We have instant access to all of recorded music, more or less. As a result, genres are collapsing and fragmenting, subcultures are mutating and combining at a rate beyond the capacity of any reasonable follower to keep up. Dizzying music is being made, but with pandora’s box now irreversibly open, I wonder whether a band like Meat Puppets would be possible in the 21st century.
I don’t know too much about the context in which brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood grew up but if, as is reasonable to expect, the music they made is infused with their influences, then as a listener to that music, I think I’m allowed a little license to colour in the gaps.
I see two brothers, kicking their heels in a distant corner of the continental United States (Phoenix, Arizona), baking in the heat, wondering how to occupy their gently frying teenage minds. From the air, from passing trucks, from a hundred radios and whispering TV sets they are picking up sounds from distant broadcasts, drifting in across the mesa and finding ways to put hooks into them as, in turn, the brothers begin to hold on to them like lifelines.
Actually, that’s where my romantic notion veers from the tracks. I’m sure it’s all wrong, but the idea that the boys who would be Meat Puppets grabbed onto music as a lifeline just doesn’t ring true. For here, plainly, is music made without any expectations whatsoever, with no care for who might hear it and what they may subsequently do with it. No-one could have created this stuff thinking it was going to offer them a way out or open up an escape route. The songs are so internal,. so personal, so unique.
When Meat Puppets formed in 1980, the brothers were in their early 20s. It’s entirely possible that by this age all they had heard was country music and, recently, hardcore punk. Taking these two forms, they set out to make some music that would make them happy. That lack of exposure, that insularity, is almost impossible to imagine these days. And yet in these hands and mouths and minds is turned into wonderful, charming, surprising organic shapes, combining the naivety of school children with the assured playing of alien virtuosos. The thrashing stumble stomp of ‘Split Myself in Two’ staggers into the whirling reel ‘Lost’ and then on into rich and wild meadows. ‘Plateau’ discovers undiscovered lands. lyrically and musically, and its playing is deft and intoxicating, as is the ‘Aurora Borealis’ that blooms after it. Everywhere you listen there are new forms of life growing from familiar places.
And here, I think, is where things are different now. I wonder whether it is still possible to make music that feels as unexposed to and unconcerned about the world as this. Truly this was a strange and wonderful nirvana, where unique and fleeting conditions existed.
Devon Record Club 