The
Desert Trilogy: Out My Way, Mirage, and Huevos
Introduction
After a year of hard touring in support of
Up on the Sun, Meat Puppets recorded
and released Out My Way in the Spring
of 1986, a six-song EP which was meant to be a stop-gap record, one which they
could tour on for a few months before recording a proper full-length follow-up
to their third LP. A broken finger,
however, forced the band to take some time off in 1986 and Out My Way had to stand on its own.
In the Fall of ’86 and into the Spring of ’87 they recorded and released
Mirage, a full-blown,
detail-oriented, studio album.
Frustrated with their inability to play the songs from Mirage live, and with a host of new
live-friendly tunes written and ready, they turned right around and recorded
and released Huevos in the Fall of
’87; two full-length records in one year.
I put these records together in one
chapter because they have some important things in common. First, all three were recorded in
Phoenix. The first time they had done
this, and they wouldn’t record in their hometown again until No Joke! in 1995. Two of the three records (Out My Way and Mirage) were recorded at the same studio, and all three were recorded
by Steve Escallier, an engineer with big-name major label credentials. Finally, artistically, these three records
are of a piece. The first, Out My Way, finds the band opening up
and extending the pop sensibilities that they first put down on Up on the Sun, but the songs on this
latter record feel more like jams than tight-knit pop songs. Mirage is
the band’s psychedelic studio epic; a lot of time and effort were spent in the
studio getting the songs just right.
Finally, Huevos finds the band
at arguably their rocking best, playing live in the studio without too much
concern about technical or mechanical flaws.
The three records make-up a career transition trilogy taking them from
their classically naïve early period into their major label mainstream
careerist period.
Careerists
Meat Puppets toured the U.S. hard after
the release of their third full-length record, Up on the Sun, in March, 1985.
Upon coming home from touring it hit them, they were a working rock band
and needed to start acting like one.
Furthermore, Curt was the father of toddling twins and the band was his
job, his way to support them. With this
careerist mindset front and center in their heads, Curt, Cris, and Derrick
dedicated themselves to working on the band not just as an art project, but as
a job. They paid more attention, for
instance, to the business end of things.
They rehearsed more often and got together every day even when not
rehearsing.
Importantly for their career legacy, one area of
their career that they consciously focused on improving was their live shows. And improve they did. From ’85-’87 or so, Meat Puppets went from
being a really good live act to a devastatingly good one. Dave Schools, bassist for Widespread Panic,
talks about seeing them around 1986 on “one of those raucous nights, where
there was slop rock, ridiculous covers, caterwauling, and blistering guitar
solos. Trademark Meat Puppets” (Prato
2013, p. 133). Similarly, Troy Meiss
(future second guitarist with the band) remembers seeing them about a year
later on “one of those nights that was a total foray into beautiful depravity
and debauchery” (Prato 2013, pp. 152-53).
By 1986, with five years of constant touring, one
EP, and three LPs under their belts, Curt, Cris, and Derrick were brimming with
confidence. Meat Puppets II and Up on the
Sun both received high critical accolades and the audiences at their live
shows had, according to one observer, tripled in size (Prato 2012, p. 131). They were a band that, in the face of rave
critical success and decent commercial success (for an indie label band), were
entering a career phase in which they knew what they wanted (artistically,
anyway) and knew how to go about getting it.
Meat Puppets had a plan. They wanted to keep touring and playing live;
after all, they were becoming very good at it.
But they also knew that professional rock bands made a record a year and
they now definitely saw themselves as a professional rock band. Their plan was to release an EP to assuage
the critics, tour for a few months to satisfy themselves and their fans, and
then record an LP. Another part of the
plan was that these things would be done in a way that would enable Curt to be
as involved of a father as he could. They
would also break from SST Records tradition and make the records themselves, selecting
their own studios and engineers, and produce the records themselves. They decided to forsake recording in
California and find a studio and recording engineer in their hometown of
Phoenix.
Enacting the above mentioned plan, Meat Puppets
booked time at Chaton Studio in Paradise Valley, Arizona, in March, 1986, using
“major label” recording engineer Steve Escallier to run the boards. Out My
Way was released soon after, in Spring 1986. However, while touring for the record a
roadie shut Curt’s finger in the van door, breaking it. The band’s plan was derailed, at least until
Curt’s finger could heal.
Curt kept busy during the band’s time off from
touring by writing songs and acquiring new electronic gadgets for use in the
studio. And by the fall of 1986 he had a
host of songs ready to record (two albums worth, as it would turn out). Once again they would use Chaton Studio in
Paradise Valley and once again they hired Steve Escallier as engineer, this
time giving him co-production credits on the back album cover. However, they would spend as much time making
this record as they would on virtually any album before or since, spending time
in Chaton through the early spring of 1987.
Mirage was released in April,
1987.
The band members found the heavily produced songs
from Mirage hard to play live, and
since they still had an album worth of unrecorded songs, they went back into
the studio a mere six months after recording Mirage to record its follow-up, Huevos. Recorded and mixed in just five days in
August, 1987, Huevos is a ZZ Top
influenced fun-to-play-live record that found Meat Puppets back to their
loose-rocking selves. Following in-step
with Out My Way and Mirage, Steve Escallier was again
employed to record Huevos, but this
time they chose Pantheon Studios (though still in Paradise Valley) over Chaton.
Huevos capped an
important stage in the history of Meat Puppets.
It was a stage in which the band took full control of their career, both
artistically and commercially. They made
three records which, artistically, found them exploring terrains they had yet
to explore: fine-tuned noodle-jamming on
Out My Way, extremely focused studio
manipulation on Mirage, and
straight-out live recorded boogie rock on
Huevos. From a business perspective
they made these records the way they wanted, in Phoenix in their own time.
Unfortunately for the band, the desert trilogy of
records didn’t go over too well artistically or commercially. Whereas their fan base expanded exponentially
from Meat Puppets II up through Out My Way, after this they seemed to
hit a commercial ceiling; their records were selling at a steady but not
increasing rate. As I’ll show a bit
later, they even began to lose a few fans during this period, at least in the
record market (their live shows would continue to draw decent though, again,
not necessarily increasing crowds).
Critically, these three records drew, for the first time, mixed
reviews. Because the band chose to make
records that they wanted to make rather than following some sorts of market
trends, the critics didn’t know what to think, they seemed confused. Some critics found the records bad and
self-indulgent, others found them self-indulgent and artistically
brilliant. Others just lost interest.
The writing was on the wall. If Meat Puppets wanted to be a viable mainstream
commercial success they would have to leave the indie rock world. After the desert trilogy they would release
one more album, Monsters, on SST
Records (though they would try to get it to the majors) and then jump ship to
boats on bigger oceans.
Out My Way
As mentioned, coming
off the success of Meat Puppets II
and Up on the Sun, Curt, Cris, and
Derrick had a plan; a professional plan.
They were now a band with a career, and they were going to act like
it. They had been touring hard
throughout 1985 and early ’86, wanted some new songs to tour on, but hadn’t had
time to put enough together for a full LP.
Instead, they thought, they would record and release and EP, tour for a
couple more months while gathering more original material, and then record and
release an LP.
For step one, the EP,
they booked time in March at Chaton Studio, “a converted guest house behind the
home of a wealthy Paradise Valley couple” (Derrick Blog, 2012).[1] It was also the first record they recorded
with Steve Escallier as engineer. Escallier
was a relatively high-profile engineer at the time having worked in various
capacities on albums by the likes of the Doors to Cheech and Chong, Burt
Bacharach to the Grateful Dead, and Glen Campbell to Alice Cooper. But, according to a current website from a
studio at which he now works, Escallier has always had a passion for recording
“aspiring new artists” (http://www.qualityrecordinghawaii.com/engineer.html).
Two factors played an
important role in the band choosing to stay in Phoenix to record the record and
to use an engineer outside of Spot at SST Records. First and foremost was that Curt had his
hands full raising twin toddlers.
Staying close to home, of course, allowed him maximum father time (at
least as much as a person who tours for a career can have). Second, the band decided to take things into
their own hands, to do it themselves.
They chose the studio, they chose the engineer, they chose the time
frame for recording the record. In
short, the members of Meat Puppets chose to take control of their careers.
In spite of their DIY
and punk pretensions and history, choosing Escallier to engineer shows that the
members of Meat Puppets had mainstream aspirations and were looking for ways to
break out of the indie world and into the popular rock world. To this end the band put a lot of time into
the recording and into other band (live shows, business aspects)
activities. Curt says that he continued
to progress in his understanding of studio techniques, and on Out My Way he figured-out how to make a
“live sounding” studio record. For his
part, says Derrick, he used a click-track in the studio for the first time;
this being a nod to the creation of a more professional sounding record.
As for the record
itself, Derrick suggests on his blog that the songs were technically
difficult. The fact that Cris and Curt
play so well on the album, he writes, shows how they were becoming top-rate
rock musicians. Derrick, on the other
hand, says that he never really warmed-up t the songs. None-the-less, the record showed, to the band
members themselves if to no one else, that they could conjure the discipline it
takes to make a professional record. In
the end, writes Derrick, Curt and Cris were proud of the record, Derrick was
“perplexed” (Bostrom blog, 2012).
Looking back, Curt
says, the band knew that the record wouldn’t sell. For one thing, the loping country funk of an
album with songs that all clocked-in at over four minutes (except for “Good
Golly Miss Molly”) wasn’t really radio-friendly. Furthermore, being on SST and making the
record themselves meant little to no label push would be behind the album;
radio stations, the driving force behind record sales at the time, probably
didn’t know it even existed. This, of
course, was artistically liberating for Curt in his songwriting and
arranging. He could make a professional
sounding record that sounded like he wanted, without concern that they would
have to please label executives whose interests were on the bottom-line of
financial success.
What Others
Say
For whatever reasons,
it seems a number of Meat Puppets fans stopped paying attention to their
records after the incredible one-two punch of Meat Puppets II and Up on the
Sun. Prato quotes a few people in
his book, including Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Paul Leary of
Butthole Surfers (who would co-produce a couple Meat Puppets records in the
early nineties), who say they simply stopped listening after those two
records. Derrick also mentions that as
the three records that make-up the desert trilogy came out it became apparent
that they had hit a plateau in record sales.
Even with the
commercial eddy that Meat Puppets hit after Meat
Puppets II and Up on the Sun, reviews
of Out My Way are generally positive,
glowing even. Trouser Press, for example, calls it “superior” (T.P.). Wilson
and Allroy praise its “brilliant tunes” and suggest the only weakness on
the record is that it is “too short” (w&a), and Brooklyn Rocks says there “isn’t a bum track on the disc” (BR). A general consensus also emerges in the
reviews of the record’s diverse collection of songs and that it is an album
that was like nothing Meat Puppets had done before. This had become a regular comment about the
band by this point, and it would follow the band for the rest of their
career. Meat Puppets were a band that
constantly changed genres and sounds, not only from album to album, but from
song to song within an album. Genres
identified on Out My Way included
punk, traditional rock, ZZ Top, pop rock, hippy music, John Fogerty, cow punk,
high-speed fifties rock, sped-up country, straight forward seventies country
rock, funk, and psychedelia, all within six songs!
There were almost no
negative reviews save Mark Prindle’s comment that the album consisted of “bad
songwriting.” In the same review,
however, Prindle points out the album’s “terrific guitars” and “strong mix”
while saying that it sounds “confident and professional.”
An interesting focus
of virtually every review of the record had to do with its final cut, a
punked-up version of the Little Richard classic “Good Golly Miss Molly.” Long included in their live sets, Derrick
suggests that this song was added-on to the record as “a tacit admission to the
paucity of our offerings” (Derrick blog); they needed something more to
fill-out the record (even to just make it into an EP). For whatever reason, probably because its’
frenetic freak-out pace stood in stark contrast to the more bucolic feel of the
other five songs, “Good Golly Miss Molly” drew the attention of the
critics. While Mark Prindle felt that
the song was, well, “bad,” and the Rolling
Stone Album Guide referred to it as “pure gimmickry,” others gave it a more
favorable review. The All Music Guide called it “explosive”
while Wilson and Allroy say it is
“hilarious,” and Trouser Press
labeled it a “crazed rave-up.”[2]
Mirage
With Curt’s finger healed the band once
again took up residency at Chaton Studio, once again employing Stever Escallier
as engineer, although on Mirage (as
well as on the next one, Huevos)
Escallier is given co-producer as well as engineering credit whereas on Out My Way he only receives the latter. This time around they would take their time,
spending three months in the Winter of ’86-’87 making the record, about as much
time as they would spend on any record before or since. The result was what Curt calls a “pure studio
album” and Derrick has alternately referred to as the band’s “psychedelic epic”
and, in reference to the Brian Wilson produced Beach Boys class, their Pet Sounds.
Staying in Phoenix to record Mirage once again allowed Curt to engage
in his fathering duties as well as allowed Cris and Derrick a bit of rest from
touring. It also allowed the band to be
more meticulous in the production of the record. In his time off from touring Curt wrote a lot
of new songs. Indeed, as we’ll see, too
many to put on one record. So Curt and
the band had to choose which songs to put on Mirage and which to leave off.
Also, Curt brought in a Roland Guitar Synthesizer for the record while
Derrick had a new set of Midi drums. New
gadgets meant new sounds, but also meant time had to be taken to figure-out how
to best utilize them.
One thing is certain, at this point in
time Meat Puppets were formidable musicians with boundless imaginations. They did want commercial success but they had
no interest in recreating their earlier, critically acclaimed records in the
name of future sales. This combination
of exceptional musicianship, time off of the road to heal, and a lot of time in
the studio resulted in a thickly-layered, musically dense record. The result was a curveball of a record that soured
some of the band’s fans. Record sales
didn’t increase as they’d hoped (something that would indicate a career on the
upswing rather than flat lined).
Overall, however, consistent with their “be true to thyself” artistic
spirit, Curt and Cris were proud of the record while Derrick, on the other hand
felt it was “flawed,” a career misstep.
Nevertheless, writes Derrick in his blog,
the band hunkered-down. They worked
harder on their live show during this period.
They rehearsed more. Derrick, who
was starting to feel tired both toward the end of individual shows and as tours
drew on for weeks on end, started exercising, doing aerobics. Curt, Cris, and Derrick got together every
day, sometimes rehearsing, sometimes focusing on band business. If they were going to be professional then
they were going to have to act professional.
What Others Say
For the most part, those who’ve written
about Mirage like it. At the time when it was released, based upon
the one available review of the record from 1987,[3] Joe Sasfy wrote that it is
their finest record. Significantly, he
highlights the typically wide-range of styles on the record, not as detracting
and unfocused, but as a positive, as something of their own. In a good way, the record “doesn’t resolve
the confusion” evident in their first four records, it “doesn’t tie up loose
ends.” Mirage, wrote Sasfy, is “real psychedelia” reminiscent of “Hendrix
at his most sensual.”
Criticisms leveled at the record are of a
few sorts: production, songwriting, and
vocals. Mark Prindle, for instance,
writes that the production is empty and unsympathetic, while the Brooklyn Rocks accuses it of having a
dated, ‘80s sound. Brooklyn Rocks also claims the record lacks the off-kilter charm of
their earlier works, creating an album that is, well, boring. As for the vocals, Prindle lists them as
simply bad, flat, hitting the wrong notes.
Finally, Trouser Press
comments on Curt’s “cringeably tuneless singing.”
Negative reviews of Mirage, however, are in the distinct minority; most applaud the
record. Some see it as a return to Up on the Sun, a record of poppy yet
intricately constructed rock/country songs.
The record is described as melancholy, “drifting, yet concise”;
“surreal, sad, and humorous.” It’s seen
as “audaciously dense and disarmingly supple.”
“Every song is great,” exclaims one writer. It contains some of their best material and
is, positively, ridiculous and thought provoking.
The writers
find Mirage a bit hard to categorize,
placing it alongside, inside, and outside a number of conventional pop music
genres. One writer, after hailing the
record for its “genre bending” uniqueness manages to categorize it as punk,
folk, and psychedelic (the latter, a characterization mentioned by a number of
writers) while s heard it as straight country.
Some writers, of course, compare the record (and the band, for that
matter) to other artist in an attempt to translate what they hear on the record
into printed media: Chet Atkins, Robert
Fripp, King Crimson, Spin Doctors, and Dire Straits (the last three being used
derogatorily) are a few artists to whom the music on Mirage is compared.
As should be the case, many reviews
focused on the level of musicianship exhibited on the record, especially Curt’s
guitar playing. They mention his
intricate finger-picking and plectrum work as being relaxed and technically
accomplished. Curt is given dues as a “Travis-picker,”
referring to Merle Travis, the Kentucky country and western artist known not
only as the writer of “Sixteen Tons,” but as a uniquely gifted finger-picker.[4] This focus on Curt’s finger-picking style
accounts for those who see the album as a country music style effort. Generally, Curt’s guitar work is seen as
impressive, fluid, and intimate.
While, as I already mentioned, some
critics site Curt and Cris’s vocals as a weak point on the album, there are
some who actually liked the singing. Weingarter,
in the liner notes to the 1999 reissue of the record, writes that although the
vocal harmonies are conventional, the fact that they sound “real” is
endearing. Another writer likes that
they had “cleaned-up” their vocals in comparison with their previous releases,
while another writes that the vocals are “strong.”
Finally, a number of writers see Mirage as a landmark of sorts. One sees it as an artistic transition from
the art pop of Up on the Sun to the
heavier rock of Monsters. Another, following along with many who
stopped listening to the band’s new records around this time, saw Mirage as Meat Puppets’ “last great
record.” Another simply saw Mirage as the “culmination of the first
stage” of the band’s career with, as just mentioned, a heavier, more rocking
set of recordings to come.
Huevos
“Huevos”
means ‘balls’ in Spanish,” says Cris in Greg Prato’s Too High to Die: Meet the Meat
Puppets (2012). “We called it ‘Huevos’ because we had the balls to put
out two records in one year” (p. 145).
In just five days in August of 1987, four months after the release of Mirage, an album on which they’d spent a
couple months recording, Meat Puppets recorded and mixed the tracks that would
be released as Huevos; it was
released in October, six months after Mirage. As the band tells it, there were a couple
reasons for the quick recording and release of the record. One was that they didn’t like playing the Mirage songs live; it was a studio album
replete with many layers of guitars and vocals.
Second, Curt had written an abundance of songs during the rehabilitation
of his broken finger, but the band had only recorded one album’s worth; they
had enough songs to get a good start on another.
At this point in their career Meat Puppets
were determined to “make it,” to succeed in the mainstream rock world. To this end they had put a lot of effort into
Mirage, a tight and determined studio
record. They had also become a
formidable live band by this time.
Future manager Dennis Polowski, in Prato’s book, suggests that every
Meat Puppets’ show was the start of something new, the beginning of a new
creative venture. At the same time (and
in the same book), future second guitarist Troy Meiss remembers shows from this
period as experiences in “beautiful depravity and debauchery” (Prato 2012, pp.
152-53). This is, of course, a
compliment for a hard-rocking psychedelic country punk band.
At the same time that they wished for
commercial success, however, the band was determined to mine their own artistic
fields. They considered themselves
artists, first, makers of exploitable product, second; they may have left the
musical terrain of punk rock behind a few albums earlier, but they retained the
attitude. To this end, rather than put
out a record that mimicked anything they’d done in the past (whether punk,
country, or psychedelic) they put out a rocking blues record, not a lot of
which were making it up the charts in 1987.
Curt, Cris, and Derrick were also a bit
frustrated by the fact that they hadn’t yet found major label success. Two of their post-punk contemporaries – Hüsker
Dü and the Replacements – had released major label records and a slew of other
“indie” bands were set to do so in the next year or so. This frustration was another reason behind
the quick recording and release of Huevos: they had put time and effort into Mirage without much commercial or critical
success, why not go back to the formula of Meat
Puppets II and, especially, Up on the
Sun? They’d play it fast and loose
on this record. Their fans may be a bit
confused and the media may not understand what the band was up to, but Curt,
Cris, and Derrick knew what they were doing.
They were making a rock ‘n’ roll record that they would enjoy playing
live.
As they had with the previous two records,
Meat Puppets recorded Huevos in
Phoenix (Scottsdale, precisely), but rather than Chaton Studio they used Pantheon. They also stuck with recording engineer Steve
Escallier for a third time. As
mentioned, however, rather than put a lot of time, money, and effort into it,
they spent but five days in August to record and mix the entire record. Curt says the record was recorded live with
no affectations, as opposed to the “fake-as-we-could-get-it sort of thing” they
had done on Out My Way and Mirage (Prato 2012). They gave it to SST quickly and SST released
it quickly.
Although Curt suggests artists such as
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ten Years After, and Muddy Waters are apparent on the record,
there is an overwhelming consensus from insiders and the band themselves that Huevos is Meat Puppets ZZ Top
record. The story goes that an interview
and story with Curt in Guitar Player
magazine included a couple of Curt’s drawings of Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s
guitarist. Gibbons saw the article and
dropped Curt a postcard claiming his admiration for Meat Puppets. Add to that the fact that Curt, Cris, and
Derrick had gone to a few ZZ Top shows in those particular years (mid-80s) and
Curt felt “it was time to pull that up” (Prato 2012, p. 146).
What Others Say
And the
rock writers agree: Huevos is an homage to, if not a downright imitation of, ZZ
Top. Wilson and Allroy point to the
“screaming guitar, boogie bass, marching drums and macho vocals” in their
comparison of Meat Puppets to ZZ Top. Brooklyn Rocks uses the “bluesy,
riff-rock power trio sound” of Huevos
as their comparison, while The Rolling
Stone Album Guide calls the album “wholeheartedly imitative” of ZZ Top,
with the “only musical difference between the two [bands] is Gibbons and Dusty
Hill can both sing, and the Kirkwoods can’t.”
Mark Prindle’s words on this subject are worth quoting at length:
ZZ Top. That's what everybody always says about this album,
so I was hoping to be the voice of dissent and say "Not ZZ Top!" But
such cannot be done. Because this album is VERY clearly intended to sound like
an early ZZ Top record. There's just no way around it. The wimpy light dirty
distortion is the same, the vocals are hoarse and Gibbonsy, the songwriting is
all Texas boogie barre chords and bluesy riffs - even the album title fits
right in with Fandango!, Tejas, El Loco, Tres Hombres and all those
other damned pre-Eliminator ZZ Top album titles. But does it work? Can
Curt Kirkwood's songwriting match up to the classics that are "Tush,"
"Just Got Paid," "Arrested For Driving While Blind" and
"La Grange"? We will address this question when we return.
We're back, and the answer is no. There are no ZZ Top rock
and roll classics on this LP. There ARE, however, a heck of a lot of "good
ZZ Top non-hits." Which is to say that even though there might not be any
"Tube Snake Boogie"s on here, there are plenty of "Pearl
Necklace"s.
Similar
to Prindle’s paragraphs just quoted, most reviews of Huevos are positive, focusing on the band’s return from studio
gimmickry to live rock riffing. The All Music Guide praises their return to
straight-ahead rock, suggesting it’s the band’s best set of songs since Up on the Sun, giving particular praise
to Derrick’s lively drumming. And Wilson
and Allroy refer to the music on Huevos
as “serious rock.
There
were, as with most of the band’s efforts at this point in their career,
detractors, writers who didn’t much care for the record. Indeed, even Mark Prindle, who provides the
lengthy positive report above, goes on to criticize the clichéd guitar and
empty mix on Huevos, while also
mentioned above, the Rolling Stone Album
Guide criticized the Kirkwood’s singing (a criticism that has followed the
band throughout their early career). The Rough Guide saw Huevos as a “doomed attempt” at raw rock, calling it unconvincing
because Curt and Cris are “too good” as musicians to play this sort of basic blues.
Conclusion
With the release of Huevos in the fall of 1987 the Meat Puppets finished a phase of
their career that included Out My Way
in 1986 and Mirage in early ’87. It’s a phase that saw Curt, Cris, and Derrick
hunker-down in their home town and concentrate on their craft, concentrate on
being professional musicians in charge of their own careers. This was partly brought-on by the healing
required after Curt broke his finger in ’86 which, because it put a stop to
their touring for a few months, allowed him time to focus on writing rather
than just playing. The result was a
plethora of new material played-out over two full-length albums. One, Mirage,
is a multi-layered psychedelic record so full of flowering melodies, running
rhythms, and complex vocal arrangements that it was difficult for the band to
play live. The other, Huevos, was a straight-forward blues
rock album that was filled with songs they could rock live.
With the release of Huevos the Meat Puppets had released five full-length and one EP
with the independent SST Records over six years, plus an EP with World
Imitation Records which was later released on SST, and though they appreciated
the creative and business freedom SST had afforded them they were more than
ready to make the move to the majors.
But that move was still two records away. First they would release Monsters, a record that ushers in a heavier musical phase for the
band and, importantly, a seemingly more focused strategic plan for leaving the
indies behind.
[1] “The original Chaton
facility called Chaton
Recordings was opened in Paradise Valley, AZ in 1973 by Ed and
Marie Ravenscroft. Over the years their client list included: the Gin Blossoms,
Ce Ce Peniston, Kenny Rogers, Judas Priest, Lyle Lovett, Paul McCartney, Alice
Cooper and many, many others” (http://chatonstudios.com/?page_id=77). The original vinyl release of Out My Way states “Recorded at Chaton
Studios, Phoenix” and the original vinyl release of Mirage states “Recorded at Chaton, Scottsdale.” Both rereleases of the list it as “Chaton
Studio.” Derrick says that he was never
aware of a distinction between “Chaton Studio” and “Chaton Recordings” (personal
correspondence, 2013).
[2] I first fell for Meat Puppets in the Summer
of 1986 when I heard, late at night, on “Listen to This,” a show broadcast late
Sunday nights/early Monday mornings on San Diego’s 91X radio station, “Good
Golly Miss Molly.”
[3] This review is available both online and on
the 1999 Mirage reissue liner-notes.
[4]
Thanks to Derrick Bostrom for pointing me to Merle, rather than Randy, Travis.
nice
ReplyDelete