A "Forbidden Places" and "Too High to Die" Interview with Derrick Bostrom, May 19, 2012

Skype to Skype Interview with Derrick Bostrom

Drummer

Meat Puppets

May 19, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

Matt-     Last time we did Up on the Sun and now I’m skipping up to Forbidden Places and Too High to Die.  The reason for that is, as a sociologist, I’m interested in structure and social organization, and it seems, my guess is, not a lot changed in the organization of the Meat Puppets between, say, Up on the Sun and Forbidden Places as far as like, your dealings with the industry and as a band.  Is that fair to say? 

Derrick- We have the same record company obviously, and there was the end of the one relationship and the beginning of the other.

M-    Meaning SST to London?

D-    Right.  But once we were on Forbidden Places we were definitely dealing with a whole different set of expectations and a whole different group of people and so, yes, I would say you’re probably correct. 

M-    During those eight or nine years things were kind of the same as far as your daily activities. 

D-    More or less yeah.  After Up on the Sun we started recording on our own and we would deliver the final records to the label, and they would put them out, and that would be fine.  And then we would do tours and then we would put out another record and we were not constrained by the label in terms of what we would give them.  The constraints were more along the lines of what they were able to do.  For instance, we would find ourselves not getting the kind of personal attention that we as artists might have thought that we deserved.  So when your record is being advertised with everything else from the stable instead of getting your own advertisements, although we did have the occasional full page add just promoting our stuff.  The promotion budgets were always a concern with SST, whereas you’d imagine if you’re on a minor label that if you were on a major there’d be bigger promotion budgets.

      What you actually find out is that you’re pretty much trading one set of constraints for another set of constraints.  You’re still constrained, it’s just different.  When you’re on a major, you’re definitely looking at different layers of approval.  For instance, we got our contract with London and the first thing they said, more or less, was, “We won’t deal with you directly.  You have to hire a manager now.”  So they went about putting us together with a half dozen different management firms and insisting we pick one.  Which we did.  And then suddenly the label had somebody that they could deal with.  So that was a challenge because, as opposed to a group of guys that started out at their inception having one of their non-musical buddies saying, “Hey I want to represent you,” and having it be an organic process.  The process of us getting managerial representation was more or less inorganic and essentially imposed upon us by the record label.  So suddenly we were dealing with both the record label and a new manager whom we were trying to get comfortable with and as a self managed, self produced group suddenly we were dealing with having to have managers and also having to have producers.  So that was the main constraint that started out of the box of Forbidden Places. 

M-    Do you remember how you came to sign with London as opposed with anybody else? 

D-    I don’t remember exactly.  I don’t remember who the specific people were.  But basically at some point Curt decided that he needed to beat the brush.  I mean Curt probably, obviously we had other friends who were making major label jumps, and they had managers and we would meet people in towns that were either managers or band members or lawyers and just through that process Curt started contacting people.  There’s people who would contact us over the years and when we weren’t ready we would just “pooh pooh” the whole idea of going with the majors, but it wasn’t until Curt decided that he wanted to do it that some of these chains of contacts started to get firm and he started pursuing them.  We did a demo in the late eighties to try to attract attention.  We would invite label reps to see us when we were in towns.  And over the course of a couple years some strong interests took place, and we began to pursue them.  The original guy who we went with at London had started at Atlantic, and we were all set to work with Atlantic until he decided to leave Atlantic.

      I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that as we had been around long enough younger people who were fans started getting jobs in the industry and began trying to sign their favorite groups.  In the late eighties there was a general shift towards signing these groups.  The advantage to the majors would be that we had been working for long enough to have developed our own following, so we didn’t need a lot of development, and that would offset the potential lack of commercial potential of a group like the Meat Puppets.  So once they started seeing those tradeoffs as being in their favor, they pushed to sign bands like us.  And meanwhile your Chili Peppers, your Jane’s Addictions, et cetera, et cetera, started doing better work in the mainstream, whereas your Hüsker Düs and your Replacements from a couple of years earlier hadn’t really panned out.  But eventually they started having successes with groups from the independent scene and began to push more aggressively to sign them.  We had had a guy like that at Atlantic who had expressed some interest, and he clicked with Curt.  And that had gone well until he decided to quit the music business because, believe it or not, he wanted to go back to his home country of Azerbaijan after the fall of the iron curtain.  After that point his boss kind of took us under his wing, and we worked with him for awhile.  Curt had a couple meetings with him.  And they developed the relationship and tried to see if Meat Puppets was something they could do business with.  We were all set to work with them, and then he got an opportunity to restart the London label for PolyGram.  This had been an imprint that had been dormant for a decade or whatever.  London had put out early Rolling Stones albums in the U.S. and had done ZZ Top,.  But for the most part he was going to reenergize the label.  I think they did The La’s, if I remember correctly that was one of their first.  And the Trashcan Sinatras, I believe, was another group that was one of the first things to come out on the new London imprint.  But he basically said, “Hey, I’m doing this and you guys are on hold for a year while I get this thing together.  I’ll be in touch when I’m prepared to restart this thing.”  So the process of getting signed actually got delayed for a good year during which time we put out Monsters.  At that point it was pretty well known by SST that we were looking to jump, so the last year of our relationship with SST wasn’t real productive.  I guess we signed to London in the late summer of 1990, and then London began to push us to get a manager.  I believe the first thing we did was have meetings with them.  I think we went up to New York one or two times and had all these meetings with different managerial agencies.  We finally picked one.  They’re no longer working with us.  That was a relationship that we had for about two years, maybe.  And then we got picked up by another management company that had, uhm, the Nirvana agency, and that was a relationship that lasted for another couple of years.  And then after No Joke when we stopped working we stopped having management.  And the band was more or less self managed as they kind of went dormant and now they’re more or less self managed.  They have a manager who’s an old friend of theirs who handles the details, but I don’t know if he actually has his own firm or not.  I haven’t been involved in those guys business for many years.

      But anyway we began to work on Forbidden Places by doing demos.  We’d have to submit demos and the label would not let us loose to cut an actual album until they liked the demos, which means they heard a single.  And then we went through a process of talking to various producers.  And we went back and forth between a couple of them and finally decided on Pete Anderson, who had produced Michelle Shocked and cut his teeth with Dwight Yoakam, who was in a country bag but also was doing a little more of a rock thing.  At the time, which would have been late 1990-1991, it seemed like a good idea for us to pursue a country rock kind of vibe, because that’s how we’d been perceived.  So we continued to rehearse.  We woodsheded.  We’d met with Pete.  He came out a couple times to Phoenix and listened to our stuff and offered his interest.  We were obviously very nervous, because we were actually having to work with an outside person, so the focus of our rehearsal was intensified in that direction.  And we finally went out to do a bunch of pre-recording rehearsals with Pete in tow in a separate rehearsal studio.  At which point we were very nervous and second guessed it and picked apart the stuff. 

M-    Is this in Phoenix or L.A.? 

D-    This was in L.A.  There were some meetings with Pete in Phoenix, and I couldn’t give you the dates.  We’re basically talking about early ’91.  And as Pete started talking about how he might want to do the songs, some live, some overdubbed, we began to organize the arrangements in that way.  And also we decided we were gonna record at Capitol in Los Angeles.  This is the first time I had an outside drum tech come in, so we rented a kit that was like mine only it wasn’t as beat up from the road.  You hire a drum tech, he’s got the drums.  He comes in.  He tunes them.  He works with the engineer and producer.  They get the sound.  And then they go, “Alright little man.  Put on your headphones and here’s your click track.  Go nuts.”  We recorded the basic tracks in about two days.  They were deemed acceptable, and then I was dismissed.  I drove back to Phoenix and the other guys did their parts.  I think the only song that didn’t get any major overdubbing was “Popskull.”  Pete was like, “I don’t care what we do on the record as long as you let me have my way with,” ah God, “Nail It Down” was the one that he liked.  The record company guy, whose name was Peter Koepke, had a hard-on for the song “That’s How It Goes.”  He felt that that was the stand out track, and so he was most interested in that one which he called his “little waltz.”  Pete was the most interested in “Nail It Down.”  “Sam” was deemed the single and the video, and that was the one that they went with.  And then they later went with “Whirlpool” as a follow up.  Neither of those tracks did any amazing business, but “Sam” got a video. 

M-    I remember hearing “Sam” when I lived in Chicago. 

D-    It got airplay, but there was no major cross over hit for it.  It was just a single that was released into the indie market and it did indie business, and that was fine.

      Getting back to the recording sessions, the main bone of contention was the vocals.  Curt was made to do take, after take, after take of vocals.  And then they flew the vocals into a sampler.  Taking all the bits and pieces of them and stitching together vocal performances and then doing the tuning.  They would go through each line and tune it digitally.  I remember Curt expressing distaste for that process.  They also brought in a percussionist who used to play with Weather Report.  The boys were very flattered to have him perform on the session.  Again, I was gone by then.  I was involved in the pre-rehearsals, obviously, and then I was like, “Should I leave?  Are you done with me?”  And he said, “Well it’s a question of mind over matter.  I don’t mind because you no longer matter.  Ha ha ha.”  So they basically told me to beat it, and then they did their thing.  The performances were pretty good.  There are some fills which are clumsy, but we were working under a very different environment where I was basically trying to stay on the click track and play consistently.  For the most part it sounded pretty good, and it’s a cool album because it’s probably the last record where we were actually aiming for a a diverse mélange of styles based on what we thought the band was.  Obviously a month or so after the album came out Nevermind came out and changed the landscape, and suddenly we were going to need to fit into a grunge bag which we did for the final two records that we did as a trio. 

But for the most part it’s an interesting record.  And a lot of the stuff that we did for Forbidden Places was, there were some different tracks which were written during the woodshedding for Monsters which never got used.  Monsters was kind of designed to be a more heavy record.  Obviously it reflects the commercial yearnings of the late eighties which had a lot of your Guns ‘n’ Roses influence.  So a lot of the stuff on Monsters tended to be heavy whereas we didn’t do a lot of countryish or quirky stuff on it, a lot of that stuff was saved for Forbidden Places.

M-    Was there any inkling of this alternative grunge thing coming up as you’re making this record? 

D-    Well, sure, because Jane’s Addiction had already broken through and The Chili Peppers were starting to get more and more popular.  The whole Lollapalooza thing was starting to pick up steam.  I can’t remember off the top of my head what records were charting and what records weren’t, but in general bands were getting signed.  In the mid-eighties after Up on the Sun you were having, it was a novelty that the bands like Hüsker Dü or the Minutemen or the Replacements were getting signed, but by 1990 bands were getting signed to major labels.  And major labels were creating these strategies where London is a good example.  London was activated as an indie an imprint.  So labels were buying small labels and creating them as subsidiaries for indie products.  If PolyGram wasn’t interested in putting it on PolyGram records they’d put it on London.  I don’t know what their strategies were but obviously they were looking to explore their opportunities in the indie market.  It wasn’t until Nirvana hit it big, and the label they were on is kind of a subsidiary of Geffen, once Nirvana had their success then the whole thing changed. 

M-    Nevermind comes out two months later.  Yours comes out in July.  Theirs comes out in September.  It doesn’t take long before they’re the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band on the planet.  How does your relationship with your management company and the label, how does that change?  Forbidden Places for one thing didn’t sell very many records. 

D-    It didn’t.  It wasn’t the break out hit.  I don’t know if they were satisfied with it or not.  I can’t remember specifically the expectations.  Another thing we had to do was we had to have a tour manager after that.  So when we went out on tour with Forbidden Places they insisted we have a tour manager.  The money was tighter because we had to pay this extra layer of management and tour management.  So the economics of touring changed.  Instead of making a lot of money on tours, they would be losing propositions and the label would give us tour support.  Which of course we would have to quote, payback, unquote.  And they would take us to zero.  And the only money I would get back from these tours would be any per diem money I didn’t spend.  So we would start to live off of advances which were negotiated by our lawyers and our management and then everyone would get a chunk of our larger advance chunk.  We would no longer be making money just off of tour receipts.  So we toured all year.  We went to Europe for six weeks.  We toured for three months straight.  It was a very long stretch, a lot more touring than usual; went to Australia for a series of dates and then we got back and then we were done.

      This was the spring and early summer of ’92.  Curt got home and began to woodshed demos for the next project.  “Backwater” was one of them.  He didn’t much care for it, but he was dutifully submitting his demos as he was supposed to, and they seemed to like that one.  We were not entirely in love with the process of submitting demos to the label’s approval.  They would go, “We don’t hear enough for a record.  You have to do more demos or else you’re not going to get to do a record.”  And meanwhile they’re like, “We kind of like that ‘Backwater’ song,” and Curt’s like, “Yeah.  I hate that song.  Forget it.”  And so we would go back and forth with them.  We eventually reached a stalemate where they weren’t going to let us do anymore records until they heard a song that they thought they could market.  And that was part of the Nirvana effect because they were waiting to hear something from us that they thought they could sell.  And they were looking at the current state of the market, and Curt was writing songs the way he always did, which was based on whatever he was interested in.

M-    Because they decided that you were going to be an alternative band.  That’s how they decided they were going to market you.  Right?  After Nirvana that’s what clicked in their head.  You’re not a country band.  You’re not a metal band.  You’re an alternative band. 

D-    Well, yeah.  After Nirvana happened everybody was chasing that.  And plus the other is at that point you’re starting to see bands that are really not part of the scene we came up in that are doing well.  So you’ve got this alternative chart, but you’ve got bands on it like Collective Soul or, what’s the other band, the one that I can never remember the name, that had Shannon Hoon in it. 

M-    Blind Melon.

D-    Right.  These were bands that we had never heard of.  I don’t know where these bands came from.  Another was the band we toured with in most of 1994 with Scott Weiland. 

M-    Stone Temple Pilots.

D-    Yeah.  So the industry had slicked the grooves for these types of bands to come in and take advantage of the market, but they were not like us in the sense that they didn’t really have the long standing indie cred that came from coming out of the American indie rock scene.  They were just bands that were poised to take advantage of the market at the current time.  Those kinds of bands always exist.  People are out there looking for music to sell.  Basically what it boils down to is you’re in business.  You might as well be selling shoes.  And there’s no point in pretending otherwise.  Once we were on a major label we were selling hair dye.  It didn’t matter what the product was.  It was the product.  So a band can view their music in a less personal way.  For some people creativity is a journey, a seeking process.  It’s something where they stumble around in the dark.  And some people are focused and know what they’re going for, and they just go for it.  For the Meat Puppets it was a difficult process of trying to get a record, material, that was going to please everybody, that was going to please us, that was going to please them, that was going to please the fans.  The fact that we were able to have a hit with Too High to Die is a fucking miracle.  You can say to men are born artistic geniuses and that we got what was coming to us, but everyone thinks that who is in a band.

      Fact of the matter is that there’s very few number of groups from our scene that got a gold record.  We’re fortunate enough to be one of them.  The stars aligned.  And you know what they say about luck and inspiration.  It’s 95% hard work.  We had to work really hard.  And in the process we fought with each other, with our label, with our management, with our fans.  But we were committed because that’s all we did.  We had committed to the path we were taking being three very strong-willed people.  And it’s the same thing with sports teams who go for like the World Series or the Stanley Cup.  They don’t take their eyes off of the prize.  And so that’s what we did.  We kept at it.  And it’s like literally you get up in the morning and those guys’d be on the phone with the record company, or they’d be on the phone with the management.  And we would be having our daily arguments.  And everybody was taking care of business.  And by the end of the day we’d get together and play music, and it was a busy time.

      As far as actually finally getting the green light to get Too High to Die made, it was one of those things where we’d reach on impasse and then we’d try something else and reach another impasse.  And finally they’d bring a different person into A & R to work.  And that’s really what it boils down to.  You got these people who have people who work for them.  And their job is to do A & R.  Once we finally got somebody in place who we were comfortable with, who they were comfortable with, who was in the position to reach the compromise that needed to be made and give enough assurances both to us and to them, we were able to get approval to make a demo, and we made a demo for Too High to Die in January of ’93.  And there were certain songs that they really liked and there were certain songs that we really liked.  And we fought to get the songs that we liked on the record, and they fought to get the songs that they liked on the record. 

      So we did our demo in January of ’93.  That’s basically all the tracks.  I don’t know if it’s been posted on my website yet.  It eventually will be.  I think I’m missing one or two cassettes that I haven’t found in my collection.  But they were good.  We loved them.  We worked on it for like a week, and we went way over budget.  And so there was a bone of contention there.  They were pissed at us for spending way too much money on our demos.

M-    Did you do it by yourself or was Paul on board yet?

D-    Paul was not on board yet.  We did them ourselves.  We did them in town just working with the engineer we had on hand.  There’s no producer attached to the project yet.  They had a couple songs that they liked in the demo version, our 8-track demo version.  They wanted us to go back in and do those songs in a studio, but they did not like the way we had done them.  So there was a couple of songs where they actually made us go back in and do multiple versions of the same song.  We had this one song which was kind of a joke song, that was designed to be a parody of other bands, and it got sent to them as part of the usual submission of demos process, and they didn’t get that it was a joke.  They just heard that it sounded like other bands.  And we were like, “We’re not doing that song. It’s a parody of our contemporaries.”  They made us do the song like four times before they finally gave up and went with “Backwater.”

M-    What song is that?  Does it have a name?

D-    Uh, I don’t remember.  There were several.  It’s just an example of how they wouldn’t, until they were certain that they heard a single that they liked, they wouldn’t give us the go ahead to write the record.  So in the meantime our manager was still screaming at them like, “These guys are broke.  They need to work.”  So they finally said, “We’ll tell you what.  We’ll let you go in and record some acoustic versions of your old songs, and then we’ll release it as an EP on one of our smaller labels.”

      And we’re like, “We’re screwed.”

      So we did it anyway, and we brought Paul in at that point.  At that point I think Curt and Paul had been talking, and Curt had been expressing his woes and Paul was like, “I’ll produce y’alls record.”  So he got involved and had enough juice to get them excited.  So they started putting parts together.  They wanted us to do a grungy kind of a record, and we wanted to do our usual psychedelic whatever.  We were way too unfocused for them.  Part of the whole process was trying to get us onboard with what was commercial and we didn’t really care.  This is probably the same old story with all groups in our position.  But we did the acoustic thing.  We liked how it sounded.  It was coming out well, and we did a series of other songs.  And the whole plan was to present them with something that would make them go, “Ok fine.  Never mind the EP.  We’ll green light the record.  We like what we hear.”  So really what it boiled down to was Paul really is the one that was able to get the thing focused in their minds and in ours so that everybody could move forward. 

M-    Was this all done in Memphis?

D-    Yeah all of that was in Memphis, both the original acoustic project and then the final sessions.  In my mind it was two separate sessions.  I seem to remember going there twice.  We did the initial acoustic stuff, and did rough mixes of it.  Then we were green lighted to go back and complete it.  And that’s when we did stuff like “Violet Eyes” and “We Don’t Exist.”  I don’t really remember which sessions were attached with which stuff, but I do know that “Up on the Sun” and “Lake of Fire” were recorded at the earlier sessions.

      So, you know, same sort of thing.  We got our rough tracks done, and then I was dismissed.  And they finished it.  The label was pretty much happy with it, but they wanted to bring in a popular heavyweight mixer guy to mix some of the final tracks.  Then they started putting out “Backwater” to DJs and started getting feedback from them.  They liked it.  And they began to call in their various and sundry favors to get us airplay.

      Around the same time Curt had seen in Spin Magazine or something that Kurt Cobain was talking up Meat Puppets II.  How did he say?  He tried to get Courtney to like the Meat Puppets, but she hated them and she didn’t get it until he sung some of the songs to her.  I believe that was the quote in the article.  Anyway it was time for us to approach them and get on the tour.  I believe that there were some other tours that we were trying to get on and either the money just couldn’t work or. . .  It’s not like you make any money opening up for other bands, in any way.  But Nirvana had this policy of grabbing the bands that they liked.  And everybody wanted to tour with them.  So they would give everybody like a week.  So we got like four or five dates with them, along with the Boredoms.  I think we started in Kalamazoo and then we went up and did Detroit.  No, let’s see?  Kalamazoo we did for sure.  I don’t remember what order it was in, but we did Montreal and Toronto, and we also did a city in upstate New York, but the upshot was it was the last leg of their tour before they went and did Unplugged.  And so it was like, I don’t party at the gigs so all of this is second hand information, but during the various and sundry after parties and back stage social events Cobain was like, “You guys should teach me some of your songs so I can do it on Unplugged.”  And obviously the story behind his ambivalence towards his career and his ambivalence towards MTV and his lack of interest towards doing the show are well documented.  But bottom line is Curt was able to convince Kurt, rather than to just teach him the songs, have him just come on.

      Our manager at the time was on his honeymoon and could not be reached, so we were putting this whole thing together ourselves, calling and calling our manager while we’re on the road going, “We need to be in New York at such and such a time.  We need to cancel these dates.  We’re canceling these dates, cuz we’ve got to get back to Phoenix to catch a flight because we’re going to be on this show.”  And he’s like, “Don’t bother me.  I’m on my honeymoon, and don’t you dare cancel any dates.”  So we were cutting it real close and we were literally getting ready to go to Vail, Colorado for our final date, and the weather started getting nasty.  And after hours of trying to reach a conclusion with our management on the phone, we basically just said “screw it.”  Curt told us we were leaving for Phoenix immediately.  We scrambled back to Phoenix and we totally hit a blizzard on the way in and were stuck in utterly undrivable conditions, and limped our way in to Phoenix after days of driving through snow.  They had time to clean up, maybe get a little sleep, and they had to immediately get on a hastily booked flight and dash back to New York, with our manager screaming bloody murder at us.  At that point we were like, “You’re done.”  So we began to put the stuff together ourselves.  Meanwhile we recorded that show.  The Kirkwoods were on it.  MTV did not like their presence there, but it happened nonetheless.  That started getting a buzz going and gave our label enough impetus to hire the various promoters that they have out in the field to push records.  Of course that’s the way the business works, independent promotion.  You can describe that term anyway you like, but independent promotion is a known quantity in the business.  So consequently our record got played.  “Backwater” started doing well.  Too High to Die came out.  It started doing pretty well.  We were disgusted by the labels putting quotes from other artists on our records, but at that point we were going to do whatever.  Then Cobain committed suicide and we were on MTV all day long for like a month.  We were able to get a gold record.  But the backlash happened fairly quickly, the next single tanked.  The one after that tanked.  And that was pretty much it.

M-    How was recording with Paul different then recording with Pete?

D-    Well uhm, Paul’s just a lot cooler.  Pete was fine.  Pete was very cool.  There was no problem with Pete.  I didn’t really work with Pete that much.  I worked with him on and off for maybe two rehearsal sessions and then like two days of recording.  The only real feedback that I can remember is Curt didn’t like how much tinkering they did with his vocals.  They were very flattered to have Alex Acuña on the record.  I think it’s a terrific record.  It’s got a lot of good stuff on it.  There’s always stuff on any of our records that I never want to hear again, but there’s a large percentage of ear candy on that record.  It’s cool.  It moved us forward.

      Too High to Die, working with Paul, was like having another member of the band who was actually in the clique.  It was like there was not outsiders there.  We smoked pot as frequently as we wanted; I didn’t smoke at the time.  Paul was totally professional.  He had his shit together.  God bless him.  When you consider the trials and tribulations we had producing ourselves over the years and the acrimonial struggling that happens in the studio when you have brothers, it was probably the best sessions we had ever done.  And it was certainly better than the follow up, which was also with Paul, but not nearly as smooth.  It just goes to show you.  It’s not like that stuff was easy.  I hated the way the room sounded in the Memphis studio.  I could not hear myself.  It was very echoey and stuff, but it got a good recording.  It was tough to get comfortable out there, and I struggled as much as I always do to get takes that I like.  There hasn’t been a session that I’ve ever done where the recording went as smoothly as I’d like, but I’m just not a studio drummer.  I’m not a professional.  But aside from that the sessions were good.  Everybody was happy and it’s a pretty cool sounding record.  And considering the fact that we were forced to play to this grunge audience, which is again an inorganic way of targeting the stuff, the sounds are good.  Now you go to the next record, the balance isn’t there.  It’s too heavy.  It’s not as playful.  It doesn’t have the same kind of energy to it.  All the same people were involved but the world had turned four-hundred times since then, and it was a different time.  But it was fun to be in Memphis and I remember one highlight of the sessions was that we were right across the street from this performance place where James Brown did this huge outdoor concert.  And that was kind of fun.  Looking across the street and there was this sea of people watching James Brown.  And there’s great barbecue in Memphis. 

M-    So now I’m thinking back to, you remember those two interviews I did with you and Cris in 1993.  They were done in January and February of ‘93 so this is between the two records.  You personally were beginning to not enjoy being in the band anymore.  Is that true?

D-    I never really enjoyed it that much, but at that point let’s just say that my concerns about it had solidified to the point where I could articulate them.  I didn’t much like touring.  I had been doing it for a long time, living month-to-month for a long time; wasn’t really seeing an end to it.  In January of ’93 we were still at an impasse.  I mean look what we did when we finally got popular.  We stopped.  We stopped because we could afford to stop.  We made money off of the Nirvana record, and we stopped working together.  The reason we kept going, by the time you talked to us the first time, we were experiencing money problems.  We had a career that we were now almost fifteen years into and we were living month-to-month, we had bills.  We were committed up to our shoulders in this thing, and we had no choice but to see it through for like five years or more after the Nirvana thing.  I mean look at this.  We appeared on one Nirvana record and we made four times more money then we ever will make on our own material.  We could basically retire from the band on the proceeds from one fucking hit Nirvana record.  Our noses are seriously pressed against the glass there.  We were not going to get into that.  There’s a world of success out there that the Meat Puppets will never ever, ever see.  You can imagine being as close to something like Nirvana as we got and seeing the kind of, well obviously there are downsides to being that successful, but all we had to do was just basically graze that and we were drowned in cash.  It was just fucking ridiculous.  Nice thing.  Nothing’s wrong with a little cash.  I mean the way this stuff works is at this point you got to negotiate every five years or whatever for renewals of licenses and stuff like that so it just depends on how savvily you can negotiate these things.  It could be down to how well the band can negotiate their contracts in the future.

New Books Audio Interview with Bob Riesman

 Here's my New Books audio interview with Bob Riesman, author of I Feel So Good:  The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy.

http://newbooksinpopmusic.com/2012/06/13/bob-riesman-i-feel-so-good-the-life-and-times-of-big-bill-broonzy-university-of-chicago-press-2011/

A "Forbidden Places" and "Too High to Die" Interview with Cris Kirkwood, May 10, 2012

Skype to Phone Interview with Cris Kirkwood

Bassist/Vocalist

Meat Puppets

May 10, 2012

Transcribed by William Jergins

Matt- The reason I skipped from Up on the Sun this far: you seem to be on a certain level when you make these last three or four records for SST, and then you make this jump to London Records.  You’ve already told me in an earlier interview about some talks, say with Gary Gersh, but how do you end up on London Records?

Cris- Let’s see.  Peter Koepke was the guy at London that signed us.  Lorie Harbough was the A&R person.  It’s all business.  I think that certain things were suddenly a little more vogue, and the Seattle thing had happened and suddenly our clothing style was a little more hip, or lack of clothing style was suddenly in.  There’s that side of it.  Also the band was definitely fucking lethal at that point.  The records we made in between Up on the Sun and the London years had definitely been a continuation of the same trip that we had always been about.  People definitely focus on those first few early ones, and they do have a lovely sound I think.  We worked with Spot on II and Up on the Sun and both of them were done at Total Access in Redondo.  And, you know, there’s a really nice little combination right there.  The next records we made out here with Steve and Scotty doing the engineering and they have their own distinct feel.  But the main thing is we continued on a particular thing that we had been doing.  So by the time that it got to the point that the business people thought that bands like us could make them some plans, or they could do business with bands like us, or us in particular, we were already at a point.  That’s what they figured, I guess.  You’d have to ask them. 

M-    I’m hoping, in the interview today, I don’t want to get past Too High to Die, when the really big hype starts for you.  I want to go right up to Too High to Die. In the ‘80s a bunch of your buddies get signed, whether it be Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, or Firehose, you were in the last of that bunch of groups.  Were there other labels that you talked to?  We’re you involved in this yourself? 

C-    To a degree I was.  The band made decisions together at that point.  But we weren’t really approached by that many other labels.  And all that stuff, honestly, it’s just the ability to get the records made.  There’s definitely a relationship between the commercial side of it and the art, because the art has to be commercialized.

      One of the reasons we made the subsequent SST records out here is cuz we could.  That’s why Mirage and Huevos came out in the same year.  Because we could.  It was a very groovy place to be making art from in that way. 

M-    So were you, then, actively looking to move to a major label? 

C-    No.  We never actively did anything in the business realm.  That stuff just happened.  We were way more about pullin’ the Bs.  No, we weren’t actually pursuing it.

M-    So then why did you decide to go to London Records?  What was it about them that attracted you to move?

C-    These business opportunities presented themselves, and we weren’t on SST ideologically.  Suddenly another opportunity presented itself.  And it seemed like it would be an interesting thing to try, because the budget was bigger.  So there you go.  There’s commerce playing a part in the art.  And it wasn’t like we were against it happening or anything, being on a major label, but it just had never happened until that point. 

M-    What did a bigger budget do for you other then maybe get a bigger paycheck once in a while?  What did it do for the band? 

C-    It certainly didn’t give me a bigger paycheck, but it did allow us to make Forbidden Places at Capitol Studios in Hollywood in the Capitol Building and spend a fuck of a long time doing it with a producer and an assistant producer and an engineer and an assistant engineer.  It was a different way of making an album for us.  And it was interesting.  It was a fun way to do it.  I definitely enjoyed the process and learned a lot off it.  That was the record we made with Pete Anderson, who was an interesting fit, because here’s this band that’s been around for a long time.  If nothing else, it showed that it really is our main interest in doing what we wanted to do musically, and then continue that for a long time regardless of the commercial circumstances, within the commercial circumstances that we found ourselves.  So suddenly it’s moved to some other building with other people who had a particular way of doing business.  You could tell.  You know, MTV had been around for a while and stuff, and just rock ‘n’ roll had been around for a while.  The music business had been around long enough.  And to try to figure out how to do business with them.  They talked about a producer and we’d met Pete years before when Dwight had opened for us.  Because Pete is Dwight Yoakam’s guitar player, and produced all of Dwight’s records as well.  And they played with us at McCabe’s years ago, the little guitar shop in Santa Monica.  It seemed like an interesting fit in a lot of ways as far as trying to pick out a producer.  And in the same time span we picked out a manager.  We were suddenly readjusting our business model because the opportunity presented itself to try these different things.  And ultimately it all went very well until I scuttled it. 

But as far as Pete, once it got down to trying to do business with these folks and having Peter sign us, Peter Koepke, trying to make the first record, they wanted us to do that, and Pete’s a guitar player.  A real good guitarist.  And we had our redneck band, and we had a little bit of a twang to us, one of our fairly consistent aspects.  So we started making a record with him, and it was a very interesting way of making a record.  Definitely more expensive.  That’s for sure.  But you get everything in tune.  Back then it was all analog tuners, it was before Pro Tools.  It was right up my alley, cuz we had had the studio by that point for years in my back yard, it was just a detached garage that we had sound proofed and practiced in and had a half inch Tascam 8-track out there.  It was in my back yard at my house.  I like recording.  I like farting around with tape, and music.  It was a trip.  It was charming.  It was charming in a really bitchin way.  A very cool thing happening.

Derrick would do his drums and then split at points, dependent on the project, and on that one he did.  He finished his drums and split.  And then we’d put a little bit of this and that on the record, here and there, little extra things, and Pete decided he wanted to hear some shaker on one song, one of those little eggs with beads in it, you know, “chicka-chicka-chicka.”  “Do you want me to do it?”  And you know where Pete’s at.  Listen to those Dwight records. You hear some fucking cool production.  Pristine.  And he’s like, “Studio guy.”  And who should he get but Alex Acuña.

And it was just so charming to me because being from the seventies, there was a point where I realized, “You know I think my brother smokes grass.”  And I’d been smoking grass for a while, and I started finding seeds around.  I think I found some seeds in his car or something.  And we weren’t that close, but we were going to go see Weather Report together and it was that night we blew a J-bar.  The first time Curt and I smoked pot together was before this Weather Report concert in Phoenix in like ’75 maybe.  And who should be the drummer on that gig, and I’m a bass player from the seventies so I’m a hopeless Jaco-phile, but Alex Acuña was the drummer that night with Weather Report.  So I’m like, “How cool.”  And the guy comes in and does the shaker part like completely spot on, one take, just like “Oh wow.”  Like professional egg playing right?  That was definitely fucking perfect.  And then he smells weed and he’s just like, “Who’s got weed?”  And we have good weed, so we go get stoned.  And I’m smoking pot with the guy, and I tell him this story, that “the first time me and my brother ever smoked pot together was one of your gigs in ’75 with Weather Report, and now here you are playing on one of my records and getting stoned.”  Charming.  The guy’s like, “Man that was like fifteen years ago. I can’t remember five minutes ago.” 

It was a new way to make a record, definitely.  And they were down with it, because they definitely spent some money to get the thing made.

M-    So this is a far cry from blocking out a studio for three days with Up on the Sun I imagine?  The recording for Forbidden Places takes place over a number of days or sessions or what?

C-    A week.

M-    Were you’re staying there and then going home and then going back, or did you live in L.A. for a while?

C-    I stayed out in L.A. with an old friend of mine from high school who had moved out quite a long time ago and still lives out there.  At the time he was an editor.  He worked on that CSI thing for years.  Now he’s on some other pop thing about vampires or detectives or something.  But at the time he was working with Jodi Foster on Little Man Tate, and he’s an old dear friend of mine, Johnny Ganem.  So I stayed there.  Curt stayed with somebody.  And there were points when we were at hotels, but for the bulk of the thing I stayed at my friend John’s house.  And it took a while, we’d go in in the afternoon and do these sessions.  It was a completely different way of making records back then.  Analog.  It’s completely different and it was something we had never done before.  The main thing being getting everything so precisely nailed down.  Something we managed to do before just by luck.  Not at all like on Meat Puppets II.  That mother fucker is beyond sloppy.  It sounds like were on a big fat fucking sack full of gack.  And it’s just like, “Oh well, that’s what people like about it?  Why even try?”  But I try because there’s different ways of doing things.  So the Up on the Sun thing we actually prerecorded it.  I told you about that.  We actually went in and it was nice and specific and we really tagged that shit.  There’s some really nice tight playing on that.  But there is on the next records as well, the subsequent records, there’s some sickeningly tight shit, on our SST records.  And we did it on our own just because the band was developing along those lines and it’s just one of those things that Curt and I found interesting.  It’s definitely one of the directions you can take music into and for a long time it was where I was at, you know, very picked, articulated, psychedelicized, fueled by hatred.

Anyways, yeah, it was definitely a different way of making it, and I liked it.  One of the main things being the vocals.  And really that was where I kinda got a lot better at singing in a lot of ways.  Because you listen to some of that stuff, it’s me singing back up on some of those records, but Curt’s singing with himself on a lot of it.  I’m on a lot of it, some of those things are Curt as well.  But it’s a certain place we had gotten to on the next thing, making a record with Pete.  We were getting into recording at a different level of singing reality.  It’s something I’ve never really been all that good at, and same with bass playing in a lot of ways.  I’m self-taught.

M-    So a lot of the creativity is happening in the studio as opposed to Up on the Sun?

C-    No.  Not really, no.  With Forbidden Places we definitely had the songs down.  We had practiced them.  We actually had a prerecording session with Pete and we were at a rehearsal studio playing the songs with him.  At one point he tried to get gruff with us about practicing.  We rented gear and it all sucked and we had Davo drive our shit out from Phoenix so we could do this preproduction session with Pete with our own gear and Pete at one point got frustrated with us and was like, “re-meh-me,” getting gruff about the gear, like making a point.  And we took him aside and told him, “Dude, don’t even think you can yell at us.”  He actually yelled and it was just like, “ha ha ha.”  And now you’re getting us into a realm that we live in.  I mean we had been masters of our reality for a long time at that point, and certainly had not gone into business with these people to get yelled at.  And I don’t give a fuck, back then if someone yelled at me it was like, “Hey, dude!  Don’t yell at me, man.”  It was one of those things that made the relationship healthier with Pete.  “We’re getting the gear out here.  You don’t need to yell at us.  You know we know what we’re doing.  This isn’t just us wasting our time.  That’s not how this session needs to be handled.”

So the songs were worked out before hand.  And Pete’s such a guitar head and through the process became such a Curt head, really fell in love with Curt and Curt’s work, really recognized it for what it was.  Years later look at the solo album that Curt and Pete made.  And that was Pete going to Curt just wanting Curt to do it.  That was Pete’s idea, because he likes Curt’s work.  But he’s definitely a great guitar player and it was fun making that record with him guitar-wise and music-wise.  Plus he was a badass at that point.  He made some huge records and he actually had Dusty Wakefield in there as the assistant producer.  Pete wouldn’t even be there, he’d let the work down for the day, because it’s pretty industrious at that point, because it’s analog.  You just multiply the time you’re in the studio by however much from just rewinding the tape deck.  And then Pete would come in, and examine the work that had been done, make his suggestions or whatever, and maybe cut out.  It was just a bitchin way to make a record.  The love of the craft itself.  Also just a bitchin set of ears, and getting us beyond our light, and it’s a fine sort of vibe in a way.  Our first go around with that.  Somebody else sitting there going, “Hmmm, well I think.”  And us actually allowing that. 

M-    So it sounds like you guys were kind of ready for this kind of recording after ten or twelve years of doing it by yourself.

C-    Well, no not really.  I mean ready?  We had been making the records we wanted to make for a long time and it was just a different way of doing it.  It was more time in a nice studio, and I liked being in the studio.  You’d have to talk to Curt about this, but the guy had become just the composer for the band flat out, which puts him in the position where everyone goes, “Hmmm, well I think.”  And I was first in line for that shit.  Because he’s the composer but it’s also our band, not his band only.  And also I’m his little brother but like, “Yeah, but fuck you it’s our band.  So I think, goddamn it.”

M-    The historical twist of fate of course is that two months after Forbidden Places comes out Nevermind comes out?.

C-    Is that what happened?

M-    It’s two months later, yeah.  That changes everything, right?  As far as marketing and business goes for you guys? 

C-    Did it? 

M-    I think.  I mean, don’t you?

C-    That was Nirvana’s record, it didn’t do anything for us.  I’m not sure what you mean exactly.

M-    I mean as far as marketing the Meat Puppets from a label standpoint. 

C-    Oh, well, that’s the labels job.  And for sure they had their opinions and you can get really into the specifics on this shit.  I don’t really care to in a lot of ways because it’s talking about people that are still around that I’ll still see, and people who were doing their best at the time and have their opinions.  And no matter what I’m the one who fucking wrecked everything so I can pretty much talk about whatever because it would only ultimately be self deprecating at the end of it all.  Because the only thing that lends me any credence at this point is being able to own what I did.

But I would say definitely once Nirvana broke, sure.  Because already the major labels had had a hard time figuring out how to sell bands of our ilk.  Hüsker, who were exceedingly focused, those guys really had a unique sound and a consistent sound.  Bob and Grant had different writing styles but ultimately the delivery still managed to sound like Hüsker.  They were consistent and their album cover art was bitchin.  So Warner signs them and didn’t manage to do what whoever did with, like, REM or something.  And Firehose was on a major label and they obviously didn’t turn into REM either, or Talking Heads, bands that were not hard rock that the labels managed to figure out how to make big.  So when Forbidden Places came out and didn’t do anything it didn’t surprise me. 

M-    Well, again, it gets buried, as a lot of things did, under Nevermind. 

C-    I think it just got buried in the same way that we still get buried.  It’s just like who gives a fuck.  How much does anybody give a fuck?  All we’re talking about is how many people are aware of it at a particular point.  How many of the things we sell.  And no matter what it’s only rock ‘n’ roll so you’re still talking about a few million at best.  There’s billions of people on the planet, and there’s been billions of people.  And everybody that’s on the planet now will fucking die and all the rest of them to come will die, and as much as you can add it all up, unless you’re able to live forever and actually control the universe like a box of tinker toys, what’s the point?  What are you trying to get to?  Ultimately it’s just about playing some music for me, and you get caught up in these other things.  The rest of it’s just some little variations that the human monkey that we all cling to so desperately or so humanly.

What happened then was that Nirvana made it easier for bands to get over.  Well, not make it easier, but definitely made the business people realize that a scruffier look seems to be the new wave.  And we just happened to be one of the bands that the next record managed to catch a little of that, and now you look back and it’s kind of like we were the progenitors of this particular scene.  And people that were into shit that we were into were into us, they caught it, made a commercial splash.  And we were one of the bands that were still around and caught the tail end of that.  I don’t give a fuck about that.  It’s marketing shit.  It’s complex and detailed.  And look what can be done with it.  Look what marketing has gone to now.  It used to be like these trends would happen, it seems, of their own volition in odd places like speed fueled drunken redneck bars or coked-out gay bath houses or wherever and suddenly you got shit-kicker music or disco.  And it’s just like a pimple.  It’s like a swelling at the neck and the groin brought about by the plague.  And then it seeps out into hinterlands and suddenly it’s a commodity to be capitalized on because it’s caught on as the next movement in the cultural shimmer that seems to happen.  And that’s what happened with stuff that could be essentially called punk.

M-    So it seems to me, though, what happens is that you guys get signed, then Nirvana happens, and your label is sitting there going, “Well what can we do with Meat Puppets?”

C-    Oh definitely.  So the brief synopsis is that we spent quite a bit of money on Forbidden Places and it didn’t do that well.  It didn’t do as well as they hoped it did immediately.  Like so many albums don’t for bands that get signed, the first album.   Then we struggled to get the next one made at all, for them to consent to let us make it.  And we were so used to making our albums when we wanted to and we wanted to make the next record and had some songs and the record label was trying to steer us in a particular direction and all that stuff started to happen and they kind of wanted us to play along with the mode-a-day grooviness.  You’re talking about fucking old dogs in a way.  Where it’s like that isn’t going to work.  It was them trying to figure it out and asking us to try these various things and try some different things out.  And ultimately we got them to let us go out to a studio that they had a lease agreement on out in Memphis with our old pal Paul at the helm, in the producer’s chair.  He had done some Butthole stuff, he had done the Bad Livers at that point, but for years Paul had been into studio shit, into the actual gear how it worked.  And he got so into it.  I remember this one time, this is such a bitchin story.  We had known them for ages and they just seemed akin to us.  They’re old dear pals, and Paul is such an interesting cat.  We went out to, they had a place outside of Austin.  It was like Dripping Springs or wherever the fuck it was.  It was kind of a neat house because you could get a bigger house because it wasn’t in the city, and those guys were doing well enough.  So they had a neat little house and they were putting a studio together and we go in there and there’s Paul doing all the welding on a patch bay.  The studio is a complex thing with hundreds and hundreds of welds.  You know, hundreds of wires and hundreds of welds.  Teeny-weeny little, not welds, soldering.  And people do that constantly.  I mean it’s just constant.  There’s this constant level of detail that people do.  And I’m so pleased that people do do that.  I’m fascinated with people’s ability to come together and create these systems that are just so complex, like the airlines, or the stock market.  What the fuck is going on there?  Any of this shit:  countries, language, good lord!  Music.

So anyways, Paul had pursued that as well, not just specifically playing guitar in the Buttholes but had just gotten down deep in the studio world, with the gear itself.  We had talked the label into letting us finally getting into the studio with Paul to make Too High to Die.  And you know then it just went through this interesting permutation to where certain people heard it and then Nirvana suddenly saying they like us. 

M-    Did you finish your Butthole story about their house out in Austin?

C-    Oh it was just that.  Yeah, his house outside of Austin.  At one point they were showing us their studio and there was Paul with his coal black eyes.  And the guy just seemed to be like a walking acid trip, which is what I always got off of Paul, one of my dearest old pals, just one of my favorite people through all this punk rock shit.  And there he is and I just realized he has a technical grasp on this shit that we use to make these records with.  I mean I know how to push “record” and “rewind” and shit, but I sure as fuck don’t have the patience to get to the level that you’re making your own patch bay.  Jesus Christ!  It was a very cool thing to see.  I’m reminded of The Dead, The Grateful Dead, and how their scene was so rife with stoner techy dudes.  And maybe that had to do it being a slightly bigger  cultural phenomenon, the hippie acid vibe, as opposed to the punk rock hatred vibe.  It attracted a different element.  It seemed like it was the application of psychedelia towards the tastiest of sounds, and the tastiest of live shows.  It’s the wastiest of experiences, and not just your happenstance but you’re actual control of some of the disparate elements that go into allowing some bitchin art to be made.  You actually know like what “impedance” is. 

M-    So how does the recording of Too High to Die differ from the recording of Forbidden Places?

C-    Well, it was out in Memphis, for one thing.  So I was staying right out on the mighty Miss, in an extend-a-stay kind of thing, kind of a slightly beat up-ish looking one, but with our balcony overlooking the river.  And the studio itself was in an old converted cotton warehouse, an old cotton mill warehouse thing.  So a big old building with big old wooden beams and a couple of studios in there, and the whole time we were doing it in the ‘B’ studio, there were these Memphis rappers who were like, you know, I mean rap.  It has its own thing, the urban black experience.  There was some fucking hard-core kids in there.  It was like, “Alrighty then.  You kids aren’t just rapping about guns, you have them.”  So it was just an interesting scene and we were off in another corner, one of the studios, not in the middle of Hollywood.  You know what I mean?  We weren’t in Los Angeles, we were in Memphis.  It was with our pal Paul, and Stewart Sullivan was doing the engineering, who Paul had worked with.  And it’s just a completely different kind of a thing.  Paul is an old pal of ours, and we were pleased to be back in the studio finally.  We had tried several different things.  The record company thought that we should go in this one particular direction and then they kept not being happy with the results.  Because they were trying to get us to do stuff and we were trying to play along.  It’s like just the same old shit.  We were trying to get records made, and move forward, and do our best.  So it was quite a different feel.  It’s just us again in there with Paul.  And Paul was real good about it.  He was real diligent and obviously interested in working with other bands and had ideas about what it took to get records to sound a particular way, to his satisfaction, which is basically what it takes to be a producer.  Going, you know, “Well I have ideas, and I think I can bring something neat to this.”  I mean he was changing the guitar strings after every take.  Shit like that.  It’s like, “Well, okay.  That’s fine.  If you wanna do that.”  And there’s slight variations in strings that have been used a couple times since as opposed to just once.  And attention to detail to keep things as crispy and clear and it worked out good.

The main thing about those records is it gets back to the vocals for us, some vocal issues.  Back then they were into taking the vocals and doing things with them, and the whole process about making the record with Pete had been very extensive about the vocals.  Without Pro Tools.  Now it’s just seems so archaic.  Their thing was to sing a half a dozen versions of the same line.  Go through line-by-line and pick out each word that has the best intonation, or each phrase.  And then you put together a comp track.  You take all of those separate snippets and put them together as your comp track, as your best vocal take, Frankensteined together out of a half a dozen good enough takes.  Before we would have been, “Fine, next.”  And you take that and put it on a synthesizer or sampler and you actually use the little knob that can like waver the tone up or down and adjust each little part where you can actually here your heart beating if you hold a note.  And you put all these little wavers up.  They called it “flying and fixing it.”  You fly it and fix it.  And you realize, “Oh you guys have been doing this on every fucking record for the last decade.  Good lord, what a laborious process.  Somebody’s getting paid here.”  The vocals are all nice and in tune.  And I didn’t really have any problem with it because I liked the recording process.  But ultimately Curt’s a fucking artist, and so am I to the best degree a halfwit near retard can be, but Curt definitely has real specific ideas that he’s on about, and then has other people tell him where to get off with it.  But we went along with that and we wound up with a record where all of our vocals are really nice and in tune.  Forbidden Places is in tune.  And it was all done like that.  And these days they do it just, it’s still done, but now it’s all Pro Tools.  You don’t have to do any of that shit now.  You can have anybody sing anyway and have it be manipulated unendingly to have it sound like Pavarotti.  And it’s easier to do because there’s no rewinding, it’s all digital.  It’s like video games now.  Suddenly the recording studio has turned into World of Warcraft.  Lots of buttons. 

M-    So how long were you out in Memphis?

C-    I can’t remember.  Curt could tell you.  It was a while.  Couple weeks.  There’s a couple really cool things that went down.  Curt had written a song that eventually became “Backwater.”  He had the riff and he had this thing and he had this part for it.  Curt had been writing for a long time and suddenly he writes this kind of blues riff, this bluesy kind of a riff, and it’s like just a slightly different feel for Curt to the degree that it inspired another song from Derrick and I called “Radio Ready.”  Anyway, Curt had written that main riff to “Backwater.”  You’re talking about the band having gotten to the point where we’re all good players, and we were still young enough.  And live we were just fucking lethal.  We had a good solid crew and took our outboard gear with us that we plugged into the PAs every night, and Davo our sound guy back then would manipulate the sound back there with our outboard effects.  It was all about the experience, and very, very focused.

So anyways, we’re in the studio there and Curt’s got “Backwater” by that point, it’s up to him having lyrics and everything for it.  And it was down to, it was one of those songs where I had an opinion.  And go back to our catalog and you’ll find songs that are like “Kirkwood/Kirkwood,” and that’s generally a song where I had an opinion, and Curt was kind enough to let old little tag along put in his two cents on his work.  So “Backwater” was one of those things again where, you know, “Gee, I really thing you could use a little part.  I mean if you listen to ‘The Union of the Snake.’”  So, I mean, Curt wouldn’t be who he is if he hadn’t all along been at the point of “I fucking don’t care.”  But he’s also my brother and he’s magnanimous, or what the fuck ever, or at points he just agreed, or liked what I wanted to interject.  But at this point with “Backwater”, this was a beautiful thing, he’s standing there and the idea would come up about a ‘B’ section.  And this was right in the studio and all this stuff is well practiced.  We know the material.  We’ve been sitting on it for a while trying to get the record made.  And he’s kinda got his head down, right, kinda like, there’s my “Fuck you.  Leave me alone, onward.”  And instead though, he’s actually ruminating on it and just decided that maybe a middle section might be appropriate and he sat there for a minute or two, and whipped out that middle part to “Backwater,” that “Hey I’m blind/good,” you know that part?  And he just sat there right?  And this has been one of the coolest things that’s allowed me to be Cris of the Meat Puppets is that suddenly Curt developed into this composer.  And it’s like, “neat!”  And it’s one thing to sit around and fart around on guitar, and I can do it unendingly, but to actually write something.  I mean the guy actually started to be able to write things that I was willing to play, or wanted to play.  It’s a different kind of thing to be able to design on an idea and get behind it.  It has to do with who you are.  It has to do with you being able to say something.

M-    This is the first time, in a long time anyways, that there are just Cris Kirkwood songs on an album. 

C-    Yeah. 

M-    It’s kind of unusual. 

C-    I guess maybe it’s the beginning of the end or something.  Maybe my ego had finally broken, and had I been healthier all along it could have been a different story.  I finally started to get to the point where it’s like, “Hey!  I can write a few things here that are good enough for the band.  That can actually make it onto our record, or I can sing, or whatever.”  Or maybe they were just desperate cries for help or attention.  It’s all just about attention.  I’m the little brother.  Mommy didn’t love me enough.  It’s one of those simple things.  It’s not that complicated.

M-    Curt had to agree to put them on.  He could have said “no.”

C-    Yeah, well, they’re good songs.  They’re really good songs you know?

M-    Yeah they are. 

C-    And he was down with that.  And then he takes them and bitchins them up a little bit.  I remember like on that one song, “Every thought’s a game/a pack of chimps I cannot tame.”

M-    “Station.”

C-    Yeah, “Station.”  “He’s the one who went “dunt dunt buh digga dunt.”  He put that chugging thing on there, whereas mine was more strumming, like the demo version of it.  Or like I wrote that little line “du du dit du du dit du du dit du du du du dit,” and he makes it liquid, and takes it out into a special place that’s neat.  By that point I’d grown a lot.  Making that last record had been right up my alley.  Forbidden Places was so like, “Oh this just fits right in.”  I liked being in the studio and I spent all the time in there.  Curt would just do the singing and split, but I stayed the whole time.  Because I liked being in there and I liked the work as well, and was in on all of that vocal work that we did with Dusty, who was the assistant producer on Forbidden Places.  And, you know, does it matter that we did all that?  It just makes the vocals come out more in tune.  But that’s just a question of tuning and whether you give a fuck or not.  What matters and what doesn’t, you know, we don’t need to decide that.  But at least it had been a realm that I felt comfortable with and enjoyed being in the studio.  And also on Too High to Die.  We had been making our own records for a while.  But I don’t know, I just wrote a few songs.  And it was just when there was the potential for things to change for me to go a lot better and I just didn’t manage to make it go that way.  It could have been different all along, but mommy didn’t love me enough.

M-    It seems that London, once this is coming together, were ready to push you.

C-    No, they weren’t at all.  What happened was we finally got to make the fucking thing and then suddenly Nirvana is this band that comes, not out of nowhere because the Seattle scene had been kind of burbling along, and it had been picked for a while. 

M-    Nevermind had been out for two years at this point.

C-    So they were just gigantic at that point.  But even before that Seattle had started to be cool.  Like, “Hey, everybody’s wearing dime story beads.”  And a lot of those bands spoke highly of the SST bands.  And for sure there were some tours up through the Northwest that were fucking scorching.  And a lot of us people that went on to become famous rock starts were exposed to some of this shit just like we were exposed to shit and the shit we were exposed to was exposed to shit.  But we just happened to be in this particular batch of folks that suddenly this popular movement were citing as some of their influences.  And then Nirvana was suddenly the biggest band in the world, and they were talking about us.  And the record company was like, “Well huh duh duh duh.”  But it hadn’t come at that point yet.

What really happened is we played a show out in South Carolina at a radio station, this pal of ours.  The cool thing about Too High to Die is that it was completely the record that we wanted to make.  Bitchin shit went down during the making of it, with Paul, our old dear pal Paul from the Buttholes.  And it lead him on to do that Sublime record and is now a go to, I don’t know if he’s Brian Eno or Rick Ruben, but he’s genius to produce records, and had a gigantic smash hit with the Sublime thing.  And it was a fun record to make.  It was completely the record that we wanted to make.  It was beyond the record company trying to figure out if they could talk us into doing things that they thought would make it easier for them to sell us or.  It got down to us making the next record that we wanted to make.

Some bitchin shit happened.  I remember Curt wrote that song “Shine”:  “She’s got rings on her fingers,” it’s so pretty right?  We were in the studio and he specifically said, I was working on the bass part, and he’s like, “Do an Africany sounding thing.”  And I was into that shit back then.  There are some bitchin African bass players.  And I’m like, “Oh, okay, groovy, groovy, groovy.  You’re talking the middle of a neck.  Alright.  The frets are closer together.  Sounds easier to me.”  And I whip out that little bass line on that, which is a real fun little bass line in a lot of neat ways and just locks into Curt’s line so readily.  It was so down and deep and it was such a part of the band to me.  And it flows out so sparkly and neato.  It’s very much a Meat Puppets record.

So then more of the same old shit where this friend of ours we’d known for years, who loved the band from the old days, and he owned a radio station out in South Carolina, in Charleston.  He had us play at this big festival, and made Hootie go on before us even though they were getting ready to break, but it was a question of respect.  It was a huge festival and the record company had an influential radio guy come down and watch it, him and his wife.  And they’re big and they think all radio stations should play this, like a hundred in the Southeast.  You know how that used to work.  And these guys saw the set and said, “These guys are rockstars.”  And they made the record company take another look at us, made somebody else at the record company come and take a look at the record at PLG, London’s parent, PolyGram Label Group, and a bunch of guys from that.  And I don’t even know their names, but one of them heard “Backwater” and decided that song was something.  So they made that the single, got it out on record.  And they had gone into Cobain and had asked him for an endorsement, and they put a little sticker on it with him and Perner and, you know, Dave’s an old friend, and they had gotten huge, they put a little sticker on it for endorsement.  Suddenly you could see they’re starting to have an idea of the direction to take this.  Just the guy hearing the song thought something.  They made that the single.  And the next thing that happened was people responded to it.  People liked “Backwater.”  So it started getting a lot of good phones, a lot of people calling in for it.  The next thing you know it’s like, “Whoa!”  We became the focus of their next sales quarter.  Us and, like, Salt-n-Pepa.

M-    Well the Unplugged thing helped right too, because that happens right before Too High to Die comes out.

C-    Oh did it?

M-    Unplugged is in December and Too High to Die comes out in January.

C-    The thing that really made it work, even going on TV with those guys and stuff, people really liked “Backwater.”  People really took to that song.

M-    It’s interesting from a marketing perspective that, to this day, it’s the only album with photos as an album cover.  It’s not Meat Puppets art on your record. 

C-    Oh wow!  I think the President is flying over or something.  That’s weird.  There’s this huge airliner and it’s being fucking flat out hemmed in on both sides on by fighter jets.  What is it today?  Is the President in town?  Is that the Vice President? 

M-    I don’t know, you’re in Phoenix right?

C-    Yeah.  That’s definitely something I haven’t seen.  I haven’t, I mean I don’t know if I’ve noticed, like terrorists flying around or something like that.  Or maybe someone’s just stolen the jet and they’re about to be shot down. 

M-    This could be a moment and we have it on tape. 

C-    Yep. They’re taking the normal flight path out of town but it’s just a big fucking. . . I don’t have my glasses on.  Unfortunately.  I’m in my back yard and I can’t see very good.  So I couldn’t quite tell if it’s actually a commercial jet or.  Where are my fucking glasses?  Goddamn it!  But it’s definitely like one of those Air Force, or Air Forcey-like jets, one on each side of the fucking thing.  Interesting.  Look, there’s my mailman.  Maybe I can ask him. 

M-    Okay. So anyway, is there more to say?

C-    I don’t know.  It’s your interview.

M-    Other than you didn’t respond, because of the airplane, to my comment about it’s the only Meat Puppets record to this day that has a photograph as the album cover.  It smacks of marketing to me.

C-    Oh yeah.  That was theirs.  I think they actually designed that.  We came up with something and they turned it pink.

M-    Is that why you’re wearing dresses? 

C-    That was us.  That was us just farting around.  That was a photo shoot we did up in Sedona.  They didn’t ask us to do that.  That was just a photo shoot we had done farting around with dresses on.  But I think it was their idea to make the record pink like that, and it was definitely their idea to put a sticker on it with our contemporaries’ endorsements.  And it’s just like, “Eh, yeah,” because we’re the ratty old Shit Puppets who nobody likes. So it’s like, “Look kids!  Come on kids!  Come on kids!”  It’s just marketing crap.  I’m not into the entertainment industry in a way to really play along and to repeat something that would be easily marketable.  I don’t got anywhere near a big enough a dick.  And I don’t compensate for my lack of penile girth with a fancy hairdo or stylish clothes.  Better look elsewhere.  I really am a fucking horrible person.  I think I’ve proven that without fail.  Repeatedly.  And it’s marketing weirdness, you know?  And I made a band with my brother and I’m still in it.  If it was down to the marketing shit we’d have stopped.  Immediately.  Or not named ourself something like Meat.  If it was down to that I’d have stayed in school and became a dentist. 

Look what they do now.  They take bands out.  They don’t sign things and try to work it through those channels.  Now they just put singers on TV and go, “Who do you like?  Which one of these do you like?”  Until they get the one that people that watch the show like, and then some of them become gigantic fucking stars.  And most of them don’t still, but they don’t have to waste a lot of vinyl at least trying to see which one’s going to stick, which one people want.  It gets back to Michelangelo forced to spend years of his life painting.  The guy wasn’t into it, wasn’t his bag.  But if you want to get the work done that you wanted to do, you had to do that.  Same old shit, right?

M-    Right.

C-    I’m a side guy, dude.  I’m a side guy in a band.  I’m Curt’s most devoted and longest lived employee.

Here’s the lowdown on everything at this point.  Two weeks ago I lost my dearest, dearest friend.  My sweet, sweet doggie Horky.  He had been with me a really fucking long time.  Michelle, my late wife, got him after our dog got hit by a car while she was in jail eight months after my mom died.  And Horky was all that remained from those dark days.  Except me.  I’ve come into my reality really fucking well, and it’s because of who I am, obviously.  I did the things because of who I am.  But Horky was a very, very dear friend, and about my only friend.  It’s a tough thing.  Things just continue to be tough.  I’m just fucking readjusting to my life without my sweet little doggy, who’s been with me for so long. 

Horky was a magical thing.  Michelle, you know our dog got hit by a car while she was in jail, our dog Rosie.  Just like all these improbable series of fucking torments brought about by our irresponsible behavior.  And one day she comes home, after she’s out of jail, with a teeny weeny little puppy that had been adopted and brought back because the people thought it was sickly.  It didn’t have a mommy or brothers or sisters, and was on its last day.  They used to put up little announcements saying this dog is scheduled to be euthanized tomorrow.  And she brought him home and he became Horky.  He was Horky.  And then she died.  And it really got down and I just devolved into such a me reality.  It was just me and Horky, such a primal netherworld.

And that’s where I’m at these days.  I think the band is a venerable wonderful fucking thing.  And I’m very, very pleased to have found the wherewithal to have been invited back into my brother’s world and the bitchin world that we made together as kids and allowed it to have another really seriously interesting continuation.  To let it have this next phase to happen and to have continued to happen and to have taken it to where now it can be this kind of a thing where it was already a bitchin band that did some neat shit and made some records that were popular and that people liked, and to have gotten up again in the way that we did and for Curt to have kept it going.  It’s exceedingly human.

Audio interview with Barry Kernfeld

 Here is my New Books interview with Barry Kernfeld, author of Pop Song Piracy:  Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929.

http://newbooksinpopmusic.com/2012/05/17/barry-kernfeld-pop-song-piracy-disobedient-music-distribution-since-1929-university-of-chicago-press-2011/

Audio Interview with Will Hermes

Here is my New Books interview with Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:  Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever.

http://newbooksinpopmusic.com/2012/04/18/will-hermes-love-goes-to-buildings-on-fire-five-years-in-new-york-that-changed-music-forever-faber-and-faber-2011/