Episode 428 - Curt Kirkwood
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Really?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Marc:What's wrong with me?
Marc:It's time for WTF!
Marc:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Welcome to the show.
Marc:I again, sometimes I have these moments where I am self-conscious about the amount that I use the word fuck, especially last week when I have a guy like Monty Hall on.
Marc:I imagine some people are checking in and even Monty himself might have been checking in thinking like, I wonder how this interview is going to be.
Marc:And then he's got to sort of muscle through a bunch of fucks and my pathetic problems to get to this lovely interview we did together.
Marc:Sometimes I question it.
Marc:Sometimes I wonder.
Marc:Don't paralyze yourself with assumptions.
Marc:I wrote that down.
Marc:Don't paralyze yourself with assumptions.
Marc:It's all bullshit.
Marc:It's all your perception.
Marc:Be in the present.
Marc:Be in acceptance.
Marc:God damn it, I turned 50 on Friday.
Marc:I turned 50 years old and I'm not processing it.
Marc:Should have been a big birthday.
Marc:Was not that big a birthday.
Marc:A little bittersweet, I got to be honest with you.
Marc:But, you know, it's not even a matter of a half a century old.
Marc:That's not the issue.
Marc:The issue is that I'm certainly more than halfway done.
Marc:This is the final stretch, man.
Marc:This might be the fourth quarter.
Marc:You don't want to be in the position where you've got to make some sort of Hail Mary pass.
Marc:Oh, Jesus, I fucked up.
Marc:I hope I catch it.
Marc:My brother told me, my brother is a Jewish guy, a little more Jewy than me, says, well, you know, it's Simchat Torah.
Marc:My birthday fell on Simchat Torah.
Marc:which is the day that they end the Torah for the year and they begin reading the next day.
Marc:That was the transition.
Marc:Let's start the Torah over.
Marc:Let's start it over.
Marc:Let's look at it a different way.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:I'm 50 years old and I'm okay.
Marc:I have Kurt Kirkwood on the show.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Kurt Kirkwood on the show.
Marc:the meat puppets, seminal band, an important band.
Marc:Some of you may not know who they are, but they were an important band and they were important before I knew they were important.
Marc:Of course, like everything else in my life, I missed it.
Marc:I missed a boat on that.
Marc:What was I doing?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Ruminating about bullshit, trying to fit in, trying to figure it out.
Marc:I got to stop trying to figure it out.
Marc:By the way, I want to thank the folks at Yuckaholics for having me this year.
Marc:There's a yearly benefit I did on Saturday.
Marc:Two shows at the Beverly Hills High for alcoholics and drug addicts and the like to benefit sober living facilities.
Marc:And it was spectacular.
Marc:Spectacular show.
Marc:Amazing performing for like-minded people.
Marc:Boy, the places you can go when you're talking to an audience whose spiritual identity is too much information.
Marc:That's the spirituality.
Marc:The spirituality.
Marc:of recovery is you got a second because i got a lot of shit going on and maybe by talking to you i'll process some of that can you can you hold the can you hold the ground can you hold it can you hold the space can you hold the space for my bullshit so i can feel better about myself absolutely absolutely i can hold the space for your bullshit because if you talk about your bullshit that means i'm not thinking about my bullshit that is the glory of community right there we'll all get through this bullshit together
Marc:So those were good shows.
Marc:All right, Kurt Kirkwood.
Marc:So here's what happens.
Marc:My buddy Josh Clover, Jane Dark, Joshua Kaplan, important poet who I used to live with.
Marc:He did a blurb on a book called The Whistling Song by a guy named Stephen Beachy.
Marc:Stephen Beachy is a writer who I thought had died, but he didn't.
Marc:He's written a few books.
Marc:was a University of Iowa guy, I believe, an undergrad, Iowa Writers Workshop, and I think that's where Josh got it.
Marc:But The Whistling Song was his first book that I got, and I was fascinated with the cover, and I was fascinated with the quote from the actual whistling song in the opening pages of the book.
Marc:These are Kurt Kirkwood lyrics.
Marc:It's a shadow in the door, the silver in the park.
Marc:It's a broken, faded bird.
Marc:You've learned to call your heart.
Marc:It's hotter than you can seek, plainer than you or me.
Marc:I don't pull the lock back and I don't have the key.
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:That just it's mind blowing because it's like, I want to understand it.
Marc:I wanted this is beautiful poetry.
Marc:Where is it?
Marc:What does it mean?
What?
Marc:What does it mean?
Marc:It's a broken, faded bird.
Marc:You've learned to call your heart.
Marc:How do you?
Marc:That is fucking spectacular.
Marc:So I read that novel and I read that passage from that song.
Marc:I looked at the cover art on the whistling song by Stephen Beachy.
Marc:And I was like, who did that?
Marc:Kirk Kirkwood from the meat puppets.
Marc:And I started to look around.
Marc:for information on the meat puppets, and I found out who they were, this sort of renegade, undefinable band that kind of broke out, I believe, out of Texas.
Marc:during the tail end of the punk era, but were not definable, but important.
Marc:Did I mention that you might know them from the Nirvana Unplugged, the Brothers Meat?
Marc:Those are the Kirkwood brothers.
Marc:Kurt Cobain did a few of their songs on Nirvana Unplugged.
Marc:I think he did Lake of Fire and Plateau and maybe one other one, but the Whistling song.
Marc:That's Meat Puppets 2.
Marc:That was the fucking album.
Marc:So I started to just go crazy.
Marc:Go crazy looking around for Meat Puppet stuff.
Marc:And that was 1990.
Marc:And that album came out in 1984.
Marc:So of course I'd missed the boat.
Marc:But man, when I got into Meat Puppets 2, I was like, holy shit.
Marc:Where the fuck are these guys coming from?
Marc:This kind of like psychedelic, borderline pop, kind of punk, a little bit country, fucking tight ass, rock and roll, undefinable music.
Marc:Wizards.
Marc:So when I was in Austin, Texas, around the same time that I talked to Hunt Sales, I tracked down Kurt Kirkwood and got him to come over and talk to me for a while.
Marc:And I was thrilled about it because he's a real artist, man.
Marc:He's a guy out there, pushes the limits cycle, you know, just in terms of the imagination and the parameters of his own creativity.
Marc:It's a fascinating guy.
Marc:I enjoy talking to him.
Marc:You know, some people might think, well, what's with all the musicians?
Marc:Well, these guys are fucking great.
Marc:And a lot of people don't know the Meat Puppets.
Marc:And it's phenomenal stuff.
Marc:They're on tour.
Marc:They're going to be on tour September 30th.
Marc:That's tonight.
Marc:They'll be in Madison, Wisconsin at the Frequency.
Marc:They'll be in Toledo, Ohio at Frankie's on October 1st.
Marc:They'll be there on October 2nd, too.
Marc:Looks like they'll be in Lansing, Michigan at Max Barr.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm just looking at the Meat Puppets website.
Marc:But he's a great guitar player.
Marc:They got some great songs.
Marc:I'd recommend it.
Marc:It was great talking to him.
Marc:I'm 50 years old, folks.
Marc:50 years old.
Marc:I got to try to get it right.
Marc:I got to try to get it right.
Marc:Here's me and Kurt Kirkwood.
Marc:Kurt Kirkwood, we're at the cutting edge of media right now.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Does it feel pretty good?
Guest:Yes, it does.
Guest:The air smells wonderful.
Marc:The meat puppets are back.
Guest:Yeah, if we were ever here to begin with.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that a philosophical question?
Marc:Is that something you really think about?
Guest:Nah, not too much.
Guest:I never really quit doing it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, my brother went away.
Marc:He literally went away.
Guest:Pretty much.
Guest:He just kind of fell off the face of the earth for about 10 years.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's the core of the band, is you and your bro.
Guest:Yeah, and Derek, our old drummer.
Guest:And when Chris kind of went, Derek became a little bit disenfranchised, and I moved out here.
Guest:I moved to L.A.
Guest:for a few years, moved out here just trying to see what to do.
Guest:I mean, I didn't know how away Chris was.
Guest:I had to...
Guest:To kind of let time gauge that.
Guest:Well, some shit went down, right?
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Guest:Definitely.
Guest:A lot.
Guest:Like, he got into an altercation?
Guest:That was the end of it.
Guest:I mean, he became heavily involved in substance abuse.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:Had a lot of personal tragedy, and just that went on for a long time.
Guest:Intermittent spells in the can, and then he wound up having an altercation.
Marc:Taking a few slugs.
Guest:Yeah, he took one in the back from a fairly large caliber weapon.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's hard, man.
Marc:I mean, you know, rock and roll, it's like, I mean, there's nobody that I've talked to that doesn't have that in their story or in the band story.
Marc:I mean, it's rough, man.
Guest:Well, he hit somebody that was armed.
Guest:He hit a cop.
Marc:I was talking about the substance abuse.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It doesn't have to get to that degree.
Marc:No.
Marc:He hit a cop.
Marc:You got to be pretty fucking high to hit a cop.
Guest:I don't, you know, he claims at the time, no.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was, I don't know what he was up to.
Guest:He was at the post office doing something and had an argument with somebody over a parking space and it led to, you know.
Guest:Taking a bullet.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Just didn't like the way he looked or something.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Shit.
Guest:And you guys, you're not twins.
Guest:No, he's a couple years younger than I am.
Guest:And where'd you grow up?
Guest:Phoenix primarily.
Guest:We were both born here in Texas.
Guest:I was in Wichita Falls.
Guest:He's Amarillo.
Guest:We moved to Phoenix early in grade school, and that's where it started.
Guest:He still lives out there.
Marc:I know Phoenix pretty well.
Marc:That's pretty flat land out there, man.
Guest:Yeah, the town part of it is.
Guest:It's unique because it has all those mountain preserves right in town.
Guest:It's a great place.
Guest:I still love Phoenix.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Guest:And the town itself can be a little rough.
Marc:Any big city is.
Marc:And how did you end up both being born in different cities in Texas?
Marc:Air Force.
Marc:Oh, your dad was in the Air Force?
Marc:What rank was he?
Guest:A lieutenant.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, he was ROTC.
Guest:He went into the Air Force as a second lieutenant out of ROTC, and he wound up in the computer biz.
Guest:He didn't stay in the Air Force too long.
Marc:Yeah, so you were on a couple bases, and that was never your trajectory?
Marc:Was never laid on you?
Guest:No, we always lived off base.
Marc:Oh, that's good.
Guest:I was born at the base in Wichita Falls, but by the time we were in Amarillo, we weren't living on base.
Guest:And when did you start playing?
Guest:Well, I was nine.
Guest:I started playing clarinet in the fourth grade in the school band.
Guest:And I thought guitar looked easier.
Guest:I didn't think you had to push down on the strings on electric guitars.
Guest:I thought you said to touch them.
Guest:And so I told my mom I wanted to quit playing clarinet.
Guest:She said, you got to play an instrument.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:Yeah, that was her deal.
Marc:What was her logic behind that?
Marc:Did she play one or did she just get them focused on something?
Guest:No, she always had us doing stuff.
Guest:Yeah, take some painting lessons.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Take some oil painting lessons and do some music lessons.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was in 4-H.
Guest:I had a lot of chickens and we had horses.
Guest:Chickens.
Guest:Lots of chickens.
Guest:That was my thing.
Marc:What was the thing about 4-H?
Marc:I mean, because I grew up in New Mexico, but I grew up, my parents were transplanted from New Jersey.
Marc:But it was like a thing.
Marc:It was like to set you up with the agricultural future kind of deal.
Guest:kind of i mean you could do uh carpentry too which i did you could take that thing too but uh did horses my mom had grown up on around horses and so we always had horses and her husband who we moved out to phoenix with when i was five or six he uh he his business was race horses thoroughbred so we lived out by turf paradise
Guest:the racetrack and uh we had about a dozen horses on our property at any time and so you can be around horses i don't particularly care to i don't trust them yeah right no they're too big i feel the same way they're too big and uh you know i rode a lot that's how and back then in phoenix you could ride on the streets you probably still can like in scottsdale right the right places it's legal yeah and so we would just
Marc:you know so you didn't think about twice about it then but now you've sort of gotten some sort of healthy fear i got it back then i got handed to me enough times by them bit kicked yeah yeah whatever they if they want to they can hurt you so so there was always sort of some uh compulsion to do uh to create shit
Guest:I always liked it, yeah.
Guest:I always loved cartoons.
Guest:I loved Disney and the Warner Brothers and Coco the Clown, whatever.
Guest:And then my early buddy in grade school, he was real good.
Guest:There was three of us that all liked to do it, and a couple of us liked motorcycles.
Guest:I was way into motorcycles, too.
Guest:I liked to race motocross.
Guest:You did that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:jumped him and shit oh yeah yeah that was that was my that's what i thought i wanted to do when i got out of high school would just be one of those guys on the bike and flying over yeah and race yeah you know i just i wasn't that good yeah and my friend was pretty good but all of us wound up being artists um uh
Guest:I didn't want to finish high school and all that stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But I did it, and I did a couple years of trying to go to college.
Guest:So my mom was just, you know, you got to do it.
Guest:Just don't be stupid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Where'd you learn your chops?
Guest:I mean, how'd you learn how to play on your own, or?
Guest:Well, I started playing classical guitar.
Guest:And the guy was a real good teacher, a Spanish guy.
Marc:On the wrong knee with your fingers?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I learned finger style from him.
Guest:So you can pick?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I never pursued that, really.
Guest:I didn't.
Guest:I took lessons from another guy that did like chordal lead stuff, like had played with Barney Kessel and had his own music shop.
Guest:Yeah, he was real good too.
Guest:Both these guys are real good players.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't like reading music as a thing.
Guest:I really didn't like sitting there looking at the charts and the stuff.
Guest:And I'm not a proficient reader.
Guest:That kind of went away pretty quick.
Guest:And by the time I was in high school, I think by the time I was a freshman in high school, I quit taking lessons.
Guest:And my mom was, OK, now I'm in high school.
Guest:I can buckle down on the books and that kind of stuff.
Guest:But then people started bringing guitars to school later in high school.
Guest:And there was something of a saddest thing.
Guest:And none of them could really play.
Guest:And I was like, well, I kind of know how to play the guitar.
Guest:I haven't played it in a few years.
Guest:But I started playing it a little bit.
Guest:And there was another guy that was pretty good.
Guest:And he kind of rocked out.
Guest:And we would play like Ridgetop, Jesse Colin Young.
Guest:We listened to Steve Stills.
Guest:He liked Steve Stills a lot.
Guest:But he said I sucked.
Guest:And I kind of did for that.
Guest:I knew what I'd kind of been taught.
Guest:I knew how to play Brown Eyes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I really started liking it.
Guest:I thought it was just a cool thing.
Guest:I started kind of getting out of racing motorcycles because I was getting hurt.
Guest:Do you still ride?
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:It's just stupid, right, after a certain point?
Guest:I've been in the hospital and all that.
Guest:I had my lumps.
Guest:I've fallen off the bike a lot of times going well over 50.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:You've got protective gear, but you still can only take so much of a hit.
Guest:No, after the last big spill, it's just one of those things.
Guest:You've got to get back on it or you're going to wind up afraid of it, which I kind of was.
Guest:And I think that's healthy.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:Horses and bikes are out.
Guest:Yeah, anything with too much of a potential for bodily harm, I'm not there.
Guest:I liked to rock climb and all this kind of crazy crap when I was a kid.
Guest:I would do anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I graduated high school, I was 17.
Guest:I moved to Canada.
Guest:I liked outdoor sports a lot, too.
Guest:I liked to hunt and fish growing up.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Had some guns?
Guest:I did.
Guest:And I really liked to fish, so I moved up to Northwest Ontario.
Guest:I got a job at a float plane base that was ferrying sports fishermen to remote locations to do their thing, and that was awesome.
Guest:I was headed up to the Arctic.
Guest:I got a job up there to run a boat up on the Chantry River.
Guest:And on the way up there, the airplane went down in the tundra outside of Churchill, Manitoba.
Guest:The one you were on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wound up there at Churchill, missing the job up in the Arctic.
Guest:I hooked up with some other people that gave me a job washing dishes and cooking up at Baker Lake, Northwest Territories.
Guest:So I stayed up there through the season.
Guest:It starts to get real cold.
Guest:I had to go back and...
Guest:My mom wanted me to go to college, so I came back and did that.
Guest:But I was up there, I realized how rough it was doing this kind of stuff that I like to do.
Guest:And it kind of put a healthy respect of just...
Guest:Well, about everything I like to do.
Guest:I kind of had just not a full reverse, but I definitely still like to go hiking and stuff.
Guest:But I realized I really like electricity.
Guest:I like the electric guitar.
Guest:And I never want to do anything.
Guest:What it really did was made me realize I never want to do anything I don't want to do again.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But you went up there.
Marc:It's funny to me.
Marc:You went up there for a bass gig.
Marc:You end up on a boat that's going back and forth in the tundra.
Marc:So you got out in the world a bit.
Marc:But then you go and you're playing.
Marc:It didn't crash.
Marc:What happened?
Guest:No, it crashed.
Guest:It ran out of gas.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:It was too much weight on it.
Guest:It was a Grumman Goose, like the Fantasy Island amphibious thing.
Guest:There's lots of lakes up there.
Guest:He was aiming for a little one, but we hit trees.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:It ruined the airplane.
Guest:I walked out.
Guest:I walked to the lake that's near Churchill.
Guest:It's where a polar bear sight sighting vehicles are for the tourists.
Guest:Now you can go and look at polar bears when they're around Churchill in a season.
Marc:So the plane crash didn't change your life.
Marc:It was just the cold.
Guest:The plane crash did it.
Guest:That was what did it.
Guest:I felt real lucky.
Guest:That's unbelievable.
Guest:Was anybody hurt?
Guest:The pilot broke his knee.
Guest:He was a really skilled guy.
Guest:He had a lot of hours.
Guest:He knew the airplane.
Guest:He knew how to crash that airplane.
Marc:You just felt it.
Marc:It was like, we're going down.
Guest:He told us.
Guest:There was only five of us on the airplane.
Guest:That's what he said?
Guest:We're going down?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:He realized he wouldn't be able to hit the water.
Guest:it was real violent and uh it made me you know just i just had that epiphany i just said no matter what and you know i'm not it was almost like
Guest:Well, you know, you've been spared.
Guest:You can do this.
Guest:Now you can do what you want.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I still had been hooked up for the college.
Guest:And, you know, once again, I didn't have a lot of motivation one way or the other.
Guest:I just figured, well, I got to do something with my life.
Guest:You have to be self-motivated.
Guest:And I wasn't good even with somebody on my ass.
Guest:So, you know, I just completely just blew it off.
Guest:I just...
Guest:Then I started jamming more with people, just jamming a little bit.
Marc:With the electric?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was in a couple of bands right after I got back from my first semester of college.
Guest:That was the first band where I'd just turned 18, and I took a jazz lab at Phoenix College just because I wasn't... I kind of hit my mom off my ass there because I was sitting around waiting to go the next fall down to U of A.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I got in this band and I played with these guys playing disco.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this guy's original kind of soft rock jazz.
Guest:That was cool.
Marc:I went down to... What did you listen to when you were a kid, though?
Marc:How did you end up being okay with that music, necessarily?
Marc:I mean, were you brought up on country or any other kind of music?
Guest:I loved country.
Guest:I had listened to a lot of stuff.
Guest:I listened to... I always loved show tunes.
Guest:I loved that.
Guest:I loved The King and I when I was a kid.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I liked soundtracks.
Guest:Wizard of Oz I always thought was great.
Guest:I loved Cabaret when it came out, great songs and that.
Guest:I just loved music in general through high school.
Guest:I was a kid in the 60s, so the Beatles had cartoons and you had Banana Splits and the Monkees.
Guest:I liked Bobby Sherman, Petula Clark.
Guest:I loved CCR when they put out.
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:Have you seen him lately?
Marc:He can still fucking...
Guest:Yeah, it's awesome.
Marc:All right, so you brought up with all that stuff, and then you end up playing disco.
Marc:At what point did your mind get blown in some other direction?
Guest:Well, it already kind of was.
Guest:Through high school, I saw a lot of stuff.
Guest:My first concert was Bowie when I was a sophomore in high school.
Guest:In Phoenix?
Guest:Yeah, and I saw Joe Walsh and Charlie Daniels Band.
Guest:I saw Fog Hat, and I saw Leonard Skinner.
Guest:That was great when I was 14.
Guest:And then I saw Gentle Giant, and I saw Return to Forever.
Guest:This was all in high school.
Guest:My friends were kind of going, yeah, you should go see this or you should go see that.
Marc:Yeah, I did that too.
Marc:I don't think we're much different age.
Marc:I'm 49.
Marc:What are you?
Guest:I'm 54.
Marc:Yeah, because those are the same... I didn't get to see Skinner, or I didn't see Bowie until much later, but that was when he was sort of in the middle of it, huh?
Guest:He was Diamond Dogs.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:It was really, really fun.
Guest:And that was a big influence on me, too, just seeing that for my first live show and knowing that that's...
Guest:Okay, that's what it did for me was that that's Bowie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you know, so nobody else is Bowie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so you have to be yourself.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Oh, so that planted that thing.
Guest:Yeah, that was it.
Guest:And I had no intention of being a musician.
Guest:I really didn't until, you know, after high school.
Guest:I never thought about it, really.
Guest:So how'd the Meat Puppets start?
Guest:I just started playing around with some other guys.
Guest:I was from the West Side, which is more people listening to Ted Nugent and Deep Purple.
Marc:Yeah, I knew those guys.
Marc:Not the bands, but my friends were those guys.
Guest:The Nuge, man.
Marc:Did you see The Nuge?
Marc:I have.
Marc:Yeah, I saw him when I was in high school three times.
Guest:And I was never even that big a fan.
Guest:I didn't see him then.
Guest:I went and saw Kiss here in Austin a little while back.
Guest:A drum player, Shandon, saw him.
Guest:He was a huge Kiss army dude.
Guest:And he got me a ticket or something and said, you got to see Kiss.
Guest:So I went and saw Kiss and Ted Nugent played with him.
Guest:And that was interesting.
Guest:He's a good guitar player.
Guest:Yeah, he's got his own thing.
Marc:As a thinker, he's not that great.
Guest:He had a big Indian hat on, like a chief's hat, whatever they're called.
Guest:And he shot a flaming arrow at a big picture of Saddam Hussein.
Guest:It was a while back.
Guest:Wow, yeah, full on.
Guest:Yeah, it was some theatrics there.
Guest:But yeah, I stopped hanging out with some dudes.
Guest:Just a group of people that were from, you know, LRY, the liberal religious youth branch of the Unitarian Church.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:You know, East Side Phoenix, a little bit more money over there and more progressive sort of part of town, North Scottsdale and Paradise Valley.
Guest:And they...
Guest:they were, had, you know, been listening to different stuff.
Guest:Uh, I met Derek Bostrom, who was the original drummer to me puppets.
Guest:He's turned me on to like dub reggae.
Guest:I only knew from Bob Marley and Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff and stuff.
Guest:So listen to a lot of that stuff and then stiff little fingers and, and, uh,
Guest:what have you germs and uh uh all that black flag and uh the fall and all this different stuff from from that from the late 70s so that kind of blew your mind yeah i went and saw iggy pop um what period of iggy was that that was before less for life or right around then
Guest:Right around then.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But the guitar player that he had was definitely, you know, the dude that played on the dams first album.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And all that stuff.
Guest:So that was like, interesting approach there.
Guest:How was it?
Marc:Like, what was it that made it?
Guest:Lots of chords and just strong rhythm playing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And a cool sound and some abandon.
Guest:And it just kind of got me interested.
Guest:I didn't know Jack about Iggy Pop.
Guest:He's fucking great, though.
Guest:Yeah, it was amazing.
Guest:He was just like this little rubber doll.
Guest:He'd throw himself up in the air and land on his side and stuff.
Guest:It was just insane.
Guest:I saw Devo around the same time, and they were just out of their minds.
Marc:So this was like the late 70s, so shit was changing.
Marc:That stuff was coming in.
Guest:Yeah, my band at the time, the kind of hard rock band, they were like, are you going to go see Talking Heads or whatever, that punk rock crap?
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:I was like, yeah, check it out.
Marc:Lines were drawn.
Guest:They were really good, too.
Guest:The Talking Heads were great.
Marc:In the late 70s?
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:Must have been amazing.
Marc:And so... He's a real rhythm monster, too.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That was all about that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Just play your part.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I just got...
Guest:I started getting ideas of how to play outside with some people that just didn't give a crap about what I played.
Guest:And there was no motivation to be playing cover music in bars.
Guest:Or what do you do in Phoenix?
Guest:You play cover music.
Guest:So we started just jamming on some
Guest:Well, you know, like damn stuff, stuff like that, just playing covers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And but just for fun and then talk my brother into playing with us.
Guest:And it just was it sounded big.
Marc:Did he play or did he just sort of come to it?
Guest:Well, he took some guitar lessons, and then I think the first thing he got was a banjo.
Guest:We saw Deliverance, so he wanted a banjo.
Guest:And then I talked him into playing bass, or he started playing bass somehow.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:He was just out of high school at that point.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we had played some with another guy in this little thing called I. A friend of ours, Jesse Stragonczyk, had wrote all this stuff.
Guest:He was way into television.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so we did that.
Guest:And it was all his songs.
Guest:And he was kind of the lead singer.
Guest:And we did one show.
Guest:He came out and just tore all the strings off his guitar, and he wore a lab coat.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Theatrics, man.
Guest:Punk rock.
Guest:And I realized, oh, that's what the lead singer does.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I kind of thought, I don't want to play with the lead singer that just is going to hog all the, do this theatrics.
Guest:And I like playing music.
Guest:That's still kind of how I am.
Guest:I like to see it, but I just don't really know how to do it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So we're just playing around, and we started, like, we played a party, and somebody, some friend of ours, he's like, you want to play my party?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So we don't have a name.
Guest:He goes, well, you're the Rash.
Guest:And we played.
Guest:He called his little house the Magic Kingdom.
Guest:It was a bunch of stoners.
Guest:Everybody's just out of high school.
Guest:And so we did that.
Guest:And we started playing.
Guest:When there'd be a party, some of our friends at their parents' house or whatever would play a little bit like that.
Guest:And we were always just kind of
Guest:We were into Art Ensemble of Chicago and The Grateful Dead and what have you.
Guest:Yeah, you got some dead in you?
Guest:Big time.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wouldn't be a Meet Puppets without it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:When did that start?
Guest:Late teens as well.
Guest:I went and saw them when I was probably 19.
Guest:Because I liked this one song I heard on the radio.
Guest:And I just didn't know that much about them.
Guest:But I went and saw it.
Guest:Which song?
Guest:I think it was Franklin's Tower.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Roll away.
Guest:Roll away.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I thought that was a cool song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I went and saw them.
Guest:And I realized, oh, these guys are some of the only rock band that do what they want.
Guest:They don't just go and play their songs.
Guest:They jam out.
Marc:You didn't hear one thing you recognized, right?
Guest:I just loved it because I liked that stuff.
Guest:Like I said, I liked Ornette.
Guest:Coleman.
Guest:Yeah, and all that.
Guest:I'd seen a lot of that stuff by then.
Guest:Just free form.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Just lay it out.
Marc:Let's just play.
Guest:Just let it go where it goes.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:I realized, oh, you can do that.
Guest:You can bring all this stuff together.
Guest:You can bring the rock, the jazz, whatever.
Guest:It's all fair game.
Guest:It's all the same.
Guest:That's just a different medium.
Guest:And unlike oils and watercolors, they do mix in these different mediums.
Marc:How serious were you about painting at that time?
Guest:i've never been serious i just like to paint yeah you know i'll do it now and then and uh and uh did a few of the covers right did you do all the yeah i've done a lot of them i did this most recent one i only got one song off of that they sent me yeah sounds pretty good well thank you yeah man did you do the forbidden places cover i did i like that cover meet puppets too that's a good cover that's classic different styles on those two
Guest:Yeah, you know, just one's a little bit more abstract.
Guest:It depends on what I've been doing.
Guest:The Meat Puppets 2 one was probably wasted and just took about five minutes to just put something down.
Guest:I always loved Van Gogh.
Guest:You see?
Guest:I think my style is really just like it's mostly Disney mixed with Van Gogh.
Guest:I like to have black borders around stuff and have it be cell art, like animation cell art.
Guest:But I like you to be able to see the brush strokes too.
Marc:Yeah, I can see that on the Forbidden Places cover.
Marc:Okay, so you go see The Dead.
Marc:Were you doing hallucinogenics then?
Guest:Sometimes.
Guest:Sometimes.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Do you remember the first time you took them?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:When was that?
Guest:Right before I turned 18.
Marc:Yeah, what was it?
Guest:Acid.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What did it do to you?
Marc:Did it change?
Marc:Because there are some people, you know, you talk to, it's interesting because you listen to Robert Crumb talk about acid.
Marc:And he was a dude that was just a straight up ink art dude.
Marc:And then he said that that just did it.
Marc:And then you start to see the big steps and that kind of shit.
Marc:Did it have some sort of impact where you kind of changed the lens permanently?
Guest:Well, Crumb had already had an impact.
Guest:I came across one of his books looking for an animation book.
Guest:Hunter's book went on a kid.
Guest:So I had bought head comics.
Guest:Compilations.
Guest:Chris and I grew up on it.
Guest:I learned a lot about...
Marc:drawing from our crumb and a lot about life probably jesus christ oh yeah the first time i saw like humans fucking it was in okay yeah a lot of that stuff it was all there you know yeah just get it at the head shop get those uh zap comics or the uh yeah we started getting zap yeah yeah yeah you know in junior high so i got turned on robert williams and s clay wilson and the checker demon all that stuff fucking checker demon dude yeah s clay's panels that's fucking mind-blowing shit yeah
Guest:So, I mean, zoosanogenics was more of just a validation of stuff like growing up in the 60s and seeing psychedelic poster art or just what are these people about at all?
Guest:What was going on?
Guest:I was like, oh, yeah, okay, now I get it.
Guest:Yeah, after you took acid?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:There's a frequency.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:There's a sparkle to it all.
Guest:Yeah, you kind of done Psychotropics or you didn't.
Guest:That's the way it goes to a degree.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Maybe that's too hardcore of a thing, but that's kind of how it felt at the time.
Guest:I was like, whoa.
Guest:Now you see things through your new vampire eyes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Grateful Dead was one of those things that was avowedly, and Gong, too.
Guest:David Allen's Gong was a big one for me.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Then I started realizing what Pink Floyd really was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all this different stuff.
Sure.
Guest:But we also had a little group of friends that we'd just like to let things go, too, with the art and see, you know, we would build art out of anything.
Guest:We would ruin all of our new stuff and just, you know, put it all together and then set fire to it.
Guest:And that was, you know, the way we did art.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's what the Meat Puppets came out of.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So it was just sort of, it was like a convergence of everything you'd just been leading towards, and then you're sort of supported by the tone of what was going on in art and culture at that time.
Guest:Cognitive, well, it was punk rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was the little scene in Phoenix.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It wasn't that big of a scene, maybe 100 or 200 people that would go to any show, and there was a bunch of
Guest:bands around like that, like the Feeders and the Killer Pussy, Sun City Girls.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Not even a whole bunch of bands, and JFA, but we...
Guest:Yeah, we realized, well, they'll let us play here.
Guest:And also, the LA punk rock scene had a lot of people in it, too, that weren't just punk rock, like the Human Hands or the B people and stuff that became Walla Voodoo.
Guest:And then there was performance artists like Joanna Wendt.
Guest:And it was just open.
Guest:Do whatever you want on stage.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And that was a major influence there, too.
Guest:So we could take our little thing in there and play some real fast stuff.
Guest:And we could play real fast back then.
Guest:And we liked it.
Marc:But you weren't really calling it necessarily punk?
Marc:No, we never did.
Marc:And then how'd you get hooked up with SST?
Marc:How'd that happen?
Guest:Well, we played a show with Black Flag in Phoenix, and they asked if we wanted to put a record out that night.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was real simple.
Marc:And did you record it in L.A.
Marc:?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The first Meat Puppets record.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was hard.
Marc:The music was fast.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:Well, we did like Walkin' Boss and Tumble and Tumbleweeds as well.
Marc:Yeah, Tumble and Tumbleweeds.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we did the way we were doing stuff back then, which was just like purposely erase whatever happened.
Guest:borders could be erased without completely obscuring the tune right right right but uh and then get beyond that even so you're not thinking about it you know you don't want to be thinking right so you just use that as a framework and then just fucking go yeah yeah yeah just kind of air guitar style yeah you're really just faking it uh-huh but then getting it down but it worked
Guest:It was cool.
Guest:It was fun to do.
Guest:It was always fun to do.
Guest:We found people in the punk rock audience that liked us a little bit, but also a lot of people didn't like it because we would play things like just whatever.
Guest:We'd play everybody's talking or something like that.
Guest:We'd play something off of a Broadway thing, something that we figured out.
Guest:Just shake it up.
Guest:Yeah, and then you'd spit on and have crap thrown at us and stuff a lot.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Brutal people back then.
Marc:Even though you were doing it in your own version and there was a sense of humor about it?
Guest:Well, you got to get the people that are just into loud, fast rules.
Guest:That was what it was.
Guest:And that also was a big influence going, wait a second, I'm in this free music scene, but now there's boundaries here too.
Guest:It has to be this way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which I think was something that Black Flag liked about us was that they were being held to the...
Guest:you know what they were and that was pre-rollins yeah yeah yeah well right you know right around that time rollins came in when i've i i heard the early black flag but right about that time it was like 82 when we did it we'd put out one little single called in a car which was put out for some people in a band called monitor in l.a great band
Guest:uh, completely unique, wonderful band.
Guest:And they had a punk rock song that they wanted us to play that they'd written.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then in exchange for that, they let us record like some of our own stuff.
Guest:So we spent the evening just doing that and wound up with our little in a car seven inch.
Guest:And then the next one, the first SST was kind of a extension of that.
Guest:It's kind of same era.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did it out in LA and, uh,
Guest:You know, just then when we went out, we were doing a lot of shows of punk rock bands from Flipper to Dead Kennedys to you name it, you know, TSOL, any of that stuff, Black Flag, any of the punk rock bands.
Guest:So we were really getting exposed to a lot of people who were opposed, you know, to what we were doing.
Guest:And just we could clear a room out, you know, fast.
Guest:And we would try to.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:If that was the vibe, yeah, I'd give them what for and let them know.
Marc:But you were pushing the envelope in a different way, but they were just so limited to just blasting out some fucking energy.
Guest:So it seemed, and it was, I don't know, we would just fall apart on purpose and play this stuff that was just completely crap and insane, too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, just fuck with him as much as we possibly could and try and get him to leave.
Marc:What was your go-to room clear?
Guest:Oh, you know, get the fuck out.
Guest:Just leave.
Guest:You suck.
Guest:Just fight him.
Guest:Yeah, I didn't really argue much.
Guest:You have a microphone, so you could tell them, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You could tell them some classic stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, you know, don't complain too much.
Guest:We'll get your parents in here and get them married real soon.
Guest:And, you know, somebody get a shovel and clean that up, whatever.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or just... But mostly it was musically.
Guest:We'd just...
Guest:you know, freak out and not play real songs and jam out.
Guest:And sometimes we'd play real slow.
Guest:And I mean, we were never just, some of that stuff is great.
Guest:We would, we always taped everything and you'd hear it back and you'd go, wow, that was really cool.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And so people don't like it whenever they, they come to hear this or that.
Guest:And I realized, and that's even more of an incentive to play just what you want.
Guest:So then I really started kind of writing, uh,
Guest:More from outside of the scene, which I'd been caught up in a little bit there, quit.
Guest:I still like to play fast stuff, and I still do it sometimes, but it wasn't just like, I kind of took a step outside of it and started writing some folkier stuff.
Marc:With the second record?
Guest:Yeah, with Meat Puppets 2.
Marc:And that became, that's a huge record.
Marc:It was important.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, to some people for sure.
Guest:I get told that all the time.
Guest:That's your hallmark.
Marc:Well, it's just such a variety of stuff, and there was a real rawness to it.
Marc:There are songs on there that you would think are slow, but they feel like they're barely held together.
Marc:It's juiced up like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I really liked it at the time.
Guest:I thought it was great.
Guest:I started kind of also all along was like, gosh, wish we could play these songs.
Guest:you know, somebody else.
Guest:I wish we could just play them the way they kind of are.
Guest:They're just these songs.
Guest:Like who would that be?
Guest:They're just simple songs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, right.
Guest:You know, and years later with the Unplugged Nirvana thing, that's how, you know, they were played more straight and real nice.
Guest:And I'd always thought that would be a good idea anyway.
Guest:So I thought that was a great representation of those three songs, which are all off of me puppets too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I went and saw you guys
Marc:in san francisco maybe uh i'm thinking like 92 93 at slim's maybe or one of those places down there and i was all into you know me puppets too of course i'm like as usual late to the party but you know so i'm all hung up on the on that album and i go see you then and man you guys tore through that shit yeah we never played it
Guest:Quite like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And same with Up on the Sun.
Guest:We would make these records that had a nice sense to them and then go out live and just play them three times as fast.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We lived in our own world.
Guest:I just didn't realize it.
Guest:We just kept getting tighter and tighter.
Guest:Well, that was the thing.
Marc:It was much faster, but you guys were fucking on top of it.
Marc:There was no air to it, but it was in no way sloppy.
Marc:It was almost tighter.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, it was way, yeah, we became more like, you know, we started kind of looking at it like NASCAR event.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But at the same time, you know, just to have it, once again, it's, you know, just, I kind of, I think it was unintentionally just defying whatever was going on at any time, you know, it would be...
Guest:People would think it's this and I'd read about that.
Guest:Oh, this is what people think.
Guest:And then something inside me would go, well, I like Prince.
Guest:I like a lot of stuff.
Guest:I'm going to do this.
Guest:I'm going to wear some spandex.
Guest:I'm going to do whatever I feel like and not play to any of the stuff that people think it is.
Marc:Do you want to be pigeonholed?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It didn't seem like something that I could hold up.
Marc:Oh, that was it?
Marc:You didn't want to have to answer to yourself or the expectations that, you know, like, they'd be like, why don't they play that?
Marc:Because it happened to me, you know, I'm like, oh, let's go see Meat Puppets 2.
Marc:And then you did something.
Marc:It was great, but, like, it wasn't, you know, what I heard.
Guest:Yeah, and I always like to go see people and have them play their songs and see it done well and stuff like that.
Guest:And I think it's... I kind of learned how to do that, but definitely coming up and making a bunch of records through the 80s and even into the 90s, I just didn't get it.
Guest:I just only wanted to play it how it felt good.
Guest:Right, mix it up.
Guest:Yeah, just...
Guest:Just really nail it down.
Guest:Just make it as sick as possible, whether that was tight.
Marc:That's a good song.
Marc:Nail it down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was one that they tried to get on the radio before Backwater.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That song made them go, hey, we could maybe get these guys on the radio, even though it didn't happen.
Marc:But at that point, everything was so fucking tight.
Marc:The production was so tight.
Marc:I mean, when I think about the evolution of what you guys were doing, that whatever labels were being hung on you, whether it was cow punk or psych ability, not psych ability, but certainly kind of got lumped into some sort of psychedelic punk thing.
Marc:But like maybe early on was like that.
Marc:But then like when you guys got so fucking tight, it was trippier than when you guys were chaotic because it was just like there was almost like a frequency to it that it was just so tight.
Marc:What's that one tune where you're like singing like rapid speed?
Guest:Same era, Sam, probably.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, Sam, right.
Guest:The auctioneer song.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I always loved to go to auctions, and so I figured I'd try my hand at that.
Guest:That was insane, man.
Guest:Well, that was fun.
Guest:And then you got Pete Anderson producing it, and he had been coming from playing guitar with Dwight Yoakam and produced all Dwight's albums back then and had that Detroit guy kind of and had that production line.
Guest:cool automobile thing and the nashville thing showed show me the guitar sound is so like you know like just like i don't know how you would describe it but it was just you know it was right on everything was like you know what i mean there was not a lot of space in there yeah that was fun that we still do that one that's still a good one yeah that's always been a lot faster than it is on the record live it's always just as like
Guest:We're just trying to keep up with ourselves.
Guest:That's fun.
Guest:It's way fun.
Guest:That's a blast.
Marc:I guess one question that I have, because there's a lot of people that don't necessarily know Meat Puppets 2, but where were you guys at as a band when Kurt decided to do that?
Marc:How did that come about?
Marc:Just the fact that those three tunes are on that record, that must have changed things up a bit.
Guest:It did.
Guest:We were out on tour with them.
Guest:We were opening for them right after they put In Utero out.
Guest:And I really didn't know them very well.
Guest:I had heard...
Guest:a few things um even before smells like teen spirit people were saying you like seattle music have you heard nirvana you want to check that out like bleach yeah and uh but we were moving all the time back then and we're just doing our own thing and i and i heard teen spirit on the radio and i thought that was
Guest:really cool and and then uh all of a sudden they asked if we want to go out on tour with them out of the clear blue because i didn't know those guys and then so he sure will do it then in the one we're out for a few days and kurt said hey you want to play uh with us on our unplugged thing we want to do some of your songs and we don't
Guest:really know how you're playing that stuff.
Guest:So would you come and play the guitar and bass?
Guest:And sure.
Guest:So I thought that was a good idea.
Guest:He's a great singer.
Guest:And my thought at the time was if somebody was going to do this from the rock thing, I think
Guest:Kurt would understand what I was trying to do with my limited vocal abilities.
Guest:But what I'm trying to do is really what I would say was my version of George Jones, who's really probably my favorite singer in a lot of ways.
Guest:Through the years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Even though it's not rock or something, but for what... He's just... He's like, to me, that's like Van Gogh or Shakespeare or something in their leagues.
Guest:That guy can do whatever, but I thought, man, either Kurt Cobain or George Jones could do these songs.
Guest:So Cobain's doing them, and I really... I think he did...
Guest:Like I said, I always wanted to hear him kind of played without the hysteria of youth that we put in him.
Guest:I mean, we were still just right out of our teens and we were doing that and just still loving in Phoenix and playing in punk rock shows.
Marc:Full of rage and the beans.
Marc:Yeah, just... And he did it, man.
Marc:I mean, his version of...
Marc:Lake of Fire I don't think is, you know, it's a little more, maybe a little slower, but I mean, his vocals on it was not, it was sort of a homage to how you did it.
Marc:I mean, he did it sort of like you, didn't you think?
Guest:Yeah, I kind of think, you know, I think he got what I was doing there, which is to try to put something in there that's, you know, it's almost like my goal at the time was to kind of get beyond emotion.
Guest:It's not just, you know, some sort of like expression of emotion.
Guest:It's like...
Guest:You don't know what it is.
Guest:Is it hysteria?
Guest:Is it just pathos?
Guest:Is it insanity?
Guest:Is it beauty?
Guest:But it's beyond some kind of emotional thing.
Guest:I don't just want to sing my heart out.
Guest:I don't know really how to do that.
Guest:I don't know that I'm not in touch with my emotions still.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I think he really got it.
Guest:I think he was built for that anyway, and that's how he was doing his stuff.
Guest:I don't know exactly what the message is there.
Guest:It was powerful, whatever it was.
Marc:I think, yeah, when you were describing what it could be, it sounded like you were almost describing him.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, you just don't know, and that's the cool thing about stuff.
Guest:To me, you shouldn't really be able to put your finger on it.
Guest:It's just supposed to make you feel good or feel something.
Marc:Feel something.
Marc:I had Harmony Corrine on, the filmmaker.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I love that gummo.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, and I'm trying to get at something with him, but I think that my mistake was not really acknowledging that you can't ask an artist to sort of describe what he's putting out there necessarily.
Guest:Yeah, I've done that before.
Guest:A buddy of mine had a 40th birthday party roast at his house and he's an agent and has a bunch of clients that people know.
Guest:Ben Stiller was there and I'd just seen Zoolander and I thought I'd tell him how good I thought it was.
Guest:And I was drunk a little bit and even though it was a...
Guest:pretty intimate setting and it wasn't like i just approached him we were all hanging out and there was a bunch of notable people there um i still felt like an idiot i was just like how did how could you do that you know it's just like it's just
Guest:I don't know if I told him, it's just so, it's beyond stupid or whatever, you know?
Guest:It's just so good.
Guest:And, you know, I don't know that I, I could tell he wanted me to go away.
Guest:Yeah, who Ben did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, through my friend, you know, I'd hung out with some of his other clients.
Guest:Jim Carrey was one of them at the time.
Guest:And Vince Vaughn and Joe Pagliano were there, you know, and stuff.
Guest:And it was so, it was...
Guest:And it was at his house, and I've known this guy since we were kids anyway, through the punk rock scene early on, before he was an agent.
Guest:So I was kind of an odd duck out anyway.
Guest:We had a roast.
Guest:I always got along good with Jim Carrey.
Guest:He just seemed like the same dude anyway.
Guest:And I never felt uncomfortable around people that are doing performing arts or whatever.
Guest:But yeah, I do think a lot of people are more sensitive than myself.
Marc:But then you realize, especially funny people, they tend to take themselves seriously at some point.
Guest:Well, I'm a rube, too.
Guest:I'm from Phoenix.
Guest:I lived there for 30 years.
Guest:you know i've had plenty of opportunities to grow up but i still put my foot in my mouth all the time so did plateau come from just looking out at phoenix well yeah for sure you know there's that the obvious and it's also like you know some some of the alan watts there's a little bit of just dumb philosophical yeah musing in there and you just kind of tie it all together but i was always influenced so i still have to go back to arizona now and then and
Guest:I go to New Mexico, too.
Guest:I'll go up to southwestern Colorado.
Guest:I love to go to Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, you know, what have you.
Guest:Clears you out?
Guest:Just there's nothing like it.
Guest:Yeah, you know, just got to have that.
Guest:You just don't even know until you go back, like what's been eating you until you realize, oh, here I am again.
Guest:Thank God I'm in the desert again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is great.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You ever do the Death Valley thing?
Guest:Never been to Death Valley.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Never have.
Marc:Never drove through it?
Guest:Not even.
Marc:It's crazy, man.
Guest:That's what everybody tells me.
Marc:It's a little hotter, man.
Marc:It's a little more menacing.
Marc:Do you ever go out by Joshua Tree?
Guest:Yeah, that's great.
Marc:That's fucking insane, man.
Guest:That's why I kind of go, okay, well, this is kind of reminding me of Arizona.
Guest:I like that part of Southern California.
Guest:And the same with Texas is the same thing.
Guest:Go to a big band and you can kind of go, all right, I'm feeling it.
Marc:Yeah, that's it.
Guest:The desert's its own thing.
Guest:Whatever it is about that.
Guest:I love the forest, too.
Guest:I mean, I love to go up to whatever, to go up to...
Guest:to Banff or Glacier or what have you.
Guest:I just love the outdoors.
Guest:I like when there's not a whole lot of people around.
Guest:You can see natural beauty.
Guest:It's what everybody likes about it.
Marc:There's something about that flatness, about that desert thing, man.
Guest:Yeah, and then the rises.
Guest:Dryness, big part about the Southwest.
Marc:Yeah, because it trips you out even if you're not on nothing.
Guest:Well, yeah, everything's so clear.
Guest:There's no humidity, so everything is just, you know, it's high def.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And there's no protection.
Guest:You really feel like you're on a planet.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:cottage feeling you know when you're out there you get laid open and if you know you've been you know messing around with cactus or whatever yeah you know crap that you've been doing you know then you really see it
Marc:Did you ever do the cactus?
Marc:Oh, sure.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Now, you couldn't find that shit around here, though.
Marc:Could you find it wild?
Guest:Back then, not wild, no, but it was around before.
Guest:That peyote, they tasted shitty.
Guest:Yeah, it was shitty.
Guest:Once again, something odd, you know...
Guest:I don't think I ever really sought that stuff out.
Guest:Growing up in my neighborhood, it's where somebody would come around with a big wreath made out of it of concentrically larger buttons.
Guest:Yeah, buttons.
Guest:Oh, it tasted horrible.
Guest:But then all of a sudden, you're just laid out naked like a root pulled up.
Guest:And there's no going back.
Guest:That you can hop around still, you know.
Guest:It's like, oh man, whoa, make it stop just for a second.
Guest:Just so I know I'm not going to be this way always.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah, and even like it's weird, if you trip before, even when you talk about it, you start to feel it, don't you?
Guest:A little.
Guest:Yeah, at the strangest times, you know, you never know where that's going to click on all of a sudden.
Marc:Where you're just locked in and everything's just like, wah, right there.
Guest:A lot of times in the grocery store.
Guest:Just when you don't need it the most, you know, when you're trying to find a can of spinach or something and all of a sudden, you know, there's... Things are breathing.
Guest:Yeah, and those shopping carts are actually, you know, very advanced little vehicles and...
Guest:yeah i know and there's there really is nothing finite yeah i mean there isn't yeah it's probably true wait i mean what do you think about that i mean what do you think about the end you know i don't yeah i can't yeah it doesn't work my mind just
Guest:The same way I think about a lot of stuff, I'll go, okay, I'm just going to meditate on this, and the next thing I know, I'm thinking about Hazel and Mr. Baxter, and then poof, I'm off thinking about how cool rhinoceros is, and then my mind just... It won't do it.
Guest:It won't stop.
Guest:Yeah, it doesn't... I've always had a little bit of that, whatever it is, you know, just...
Guest:I don't have a broad attention span a lot of times.
Marc:Do you get a God thing going or no?
Guest:I think I'm way too mortal for that.
Guest:I feel way too... Do you believe in one?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:That's how I was raised, though, once again.
Guest:My mom was agnostic or whatever they call it.
Guest:She told me that always.
Guest:That's how I was raised.
Guest:Nobody knows.
Guest:And I never had early on anybody.
Guest:And so I've seen whole...
Guest:you know, flocks of saints walking across the field, you know, in the forest or whatever before, but I don't know what that is.
Guest:You know, are they Civil War ghosts or is it, you know, are those Martians?
Guest:I don't know what, I don't know.
Marc:Why are they here?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, now I know I'm seeing them, but I obviously didn't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then that kind of thing makes you think, well, just so everything's real.
Guest:If I think about
Guest:If I thought something up, even if it's just like the dumbest thing, well, it could be real somewhere.
Guest:Maybe it's real.
Guest:Maybe it's real in your mind.
Guest:Maybe not.
Guest:Probably not.
Guest:But all this stuff to me is, once again, I don't really dwell on it.
Guest:If it's not something I can put my hands on, I just don't dwell on it very much.
Guest:Right.
Guest:tactile things like that and just let the the visions pass without making too big a deal yeah yeah i want to talk about them too much or people start going there's a million beautiful things to see yeah you know and and i've always got my eyes open for something that i think is cool and and uh
Guest:About as philosophical as I get, really, is crossword puzzles.
Guest:I love them.
Guest:And that's thinking.
Guest:And it doesn't really appeal to me in a lot of ways.
Guest:But at the same time, once I've written it down, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Marc:Yeah, getting that word right is not nothing.
Guest:Simple pleasures are fine for me in a lot of ways.
Marc:Real quick, I feel silly going back to it, but so you do Unplugged, and now you've got, like, you must have had a couple hundred thousand new fans who didn't know who the fuck you were, who were like, what's up with this?
Marc:Did that, did like, you know, just on a business level, I mean, did Meat Puppets 2, like, blow up again?
Guest:No, Too High to Die became a big record.
Marc:The one after.
Guest:Yeah, that went gold real fast.
Guest:And we went out on tour with Stone Temple Pilots.
Guest:This was 94.
Guest:We went out for three months.
Guest:Massive stadium tour.
Guest:And people, I don't think they still, they knew the song, the Backwater song.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And you could say, yeah, Backwater, oh, yeah, I know that song.
Guest:But they don't know me puppets, really.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Did that bother you?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Our band was always, I realized that it's an acquired taste or whatever, that it wasn't necessarily what mainstream would be and the way we approach things, even if we
Guest:you know nailed it down for some reason because possibly because we never pursued it and people always wanted us to especially at the major levels and yeah we'd go and we'd make the records you know we we were lucky to work with people that we really liked like Pete Anderson and Paul Leary and stuff but but all surfers yeah he produced the too high to die record with backwater and that's are you friends with those guys
Guest:I had been friends with them since like 82.
Guest:They were some of the first... They called us.
Guest:They looked us up in the phone book when they went through Phoenix and called us up out of the clear blue.
Guest:So I'd known them for years by then.
Marc:But you guys share a sensibility in a way.
Guest:Huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were like always our...
Guest:We, you know, acknowledgedly kind of have that similarities that's not really stylistic, but what we are is, you know, that's it.
Guest:Those are some of my favorite people too.
Guest:Gibby and Paul and King are great people.
Marc:I've sat down with their fucking records, you know, just like trying too hard
Marc:to sort of like figure out what the fuck is going on.
Marc:And then I realized like, dude, maybe that's not the right approach to this thing.
Marc:You just let it happen.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Guest:There's a lot of smarts in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a...
Guest:a lot of creativity, but you definitely don't want to think about it too much.
Guest:He's a great musician and stuff.
Guest:And Paul, for instance, Paul just loved Willie Nelson.
Guest:Phases in Stage is probably one of his, if not his favorite records.
Guest:So by the time we do him,
Guest:too high to die when we're doing something like with an acoustic guitar or whatever it is.
Guest:He wants it to be like that and to be appropriate and be considerate of the song.
Guest:It was a great production thing.
Guest:And we did that, but it was
Guest:wasn't really it was trying to try to make good music and the record went over pretty good but and a lot more people knew about us but um that just exposed me to a lot of more uh popular stuff just by being out with stone temple pilots and uh having
Guest:people say all this stuff to me, just the Martian Chronicle part of me, whatever that is, it's like, or Zelig, like I'm around stuff and I become it.
Guest:And so then the next record was real heavy, kind of, and I was just like,
Guest:woohoo yeah and uh you know it's which i'm all down i was down for all of it i it's it's really it's really cool to have a band like the meat puppets have some mainstream success because you're such a fucking asshole to begin with yeah you know and then all of a sudden there you are and you're like haha fuck you here we are you like it or not
Marc:Does Beefheart play into your world at all?
Guest:Huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:That was also... Saw him in 1980.
Guest:I saw the last shows he ever did.
Guest:Two shows.
Guest:Wasn't he out in Arizona?
Guest:He did for a little while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then back to California.
Guest:I never met him, but I did see him.
Guest:It was like right...
Guest:Right before, as we were starting to meet puppets in 1980, Chris and I drove out there.
Guest:He did three nights at the Whiskey.
Guest:It was the last time he ever played.
Guest:I met the mother's spouse that night, both Bob and Mark.
Guest:That was a big thing for all of us, you know, kind of arty punkers at the time, seeing Beefheart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, yeah.
Marc:Because he was the root of it, a lot of it, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think he had it nailed, the freedom.
Guest:And also just in terms of being a composer, I don't think there's anybody like him.
Guest:Not Stravinsky, not Prokofiev, not Vyburn, not the random stuff, not free jazz, nothing like Beefheart.
Guest:That's a whole, it's own thing.
Marc:Where do you think it kind of, because quite honestly,
Marc:you know beef hearts been hanging over my head for years and i'm just now you know starting to to to really dig in so how do you think he evolved when you listen to his shit i mean you know what do you think happened oh r b you could hear that with diddy yeah yeah for sure it's like and you know holla wolf yeah right and uh and then uh
Guest:But I think early on in California, he got popular with bikers doing, like I say, like Diddy Wadiddy and that kind of stuff.
Guest:But he is a sculptor initially.
Guest:And he apparently got a scholarship to a school in France.
Guest:And his parents wouldn't let him go because they thought artists were suspicious or something like that.
Guest:And I think sculpting always played a lot in it.
Guest:I talked to some people who played with him.
Guest:Cliff Martinez, who played with the Chili Peppers, played drums for a while.
Guest:He played on Ice Cream for Crow.
Guest:And I said, what's that like?
Guest:Well, he's real demanding.
Guest:He stands right over you and is like this.
Guest:But he said he'll draw pictures of how it's supposed to.
Guest:He doesn't write it out.
Guest:It's not musical notes.
Guest:He'll draw little pictures and diagrams.
Guest:which that appealed to me.
Guest:Geometry and abstract geometry.
Marc:I get that.
Marc:It's like you wonder how much of Beefheart early on defined Zappa and which way that went.
Guest:I think I don't equate them as much.
Marc:But they were together.
Guest:Yeah, they were together.
Guest:And I hear people say, oh, you know, Zappa got a lot off of Beefheart or whatever.
Guest:And some of the musicians that have played, I think he probably was really eccentric.
Guest:And I think... But...
Guest:There are two different things.
Guest:I love Frank Zappa, too.
Guest:That's just another one to me that's just amazing discipline as a rock band.
Marc:Prolific as fuck, too.
Guest:And great guitar player.
Guest:People never, they don't say it enough what a great guitar player Zappa was.
Guest:He could really shred.
Guest:And, you know, yeah.
Guest:That happens when you're really good at like Todd Rundgren's another one who's just a sick guitar player.
Guest:Doesn't get the credit.
Guest:Yeah, or people like Prince is another one.
Guest:What a great guitar player.
Guest:How many people that are into Prince just don't Purple Rain or whatever.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:A lot of times he's, I think with guitar heads, people might know that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Zappa, to me, that's kind of his own thing.
Guest:I never really equated him that much.
Guest:I love what they did together.
Guest:I love the whatever.
Guest:I would think it was done here at the Armadillo World Headquarters, before I was out singing with Zappa.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think they were buddies, but I don't know.
Guest:I'm sure they influence each other, and musicians influence each other all the time.
Marc:Do you ever get that thing where you see somebody that you've directly influenced, or do you pay attention to that shit?
Marc:Does it have an effect on you?
Marc:Do you see guys you like today that are like, you know, that's pushing the envelope there?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, everything.
Guest:I'm easily influenced that way.
Guest:I have to watch it sometimes because I'll just go right down the rabbit hole if I go and see something and it's amazing.
Guest:I'll think I want to do that for a while until I make a fool out of myself.
Guest:What was the last mistake you made along those lines?
Guest:Whoa, I don't know.
Guest:I think I'm still trying to recover from seeing Leonard Skinner when I was a kid.
Guest:Honestly, I think the Ron Van Zandt orientation and the vocals.
Guest:My grandmother taught me how to growl with my voice when I was a little kid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:That's still reverberating.
Marc:Skinner didn't growling.
Guest:It can come out.
Guest:Once again, Skinner was well beyond just being a southern rock band.
Guest:Maybe that's what they were to themselves and maybe that's what they really are, but they're a really great band.
Guest:Live, it was just like
Guest:That set the bar up real young for me.
Guest:That's what a band can do live.
Guest:They were tight as fuck, right?
Guest:Yeah, and just pushing it to where you were just like, holy shit.
Marc:Guitar army.
Guest:Real naturals.
Guest:I guess they just did it a lot.
Marc:So this newest record, how do you rank it among your records?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I have no idea, man.
Guest:Do you like it?
Guest:I always like what I do.
Guest:I always think it's great.
Guest:I don't try to go over my head too much.
Guest:I really just work to do what we're doing as best as it can be done and try to respect that that's what it is.
Guest:Try not to make too much out of it.
Guest:And I'm not that attached to anything either.
Guest:It's just music.
Guest:And it's only rock music or whatever.
Guest:It's like peasant music.
Marc:But it's you and your brother again.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You guys are getting along all right?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:We never had a problem with that, really.
Guest:It's just us don't really like being around people that are messed up that much.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:That's my sensitivity.
Guest:Is he living here?
Marc:He lives in Phoenix.
Marc:And why'd you pick Austin?
Marc:You just dig it here?
Guest:I lived in Venice Beach for a couple years.
Guest:I moved over there once in the mid-90s.
Guest:I couldn't get anything going.
Guest:I couldn't get musicians to want to play without being paid to practice and stuff.
Guest:And I just wasn't used to anything like that.
Guest:It was real expensive and time-consuming and just about impossible.
Guest:So I knew people here and butthole surfers mostly and people that I'd met through them.
Guest:I knew I could put a band together here.
Guest:So I moved over here and did that.
Guest:It was great talking to you, man.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Guest:Good for talking to you, too.
Guest:It was a lot of fun.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.
Marc:You people who are newbies or people who are just coming to the show and you missed about 400 episodes, only the most recent 50 are available for free on the site there.
Marc:Oh, L.A.
Marc:Podfest is coming up.
Marc:Go to LAPodfest.com.
Marc:That's this weekend.
Marc:What else?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So get the app.
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Marc:So if you want to do that, leave a comment on the comment board.
Marc:Enjoy.
Marc:Everything's going to be okay.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Boomer lives!