Meat Puppets [ENHANCED] [EXTRA TRACKS] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REISSUED] [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]

Meat Puppets

Product Details

• Audio CD (February 23, 1999)
• Original Release Date: 1982
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced, Extra tracks, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
• Label: Rykodisc
• ASIN: B00000I5EJ
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #36,240 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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  Music > Indie Music > Alternative Rock > Hardcore & Punk > Hardcore

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
There are four early '80s American hardcore albums you must own: the debut from Flipper, the Minutemen's What Makes a Man Start Fires?, Ian MacKaye's straight-edge Minor Threat, and this, the taut, wired, explosive, and downright funny, fully realized 1982 masterpiece from Phoenix's Kirkwood brothers (Curt and Cris). Never had vocals sounded so skewed and manic, never had guitars sounded so hemmed in and angular. Hard-core fans loved the Puppets for their songs' breakneck speed. But, as they later proved, there was far more to them than the (non-)simple three-chord thrash. The fact this reissue contains 18 extra tracks (including the debut five-track single "In a Car," still one of punk's finest moments, and a terrifying, previously unreleased version of Fred Neil's tormented classic, "Everybody's Talking") is some bonus! Unmissable. --Everett True

From the Label
Includes the In a Car EP, "Hair" from the Monitoralbum, "Meat Puppets" from the LA Free Music Society Light Bulbcassette, "H-Elenore" from the Happy Squid Keats Rides a Harleycompilation, "Unpleasant" from the Placebo Amuckcompilation, and nine previously unreleased recordings, as well as an live video performance of "Walking Boss." Also, an essay by Gregg Turkington and recording notes by Derrick Bostrom.

"Meat Puppets" was released in Summer of 1982 to near unanimous praise from the rock press. The New York Rocker called it "one of the most forcibly gripping blobs of wax ever created," and New Musical Express called the Meat Puppets "near-virtuosos, three of the most inspired musicians living under the sun."

Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, the original twelve-inch EP release featured fourteen tracks, including the Puppets' classic versions of "Walking Boss" and "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds." For this reissue, the album has been expanded to nearly an hour in length by the inclusion of the contributions the band made to various compilations at the time, as well as outtakes from the band's early recording sessions.

As an added bonus, the albums in this series include an "Enhanced CD" partition for play on home computers. "Meat Puppets" offers an excerpt from the earliest known Meat Puppets performance captured on video. Recorded in early 1983 by San Francisco's Target Video group at their studio, the performance captures a scruffy young band nervously -- even uncomfortably -- jamming their way through a version of "Walking Boss" in front of a small group of punkers who were no doubt more interested in slam-dancing than spacing out to the Puppet's improvisations.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a love offering for your ears, June 24, 2006

By	M. N. Davess (Moscow, Russian Federation) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As far as I understand, the Meat Puppets never considered themselves a punk band, but just kind of let themselves be carried along, no pretense otherwise, but no real intention, by whatever they felt inside, whatever they liked and whatever resonated with them that was around them. Thus the Meat Puppets could be these insane monsters on this first ep and lp (and bonus early recordings) and then easily move on to being 'stoner country' (or something) and kind of funky, finger picking and dreamy, and 'college rock' (or something), and whatever else later in their 'career'.

So this is kind of punk, kind of hardcore punk even, but also not exactly, the categories being too limiting and pinning down unrealistically, and that fact also corresponds to the general feel of 'go with the flow, strip yourself bare, and let rip shamelessly' that permeates this release.

Never mind that 2 of the songs here (from their first lp, which makes up the first 14 tracks) are country oldies, even a traditional ('Tumblin' Tumbleweeds' & 'Walkin' Boss'), or that in the later, bonus, part of this CD (demos & live, by the sounds of it) there are covers of songs by the Grateful Dead, Neil Young & Harry Nilsson (and is the cover 'Hair' from the musical of that name? I don't know, but could that demented song really have come from there?); oh, and there's also a great cover of Iggy & the Stooges' 'I got a right' (it's just a great song anyway, and that demented meat puppet thing is just another nice context for it); but then that IS a punk classic.

I guess that was a major asset of most SST bands, and the culture of SST: just freely open to whatever influence, regardless of fashion, and a spirit of freedom and openness, and an enjoyment of the whole spectrum of living; dirt and human darkness, stupidity and childishness included.

But doesn't it just SOUND like 'let's just do what we want', even that no-one suggested it; they just lumbered onto stages and into practice areas with sunstroke from their native Arizona desert and it just kind of happened like that? Playing on the wrestling-ring stage of the Madison Square Gardens club in Phoenix (see cover of compilation 'this is Phoenix, not the Circle Jerks), in that heat, in that condition, with all those other crazy bands, and all that punk rock too, was just bound to rub off on them like that; or maybe they rubbed off on others.

Generally on this disc Curt Kirkwood (guitar, vocals) sounds like he's swaying about, sleepy, in a stupor, dribbling, losing the words, and occasionally lashing out at whoever may be there or who he imagines may be there, with bared teeth and long sharp, monster claws (strange that he looks and sounds so angelic in later pics and on later releases). His guitar is generally not punk rock barre chords, but crazy, loose, overdriving, (distantly) country-influenced licks on very metallic strings, to a frantic-and-free bass and drum backing.

So, besides the covers, we end up with mid-tempo to fast, crazy, wobbly, drivelling and raving, insane songs, a few hyper-intense, guitar feeding back already as it's plugged in, breakneck speed, wacko thrash songs (like 'Melons Rising', 'Electromud', 'The Goldmine', 'Dolphin Field' and 'Foreign Lawns'), and then, from their first ep (an orginal, World Imitation Records edition of which I am fortunate enough to still possess), two classics of extra-special loony beauty : 'Big House', which somehow simplifies it all and strips it down to to a twangy and silly version of all the above, and then the utterly brilliant 'Out in the Gardener', which is just a hypnotic bouncy puttering of bass and drums, with a wacky but almost sublime thin twang of some crazed and sleepy stoner cowboy.

I remember listening to this album in the record store, in 1982, and taking a while to decide to buy it, thinking I might find it unlistenable after a while, and the only person I ever seriously discussed the album with said as much: that it was unlistenable junk. Junk it is; inspired, transcendent, beautiful, godly junk.

This album is the infinite golden bliss of a Buddhist Monk's elightened inwardness fused and melted at heart-of-the-sun temperatures with a drunk fool's rabid primal scream.

'We played for you and you did not dance, we wailed and you did not listen, and John came neither eating or drinking, and you said he is possessed by a demon.'

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Glorious Mess., April 2, 2004

By	Patrick W. Schubert (Santa Ana, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As with Flipper's classic trainwreck "Generic Flipper", "Meat Puppets" elicits a type of knee-jerk reaction along the lines of "What the hell were these guys thinking?!". After a few listens, however, the album reveals a level of depth, creativity, and humor that few of the Puppet's contemporaries could ever dream of approaching.

This isn't the militant, humorless, paint-by-numbers hardcore being churned out by the majority of bands at this time. Rather, it's a hallucinogenic blur of blazing drum beats, brilliantly sloppy guitars, and manic, unintelligible vocals.

If "Meat Puppets" had been recorded during his lifetime, it probably would have been Salvidor Dali's favorite record.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars BWAAPA MAURHYTGHPPPPPTH, October 6, 2006

By	Powdernut 75 (right up your alley) - See all my reviews

BWAAA! JEKOLIMONYFHTPTHHTTPPTHHH....ZAKASOWERYU TIUN Y HUIY BWAAAAAAHHHHHPPPPHH!
There's your prize for buying this little stinker. Completely incoherent jizzmajazz set to fast and squirrely music. The music's great. The vocals twist and squirm through mazes of mush. Make your own soundtrack! You get to decide what the hell's going on with the lyrics.
Besides that, Meat Puppets struck a reverberating originality chord here. Get your friend to buy it first and then laugh and enjoy it together.