The dogs are barking but it doesn’t seem to bother Curt Kirkwood. The Meat Puppets’ leader is as laid back as he ever was, enjoying a little hang time at home before his band hit the road for a mini-tour in advance of their new album Rat Farm, which came out last week on April 16, two years after their last studio album Lollipop. But this tour is only the beginning for the Puppets. “We’ve got a lot of stuff planned,” Kirkwood informed me about the band’s plans for 2013. With songs such as “One More Drop,” “Time & Money” and the introductory single “Down,” the Kirkwood brothers are adding to their oeuvre of kick ass tunes.
Formed at the beginning of the 80’s in Phoenix, the two brothers experimented with different sounds; something they continue to do twenty years on. With a cult following built up via their SST Records releases like Up On The Sun and the self-titled volumes I and II, they moved to a big-time label, scored the monster hit “Backwater” from Too High To Die, toured with Nirvana and kept going until Cris Kirkwood’s drug problems were too severe to ignore.
With Cris’ return to health and the addition of Shandon Sahm on drums, the Meat Puppets have only grown stronger over the years. But Curt still remains nonchalant – about how he creates music, how he lives his life and his dogs that are barking in the background during our interview last month. It is what is..JPG)
You’re about to start a short tour before Rat Farm’s release. You haven’t gotten tired of touring after all these years?
Nah, I haven’t done too much of it. In the last year we were just doing little short ones, you know, maybe a week here and there, then did the album and we’re just getting started again. It’s always fun doing shows. I mean, it gets to be kind of tedious doing a lot of driving and whatnot but we try to keep it to where we’re not out for months at a time and that does the trick.
Rat Farm is your fourteenth album. How have you kept your music as fresh and as interesting as you have done after all these years?
Oh, you know, I don’t try. I really don’t care that much (laughs). I just do what I do. That’s how you do it. I’m not a real disciplined songwriter. I kind of have to wait till songs come up and then hopefully I like them cause I kind of get stuck with what I have. I mean, I like to play guitar, I like to sing, I like doing shows. I don’t know, I don’t belabor it, that’s for sure. I try not to cause it takes a lot of the fun out of it. I think that’s part of it: just have the goal to be to have a good time playing music and then the rest will take care of itself.
Has the way you write and create music changed since you’ve gotten older?
Not really, I’ve always been pretty much the same. I get an idea in my head or a melody or I’ll be sitting around playing some chords and kind of get an interesting chord change and then work something out from there. Like I said, I can’t sit down and go, I want to write this kind of song. That doesn’t work too well. I’m not that good at that. I mean, I can do it but in my mind it always seems a little more contrived than when stuff just kind of comes up. I’ll get something going in my head and realize, oh, that’s a cool song and I’ll finish it up that way. But I’ve always done stuff pretty much the same.
Did you do anything different with this album?
Yeah, we pretty much just set up the band and played the songs instrumentally as a live band and tried to get the takes that way rather than building it in the studio like you can do. You can just build it up like the last one. Lollipop, we built up like a model, just one piece at a time. And that was the goal on that one. This time we set up the drums and bass and guitar and got basic tracks for the songs as a unit and then finished it up.
Did you like doing it more this way?
I don’t know, really. I like it kind of both ways. I just think this way to me it sounded a little bit more like the band playing, more like we kind of really do. I mean, I liked the last album and I take into consideration it was put together the way that it was. But the goal there was to kind of sound that way too, to not sound put together. I just thought that there might be a little more clarity to those songs. And it wound up turning out sounding like real music. But this one to me sounds more like we did it. I think these are subtleties that maybe not a lot of people would really notice if you didn’t have your head so into it, you know.
“Down” is the first single. Why did you pick that particular song to introduce the new album?
I didn’t do it. The record company did. You know, they might ask me but, I mean, I know some people that have picked their own singles for sure but I don’t know how common that is, and I don’t have a whole lot of interest in that, the marketing side of it. I’m willing to go with their opinion. I don’t know about tastes and radio and crap like that. I don’t know how they do that stuff.
"Time & Money” is really pretty melody-wise.
That’s probably the oldest song. That’s one that I actually had done going in. There’s a lot of them that I had to write the lyrics for once I was in the studio but that was one that was pretty much done. I changed it a little bit. My buddy Kyle [Ellison], who used to play in the band, played on Golden Lies, he had that intro guitar riff, so I just took that and made a song out of it.
Waiting” has a great guitar solo at the end.
Yeah, that’s kind of going with the feeling of the song there, kind of just letting it rip and play, kind of a Spanish sounding guitar. That’s a pretty new song. It’s one of the ones that I wrote going into the session. I think I had the lyrics to that one too. It’s pretty simple lyrically, pretty simple all told, tried to flush it out with a few different vocal ideas. It’s got kind of like a vocal round in it, sort of like a Beach Boys thing.
Did you do the cover artwork again?
Yeah, I did the front cover. My brother did the back cover, the little rat drawing.
What comes more natural – doing the artwork or writing songs?
Well, the artwork is always just for fun. I’ve done a few where I did them just for the cover but this is something I had sitting around that I had already done. So I just picked it. I haven’t been painting much in the last year but, you know, I’ve always kind of liked the painting. It’s a big one, kind of like 4 x 4 and it looked real good once it was photographed so we just decided to use it. In some odd way it fit the title.
Have you ever done an art show?
I did, I had one up in New York City one time about ten years ago. I really didn’t know what this art show thing was about. I had a real good agent and it was well attended and all that stuff but I didn’t know I was supposed to sell it so I never really priced anything. And people started asking what the price was and I thought, well, I thought they were just for looking at. All this stuff that I had taken up there, I didn’t want to sell it, so it turned out to be just an exhibition (laughs).
What do you remember most about recording the first Meat Puppets album?
Well, the first time we actually did something that got put out was “In A Car.” Our friends had a band called Monitor and they were from LA, real cool band and we played with them some and they really were an eclectic band. It’s hard to describe them, but they had one song that they thought should be done like a punk rock song and we could play real fast so they said, “We want you guys to record the music for this song, just record this song for us and you can have the studio time to record, the rest of it.” We had like five hours in the studio and went in and busted out the rest of it real fast one evening when we were in LA.
The first album, we actually had like three days in the studio, also in LA at Unicorn Studios. SST set that up for us but I don’t remember a whole lot about it, really. I remember hanging out on the street. It was on Santa Monica Boulevard and back then it was just tons of hookers and it was all different styles, like it was a carnival atmosphere of weirdness out on the street. We’d go out there and sit around and go back in and play some more stuff. We just played it all live, no real overdubs or anything, we didn’t set up, we just did it. I don’t know why it took three days. It was a pretty simple affair but once again, it was kind of a whirlwind. I remember I stepped into one of the studio monitors one time, one of the monitor speakers, and broke it (laughs). They were a little bummed out but it was just such a simple thing. Also, I wasn’t that involved with the studio at that time. I didn’t know anything about studios, really. I was just kind of getting started going into those things so I would just go in and do whatever anybody told me. Spot, who did that record, engineered that one and Up On The Sun and Meat Puppets II and he did a lot of SST records and was kind of the house guy there, so it was very organic. We just did it how we played.
What would you say was the biggest difference between SST and being on the majors?
We had been kind of the de facto producers on all our SST records, there was no producer, so we just worked with Spot and he’d be in there engineering and we would just say what we wanted pretty much. Starting on Meat Puppets II, we knew what to do and we started working with Steven Escallier but we made seven or eight records with SST, something like that, I don’t know. Nobody ever said anything, nobody ever said, “You should record this” or “This is how it should be done.” There was nothing said so we could go in the studio, do what we wanted and give it to them and they wouldn’t bat an eye and then put it out.
Once we got on the majors, they thought at first, “Oh yeah, you guys can produce, that’s part of your thing.” We had much larger budgets at that point. I didn’t really know what you did besides just go in and record like we did at SST. We always did it real fast and not a whole lot of thrills but once we got on the majors we made some demos and they were like, “Oh no, no.” They wanted to bring in production and brought Pete Anderson in for Forbidden Places, which I thought was a cool idea. We had played with Dwight Yoakam. He had actually opened for us years before, just him and Pete playing acoustic guitars, so Pete knew who we were. He’s an amazing producer.
Then we went to Capitol Records up there in Hollywood and spent a good long time, probably three weeks or something there doing that, really getting nit-picky. That remains true through all the London Records where we worked with Paul Leary, and the next two were Paul Leary, and we also took a good amount of time and spent a bunch of money, tried to make them where they were state-of-the-art so that the record company would accept. Promotion depended on how much the radio people thought they could get happening, trying to get a hit. They never really told me what to write so much. They just said, “Why can’t you write a hit that we can get on the radio?” (laughs). Forbidden Places didn’t have anything that really sparked a lot of interest but the radio guy there, a guy named Sky Daniels, said, “Hey, there’s a couple of your songs that are real close. You’re almost there.”
When we did Too High To Die, he was like, “Ok, there’s one I can do. You’ve got ‘Backwater’ and you got that happening.” And it’s good and bad cause then you appease them. Forbidden Places didn’t do enough for them to make them too hot on doing a second. I think we had a good number of albums on the deal but we were semi-shelved after the first one didn’t meet their expectations and it was just kind of a fluke that we were going to go and do an acoustic EP of older stuff, of like Up On The Sun and all three of those songs that Nirvana did on their Unplugged. We went in to do all those over in Memphis acoustically. Then we threw in an old Phoenix punk rock song by the Feederz called “Fuck You” that we just went over the top electrically just cause we were in there and just wanted to, and we sent that to them too, just kind of good-natured ribbing and it sounded really good so they said, “Hey, make a whole album, an electric one.” So they put up the fronts for that and it wound up being a best seller. It was kind of flukey.
You mentioned Too High To Die and Nirvana. Did you feel after all the hoopla from Unplugged like, ok, we’ve been around for a while, people, and you’re just now picking up on us? Did that kind of irritate you?
Nah, I ignore all that stuff. It’s nice to have people talking about you. We had been a hardcore band and then Americana and country-punk and whatever through the eighties and at one point got kind of lumped in with REM and the Violent Femmes around the Up On The Sun time. And we noticed people were struggling to find a label and then with Too High To Die it was easy for them to settle on grunge for us, which still kind of hangs around because that’s when a lot of people got to know us in the nineties. But we’d been around for sure and by the time we got mainstream popularity, it was cool. But I’ve never really cared. It’ll drive you crazy if you care about what people say, you know.
Did you know that you were going to stay up there and sing with Nirvana as long as you did?
They planned on doing those three songs. We were around the New York area for more than a week practicing. We had a practice space over in New Jersey, or Nirvana did, so we were going in there daily and working on that stuff. We knew what was going on.
I bet you weren’t starstruck at all.
Well, you know, it was kind of hard not to be a little bit. I don’t know if it’s starstruck but it’s fun to be around people that are that gifted. We were kind of similar the way we did stuff. I don’t think any of us worried about stuff very much, it was just the way that we play and the way that we approached practicing was all similar: “Well, you know the songs so that’s good enough. You don’t have to beat this thing until we hate it.”
But it was fascinating too cause they were just a pretty unique band. There was a lot of enigmatic sort of emotions and stuff and it was fun to be around. But also we’d been on tour with them and they came from our scene. I became friends with them to the point of having a band with Krist, and then we just did SXSW opening for Dave Grohl’s Sound City Players thing with John Fogerty and Stevie Nicks and all the Sound City Players that he had. He called up and had us open that and then Novoselic playing bass on the Rick Nielsen portion of that. So we got to kind of reconvene, kind of like family.
What did Shandon Sahm bring to the Meat Puppets when he joined?
He hits the drums hard and he’s a Sahm (laughs) so there’s some genetic musicality going on in there. It would be nice to get him to sing. He’s got a great voice but he just doesn’t sing. He sings in his own band but Shandon really loves KISS and KISS is his favorite thing ever. He’s a bit younger, like ten years younger than I am, but he brought in his early bands and experience in music was more hard rock than say his dad but he picked up a lot of that stuff too. I love Doug Sahm and a lot of the stuff that Doug was into probably influenced me too. So it’s in there with Shandon and you just kind of have to work it out but playing with me he got more back to where his dad was at in a way. And yet still we have some hard rock stuff too which works real easily for him. He’s a real good musician and he’s, well, he’s a Sahm and that says a lot (laughs)
Your son Elmo is also musician and he’s been touring with you. What kind of advice did you give him way back when he was just starting out and wanting to be a professional musician?
I never really said too much. He grew up around us playing from the time he was born. The band all lived together so they lived with the band the first few years of their life and would have to hear that stuff all the time cause we’d practice in the living room. But I never encouraged him to play or anything. He picked that stuff up on his own. He just started playing and always just kind of did it himself. I never really told him too much outside of just, “Do whatever you want. People will try to say this or that but one thing, you got to be kind of hard-headed if you get to be a musician cause it’s easy to be influenced and maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad but if you want to get the stuff that you want, it’s a good idea to be straight-forward about it.” But I didn’t really say too much to him. He started playing guitar on his own and worked at it and he’s an amazing player. He writes a lot of music, a lot of different kinds of music. I’m lucky that he likes to play guitar and he’s having fun playing this album and he says it’s fun to play, which is encouraging. He’s a real good player and it’s cool to play with him. I haven’t played with a lot of other guitar players in the band but he’s real versatile and he’s kind of cut from the cloth. He knows how to ad lib. We’re pretty loose sometimes and there’s a lot of, “You feel like going that way?” and he knows what that is.
Any plans for another solo album?
I don’t have any right now. [Snow] really wasn’t my idea, that was Pete Anderson’s. I had run into him and he said, “Hey, I got a record label of my own now and a studio. You want to make a solo album?” I thought that was a great idea. I love the way Pete works and he’s just a consummate professional producer and amazing musician himself. And that’s one of the favorite things that I’ve done. I just kind of let him take control and just played the stuff on acoustic and it’s as much his baby as mine. I might do another one but the thing is, if I get a bunch of songs and I’ve got the band around, I’m liable to just let the band play them too, you know. It’s fairly similar and unless somebody else wanted to come around, another visionary producer like that, and go, “Hey, I think you can make this,” otherwise I think it sounds a lot like the Meat Puppets.
What are your plans for 2013 after Rat Farm comes out?
We’ve got a little time off and then we’re going over to do a festival in Spain and another festival in Lisbon and then we may go to Moscow. We had a show set up there but our guy didn’t get the visa work done in time so we had to postpone it. So we might hit that. Then after Lisbon we go to England, we’ve got a bunch of dates with Mudhoney and a bunch of our own there. Then we’re coming back. I know there’s some stuff like Summerfest in Milwaukee and some other festivals in July, but we’ll keep touring.
So it sounds like you’re going to be pretty busy touring. Maybe you’ll actually get a little rest also in there somewhere.
Yeah, if we get a few weeks off in between the tours it’s a real good thing for us cause we do it on the cheap. We drive ourselves, just get a van and we have one fella that helps carry stuff, sells merch, and setting the stage up and whatnot. You need a few weeks to recharge in between the things so you can get ready to go again.
Are you seeing a lot of younger fans coming to your shows as well as the old school guys that have been listening to you for years?
Yeah, you know, it’s kind of always been that way. I think it’s a really fortunate thing. I think that young people are an inspiration in the audience. You can always feel the audience and it’s cool, however they’ve been turned on to it and coming for the first time. But yeah, I can definitely see that. It’s a real good mix. Generally, the people that come out are the people that are of age to go to the clubs primarily, but if we can get an all-ages show then you do see a great amount of underage kids. And as people get a little bit older, they start to drop out, they don’t go to as many shows, but we still see a good number of people who have seen us coming back today. But it’s a broad mixture of people.
