also known as the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra) that
released one EP, You Love Me, in
1999, one studio LP, Golden Lies, in
2000, and one live record, Meat Puppets
Live (2001).
[4] In
1999 Curt put together the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra, a band that included
current Meat Puppet’s drummer Shandon Sahm.
He eventually rechristened that band Meat Puppets even though Curt was
the only member left from the original band.
This version of Meat Puppets released a studio EP (You Love Me, 1999), one studio LP (Golden Lies, 2000) and one live LP (Meat Puppets Live, 2002). In
2006, after Cris’s eighteen month stint in prison for assaulting a post office
security guard, the Kirkwood brothers reformed Meat Puppets without Derrick,
They had a third party say, “So, you wouldn’t really be
interested I doing this, would you?”
“No, not really.”
“We didn’t think so. Thanks.” (Derrick, personal interview, 2012)
As of this writing, the current Meat Puppets
have released four LPs: Rise to Your Knees (2007, with Ted
Marcus on drums), Sewn Together
(2009, with Marcus again on drums), Lollipop
(2011, with Shandon Sahm on drums), and Rat
Farm (2013, with Sahm on drums).
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