The Creative Freedom of Meat Puppets: A Conversation with Derrick Bostrom

Transmission 090: Interview with Meat Puppets

Meat Puppets, formed in Phoenix, Arizona in 1980, emerged with the original lineup of brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood alongside drummer Derrick Bostrom. Originating within the punk rock scene, the group gradually developed a hybrid style that fused punk energy with elements of country and psychedelia. This stylistic shift became evident on early albums such as Meat Puppets II (1984) and Up on the Sun (1985), both of which attracted a devoted underground following for their unconventional sound.

The band’s national exposure grew considerably in 1993 when Curt and Cris Kirkwood were invited by Nirvana to join them during their MTV Unplugged performance, playing three Meat Puppets songs alongside Kurt Cobain. The collaboration introduced their music to a broader audience and helped pave the way for the release of Too High to Die (1994), which became their most commercially successful album.

Throughout the following decades, Meat Puppets experienced multiple lineup changes and periods of hiatus but continued recording and performing. Their body of work has left a lasting imprint on the development of alternative and indie rock in the United States. In recognition of their contributions, they were inducted into the Arizona Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2017.

Featured image by Joseph Cultice

What were some of the earliest musical influences that shaped the sound of Meat Puppets?

Obviously, punk rock. I got into punk around 1977 and tried to start a punk band in Phoenix and Tucson while I was in school. I didn’t succeed until I met the Kirkwoods—Chris on bass and Curt on guitar—who were as disaffected as I was. Curt had been in a few bands playing more commercial music but was kicked out for being too weird. I gave him some of my punk rock records, and he liked them enough. He saw Iggy Pop when he came to Phoenix in ’79 and he said he liked it well enough. I said, “well, you and I should learn some Iggy and the Stooges songs”, which we did, and we got Curt’s brother, Chris, involved.

Chris wasn’t into punk rock initially; he saw it as a fashion thing and was turned off. He didn’t care for any of that because we were all more or less kind of hippies.I pretty much still wear jeans and T-shirt and tennis shoes, just like I did when I was in my teens. We talked Chris into it because anything his big brother would do, he would be happy to join in on. 

Curt was more of a Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, David Bowie kind of guy, though we all had phases of liking The Grateful Dead. But the interest in joining the punk rock movement brought us together. There was a punk scene in Phoenix, though not many bands from there became widely known. The scene was influential, with bands starting to do shows and getting clubs to host them, even bringing in bands from L.A. I would say the Los Angeles punk scene was a big influence, with bands like The Germs—whose drummer, Don Bolles, was from Phoenix—The Plugs, The Go-Go‘s before they got popular, Alley Cats, X, and others. 

We thought, “We could open for them,” so we put together a band. People liked it, and we kept playing locally until we got the chance to play in Los Angeles. A band called The Consumers had moved to L.A. and then broke up, with their singer joining Human Hands. Through them, we met a band called Monitor, who liked us and put out a record for us, acting as our de facto managers until we started working with SST and Black Flag’s label.

So, the main influence that brought us together was the punk rock of the time.

Your early music combined punk with country and psychedelic rock. What inspired this mix?

That’s just what we were into. The Kirkwoods weren’t committed to punk rock like I was. I started playing drums because I loved punk rock, but they had been playing music before that. Curt always liked Johnny Cash, who was on TV when he was growing up, and Neil Young. A lot of our so-called ‘country influence’ comes from listening to Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Byrds—more country rock than straight country. As for psychedelia, the Phoenix punk scene was always kind of psychedelic/progressive. 

We liked bands like Gong, Yes, Eno, and others, both pre-punk and after. We listened to all that stuff, and Curt happened to be a really good guitarist. When we played together, we realized we could play anything we wanted. We naturally stretched out, and we took a lot of acid, which didn’t hurt.

How did the transition from hardcore punk to more experimental sounds come about? Was it a conscious decision or a natural evolution?

The main reason was that we got on SST and started playing with Black Flag. We found that their audience was too straight for us. One of the reasons we leaned so hard into country on our second record with SST was because we didn’t like the Black Flag hardcore crowds. They would throw things and spit at us. We had long hair and didn’t wear the uniform, and some of the kids decided that was bad. The idea that if you’re not a certain way, you should be picked on was just absurd. That kind of mentality still goes on in America today, and we didn’t like it then and we don’t like it now.

So a lot of what we did on Meat Puppets 2 was a reaction to hardcore, which we didn’t really care for. The way we presented ourselves on that record might differ from the music we were interested in, but we were reacting to the punk scene around us. We were interested in everything, but you can only put 12 songs on a record at a time. Over time, with records like Up on the Sun, we stretched out musically. By that point, we’d been playing together for five years, and we had developed a fluidity in playing each other’s style. We worked on an extemporaneous, group-mind approach, which served us well, and we wanted to capture some of that weird energy on that record.

However, after Up on the Sun, we faced the challenge of being successful, which meant we started getting noticed. And when you start getting noticed, people begin to typecast you. We struggled to make records after Up on the Sun that interested us because people wanted us to be a certain way. We did the EP Out My Way, which was less punk and very un-country, including elements of funk and art rock, but people didn’t really take to it. Similarly, Mirage was a very art rock record, and people started losing interest. So we switched gears a bit and did something more riff-rocky with Huevos, but then half of the people called us sellouts.

The problem with scenes like punk rock, hardcore, college rock, and alternative is that every fucker has their own opinion of how things should be. You can’t do anything without someone accusing you of selling out or not being good enough. It’s like with R.E.M. when the media decided they were going to be the band to bring into the mainstream—they were constantly second-guessing them. The media, unfortunately, tells people what to think and how to react, and the majority wait for that before making decisions.

We’re a band from Phoenix that didn’t give a shit and just wanted to do what we wanted. We had enough of an audience to avoid day jobs, and kept making records and touring. That kept us going until the major labels started buying up bands that were keeping the alternative scene alive. Without those cash cow bands, the scene began to fade, and labels started to go under. Good bands went to major labels, making it harder to get good gigs. Opening bands on major labels got better pushes than SST could give us, and you could find their records in stores while ours were harder to find. It made us wonder if things would shrivel up and die if we didn’t get signed to a major label, and basically, that’s what happened. The major labels co-opted the alternative scene, turned it into “indie,” which became meaningless, and then moved on to the boy band scene after draining the cash out of the alternative scene. Many bands were left behind, some dying of drug overdoses. The music business sucks, and our main impetus has always been to turn our backs on anything other than whatever the fuck we feel like doing.

How did the connection with SST Records come about, and how did it impact your career at the time?

At the time, it was a good thing for us. We did our first EP with a band called Monitor, who had a label called World Imitation. They had a great record of their own and relationships with small distributors up and down the coast, one of which was Systematic, run by Joe Carducci and John Bouchard. They had a label called Thermador and were interested in doing a record with us, which we were all for. But Joe was in the process of moving to SST, so Thermador shut down, and he brought us along to SST.

Our connection to SST was mainly through Joe Carducci. SST was its own thing, largely fueled by sales from Black Flag. When we joined, it was just us, Minutemen, Saccharin Trust, and a couple of others, before they started signing bands like Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth. SST’s main strategy was to go on tour, and their booking arm put a lot of time and energy into their thing. I saw you guys posted an interview with Henry Rollins recently, and he said the same thing—what attracted him to SST was how much work they put into it, how committed they were. We weren’t as committed; we thought they were a little obsessive, even cult-like. But in hindsight, they kept their thing going long and hard until it became unsustainable.

If you talk to Greg [Gin], he’d probably give you a jaundiced view of the music industry as well. They had lots of anti-music biz stuff in their propaganda, like “major labels suck.” A lot of their bands left on not-so-good terms, and we were one of them. The big difference is that we managed to get our back catalog returned to us, which was huge, especially since Meat Puppets 2 and Up on the Sun are still our most popular records. We’ve kept them in print and control what happens to them, which is huge.

SST was committed and dedicated, but also kind of mercenary and protective of their thing. That’s fine, unless you have a difference of opinion. Even early on, there were conflicts, like them assuming we would work for them, haul their equipment, and let them decide everything.  They were going to decide how much money we were going to make. It wasn’t as equitable for us as we would have liked, so we found our own booking agent and stopped working with them on the road. Eventually, we stopped putting out our records with them too. But I don’t see this as an aberration; it’s part and parcel of caring about what you’re doing. 

They fought for what they believed in, as did we. And, you know, this is how you find common cause with people, even if it’s only in hindsight.You fight for what you believe in, full stop. And when it’s time to move on, you move on. 

You have played with many artists over the years. Are there any collaborations that stand out as particularly memorable?

When Nirvana came out, they weren’t shy about working with artists they liked. They brought as many bands as they could on tour with them, having different bands open for different legs, because they wanted to play with all the bands they loved. We did three or four shows with them before they did their MTV Unplugged session. Cobain mentioned in an interview that he wanted to learn some Meat Puppets songs for Unplugged but never found the time. So, while we were on the road with them, he said, ‘Why don’t you guys just come on Unplugged with us and play along? That’ll make it easier for me,’ because he was under a lot of pressure and was trying to keep things off his back. He asked us to join them on Unplugged and play along. That was a great shot in the arm for us since they were the biggest band in the land.

The following year, we toured for ten weeks with Stone Temple Pilots, who were also huge. These weren’t artistic collaborations per se, but they were business partnerships that helped us a lot. We didn’t do many collaborations with other artists. Curt formed a band with Chris Novoselic after Nirvana, but it only lasted for one record and one tour. We did have a minor collaboration with They Might Be Giants; we shared a manager, and they overdubbed backing vocals on one of our songs, which our label released. They also covered one of our songs.

Aside from appearing on Monitor’s album, where they hired us to do one of their songs called “Hair” for their record, because they thought it would be funny to have a whole other band do one of the songs on their record. And while we were in the studio recording that, we recorded five of our own songs, which they then released. But for the most part, the Meat Puppets were always kind of an insular little group and never really did that much collaborating.

Are there any particular songs or albums that you feel were pivotal in defining the band’s identity?

Well, aside from Meat Puppets II and Up On The Sun, the album Too High To Die in 1994 went gold. It did really well for us. That record, I don’t think it’s currently in print, but it’s available on streaming. It’s owned by Universal Music now, so we don’t have any control over its destiny at the moment. Hopefully, that’ll change one day. But Too High To Die is basically the record everybody knows us from. The song ‘Backwater’ from it was on the radio a lot in 1994. We toured for an entire year on that album, worked nonstop, and still managed to lose money on the deal. But we did get a gold record, and I still have it hanging in my bedroom right next to my wife’s college diploma. So, I’d say Meat Puppets 2, Up on the Sun, and Too High to Die are the ones people care about most.

What can fans expect from your upcoming projects?

We’re essentially on hiatus. A lot of bands aren’t touring right now; ticket sales are bad. Helmet just canceled their tour, and they’re not the first. The last new record we put out was in 2021, a 10-inch EP. We’ve since released two live records and are working on other archival projects. Universal licensed Forbidden Places, our first major label record from 1991, for Record Store Day last year. They might do another one, but Record Store Day keeps their releases close to the vest. We’re probably working on some oddball live reissues until Curt calls us up and says he has an album’s worth of songs. But he often takes years to do that. We’re semi-retired and don’t have to work as hard as we did in the ’80s anymore. Thank God.

Photos courtesy of Meat Puppets

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others