How Tempe's legendary Meat Puppets found their way back to where it feels like home again

Ed Masley | The Republic | azcentral.com

It's been two years since drummer Derrick Bostrom joined Cris and Curt Kirkwood onstage for a short set of Meat Puppets classics for the first time since they went their separate ways in 1995.

It was the night of their induction to the Arizona Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame. And it was clear that they were celebrating something more enduring than enshrinement, tapping back into the freewheeling musical chemistry that made them such transcendentally unusual heroes on the underground when they rolled out of Tempe on SST Records in the '80s.

The three founding members are touring together again as part of an expanded five-piece lineup, joined by Curt's son Elmo Kirkwood on guitar and Ron Stabinsky on keys.

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They also released their first album with Bostrom on drums since 1995's "No Joke!" in March, the aptly titled "Dusty Notes."

But if the seeds were clearly planted in the course of that performance in 2017, Curt Kirkwood says they didn't leave the show that night with any real reunion plans.

"We just pretty much left it at “Well, that was a blast' and 'We should do some more,'” he says. "But we didn't make any plans and didn't have – at that point, really – any way that we could do it, or that we saw. But then the opportunity just kind of arose."

How the Meat Puppets reunion happened

About a month after their Hall of Fame induction, Kirkwood got together with Stabinsky in Austin to jam.

"We came up with some songs and shortly after that, the drum slot opened up, just kind of suddenly right as we wanted to start recording an album," Kirkwood says. "That was kind of a surprise. I didn't really see it coming. So I just called Derrick and said, 'Hey, we’re starting an album. Here’s the opportunity we're looking for.'"

Kirkwood had never considered bringing in a keyboardist before that visit from Stabinsky.

"As soon as I started playing with him, I was like ‘Wow this is super easy and I get it,’" Kirkwood says. "I never saw how it would really work out and I didn't know anybody that I thought would be such a great fit. He lives in Pennsylvania and he came down for a few days just so we could jam and right away, I was like, “Oh, these songs are cool. We should make a whole album like this.'"

Stabinsky is what Kirkwood calls "a childhood polka prodigy."

He laughs at the description, then continues.

"Yeah, I think he started playing out in public at, like, 5 or 6. He played for the Polka King for a while. But he can play anything. We don’t do a lot of polka, but…."

Arriving at the sound of 'Dusty Notes'

This album also features Elmo Kirkwood's first appearance on one of the Meat Puppets records. And having those two in the sessions really opened up the sonic possibilities.

"Oh, very much so," Kirkwood says. "It was directions that I don't see, the way that Ron plays. I don't know how that happens but everybody has their own way of jamming and yeah, it way opened it up. And then Elmo is also a way different guitar player than I am."

Once they all started playing together, he says, "you could really see how now we're in a place where we can just do whatever we want. The three-piece was like that early on. There was no boundaries and we found that the mistakes were some of the good stuff. That's how that is now. It takes a lot of the thinking out of it, which is good. I never really like to think about it too much, at live shows especially. Thinking about it as little as possible in music is a good thing."

Having Elmo in the band is great, he says. "I get to spend a lot of time with him. He lives in Phoenix. I live in Austin. So that makes up for a lot of … you know, we can just be social. And we room together. It's been that way for years now. I think he's been playing with us for six or seven years, probably, at this point. And again, he's a really good guitar player. I don't have to play as much and we can just toss stuff back and forth."

Bostrom has called "Dusty Notes" the best Meat Puppets album to date.

And Kirkwood?

"I'm not a very good critic of myself," he replies, with a laugh. "I can't say I have much opinion about it that way. I think it's a good record. As I listened to it, I was kind of surprised that it came out as kind of cohesive as it did and that’s the way it should be. It's nice to have a surprise and not have some ideal. I've never really done that. I’ve learned to take what I can get and then kind of accept it. Derek's always got a good mind about things like that. I'll agree if he says that's what it is."

They recorded the album in Phoenix, which definitely added to the feeling of coming full circle.

"It had been a long time," Kirkwood says, "since we recorded an album in Phoenix. I love being there. And Ron really loves Arizona. He's a lifelong Pennsylvania guy and he jumps at any chance to come down to the desert and yeah, definitely. It’s home."

Hardcore beginnings to 'Meat Puppets II'

The sound of "Dusty Notes" is a world removed from the hardcore punk of their earlier work — the "In a Car" EP and their self-titled full-length debut.

Of course, they had already left that sound behind by the time they cut their second album, the seminal "Meat Puppets II."

"It was just kind of one-dimensional, really," Kirkwood says of their hardcore days.

"Punk rock to me was like, 'OK, we did that. That's that. Everything sounds kind of the same.' You need to give yourself a little room at a certain point. To me, music is about the space between the notes as much as anything, and there just wasn't much there."

He still hears occasional echoes of that sound in what they're doing now.

"Like if we go into a jam and it gets real heavy, you can hear points where you can’t hear through the music at all and it's real satisfying," he says. "But as we did records back then, we’d say, 'OK, let’s not make another one like that right now.' So we would just kind of let ourselves drift away."

They never really fit in on the punk scene anyway.

"I liked playing the music and met a lot of cool people," Kirkwood says.

"In a way, the audiences were a little bit biased towards things being just hardcore. And it just didn't seem like we fit in there so much because we weren't punk rockers. We just liked to play that kind of stuff. But little by little, we found our own audience in that group of people because there were a lot of artists in the people that would come to those shows, a lot of open-minded people, a lot of holdover hippies from the 70's who found that punk rock was new to them. But no, we didn't really didn't fit in."

As to how they managed to evolve as quickly as they did in the two years between the recording of that first self-titled album and "Meat Puppets II," Kirkwood says he always liked a lot of different types of music.

"I just felt like 'What's a good feeling to step back from something like that?' It was pretty intense. The shows were intense and people would slam dance. And I thought of stuff I liked before, like Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives — stuff from my childhood. So it's easy. There's tons of music and I’ve always been game. If I can play it, I'll do it. A lot of stuff I'm not able to play. I’m mostly self-taught and kind of lazy but I just thought, 'Well, let's do folk music and these people can shove it up their (expletive)."

Going Unplugged with Nirvana

Among the fans who loved the psychedelic folk-punk stylings of their second album was, as luck would have it, Kurt Cobain, who invited them to join him on the set of "MTV Unplugged" to dust off three classics from "Meat Puppets II."

"It was kind of like they were a big band," Kirkwood says. "And they asked us to go on tour, which I thought was kind of interesting. I was like, ‘I'll be damned. That's an interesting idea.’ I kind of felt the same way about the 'Unplugged' thing as well, when we were on tour and Kurt said ‘Hey, you want to play on "Uplugged" with us?’ I was like ‘I’ll be damned. This is a step in a different direction.'”

It was, he says, a "very good" experience.

"It couldn't have been better. We found kindred spirits there. They had a big open space and a really good heart for the music they were playing and it wasn't so belabored. It wasn’t beaten to death at all. It was just kind of what it was. And it suited the songs of ours that they did. And the way that it was done suited them real well. So it was pretty magical."

Riding 'Backwater' into the mainstream

Thanks in part to that exposure, Meat Puppets had their first serious hit with "Backwater" the following year.

Suddenly having a radio hit was "kind of how I always thought it would be," Kirkwood says. "Like, we really don't belong here. This is a fluke."

Kirkwood laughs, then says, "Once again, it was ‘I'll be damned, you know, here in the mainstream is one of the last things you would think should be in the mainstream.' But then they were kind of trying to figure out, the big companies in the industry, what alternative really meant. Because it was like, 'Well, it's not just grunge. What is it? What do we do here?' And so they were casting about. And it worked."

'I never said, "OK, we're done" '

Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Induction highlights Nils Lofgren, Gin Blossoms, and Meat Puppets performed after their inductions into the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Thursday. Sean Logan/azcentral.com

They've broken up and reunited twice since then, but Kirkwood says he never really thought of them as broken up.

"I never said, 'OK, we're done,'" he says. "It was never that way. I just let things slide until the times were good again. We never said, ‘OK, we're throwing it in.'"

The first time Kirkwood let it slide was after "No Joke!," when his brother's downward spiral into heroin addiction led to London Records pulling its support for an album released at a time when their profile was higher than ever.

When Meat Puppets returned in 1999, Curt Kirkwood was the only founding member left in the lineup, which "fizzled out" as Kirkwood would prefer to think of it in 2002.

For the next four years, he stayed busy with solo tours and side gigs.

"As soon as my band here in Austin started to kind of go away, I got a call from Sonic Youth," he says. "They said, ‘You want to open some shows?’ I said, ‘Well, my band is not really very cohesive right now. Can I open them solo?’"

From there, he formed a group called Eyes Adrift with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh. When Novoselic left, he and Gaugh formed a group called Volcano, which lasted about a year. Then, Dwight Yoakam guitarist/producer Pete Anderson came out to one of his solo shows and asked if he would like to work together on an album, which he did, releasing "Snow" in late 2005.

'Then Elmo said, "Hey Cris is better" '

It was while doing solo shows on that album that Kirkwood and his son started playing together.

"Then Elmo said, 'Hey, Cris is better,'" he recalls. "So I said, ‘Hey, let’s do Meat Puppets.’ In between the band here in Austin and Cris coming back, stuff just kind of kept falling in my lap and I didn't really think about, ‘How do I get the Meat Puppets thing to be a band, not just a concept?' But it's always just been a concept, too. From the get-go, it’s had its own kind of legs. And I don’t really get it. I just try to see where it's at and do what it takes."

The Kirkwood brothers returned with Ted Marcus on drums in 2006, releasing an album called "Rise to Your Knees" in 2007.

Asked how it felt to play with Cris again, Kirkwood says, "It was really good. It's like we played together for years and you know that stuff like the back of your hand, how it was anyway. But then a lot of that stuff is just how we play in general. So it was real easy, and it was a lot of fun. And it was nice to see him, you know, out of trouble."

"Dusty Notes" is the fifth Meat Puppets album since the brothers reunited.

Asked how the band dynamic now compares to how they interacted in their youth, he says. "It's really kind of similar. You know, it can't be the same. The venues were different. The times were so different. But now it's like a five-piece version of what the three-piece was, where anybody can do whatever they want. And it can be chaotic, but it still makes a ton of sense. We haven't been doing it that long, this five-piece thing. We’re playing some of the stuff we made on this new record live and playing some old stuff and just seeing where we are, but it's fascinating in the way that the three-piece used to be, where after the show, you’re like ...'damn, how about that part of that one song there?' Like, holy crap. Not just like, 'Oh, that was a good show.' It's more like, 'Wow, some of this stuff is nuts.'"

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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Meat Puppets

When: 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29.

Where: Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $20.

Details: 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.