Heat shimmers and ripples up from the desert floor. The horizon glimmers like a translucent mirror. The landscape is at once endlessly varied and endlessly repetitive. At times the Southwest seems like another country, if not another planet.
The Meat Puppets are a product of this environment, and their music echoes the ragged peaks and wide-open spaces of their Arizona homeland. The region’s mysteries are certainly central to the pleasures of Meat Puppets II, the band’s finest effort. Hell, the landscape even intrudes upon the album’s song titles: “Plateau”, “Aurora Borealis”, “Lake Of Fire”.
The Puppets’ self-titled debut was something of a concession to the punk scene, though two sloppy, spirited covers, “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” and “Walking Boss”, betray the band’s country leanings. Meat Puppets II, the follow-up, dispenses with hardcore’s speedy tempos and rampant nihilism altogether. Curt Kirkwood’s spacey lyrics posit a goofy, existential quest, a world in which climbing out of bed and climbing a mountain of sand are all but equivalent. Throughout, the Kirkwood brothers’ voices creak and groan above an instrumental terrain more indebted to the Grateful Dead’s stoned virtuosity and Neil Young’s elemental primitivism than to the speedcore of their contemporaries.
Meat Puppets II was justly lauded upon its release in 1984 and has since become a touchstone of both the post-punk and alt-country faithful. The band’s unassuming marriage of styles seems the product of some bemused schizophrenia, acknowledged, at least in part, on the album’s lead track, “Split Myself In Two”. Nonetheless, the Puppets were hardly pioneers; the Replacements dabbled in hillbilly, X and the Clash celebrated the music’s roots, and the Blasters spearheaded (then transcended) the rockabilly revival. But even at its best, the bulk of that music was willfully self-conscious; no matter how earnestly the bands embraced their musical heritage, it wasn’t where they lived. The Puppets’ music, on the other hand, sounds organic, lived-in, unique; it clearly recalls country, but no country that you’ve ever heard before.
On November 18, 1993, the Kirkwood brothers joined Nirvana in a New York studio to reprise three of the finest songs on Meat Puppets II. Through an accident of fate, this moment, locked in amber (and captured on video), is probably how the Puppets will be remembered. Still, after repeated listenings, Nirvana’s versions have the feel of homages — admittedly graced by a broader instrumental palette and greater emotional depth. Yet, tucked away in their original versions on Meat Puppets II, the same songs suggest deeper mysteries and forebodings — and peace, a peace that ultimately escaped Kurt Cobain. Heat shimmers and ripples up from the desert floor; in the distance stand the Meat Puppets, lost desert cowboys.