Sunday Music: Meat Puppets II

It was Nirvana Unplugged. I didn’t start asking questions to go back into the Meat Puppets catalog until after that concert. I was in middle school. You should also understand, that I had but one family member cluing me onto any of this stuff even existing (hey Tim), and a few friends with cool older siblings who were willing to pass tapes down. 

As a suburban middle-schooler in the early to mid-90s, I also didn’t have the budget, let alone the transportation options, for building the music library I dreamt of at the time. A Kurt Cobain cosign and some cool older friends nods was enough to get me to dig. Plus, thanks to Too High To Die not long after, the old stuff got easier to track down too. 

Still, you find your ways. It’s part of the joy of being curious. Let’s talk about II. 

Meat Puppets II doesn’t sound like Meat Puppets (I). They were a sloppy, messed-up hardcore band. They were on SST - with Black Flag, et. al. “Cow Punk” gets thrown around when I look up stuff now. Weird, but fitting.

In my mind, in the “hardcore got boring after peak fast, loud, and shouty” moments in the early 80s, The Minutemen went one way and the Meat Puppets went another, and I’ve forever been fascinated by how both of these acts evolved. For how different they were. 

The sheer curiosity of these bands. For what they did, when they did it, and just - how?? Why didn’t anybody else quite do this?! Why is it so - cool (at least to me, still today/now, but also then at that age)???

Kurt Loder reviewed Meat Puppets II in 1984 for Rolling Stone. Yes, future MTV News anchor with the vibes and the hair. That Kurt Loder. He poetically described the record as a “cultural trash compactor.” He gave it 4 out of 5 stars. 

In 1984, for context, Bruce Springsteen was putting out Born in the USA. John Cougar was battling “Authority” and describing “Pink Houses” a year earlier on Uh-Huh. America was being taken over by Japan and Americana represented a cultural pushback of a movement operating at all levels of culture.

Enter the Meat Puppets. 

Yeah, the mainstream caught the vibes, but the underground got high on the vapors. They were raving mad and going gonzo in zines. They were putting out albums upon albums of in-between music for those that defied the monoculture-seeking major labels. It was an underground renaissance.

There’s always an underground renaissance happening somewhere, if you’re willing to look hard enough for it.

Meat Puppets II is sloppy. It’s chaotic. It’s punk, it’s country, it’s kind of the sound of being in between two AM/FM channels while driving through nowhere, lost in the noise of “what was that I just heard” staticky brilliance. The kind you wake your friend up in the passenger seat to hear. The kind he turns to you, because you’re in the middle of the desert or somewhere that’s very nowhere, and he says, “What? Oh. OHhhhh.”

It still sounds best on tape to me to this day. Spotify should add a “like it sounded on a tape in a busted up walkman” effect. Where’s that feature? 

I don’t know what more to say about it except that the whole album plays like a feeling. There’s a lot of youth in it. But there’s a maturity too. You can hear what Kurt Cobain and Nirvana glommed onto. The pop behind the punk is undeniable. There’s hooks. There’s melodies. Even if at first blush they’re poorly executed, they’re also perfectly executed.  

And while you can’t exactly slow dance at a prom to it, but you can have one hell of a pit to it. 

I learned to play a bunch of these songs on guitar from Nirvana Unplugged. When I made it back to the source material, my brain melted. It opened the gateways to connecting my Johnny Cash obsession (from my parent’s 45s) to Uncle Tupelo, the Old 97s, and the others that followed. 

We get so caught up in hip-hop crossing artistic lines across generations in this period, that it’s easy to forget how much rock actually progressed for those not just trying to repeat the past. 

Nothing against Springsteen or Mellencamp either. I love those too. But Meat Puppets II will always be the roots of my Americana experience.

We Americans are a weird bunch. We global citizens - we are f***** up, and it’s f****** beautiful sometimes. Especially when the expression just comes exploding out. Meat Puppets II is an explosion. It can never happen in exactly this way again either.  

Play the whole record, but if you know nothing yet, maybe this video for “New Gods” will give you a sense of the energy. It’s not even my favorite song on the album, but this is just mesmerizing. 

And what about you - favorite Meat Puppets album? Favorite piece of Americana? Best middle-school, cool older sibling hand me down discovery?