"Up on the Sun": A Retracted Segment from "The Meat Puppets and the Lyrics of Curt Kirkwood from 'Meat Puppets II' to 'No Joke!'"

Up on the Sun

Introduction

      Meat Puppets II was recorded in early 1983, mixed in late ’83, and released to the public in early 1984.  Its follow-up, Up on the Sun, the band’s third full-length record, was recorded and mixed in just three days:  January 26-28, 1985.  It was released in March of that same year.  Much happened in the two years between these two landmark albums.  First, their living arrangements, and thus their playing arrangements, changed.  Second, the songwriting, playing, and recording skills of the band and its members increased dramatically.

      The result was an album, Up on the Sun, that showed a band that had made a clean cut, at least in the recording studio, from their hardcore punk genesis.  It’s a musically solid record featuring intricate interplays between Cris’s bass, Curt’s guitar, and Derrick’s steady rhythms.  Lyrically, the album finds Curt fully realizing his oblique writing style with a number of songs being ambiguous and/or nonsensical.  Structurally, the songs are often psychedelic strings of metaphors mixing senses and colors to create surreal images.  Topically, the most consistent theme on the record is one of escape from conventional reality into alternate places, reached through drugs and other ways.

History

      The main factor that influenced the lives of the band members at this point was the birth of Curt’s twins in the Fall of ‘83:  Elmo Isaac Dillinger Dean Samuel Sinbad Kirkwood and Katherine Louisa St. Elmo Amelia Violet Presley Kirkwood (http://meatpuppets.com/puppets/phoenix-new-times-weekly-october-1983/).  According to Derrick, things began to get “a little bit more tense” and “a little bit weird” at the house out on the edge of Phoenix shared by he, Curt, and Cris as the twins’ births grew nearer.  For the first few months after the release of Meat Puppets II but before the twins’ births, the band members hung-out, got stoned, and honed their craft, as before.  With the impending births closing in, however, the Kirkwoods’ mother sold the shared house, bought a new one for Curt, Cris, their girlfriends, and the twins, and kindly informed Derrick he would have to find other living arrangements.

      Moving houses was a regular occurrence at this point.  As a band of young men who partied pretty hard, houses tended to take a beating.

We trashed that house and moved to another one.  My mom was a realtor.  She owned the house that we were living in when my kids were born, and we ruined that so she got us another rental which we ruined, and we got ourselves this nicer rental with a pool and horse pastures.  I think they sold that. (Curt, personal interview)

      At the break-up of the “party” house that Meat Puppets had been living in for the past year, Derrick moved back to his mother’s house on the East side of Phoenix in Paradise Valley, while the Kirkwoods moved into a “converted trailer kind of place” (Derrick) in a “not so good area” for awhile, and then to a house a few miles away from Derrick near the Paradise Valley Mall. This, of course, changed the practicalities of the band’s rehearsal schedule.  For one thing, rehearsals happened at the Kirkwoods home and Derrick did not have a car, so he relied on rides from the brothers or his mother or, as often as not, he rode the bus.

      According to Derrick, changing living conditions and practice spaces made for more focused sessions.  While living together the three Puppets would rehearse haphazardly whenever they happened to be in the mood which, given their dedication, was quite often.  Now that they lived apart, however, they had to make better use of rehearsal time.  As time became more precious, says Derrick, “rehearsals got more intensified” (personal interview).

      In the second half of 1983, after recording Meat Puppets II and its release, Meat Puppets never stopped working.  Curt was in a fertile writing period so, instead of waiting around for the release of II they began working on new songs as well as gigging and touring.  Says Derrick:

We’re just in an environment where we’re always working.  Curt was always working on stuff.  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 (personal interview).

At this point the band was still benefitting from an inheritance left to the Kirkwoods by their grandfather (an inheritance that would last until 1986).  Along with helping Curt support his new family, the inheritance allowed band members to eschew day jobs and continue to focus on their rock career.  As Derrick says, in 1983 he, Curt, and Cris “basically sat around and smoked pot and worked on our music” (personal interview).  Much of what would come out on Up on the Sun was conceived at this time.  Curt’s vision for the albums was formulated here and some lo-fi cassette demos were made.

Meat Puppets considered their eponymous debut to be successful and, given the obvious creative strides they made on the second record, had every reason to believe that II was even better and they were eager to promote its release.  To this end they went on a six-week American tour with SST label-mates Black Flag and the Nig-Heist.  This tour served to solidify band members’ vision of themselves as unique and distinct from the hardcore punk crowds and sounds for which they were playing. Meat Puppets II, for one thing, was released in the midst of the tour to strong reviews, including a four-star rating in Rolling Stone magazine.  Yet they weren’t seeing many of their records in stores around the country while Black Flag records seemed to be stocked in abundance.  Similarly, they were feeling artistically constrained by being lumped in with the heavier sounds of Black Flag and sophomoric antics of the Nig-Heist.  With the tour at an end, Meat Puppets were “looking to move as far ahead of the pack as we could” (Derrick interview).

It was in the Summer of 1984 that the Kirkwoods moved to Paradise Valley, near the mall, just a few miles from where Derrick was living with his mother.  In the Fall the band rented an RV and did a headlining tour of their own (they had been the support act for Black Flag).  Upon returning to Phoenix sometime after Thanksgiving of ’84, they decided it was time to record the follow-up to Meat Puppets II.  In an attempt to avoid replicating the long wait that occurred between recording and mixing Meat Puppets II, and in true DIY fashion, they began recording at the home of Darrell Demarco, their soundman, with the intent of doing the entire album themselves.

The Kirkwoods rented the tape deck from a local music shop. Our sound man already had the board, mikes, available space, etc. so we set up there (Derrick interview).

The band spent about a month at the end of 1984 recording.  However, they weren’t getting the sounds they wanted down on tape.  Derrick, for instance, didn’t like the way the drums were sounding and, overall, the band was feeling that the sound was too lo-fi and muddy.  The final nail in the album’s DIY coffin was when the recorder was taken back:  “The music shop sold the tape recorder some time around New Years, thus ending the project” (Derrick, email).  They did, however, get some “very good” demos out of the sessions and, importantly, an idea of how the songs should be arranged.

      With the DIY recording sessions over the band decided to go back to the familiar, they would record with Spot at Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach, California; the same engineer from their first two albums and the same studio used for Meat Puppets II.  This time, however, to avoid the delay between recording and mixing, they blacked-out the studio for three days, Friday through Sunday, January 26 through 28, 1985, with the intent of finishing the entire album in this time.  And they had reason to believe they could do it.  By virtue of having attempted to record the album on their own, they knew the songs well and they rehearsed the songs well before going to California.

      There were a few hitches in the recording process, though.  Most notably, as he encountered throughout his career with the band, Derrick had trouble getting the sounds he wanted out of his drums.  Curt and Cris grew impatient with this.  At one point Derrick left the studio in frustration (he says for half an hour, Cris remembers it being more like five hours).  In the end, Derrick had to simplify many of his drum parts in order to get consistent audio quality.  Because of this streamlining of arrangements, however, says Derrick, the record has an immediate and up-tempo feel to it.  In the end, they finished the record in the three days.

We were able to get the whole thing done by the end of Sunday night:  basics, overdubs, vocals, mixing, cutting, sequencing and it was done.  That was definitely an incredible thing for us to do.  (Derrick, personal interview)

The Album

      Up on the Sun was released in March of 1985 to, again, critical acclaim.  Critics and band members alike saw it as yet another creative step forward, leaving behind the country punk of Meat Puppets II and embracing a poppier, possibly more accessible, set of songs.

What Others Say                  

      After the nearly unanimous critical praise that accompanied Meat Puppets II there were great expectations awaiting Meat Puppets’ third album, Up on the Sun, and, for the most part, the band didn’t disappoint.  Joe Carducci, author and one-time co-owner of SST Records (the label that released Up on the Sun), saw the record as “fully realized” (A&I p. 204) while Greg Prato in the All Music Guide to Rock calls it “another masterpiece” (All Music Guide, p. 719).

      As might be expected, most of the reviews of Up on the Sun used its predecessor as a comparison.  Prato, again from the All Music Guide, praised the new record as a move forward from their previous masterpiece while Sputnick Music hails it as “an amazing album and just as good as its predecessor” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/).   There are those, however, such as Precious Roy from the blog Dead On, who see Up on the Sun as “discombobulating” and “out of place, a “lateral move” rather than a progressive one (http://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/upon-further-review-meat-puppets-up-on-the-sun/).  For avid fans and critics, Up on the Sun and Meat Puppets II remain, as blogger Mike states, the band’s two essential recordings; they debate over which one “is the band’s strongest” (http://brooklynrocks.blogspot.com/2012/01/meat-puppets-up-on-sun-cd-review-mvd.html).  Up on the Sun was a turning point in Meat Puppet’s musical career.  It “cemented the band’s reputation as sonic chemists and maturing songwriters” (Linblad, A&I p. 3), they were a band that “had learned to work as a unit” (http://www.allmusic.com/album/up-on-the-sun-r709034/review).

      If Meat Puppets took a step away from punk and hardcore on Meat Puppets II, they made the break clean with Up on the Sun.  The material on this record is a “jazzy, jam-based trip-out” (A&I p. 6), lush and “psychedelic” (Rough Guide), proving that “not only weren’t they punks, they could easily pass for hippies” (http://www.allmusic.com/album/up-on-the-sun-r709034/review).  Influences identified on the record range from Captain Beefheart to “proto-Phish” (http://deadon.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/upon-further-review-meat-puppets-up-on-the-sun/), “almost Rush level” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/), a punk “Jerry Garcia” (Trouser Press) and “the Grateful Dead” (http://brooklynrocks.blogspot.com/2012/01/meat-puppets-up-on-sun-cd-review-mvd.html).  Hardcore punk or not, Up on the Sun, is cited as “the most impressive record any hardcore band. . .has made” (A&I, p. 298).

      One thing Meat Puppets did learn from punk rock, writes Mark Deming, and carried through on to Up on the Sun, “was to get to the point” (http://www.allmusic.com/album/up-on-the-sun-r709034/review).  The album, he writes, is “remarkably tight” and “full of energy and purpose.”  Most of this tightness and purpose, of course, can be attributed to the band having prepared and rehearsed the songs before entering the studio.

      The songwriting on the record is praised as being “unbelievably smart” (http://www.markprindle.com/meatpuppets.htm#uppie), filled with “memorable melodies” and “musical unpredictability” (A&I p. 42) while the production creates an album that is “beautifully textured” (http://www.warr.org/puppets.html), making “them shine” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/).

      It was with the release of Up on the Sun that a consensus developed concerning the musical prowess of the members of Meat Puppets; they were good.  Specifically, the interplay between Curt’s guitar and Cris’s bass is often singled-out for praise, “it’s some of the best i (sic) have ever heard” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/) is not an uncommon sentiment.  Derrick was keeping pace with the Kirkwood brothers, “pumpin’ out the uptempo beats left and lefter to keep such mature music moving quickly” (http://www.markprindle.com/meatpuppets.htm#uppie).

      Taken as a whole, the original (1981-1995) Meat Puppets’ catalogue of music leans toward the darker side of the human condition:  hard, grungy music accompanied by lyrics focused on the existentially meaningless nature of being alive.  But with its up-tempo, jazzy, finger-picking guitar, melodically noodling bass-lines, snappy percussion, and fanciful lyrics, however, not a few have pointed to Up on the Sun as the band’s happy album:  it is described as “frequently beautiful” (A&I p. 298), “joyous,” “their most purely pleasurable work” (http://www.allmusic.com/album/up-on-the-sun-r709034/review), “one of the best feel good albums ever made,” “happy music for great ass times,” and, well, and album that “just makes me really happy as ***, like i have to start dancing” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/).

      Any criticisms of the record tended to focus on Curt’s vocals, something that has followed him throughout his career.  No less than three times in one three-paragraph piece for the Rolling Stone Album Guide, for example, J.D. Considine mentions Meat Puppets’ “haphazard vocals,” the fact that “they can’t” sing, and that, in the end, “the Kirkwoods may yet learn to sing” (p. 465).  Mark Prindle uses language that is no less direct in referring to the vocals on Up on the Sun:

unfortunately the vocals are pretty abominably hideous as either Curt or both Curt and Cris have given up warbling and screaming to attempt actual SINGING which they aren't too good at yet and generally sing flat and miss lots of notes, to such a degree that my wife made fun of them during the first song (which incidentally features by far the worst vocals on the album, so don't judge it on that track alone!) (http://www.markprindle.com/meatpuppets.htm#uppie).

      While most comments and criticisms of Up on the Sun focus on the musicianship of the band, some people do mention Curt’s lyrics.  As with the comments about the lyrics on Meat Puppets II, the comments on this album skip any detailed analyses for rather superficial mentions of their weirdness.  Wilson and Allroy, for instance, suggest that “the lyrics run the gamut from the ridiculous (‘Swimming Ground,’ ‘Buckethead’) to the engagingly poetic (title track, ‘two rivers’)” (http://www.warr.org/puppets.html).  Similarly, Sputnickmusic suggests that the lyrics are good, but it’s the music that makes the album:  “the lyrics are crazy and cool but who cares about the lyrics when the musicianship is this good” (http://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/47362/Meat-Puppets-Up-on-the-Sun/).

What Puppets Say

      So there were two years between the recording of Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun.  During this time the band went on a few tours, the most notorious of which was the Spring of 1984 tour with Black Flag and the Nig Heist.  Also, Derrick, Curt, and Cris moved around the Phoenix valley a few times, sometimes living together, sometimes apart.  But the band kept rehearsing, Curt kept writing songs, and, most importantly for the creation of the new record, they attempted to record the album on their own, which allowed them to become familiar with the songs.  The result was an album completely recorded and mixed in three days at Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach, California.

We knocked it out in the first day or two and we lived at the studio.  We didn’t leave.  Spot and I, especially, just hung in there and took little naps on the floor next to the sound board and it was done.  (Curt, personal interview)

      It was during their Spring ‘84 tour that the members of Meat Puppets began to formulate a conception of themselves as truly separate from the hardcore punk scene that was building around Black Flag.  As opposed to the more arty punk scene in Los Angeles where Meat Puppets first began, where the emphasis was on individuality and creativity, the fans that followed Black Flag at this point become uniform.  As Cris says, a “batch of kids suddenly came up who were all into Doc Martins and skanking and being bald.”  (personal interview).  Additionally, these fans were into a “hardcore” type of music:  loud, fast, and aggressive.  And although Meat Puppets could play as fast as anyone, they envisioned themselves as something more, as a rock band generally, not just a punk rock band.

      Even with this broader vision of themselves as a rock band, Meat Puppets were still playing the hardcore punk circuit, playing to hardcore punk fans and, not going over so well:  “The punkers always hated us.  But those were the only places we played shows.”  (Cris, personal interview).  And, to be honest, Curt, Cris, and Derrick did harbor a certain amount of punk attitude even if they saw their music going somewhere else.  To this end, they began to goad their audiences, affectively punk rocking the punkers.  One example of this was at a show from this time period at which the band opened for Suicidal Tendencies, a band which epitomized the new louder-faster rules type of hardcore/speed metal hybrid.  As Suicidal Tendencie’s fans called for Meat Puppets to play faster and harder, Curt started singing a mid-tempo rambling ballad about his daughter, a slowdown of the music in direct response to the fans’ wishes.  The song, of course, was “Up on the Sun,” the title track to their upcoming album.  “So,” says Derrick, “Up on the Sun has its core in that tension between us and the punk audience.”  (personal interview).

      Furthermore, the members of Meat Puppets came from different backgrounds and expressed a different view of the world than many of their hardcore brethren.  As Henry Rollins, lead singer for Black Flag at the time of their 1984 tour with Meat Puppets, states in his journal from the period:

4.2.84 New Orleans, LA:  The Meat Puppets are a great band but they are children.  They think that everyone owes them something. It’s funny to see them deal with things as the rich kids that they are.  (Rollins, p. 84)

Curt doesn’t disagree with Rollins’ assessment of the influence Meat Puppets’ middle-class upbringings had on their music; they weren’t interested in playing exclusively loud fast punk rock:  “We just weren’t that aggressive, we weren’t that pissed off.  I mean, we were more than pissed off—it was psychosis full-bloom—but it was just beyond emotion” (Curt, A&I p. 307).

      If Curt was beginning to show his leadership role on Meat Puppets II, his position is undisputed among the members by the time they get to Up on the Sun.  As Derrick says,

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.  (personal interview)

Although Cris does have two co-writing credits on the album (“Maiden’s Milk” and “Animal Kingdom”) Curt is responsible for the final arrangements, it was Curt who wrote the songs, it was Curt who didn’t leave the studio during the recording session.

      As for the finished product, Up on the Sun is generally seen as Meat Puppets’ lightest record.  The reasons for this are varied.  One reason, Curt suggests, might have to do with the drugs he, Cris, and Derrick took during the recording session.  Rather than LSD (Meat Puppets) or MDA (Meat Puppets II), Up on the Sun was made primarily under the influence of nothing stronger than beer and pot, drugs that Curt feel give it a more relaxed feel.

      Another, probably more realistic, reason for Up on the Sun’s lighter feel had to do with the band’s conscious movement away from hardcore punk and into a more mainstream competitive market.  Curt, especially, began to see himself and the band as members of something beyond punk, as members of the larger rock and roll music world and, thus, as a songwriter, as someone who wrote songs for a broad audience.

I came to the realization that my competition wasn’t in the same genre, or it wasn’t a genre, or there wasn’t any competition.  I realized if you look at things that way, then what you’re really doing is throwing yourself out there with anything else that anybody records, and therefore it’s probably on a par with that in some people’s eyes and I started looking at it in that way in my own eyes.  Like, “Well I’m not really writing punk rock songs, I’m writing songs the same way anybody else does, whether it’s Prince or whoever.”  That opened my eyes up, made the playing field a lot bigger (Curt, personal interview, pp. 4 & 5).

      Meat Puppets’ influences at the time reflected their desired movement into the realm of popular rock music and away from the confines of hardcore punk, and these influences, as Curt, Cris, and Derrick say, can be found on the more pop oriented sounds of Up on the Sun.  Eighties contemporaries such as Prince, REM, and Duran Duran, for example, are mentioned multiple times by the band.  As Derrick suggests, the band made a conscious decision to make a pop oriented record:

We were like, “We’re going to make indie dance music with Meat Puppets flair.  And were going to be clean sounding and we’re not going to be alt-country.  It was a post-Duran Duran, post-REM kind of record, Up on the Sun is (personal interview).

These same bands influenced Curt as the songwriter in the band:  “I was pretty into Prince at the time, and Bruce Springsteen, and REM, stuff that was popular at that time (personal interview).  Similarly, Cris points to Mike Mills of REM and John Taylor of Duran Duran as direct influences upon his playing on Up on the Sun:

I really dug what Mills was doing in REM.  It was 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.  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 (personal interview).

      As a result of these pop music influences upon the members of Meat Puppets, and also as a result of the band being well-rehearsed (as a result of their aborted attempt at self-recording), Up on the Sun is a surprisingly light (as opposed to heavy) record.  According to Derrick, the move to lighter and poppier was gradual and can be witnessed by listening to earlier self-recordings of the songs that make it onto Up on the Sun:

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 heavy.  It was conceived to be heavier than it ended up being.  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 (personal interview).

This movement to a more pop oriented sound is evidenced in the structure of the songs.

The songs are short and have more of a pop structure.  They have intricate parts but they’re not designed to showcase.  It was better integrated so you got interesting instrumental parts budded to songs that they fit in rather than having a five minute solo song (Derrick, personal interview).

In typical nonchalant fashion, Curt suggests there was no intention to have Up on the Sun be of any particular style or genre, it was simply him trying to be idiosyncratic, to make a record pure to his vision:  “I don’t think it was supposed to be intentionally poppy, I was just trying to get outside of style if anything” (personal interview).  All-in-all, then, Up on the Sun is a relatively light record by a band known to explore some fairly dark themes throughout their career.  As both Curt and Derrick suggest, maybe the answer is as simple as the drugs (or lack thereof) the band members were taking (or not) during the recording process

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 (Derrick, personal interview).

      Another important distinction between Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun that shows the band’s progression in the studio was the recording process itself, especially Curt’s guitars:  “We recorded the whole thing direct guitar.  I don’t think we used an amplifier on that whole album” (Curt, personal interview).  Additionally, Curt learned something about overdubs in making MPII and attempting to home record Up on the Sun.  The result was a thickly layered album:

There was maybe one or two overdubs on Meat Puppets II.  That was pretty much just a straight take, and put on a few acoustic guitars or a lead here and there.  Up on the Sun had three, four, five guitars on a song, at least two or three on a lot of them.  That was fun, understanding they don’t do all of this at one time.  I didn’t know.  We started figuring it out on Meat Puppets II (Curt, personal interview).

So the band’s third album was the one on which “we kind of figured it out. . .how to mess around with production when we produced Up on the Sun” (Curt, A&I p. 123).  Curt credits the record’s engineer/producer Spot with giving him the room to find the sound he wanted.  Spot was hands-off, which was to Curt’s liking:  “He made it really easy to get exactly what I wanted.  He had no opinion” (Curt, A&I p. 108).

      As a result of the band’s intense preparation and of their accumulated familiarity with studio recording and understanding of the recording process itself, Up on the Sun is a more coherent set of songs than either of the band’s previous records, which isn’t to say it’s better, though it is consistently mentioned as the favorite album of Meat Heads.  "And that's like [most] people's favorite record of ours.  Whereas Meat Puppets II was more varied, more difference from song to song, in instrumentation and arrangement.  On Up on the Sun, each cut is arranged real similarly, to streamline the process" (Derrick, A&I p. 157).  

     In the end all three Meat Puppets are fond of Up on the Sun.  It's a record that is unique in their repertoire for its pop structures and technical virtuosity.  Curt has "always thought it was a pretty different albums for us, one that stands out.  I love the sound of it" (A&I, p. 247).  In discussing the musical abilities of the band at the time, Cris says, "the band is an entity unto itself" (Cris, personal interview) at this point, an entity with few peers.

Conclusion

      Up on the Sun found Meat Puppets continuing their push through new artistic boundaries.  Touring with Black Flag, the success of Meat Puppets II, and changes in the band members’ living situations (Curt becoming the father of twins, Derrick moving back home with his mother) served to light a fire of purpose under the band.  The album, voted Meat Puppets’ best by an online survey, is musically and lyrically stunning.  These are musicians who have found a voice playing songs written by a songwriter/lyricist who is on top of his game.

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

Interview with Curt Kirkwood

Guitar/Vocals/Songwriter with Meat Puppets

February 21, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

M- This interview will focus on Up on the Sun.  That’s my next chapter.  Let’s get a little overlap first.  You recorded Meat Puppets II in early ’83, it comes out in early ’84, and you release Up on the Sun in early ’85.  What are you guys doing for those two years?

C- We were always touring.  We didn’t really need an album to tour on back then.  We just toured whenever we needed money, which was a lot.  So we toured, put out Meat Puppets II, went out for six weeks with Black Flag while they were touring for My War.  That was into the summer of ’84.  Boy, I can’t really remember.  I’m sure we toured more after that, and I don’t really remember when we recorded Up on the Sun, what the dates were.  We went in pretty quick.

M- I do know some things that happened.  For instance, you had kids right after Meat Puppets II.

C- About ’83.  That was before it came out.

M- Right.  Before it came out but after you had recorded it?

C- Yep. 

M- You and Derrick and Cris stop living together.

C- Yeah.

M- You and Cris, and Cris’s girlfriend, and the mother of your kids, and your kids all move into one place.

C- Yeah.  I don’t remember if Derrick went back to his mom’s for a little while.  He lived with us the last time in ’85.  I don’t recall.  I don’t think that he lived with us when Meat Puppets II came out in ’84.

M- I think he moved back with his mom, according to Derrick, so we’ll go with that.  How does this change the dynamic of the band, because on Meat Puppets II you’re all buddies hanging out in one house? How do things change as far as the band organization?

C- Not much.  We just lived together to make it easy, because it was affordable.  And Derrick wound up moving back in in ’85 and we all lived there with the kids in this bigger house.  Cris’s girlfriend and him and my girlfriend and me and Derrick.  You know it didn’t really change.  We were always pretty much hanging out together because of the band and we still had the practice place at the little house we lived in without Derrick.  And we trashed that house and moved to another one.  My mom was a realtor.  She owned the house that we were living in when my kids were born, and we ruined that so she got us another rental which we ruined, and we got ourselves this nicer rental with a pool and horse pastures.  I think they sold that.  They decided to put it up on the market so we moved down to Tempe at that point.  Let me think.  I think Bostrom moved out at that point again.  Oh I know.  He bailed for a while.  He quit in ’85 for like a month; went to New York City to work in a bookstore.  He had a girlfriend up there, and then he decided he made a mistake and came back to Phoenix.  I think at that point he may have started renting his own house in Tempe, too.

M- So do you have to start scheduling rehearsals?  Where are you rehearsing at this point if you’re not in the same house.

C- Always where I lived.  We never had a band rehearsal space.  I never had one until I moved to Austin.  Always worked at home and then, I think around ’86, Cris and I bought houses next door to each other in Tempe and Cris had a detached garage where we practiced for a long time.  But we never had to schedule or nothing.  It’s all we were doing.  It’s all we ever really did after a time.  None of us had jobs after about, I’d say, ’82. 

M- Your other job, I guess, was raising kids.  Did you schedule it around that?

C- I scheduled raising kids around my job.  That’s the way this thing works, but it’s also just the way that I am.  I figured I was doing it first.  I wouldn’t be able to raise the kids without the job so that was my priority, and their mom stayed at home with them. 

M- Were you ok with the fact that it took a year for Meat Puppets II to come out, were you frustrated?

C- There was a little bit of a mix up.  The people that did Meat Puppets I, Ed Barger recorded that, and also the In a Car single.  Actually, I don’t think he recorded. . . He was around when we did Meat Puppets I, but they kind of were possessive and they did a mix of it and we didn’t like it, or Ed did anyway, and we wanted Spot to mix it.  So he mixed it and it was better.  We kind of had to separate ourselves from World Imitation at that point, Ed Barger and them, and that took a little while.  That was the first time we were experiencing something like that like from the outside.  Our thing was always like, “We don’t do what anybody says, only us.  And we don’t care what anybody wants, period.  And nobody gets in.”  So we parted ways with that group of people from Monitor and Ed Barger and started getting tight with SST, a little tighter there.  So when we did Meat Puppets II, I don’t know why it took so long to come out.  I don’t think I really had any expectations at the point.  I don’t really remember it.  I was fairly overwhelmed.  I started getting more serious about making songs.  Not trying to make better songs, but like, “Man, I gotta write because I have kids and we have to have another album.” 

M- Did you start doing that right away after you recorded Meat Puppets II; start writing specifically for the next record?

C- Pretty much.  I always wrote.  I don’t know that I was ever writing for a record.  It’s just that you wind up with that many songs in enough time to put out a record a year.  Also, after the first record, I was like, “Okay, what are we doing here?  Everybody just wants to sit around and get high.”  And we had had these songs.  We were coming up with songs.  We weren’t trying that hard for the first couple records.  And then we started doing the Meat Puppets II songs.  That’s the first time I was like, “Okay, I gotta write songs.”  Nobody else was going to do anything.  We put out this album.  We put out this single and then the album and then it’s like, “Now what?”  You know? We did our little thing with our garage band, it’s like, “We need more songs.”  And I found out that I had kids and I was in the middle of writing these songs.

M- So at some point in here you made the conscious decision that (1) you’re going to be a rock n roll band and (2) that the career of a rock n roll band means putting out a record, at least at that point, every year.  You put out a record, tour, put out another record, tour.  You had to start thinking about that at some point, right?

C- I started realizing this is what we are.  None of us are going to school.  None of us have any other ambitions.  It’s what we were doing, and we were neck deep in it by the time I had kids, and we’d been doing it for three years at that point, and just kind of got swept away in it.  I hadn’t ever really thought about being a professional musician, so that’s when I was like, “Well, this is what you do.  I have to come up with some new songs.”  I pretty much, like, around ’84, quit using as many drugs.  After my kids were born, quit messing around with my time so much.  I was never really that into it, but we were wasting a lot of time with the little world we were treated to in our late teens of what the band came out of.  I didn’t have to work that hard to do it.  I just started to write songs and it was fun.  I think I came to the realization that in reality my competition wasn’t in the same genre, or it wasn’t a genre, or there wasn’t any competition.  I realized if you look at things that way, then what you’re really doing is throwing yourself out there with anything else that anybody records, and therefore it’s probably on a par with that in some people’s eyes and I started looking at it in that way in my own eyes.  Like, “Well I’m not really writing punk rock songs, I’m writing songs the same way anybody else does, whether it’s Prince or whoever.”  That opened my eyes up, made the playing field a lot bigger. 

M- So you did record Up on the Sun in three days.  You blocked out the same studio and Spot again, and you do the whole thing from beginning to end in three days.  Do you remember much about that recording session?

C- Yeah.  We knocked it out in the first day or two and we lived at the studio.  We didn’t leave.  Spot and I, especially, just hung in there and took little naps on the floor next to the sound board and it was done. 

M- Were there any differences in the recording sessions for Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun?

C- We still didn’t know that much about recording when we did Meat Puppets II.  We had done the first one, which we were just completely stoned during that time, during the first one.  SST was, “Come to our studio,” and we did the same thing with the first single, Monitor said, “If you record this song for our record that we can’t play, then you can record two songs of your own and we’ll put out a little five song seven inch.”  So the first two things were like, “Here you go.  Here’s the studio.”  We had no idea about the technology or anything.  By the time we got to Up on the Sun, I realized that this is how this stuff works, to a degree.  I mean, I didn’t know the recording process yet, that other people were doing so many different takes on stuff.  It took us a while to figure that out, why people do so many different takes and punch in words and all this different stuff and just completely fabricate it.  We recorded records the way we played them.  That’s the way they came out and we did that until, probably, Huevos.  So Up on the Sun was more like, “I get it.  This thing is a tape recorder, this is a sound board, here’s a treble knob.”  And Spot was always amenable to us.  We would mix the stuff all together.  Same with Steve Escalier.  Back then there was no automation.  No Pro Tools.  When it’d come time to mix the three of us would stand at the board.  And he’d roll through it and put it to half-inch.  We didn’t put a lot of time into that because we had the ideal that no matter what it is, it is.  It’s real.  It is what it is.  We liked that.  That was as punk rock as we got.  We were never really punk rock but it was always like, “Nobody gets to say what’s good.  That’s one concession I’m not going to make.”

M- At one point you try recording this album on your own, right?

C- That’s true.  That’s how we learned about it really.  Our friend was starting to learn how to do it, our sound guy, so we borrowed a little sixteen-track that recorded to cassette.  I’m pretty sure it was to cassette.  It was a Fostex or something.  We got it all recorded and that’s what made it easy when we went into the big studio.  We had already done it.  I knew all the parts.  I knew what I had done exactly, it was just a blue print that we followed.

Well, the dude that had loaned us the thing had a music store in Phoenix, he had to take it back, to sell it.  They were kind of rare, that was the only one around, and I don’t think we knew that much about mixing.  “What do we do now?”  We recorded it on sixteen-track and he took it back.  We just went over to Total Access and redid it.

M- Was there any improvising on Up on the Sun?

C- No.  What we did at home was about exactly the same.  I wish I had it because it’s probably pretty cool.  There might be a lead here and there but not a whole lot.  I knew exactly what to do.

M- What about the record itself? It’s poppier, happier, cheerier than anything you’d done before, maybe even since.  It doesn’t sound heavy.

C- No.  It’s definitely not that.  I don’t know what accounted for that really.  I don’t think it’s something that we were going for that much.  I was pretty into Prince at the time, and Bruce Springsteen, and REM, stuff that was popular at that time.  REM was getting popular.  Stuff that I was always into that wasn’t so punk rock, just less grungy guitars.  We recorded the whole thing direct guitar.  I don’t think we used an amplifier on that whole album.  But I don’t think it was supposed to be intentionally poppy or anything.  I was just trying to get outside of style if anything.  You couldn’t really say what it is, that album.

M- We know it’s not punk rock.

C- No.

M- Meat Puppets II has a little punk rock on it but Up on the Sun, there’s nothing anywhere close.

C- That’s true.  The Minutemen were around a lot at that time, good buddies of ours, and Hüsker Dü, too.  And having those three trios on the same label you’re always arm wrestling with all the good natured, “Ah, look what we did, look what we did!”  I think D. Boon and I were especially influences on each other, so you get some Minutemen on Up on the Sun.  And then he’s turning around with Three Way Tie or Double Nickels, I forget which one, and he’s like, “Look!  It’s Up on the Sun.”  And I’m like, “N,o Up on the Sun is a rip off of you.”  We were around a lot of cool music at the time so a lot is bleeding through.

M- You called this your Beach Boys record.

C- Oh yeah, that’s another one.  You have your Pet Sounds and all that fun Beach Boys melody stuff, and The Who is in there.  It definitely started like, um, early Who.

M- You’re putting a lot more layers in this record than previous.

C- Oh yeah.  There was maybe one or two overdubs on Meat Puppets II.  That was pretty much just a straight take, and put on a few acoustic guitars or a lead here and there.  Up on the Sun had three, four, five guitars on a song, at least two or three on a lot of them.  That was fun, understanding they don’t do all of this at one time.  I didn’t know.  We started figuring it out on Meat Puppets II.  We had our own little tape recorder and another little cassette thing, like a four-track or an eight-track, another Fostex thing.  So I started figuring out how to do stuff and “Up on the Sun,” that song itself was the first time I started trying to do original songs with harmonies. 

M- Did you think about your vocal style much?

C- I didn’t know what to do on Meat Puppets II and, also, that’s just the way I sounded.  Then I started figuring out how to sing.  I had never sung much before the band, not at all actually.  I had been in bands but I had never sang until we’d been playing for about a year.  Derrick was the singer, and he wrote a lot of it too.  Then I started singing since we decided it wasn’t cool to have a singing drummer.  His lyrics were more sociopolitical opinion punk rock type stuff, and it was cool stuff, but I figured if I’m going to sing I’m going to start making up some stuff I don’t mind singing.  But I just didn’t know how to sing.  So by the time we had gotten to Up on the Sun I was starting to remember how much I really liked stuff like George Jones, and how some of my favorites who had idiosyncratic voices had figured out how to do it, so I was just flying off the handle.  I felt like you can sing good even if you’re a bad singer.  That’s what I figured.  And I think it got a little monotonous and boring.  I think it hasn’t changed much since then.  I can’t fake not knowing how to sing.  People go, “Oh, Meat Puppets II.  They sang out of key purposely.”  No, it wasn’t on purpose.

M- Did you ever consider having a lead singer?

C- Yeah.  When we started out we tried out a number of our friends, some different people, and everybody wanted to be Joey Ramone.  It didn’t work.

M- I’m sure you’re aware that one of the early criticisms of the band was your voice, right?

C- I’ve been given so much crap all through the eighties and I still get it.  Like, “It’s flat.”  I still see it from time to time.  I definitely saw that.  It’s just one of those things.  Some people don’t like being made fun of and some people don’t like being criticized, but I’ve always, especially back then, thought anybody who had an opinion about me good or bad was an asshole, and I really didn’t care.  “Who the fuck asked you?  You know what about me?  What about you?  Fuck you!  Oh you like me?  Who the fuck asked you?”  It’s like, “Oh, validation.  Wow.  Thanks, God.”

M- When you were on London didn’t you actually take some voice lessons?

C- I did.  I took them from the dude who did Axl Rose, Ron Anderson.  Ron’s a good guy, he taught me tons of stuff.  I didn’t take them for very long.  I only took four or of them, because they’re kind of expensive, but the record company paid for it.  And, yeah, I was glad cuz I was in the dark.  Really all he did was tell me, “You got a cool voice, just relax.” 

M- So let’s get back to Up on the Sun.  What about the lyrics?  They seem like you’re getting into what you called last time I talked to you, the “oblique approach.”  There’s a lot of imagery.

C- Yeah, that’s the Eno side coming in, oblique strategies.  I’m sure that’s where I got that, and also William Burroughs and cut-ups, intentional cut-ups.  I wasn’t letting it fall the luck of the draw.  I took Latin for three years in high school.  I think that started to come into play.  The ability to take sentences apart and still have them be the same.

M- Lot’s of escape songs on this record.  “Away,” for instance, or “Animal Kingdom.”

C- That’s all art is in any case.  It’s all a departure or an escape.  It in no way realistically draws you closer to its subject matter, not art.  Art’s a way around that stuff.  It’s artificial.  I think it’s supposed to be.  Some people say, “Write about what you know.”  I never really have and I don’t think I was trying to escape anything.  It was flights of fancy.  Idylls with a ‘y’ type stuff.  It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I love Shakespeare and I love Van Gogh.  Those are the two biggest influences, even though it’s not so stylistic and Van Gogh’s not a lyric writer.  It’s more how can you make the trivial magnificent and majestic? How can you take something ordinary and give it the perspective, or the aspect of something more than what it really is? That’s why I like Van Gogh.  He could paint a chair and you go, “Whoa, that’s awesome!  It’s a chair.”  I’m just trying to come up with stuff that sounds cool and go, “Ooh, what’s that supposed to mean?”  Everybody comes up with their own ideas.  I very very rarely will write about anything that I have done or that I’m actually feeling.  That’s something that I got more into, writing more and more to the point of having it sound like, “He’s singing about this,” but it’s not.

M- Some seem pretty straight forward, like “Creator” seems like a fairly straightforward comment on religion.

C- I think that one is probably true.

M- So sometimes you do write songs that seem pretty obvious.

C- Yeah.  I imagine I do.

M- I imagine you and I could probably agree on what they’re about.

C- They happen now and then.  I’ve written a couple of romantic things, but they’re not straight forward.  A lot of times I’ve written something like that for somebody else, like on Snow is a song called “Here Comes Forever.”  That one and a couple others I wrote for Willie Nelson.

M- Did you give them to Willie?

C- I gave them to his nephew Freddy who runs his studios.  I don’t think that Willie by that point was learning many new songs.  I think a lot of people probably write songs for Willie Nelson.

M- Some songs on this record are like children songs.  Have you ever thought of your songs as children songs or songs that children might like, lyrically?

C- Oh sure.  That was the other influence, “Disney from nine to ninety” sort of thing.  It’s for everybody.  It’s one of the reasons why I made a conscious decision not to use to much foul language back when punk rockers were doing it and then when rap came into style.  I never really liked it.  It felt like shooting fish in a barrel.  Let’s say, “Fuck.  That’ll get attention.”  It’s too easy, and it thrills kids too much and it also puts a spin on it that takes it into a realm that might not be for kids whereas, and not to dumb stuff down or anything like that, but from the writer’s perspective, I wasn’t pointing at one age group.  That’s those little walls that I put up for myself.  One way or the other you choose a direction, walls go up.  That’s the nature of the game.  You’re not gonna tackle it all in one song in one album.  You gonna find guidelines that you’re following somehow.  Although, like I said before, a lot of times it’s oblique.  I don’t know and I don’t really care to know.  The more I think about the stuff the harder it is to do and that’s something that I think I initially got off of Captain Beefheart when I read a quote where he said you can’t think about it, it stops the flow.  I still feel that way.  The stuff at its best I just don’t remember anything about it.  I don’t know why a lot of time I wrote stuff.  I don’t remember writing it.

M- Some of the lyrics remind me of Pink Floyd back in the Syd Barrett days and Pipers at the Gates of Dawn.  At one and the same time they can be an LSD trip or they can be a song that you can play for your four-year-old and they’ll get it, too.

C- Definitely.  And there too you want to go with somebody like Rimbaud where it’s like, “Okay, this is beautiful but might not be for kids.”  But he can write in that same style and have it in a dialect that anybody can get and understand; take out some of the loftier stuff, the fancier words.  I could probably use a lot more words but I think that’s one of the walls that I’ve always put up.  I’m not going to go out of my way trying to find flowery ways to say this.  I’m just going to try to make the syntax different enough to make it on its own.  I’d love to be able to write stuff and not just have it be what it is.  I’m not a story teller.

M- Was the swimming ground a real swimming ground? Was there a place you used to go and float around?

C- It wasn’t that I wasn’t writing it about that, but any place where there’s a puddle of water around Phoenix is a place where we’d go.  There’s a place called The Flumes where there’s a flume that went over a canyon and there was this concrete drain that ran down to it that was about a hundred yards long.  It was flat-bottomed and ended on the sides and it was just a couple inches of water and had scum on the bottom.  It was angled real good so you could slide down that on tennis shoes.  Or we used to slide, kids would slide, take big wheels out there and ride those down it.  And once you got to the bottom there was a little box that we’d swim around in and some kids would drown in it now and then.  We lived out in the desert outside of Phoenix.  It was in the middle of nowhere.  So you get out and there was nobody around.

M- It’s not close to any town.

C- Yeah, yeah.  Then you’d float across the canyon in this flume that was like a half pipe.  And there was a place up in the mountains, up in the middle of town, a reservoir that nobody knew about.  It was a reservoir in Squaw Peak City Park and it’s built into a canyon, covered with corrugated aluminum, and not many people knew about it.  It was massive, the size of like about five or six Olympic-sized pools, all covered with a sheet of aluminum held up by these beams coming up out of the water, and the water was drinking water.  You could slip under the fence that was around it.  Somebody peeled up one of the corners of the corrugated tin so we could slip in there.  And we had pools and stuff, too.  We were always looking for something to do.  So it’s a possibility that that’s that.  All that water stuff comes from, that’s all environmental.

M- There are drug references in the album, you can see how some of us might see drug references in the album, they seem more youthful and exuberant and happy than what will come later in Too High to Die or No Joke.

C- I don’t know.  I’ve always been careful about that stuff.  Hang on a second.

M- Sure.

[Curt goes and quiets his barking dogs.]

C- I love Pink Floyd.  I like Jimi Hendrix, and stuff but I was always really careful.  The drugs are somewhat of an influence, but I think they’ve always been an easy way to look at stuff with us.  Like, “Oh, they smoked pot, they’ve dropped acid, so this is psychedelic.”  Honestly I’ve written a lot of stuff after I’ve tripped or while I was tripping and later I look at it and go, “No way!  That’s retarded!  It sounds like somebody who’s on drugs.”  I think there’s a line there.  It’s a fine line.  “Too high to die” is really supposed to be funny.  It’s something that our sound man said one time.  I just thought it was funny.  It’s like, “party ‘till the world obeys” is another thing that he screamed at some people one time.  I just thought it was funny.  There’s always been drugs around since I was a kid.  There’s still always drugs around.  And it’s definitely an easy way to get some stuff done, but it sounds like that’s what you’ve been doing.  The Stones, for instance, is a really great example.  When they put out Satanic Majesties Request and they went “No.  Not really for us.”

M- So why do you think that other people point to Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun as your classic records.  Whether you think so or not, what is it that you think other people see in them?  You’re aware that these are the two albums people talk about?

C- Oh yeah.  They have been for a long time.

M- Even records you put out now compared to these two.

C- Yep.

M- “Curt’s back to his Up on the Sun days.”

C- These would be people who have a more extensive knowledge than the average record buyers.  I never wanted to think of all my fans like this or that.  You don’t want to be preaching to the choir so much.  I think people like those records because a lot of the people who were aware of them at the time and continue to be made aware of them are sort of more bohemian life style college student artsy folks.  Cuz they sound homemade.  Yet at the same time they don’t sound like they were necessarily crumby.  But it’s hard to make records like that.  I know how we did it, but there’s a couple of things.  First of all, you can’t repeat yourself.  It’s really hard to do that for me.  It’s just like, “Let’s do that again.”  I was still learning at that time.  That’s why Up on the Sun sounds so much different than Meat Puppets II and I’ve said it to just about everyone I’ve worked with since then.  “Oh, you like Meat Puppets II.  Well then let’s get it done in a couple of days and let’s get out of here.”  One of the things is that critically you can achieve acclaim by being completely insane and having no commercial potential, and you wind up kind of limited.  We were like, “We don’t want to just have these other artists listening to it.  We’re trying to expand ourselves and our audience.”  Why else would we tour.  It was forcing us to look ourselves in the mirror and go, “Why are we out here? Are we just showing off? Are we just self indulgent? No.  I don’t have to do this.  I could stay in my bedroom and do it.”  Something that we realized right around that time of Up on the Sun was playing music at all commercially is the sell out right there, and that’s when I started to have an intellectual schism with the SST thing.  I gave them Up on the Sun and they were like, What the fuck is this?!” 

“Well, it doesn’t have to be loud and fast.”

And they were like, “You guys are into the dream, you know, getting big.”  It’s not a dream, it’s not an ambition, it’s just facing the reality that you’re a commercial musician every time you step up on the stage, period.  You take money for it therein lies the dirt.  I don’t care what your intentions are.  What your mind set is.  How pure you believe you are.  How gifted.  You accept money for it you’re a whore, period.  So there you go.  We’re whores.  Do whatever we want.  Also as soon as somebody, being young and impetuous, as soon as somebody says they like it I was like, “I’m doing something else.”  So I left those things behind.  I think you can say that for many different artists.  With The Who, their early records were this thing and then they became an arena rock thing.  Or people try different things just to shake things.  But time and place is a big part of this stuff too.  As it turns out no matter how much, and I think this is the cool thing about it, the external influences, no matter what my intentions are you get what you get.  Whether it’s how the album came out or a reproduction of a painting on a record and it doesn’t look quite like the painting, but that’s the cool part.  It’s like the fun house mirror part or the reproduction of an idea or this is my take on my idea or this is the reality of how the idea turned out.  I just always liked that stuff, but to get back to that has always been nearly impossible.  You wind up in the music world and technology starts to get to the point and even people that are technically anachronistic, say people that use vintage gear and vintage recording equipment and stuff, they still don’t sound like their just taking a shit into it these days.  Sounds like a vintage guitar but they’re playing it really good.  To get to the point where you have these concepts like Meat Puppets II, “Look, let’s get a bunch of ecstasy and let’s record this thing.”  Which is what it was.  It was a concept.  The first album was, “Let’s do it all on acid.”  We thought that our heroes did.  And I always thought, “Wow, the Grateful Dead and Jimi were trippin’,” and so we did it in the studio, Meat Puppets I sounds like that because we really are on drugs.  Meat Puppets II we had MDA: lots of it.  Really good MDA.  We just had a ball with the stuff for about four or five days and recorded the record, but nobody is going to do that again after that.  It’s like, “This record depends on this.”  Well, it kind of does.  Up on the Sun is just a big pot and beer album.  “Now this one we’re going to go smoke pot and drink beer.”  Then we go do Mirage and Huevos and snort cocaine.  Out my way.  I don’t know.

M- Right on.  Well, thanks Curt, I appreciate your time.  Am I missing anything here, do you think I’m getting it all?

C- I don’t know.  I think there’s a lot there.  I think you’re getting a lot.  Once again it’s so long ago and my ideas about it are somewhat patent at this point. 

M- They are.  I know you’ve answered all of these questions dozens of times in the last thirty years. 

C- Yeah.  Sometimes I wonder.  Stuff get’s joggled loose.  I think it more depends on the questions you ask and how you feel about the answers.  Because it’s pretty loose in there.  It was a long time ago.