u:mack Present
Meat Puppets
Dinah Brand
Tuesday December 2 Whelans
Doors 8pm TICKETS €22 from Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar, Spindizzy, Wav Box Office 1890 200078 & online at
www.tickets.ie/umack
www.myspace.com/themeatpuppets
www.myspace.com/dinahbrand
www.myspace.com/umackproductions
www.umack.com
We’re extremely proud to present the debut Irish appearance by one of
our favourite bands of all time, the Meat Puppets, formed in Phoenix,
Arizona in 1980 by brothers Cris & Curt Kirkwood. Blending punk
with country and psychedelic rock, their releases on the legendary SST
label helped redefine American hardcore during what many consider the
golden age of American underground music. Very Special guests on the
night will be the excellent Dinah Brand, featuring Dylan Phillips of
Pet Lamb and Stephen Ryan of Stars of Heaven
MEAT PUPPETS
For most of the 1980s, Curt, Cris and original drummer Derrick Bostrom
turned out a remarkable run of independent releases, originally
released on the SST label, including such acknowledged underground
classics as Meat Puppets , Meat Puppets II , Up on the Sun , Mirage ,
Huevos and Monsters . On those albums, the band applied punk's loud,
fast energy and a free-spirited sense of experimentalism to an
ever-evolving mix of bluesy hard rock, high-lonesome twang and homespun
psychedelia. The threesome delivered its eclectic iconoclasm with an
increasingly sophisticated level of instrumental interplay, highlighted
by Curt's inventive guitar runs and his and Cris' rough-hewn vocal
harmonies. The trio's dynamic interaction was further reflected in
their adrenaline-charged live shows, which were prone to induce
delirious sonic highs. Meat Puppets exercised a massive influence on
more than one generation of like-minded indie combos--including
Nirvana, whose fandom ran so deep that they invited them along as
opening act on their In Utero tour, and invited the Kirkwoods to share
the stage to perform three Meat Puppets numbers on Nirvana's historic
1994 MTV Unplugged special.
After nearly a decade of D.I.Y. success, Meat Puppets made a successful
transition to major-label status in the first half of the '90s, signing
with London Records and releasing Forbidden Places , Too High to Die
and No Joke! , making unexpected inroads into the rock mainstream and
even achieving a surprise hit with "Backwater." The band went on hiatus
for the remainder of the '90s, and Curt eventually reemerged leading a
completely new, Austin-based four-man Meat Puppets lineup for 2000's
Golden Lies . He then formed Eyes Adrift with Nirvana bassist Krist
Novoselic and Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh; that outfit released one
self-titled album in 2002. Kirkwood then spent an extended stint
touring as an acoustic solo act, releasing the stripped-down album Snow
under his own name in 2005, before feeling the urge to reactivate Meat
Puppets. "I never broke the band up," asserts Kirkwood. "I never said,
'There's no more Meat Puppets.' I drove thousands and thousands of
miles doing solo stuff, and I had a blast doing that, but nobody was
watching out for my ass except me. After four or five years of that,
I'd had enough and was ready to play electric. And then some trusted
friends in Phoenix said that Cris was rehabilitated, so I called him up
and he seemed ready."
New drummer Ted Marcus arrived in an appropriately organic fashion,
initially entering the band's orbit while working as soundman on a new
Meat Puppets documentary, which had been shooting during the early
stages on Rise to Your Knees ' birth cycle. "After a few days of
tracking, everybody was like, 'Sonofabitch, this is amazing,'" recalls
Curt. Having made self-produced low-budget indie records and expensive
major-label albums with big-name producers, Kirkwood has a pretty clear
idea of which approach works best for his band, whose music has always
been rooted in spontaneity and inspiration. "In the '80s, we used to
just crap this stuff out," he notes. "Those SST records cost, like,
five grand apiece, if that much, and those are the records that made
people like us. Later, when we got into a position to work in bigger
studios with outside people, we'd wind up spending a whole bunch of
money and having to satisfy the people who gave us that money. We did
that all through the '90s, and I'm just not interested in doing that
anymore. "Now, if I can get away with it, I'll make a record as cheap
as I can and put as little work as I can into it, which is what we did
with this one. I don't like putting a lot time into it. We cut a track,
and If we've played it halfway right, we're done with it.
