The chances are that unless you have a specialist interest in U.S. hardcore punk and it’s various trajectories, the Meat Puppets will only be familiar to you via Nirvana’s acoustic covers of three of the songs contained herein (namely “Plateau”, “Lake of Fire” and “Oh Me”). The Pups began as a comparatively unfocused, if promisingly off-beat, post-hardcore outfit — to which their 1980 E.P. “In A Car” and their eponymous debut album will testify. Both these releases are erratic, disjointed affairs that nonetheless contain moments of hypnotic beauty. However, by the time of “Meat Puppets II” they had blossomed into something gloriously off-centred and virtually unique among their U.S. underground peers.

According to vocalist / guitarist Curt Kirkwood, one of the principle reasons for this metamorphosis was the hostile reaction of straight-edge punk audiences to a bunch of misfits from Arizona who had the gall to play hardcore but still have long hair, considered an unforgivable travesty in the early 80s. As our good mentor Julian will no doubt himself attest, punks and hippies were still regarded as diametric opposites back then, and anything tinted with the ugly word “psychedelia” was an utter taboo. A more opportunistic outfit with less integrity than the Pups might have cut their hair and polished the hardcore / country hybrid of their debut into a formula, but the group’s reaction to such puerile tribalism was “Fuck this — we’re going to stop playing punk”. (As the liner notes to Rykodisc’s CD re-issue of “Meat Puppets II” point out, they then proceeded to get spat at and have things thrown at them because they were playing country, but that’s another story).

From the opening bars of track no. 1, “Split Myself In Two” it’s immediately obvious that something has gone gloriously, nay transcendentally WRONG here. The bass lurches like a drunken hillbilly making a crude pass at his own cousin, whilst Curt Kirkwood belches the words in a speedfreak frenzy that makes it almost impossible to decipher anything but the urgent, haunted tone of his voice.
Then a trippy guitar solo kicks in like a combination of mescaline and methedrine, sounding incongruous and thoroughly unprecedented in those pre-Buttholes times, not to mention phased and delayed to the point where individual notes disappear into a blissed out heat-haze of pure, undefined sound.

It’s followed by an instrumental “Magic Toy Missing” which ups the ante even further in the weirdness stakes by featuring a country hoedown riff speeded up to the point of mania and played in a deliberately sloppy, drunken manner. It’s not hardcore. It’s not country. It’s not psychedelia. Yet somehow, it manages to be encapsulate the pioneering spirit of all three genres in a minute and a half. It’s very, very odd.

“Lost”, meanwhile, is a weepy, genuinely affecting Neil Young-influenced paeon to Reagan-era alienation and it’s ensuing cultural displacement. Perhaps the most telling line on the entire album is “I’m getting tired of living Nixon’s mess”, hinting at a sentimental nostalgia for more innocent, pre-Watergate times. 

According to the liner notes, the Kirkwood brothers would escape a troubled adolescence by hiking in the planes and deserts on the outskirts of Pheonix, harking back to Biblical depictions of the likes of Job and John the Baptist using the desert as a vehicle for spiritual searching. On the next song, “Plateau” — the first of the three songs covered by Nirvana, incidentally — Kirkwood decides to escape “Nixon’s mess” by heading out into the wide open prairie and seeking transcendence, only to find his current destination wanting, which in turn inspires a never-ending search for “the next Plateau”. The following track, another instrumental “Aurora Beraolis”, evokes the arid plain of the Arizona desert as effectively as anything on Ry Cooder’s “Paris Texas” soundtrack, also betraying a strong Grateful Dead / mid-70s Beefheart influence. It’s startling to hear a band who started out playing hardcore to depart from it’s earthbound aggression so thoroughly. 

But it’s on track 6, “We’re Here”, that the Meat Puppets finally lose contact with Houston altogether and float upwards into boundless hyperspace. The lyric seems to be about an acid tripper who’s reminded of the existence of a world outside his head by the sudden arrival of a group of friends. As an object lesson in 80s psychedelia, it kicks all these lame-ass Paisley Underground bands into orbit by taking on the Byrds at their own game and at least equalling, if not beating, them. However , it’s precisely because of the Meat Puppets’ lack of stifling reverence towards their 60s predecessors that they effortlessly accomplish what bands like the Rain Parade and the Long Ryders struggled hard, and largely failed, to achieve. 

“Climbing” is in much the same vein as “Lost” a stumbling, endearingly clumsy C’n’W ballad topped off by that familiar whisky-sodden Neil Young whine. “New Gods” signals a brief return to the Pups’ hardcore roots, albeit leavened by a wierdly incongruous lyric about not being able to drink the water in Mexico. Then there’s “Oh Me” and “Lake of Fire”, both given a far smoother and more professional, if still affecting treatment by Nirvana on “Unplugged in New York”. No disrespect to the genius Cobain, but for me the originals win out every time, in spite of Curt Kirkwood’s somewhat erratic relationship with
melody. The way in which he screams out “I can’t see the end of me/ My whole expanse/ I cannot see” is a more endearingly human, and therefore for me, more moving precursor to the familiar throaty Cobain growl.

Then, there’s another unexpected left turn into Bert Jansch-influenced acoustic folk rock with the perversely titled instrumental “I’m A Mindless Idiot” ‑despite it’s name, one of the most serene and transcendental pieces in the entire U.S. indie canon. Something about the Meat Puppets’ utter refusal to conform to the nosebleed aesthetic of fundamentalist hardcore makes them sound far more punk in spirit than most of their SST contemporaries (except for Husker Du and The Minutemen, of course). 

Then there’s the closing “Whistling Song”, on which Kirkwood finally seems to crack up completely, abandoning all attempts at cohesion and whistling like a drunken cowboy ambling off into the desert after shooting his own wife in a domestic dispute. It’s a more contemporary, not to mention darker and far more sullied equivalent of Quicksilver’s own “Happy Trails”, spectacularly reviewed by Seth Man just last week. Indeed, the entire album could almost be read as a post-punk translation of 60s west coast psychedelia, albeit tainted by the 80s slacker zeitgeist of knowing that the world can never be such an idealistic place again.

That’s all, unless you own the CD re-issue which contains seven bonus tracks, most of which the LP was perfectly well-off without. So how did the Meat Puppets manage to come up with such a devastatingly original and uncategorisable sound? My guess is that their Pheonix origins contributed to a sense of cultural displacement which allowed them to mix post-punk’s stripped-down production values (short songs, unrehearsed spontanaeity) with the more traditional mores of psychedelia and country ‚without seeing any contradiction in doing so at all. Remember, Pheonix — despite, along with most other medium-to-large American cities, having a regional scene of it’s own — was far removed from US punk’s two main arteries (New York and L.A.) and it seems that the Pups’ disaffection at being misfit loners in a redneck environment contributed to an all-pervading feeling of despair at the possibility of ever fitting in anywhere. It’s this total absence of roots, and of hope for the future, that makes “Meat Puppets II” such an affecting album — a despondency which their highest-profile fan Kurt Cobain no doubt related to as a native of the even more parochial Aberdeen.