1000 Day Album Challenge (#62) Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II (1984) [02.03.24]

lost on the freeway again / looking for means to an end / nobody knows which way its gonna bend / lost on the freeway again…

this is a bit of a secret handshake album as far as I’m concerned. I know I have a number of friends who love this album, but I imagine I have many more friends who don’t even know who the Meat Puppets are.

this is the psychedelic country album the world didn’t know it needed until a hardcore band from Phoenix created it in the mid-eighties. as per usual, Robert Christgau was able to sum this album up in three sentences, “Alone with various strange gods (is there another kind?) in the wide open spaces of his psyche, Arizonan Curt Kirkwood has stumbled upon a calmly demented country music that does more to revitalize the dubious concept of "psychedelic" than California suburbia's whole silly infatuation with the late '60s. He conflates the amateur and the avant-garde with a homely appeal bicoastalists would give up their nonexistent roots for. Rarely if ever has incipient schizophrenia sounded like such a natural way to go. A-” (https://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=meat+puppets)

many a GenXer will recognize three of the tunes here (Plateau, Oh Me, and Lake of Fire) because Nirvana covered them on MTV Unplugged. The Kirkwood brothers (Cris and Curt) joined Nirvana on stage for these. that alone probably gave the Meat Puppets more exposure than they had ever had in their career.

I would buy their next three albums plus the EP, Out My Way (1986). some I liked more than others, but even though I’m sure I could put together an excellent compilation of tunes from those records I feel like they never recaptured the magic of Meat Puppets II.

#1000DayAlbumChallenge #MeatPuppets #MeatPuppetsII #Nirvana #MTVUnplugged #Plateau #OhMe #LakeOfFire #RobertChristgau