By: David Schultz

The Meat Puppets always seemed like a band that couldn't catch the right break at the right time. For a vast majority, the Puppets are that band that Kurt Cobain liked so much he played three of their songs on the Nirvana Unplugged special. As MTV turned that performance into a recurring communal wake for fans to perpetually mourn Cobain’s suicide, it became the biggest exposure for the band intimately connected with Cris and Curt Kirkwood. Anyone diligent enough to notice might have even spotted the Kirkwoods playing along with the expanded band. They capitalized to a small extent on the increased awareness brought to them by grunge rock’s poster boy, but they couldn’t sustain it. Cris Kirkwood battled heroin addiction, original drummer Derrick Bostrom left the band and by the mid-Nineties, one of SST’s brightest acts were relegated to being talked about in reverent terms by idiosyncratic music junkies.

Meat Puppets were a band that was simply ahead of their time. As populist attention has finally caught up with them, it’s only fitting that the Kirkwoods have recruited a new drummer, Ted Marcus, and reformed their seminal band. The Puppets closed out the summer with a pair of sold-out shows at New York City’s Knitting Factory. For their Thursday night show, they tore through a ninety minute set that infused country, punk and a little psychedelia into a raging guitar fueled pastiche. Were these songs, many of more than 15-20 years old, to come along today, Meat Puppets would be at the forefront of the alt-country movement instead of its distant grandfather. Sadly, the Puppets were putting this forth in the Eighties when most of America was looking for new ways to spike their hair and finding comfort in sterile, synthesized beats rather than off-kilter, country tinged punk.

Sounding as if they were belched out of Austin, Texas, the Puppets offered a thunderous version of “Plateau” and reclaimed “Lake Of Fire,” closing their set with a powerful, extended version of the tune. For their encore, the rambled with a little country before capping off the night with “Backwater,” their biggest hit in the wake of their post-Unplugged upsurge of notoriety. Although they recently released Rise To Your Knees, the first true Meat Puppets album (both Kirkwoods) in seven years, they barely acknowledged the new release, keeping the set list firmly rooted in their older, influential material. The skeletal looking Cris sounded in fine form but physically looked like a man who has battled demons. When he sang, his face strained into a bunched mass and his neck muscles bulged and strained with an unnatural ropiness.

History has finally caught up with Meat Puppets; it’s fortunate that they are still around to take a much deserved victory lap.