A Year of Blind Spots: Meat Puppets II

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Meat Puppets II

Meat Puppets

1984

This is not the first time that Kurt Cobain single-handedly turned a band into a Blind Spot that I felt compelled to check out. What's up with that? I don't know if we've ever gotten to the bottom of this. I know last time (for the Slits' Cut), I speculated that Kurt's pre-suicide journals were just lists of his favorite bands, but that was just a dark joke. I think it really just has to do with Cobain having an outsized influence on pop culture for a brief period of time, and using the superpowers that come with such a stature to drag as many underground artists along as he could. Wouldn't you promote your favorite bands on a national stage if you had the ability to do so? I certainly would. Wolf Parade would be playing the motherfucking Super Bowl.

Nirvana never played the Super Bowl (though I wonder if they ever would have, if things had gone differently), but they played MTV's Unplugged close enough to Cobain's death that the live album version became a best-selling and Grammy-winning posthumous album. Meat Puppets played a pivotal role in that production, in what would have seemed like random happenstance if Cobain hadn't already proved he was gonna give the golden touch to any C-level college rock artist he wanted to. To MTV execs, roping Meat Puppets members/brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood into the performance probably seemed like a disappointment. Imagine how the Kirkwoods felt: "I mean, I had no fucking association with the guy, none whatsoever, until—BOOM!—there he was."

Would I have ever heard of Meat Puppets were it not for this series of Nirvana-related events? Probably not. They were doing respectable numbers in the late '80s and early '90s, but I don't think there was momentum enough to get them to my ears by the time I started listening to music seriously. There's a huge gap between "niche hardcore cowpunk band from 1980s Phoenix" and "cult cowpunk band on a Grammy winner for Best Album of the Year," and it's a gap that can only be traversed by your favorite band saying that this other band is their favorite band. It's something only the epitome of cool can do before they get too uncomfortable with their coolness and end it all.

So I would've listened to "Lake of Fire" eventually, maybe, but also maybe it wouldn't have been a standout, since I wouldn't have recognized it from that Unplugged set. And then maybe I would've still recognized the instrumental "I'm a Mindless Idiot," because they definitely play a clip of it on XPN during their commercial breaks, maybe the concert calendar I think (and this would've gotten a lot more real estate in today's blog post if I hadn't literally just written about this phenomenon). But would XPN have known about the song if the album hadn't gained an immense cultural cache from Nirvana? I don't know. XPN is cool but probably not that cool. And what to say about the influences of this album? There was the pull of cowpunk made stronger, for sure. But I'm thinking about a band called Goon Sax, one that has since broken up, but whose one singer is a dead fucking ringer for Curt Kirkwood, I'm noticing now. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me made the connection at the time.

Pretty good album, too. Not the best I've ever heard for this column, but for sure unique and fun. It feels chaotic, like these dudes were just fucking around and made an album and it somehow, against all odds, works. Also, mad respect for the idea of a hardcore band diving into country and psychedelic (Grateful Dead covers at their shows) back when such cross-genre tomfoolery was still gauche. I keep thinking that this is probably one of those albums that is more IMPORTANT than GREAT, even though it's still really good.

I read something the other day that is going to stick with me for a while (and shit, who knows, maybe I'll use it again on this blog, somewhere besides the end of a tossed-off Saturday post that no one is going to read). They did a test, and played some classical piano composition for two groups of listeners. The first group were told that this was a piece composed in a concentration camp, and that it somehow was found even after the composer didn't survive, and they'd be playing it that day for the first time. The second group were just told the composer's name. The first group loved it WAY more than the second group. That's because of the motherfucking STORY. Do you think we'd be talking about Meat Puppets if it wasn't for their part in the story of Nirvana? Probably not. But they are part of a good story, and so, I listen, and I am enthralled.