Seminal scuzz-country rockers The Meat Puppets make their Ithaca debut on November 19th at Castaways! Reunited once again in the closest to original line-up yet, the Kirkwood brothers along with drummer Ted Marcus are on the road once again to support their latest disc, Sewn Together. Tickets for this show will be $12 advance and $15 day of show. Tickets are on sale now BY CLICKING  HERE. Among their latest reunion shows was a performance of their classic album Meat Puppets II at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Monticello. Expect the best of new and old at a night full of rock from a band that inspired Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, Pavement, and more.

The Meat Puppets hail from the desert clime of (in and around) Phoenix, Arizona. Born on January 10, 1959, Curt Kirkwood was the first-born Puppet, followed a little less than two years later by his brother Cris on October 22, 1960. Future drummer Derrick Bostrom was born in between the two brothers on June 23, 1960. Derrick grew up in a “liberal intellectual environment”; his medical technician mother divorced his father and remarried a doctor in 1966. Bostrom succeeded as a “straight-A student [and] pothead with the longest hair in school,” as he told Option magazine in 1995. The childhood of the Kirkwood brothers was as warped as their surreal lyrics; Curt calls his childhood a “twisted mess.” The Kirkwoods moved from locale to locale, including Texas, Mexico, and Arizona, and witnessed their mother go through a string of abusive husbands after their original father, an Air Force pilot, divorced her. The Kirkwoods occasionally had to take her to the hospital and suffered some of the abuse themselves from the first husband; the second tried to burn down their house. Yet the boys would eventually escape their torment, inheriting enough money from their multimillionaire inventor of a grandfather to attend Brophy, a Catholic prep school. However, higher education would not be destiny of the Kirkwoods.

The Kirkwoods were destined to be musicians, inspired by everyone from country artists to hard rockers. Cris picked up banjo after being inspired by Deliverance. An initial love of motocross racing shared between the brothers fell apart after Curt injured himself in a motorcycle accident at the age of 17, after which he took up guitar, one of the most significant decisions in his life. Curt went to college, but gave up on it after two years, returning to Phoenix to start a band. He and his brother began to play together in 1977. Curt also met Derrick Bostrom in that year, but the two would not play together until late 1979. Derrick brought his love for punk into the equation: “[The Kirkwoods] were more into mainstream rock (in the case of Curt), fusion jazz (in the case of Cris) and art rock. I started turning them on to some of the records I’d gotten, like The Damned for instance. Eventually, they came over to the house one day, having learned a bunch of Damned and Iggy songs, and wanted to jam. It sounded good enough to keep us interested. All of us had been playing in one capacity or another with other people, and we all hungered to play live. So we rehearsed fervently and began looking for gigs,” Derrick said in 1998 of the band’s beginning.

Originally calling themselves the “Bastions of Immaturity,” the trio quickly changed their name to “Meat Puppets” after a Curt Kirkwood-penned song of the same name. The band released a few songs on compilations, and eventually recorded their first EP for SST Records in 1981, following it up with their first self-titled album in 1982. Their most famous labelmates were the southern California hardcore group Black Flag, fronted by Henry Rollins. This kind of company likely had its influence on the abrasive, harsh tracks of the band’s first two efforts. However, the band’s eclectic musical influences and hallucinogenic lyrics didn’t gain them a big following amongst the fans of harsh, angry hardcore groups. “The reaction we got from the South Bay kids, a lot of them don’t know what to do; they just stand there and watch. That’s the biggest percentage usually, and a smaller percentage like us and get into it. And there’s a percentage that doesn’t like us and yell at us. We’re so easy to not like,” Cris said in 1982.

Eventually, the band shed the hardcore pretense and indulged their original musical vision, working on their second album throughout 1983, the year in which Curt’s twins, Katherine and Elmo, were born. Meat Puppets II was released in 1984, an amalgam of punk, country, and improvisation that proved the extent of their abilities. The album became an unexpected classic. Perhaps the only person on MTV who really understands music, Kurt Loder, gave the album four stars upon its release, and said the following in a 1984 Rolling Stone review: “What is one to make of an album that kicks off with a headlong punk-rock ripper called ‘Spilt Myself In Two,’ then devolves into a collection of brain-damaged C&W-style instrumentals, feedback-guitar ballads, and Dylanesque rockers, and includes a lovely, follklike finger-picking opus called ‘I’m A Mindless Idiot’? Well, make the best of it, I say – Meat Puppets II is one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums of 1984.”

The band continued on its remarkable career for 11 more years, releasing an album almost every year. Up In The Sun, a jazz-tinged, jammy album released in 1985 that features a brighter landscape and a tighter musical focus, is considered by many to be the band’s classic album. The 1986 EP Out My Way featured a mixture of harder, more focused country-tinged rock and a cover of “Good Golly Miss Molly.” Both Mirage, an emotional and poetic record of noodly psychedelia and classical influences, and Huevos, an album of ’sexy music’ and streamlined ZZ Top-influenced guitar rock, were released in 1987. In 1989, the Puppets released their last album for SST (unless you count the hurried compilation album of 1990, No Strings Attached) and hardest effort yet, Monsters.

After successfully touring and recording as an indie group for around nine years, the Pups finally signed to a major label in 1990, making a deal with London Records after appearing on the pilot for Beverly Hills, 90210. All of this glitter didn’t affect the band’s musical abilities and affinity for the surreal–their first major label release, Forbidden Places, was the band’s most diverse effort yet. The 1991 album features everything from waltzes to hard rockers to a bluegrass jam on speed. In my opinion, the album is one of the strongest of the band’s career, although the band itself wasn’t too sure of the album, taken aback a bit by its notably slick production.

With the “alternative revolution,” the Meat Puppets all of a sudden found themselves with a much larger audience. Throughout 1993, they toured with Nirvana, culminating their experience with the inclusion of the Kirkwood brothers on Nirvana’s Unplugged appearance. Kurt Cobain, a big fan of the band’s, realized that instead of attempting to learn the difficult songs, especially Curt’s fleet-fingered guitar parts, it would be easier to invite the “Brothers Meat” to come on the show and play three cuts from their classic II album, “Oh, Me,” “Plateau,” and “Lake of Fire.” The release of the Unplugged album brought the Kirkwood brothers some of their first big royalties and lead them towards a hit single and album. But the future would be far from bright, Kurt Cobain being the first of many people surrounding the band to die.

The Puppets followed their stint with Nirvana with the streamlined rock of Too High To Die, eventually scoring their first hit single (”Backwater”) and first and only gold album. Too High To Die succeeded largely due to the media hype of “alternative,” a catch-all phrase molded to encompass a range of successful bands from Nirvana to Nine Inch Nails. “They stripped us and tattooed ‘A-l-t-e-r-n-a-t-i-v-e b-a-n-d’ across our backs,” Derrick said in 1999. The album’s 1994 release was followed by tours with Soul Asylum, Cracker, Blind Melon, and Stone Temple Pilots. Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon both died soon after their tours with the Puppets. The tour with STP would take its toll as well, leaving both Scott Weiland of STP and Cris addicted to heroin.

Having had a good experience with Paul Leary at the helm of their last album, the band tapped him as producer of their 1995 effort No Joke. Another solid rock album full of hooks and potential mainstream appeal, No Joke’s recording was plagued by the drug addiction of Cris Kirkwood, evidenced by the dark landscape of the album’s lyrics. A follow-up tour with Primus and the debut of the band’s website, designed and ran by Bostrom, seemed to promise a brighter future. Fans like myself connected to the site to find an entertaining Prodigy Tour Diary and other positive updates with no mention of the struggles of Cris or the band. The band’s future seemed bright, and even though new information about tours or records never appeared, the song “Unexplained” appeared in 1996 on an X-Files soundtrack album, making fans believe the band was still functional. Few, if any, fans had any idea of the extent of Cris’ drug problems, or the fact that “Unexplained” was a Curt Kirwood solo effort borne from a band that was falling apart. It would be years before it would become common knowledge that the band had fallen victim to Cris’ crippling addictions.

“My brother cost himself, me, and Bostrom millions of dollars,” says Curt. “His drug abuse was this band’s only catastrophe. The record company had big, high hopes for our last album, but when they saw the internal problems, they decided to cut their losses. I don’t really blame them. It just got away from us, because I wouldn’t let him go. Our managers at the time [Gold Mountain, which also managed Nirvana] knew all about this kind of shit, and they were not fucking into it at all… They told me to get him out of the band, and I wouldn’t because he was my brother. I figured he might pull his head out with the album going down the tubes, but he didn’t,” Curt reflected later. This reflection, along with the detailed story of Cris’s harrowing descent into a crack and heroin addled hell, appeared in the November 1998 edition of the Phoenix New Times. Writer David Holthouse presented a vicious portrait of drug abuse with the article, detailing the death of Cris’s wife by heroin O.D. and Cris’s sorry state:

“Overweight from binging on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, he’s pocked with the sores and boils that result when a junkie misses a vein and shoots impure, infectious heroin directly into muscle tissue. After numerous, futile attempts to convince Cris to step back from the abyss, Curt now seems resigned to his brother’s fate. He describes Cris as ‘a suicide in progress.’ The two haven’t played music together for almost three years,” Holthouse wrote. Later on, Curt would admit in another article the pain of his decision to move on without his brother: “I tried really hard to help him and I just can’t do it anymore… He doesn’t care about the Meat Puppets – I mean, its not like he doesn’t care, but that’s the sickness… I don’t know what’s up with him at all and I’ve had to keep it that way… It’s beyond painful. I don’t even know what the word for that emotion is and I’ll have to live with it the rest of my life,” Curt said in April 1999.

The year 1999 was a year of new beginnings for the Meat Puppets. While Cris came and went from jail, Derrick worked on a new live album and an extensive set of re-releases packed with unreleased tracks, new liner notes, and multimedia portions. Curt continued to work with the new band he formed in 1998, the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra, eventually re-dubbing it confusingly as the Meat Puppets. This new Puppets 2.0 released a new EP, You Love Me, as an exclusive on www.meatpuppets.com in late 1999 and early 2000. The New Pups released Golden Lies on September 26, 2000, and promoted it with a string of club dates lasting throughout 2000 and 2001.