The 1985 Project Part 23: Meat Puppets - Up on the Sun

Is it their greatest album?

I continue to peruse the 1985 Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll with plans to continue the series and cover a whole bunch of records that didn’t make that list but which came out in that year.

Did you ever notice when people talk about 80s music how they leave out bands like the Meat Puppets (and frankly, quite a few others I’ve covered here so far)? For me and many of my friends, the Meat Puppets were absolute favorites during the years 1984-87, with interest extending further in each direction. But if I wanted to pin down what I consider to be their very finest records, it would be either this one or the EP which followed it, Out My Way.

The Meat Puppets hailed from Phoenix, Arizona, and lived in Tempe once they started the band. Starting out as a twisted and skewed hardcore punk band, they slowed things down on the second album, bringing in country and psychedelic influences that if they existed earlier were hidden beneath the screaming gargled vocals and the triple time rhythms at play.

But we’re not here to talk about the In the Car EP, Meat Puppets, or Meat Puppets II. We’re looking at Up On the Sun, the 23^rd place finisher in the 1985 Pazz and Jop Poll. Continuing to advance in songwriting, musicianship and recording techniques, this record revealed the secret weapon they’d been hiding for the first years of their career. Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood had a magical way with harmony.

The vocals of the Meat Puppets were always the hardest sell. I remember interviewing the band probably in 1985, when Curt Kirkwood puffed up and said, “You know, I could croon like Mister Bruce Springsteen if I wanted to.” While he never showed the vocal chops of the Boss, he did wean himself off the dissidence so vital to the way he and Cris sang in the early days. Most of Curt’s vocal melodies featured only a few notes, with a slight deviation from the notes you’d expect from the chords. Cris, when he started singing along on this album, matched the melodies, singing, I think, a fifth higher than his brother. (I never took music theory, but my vague memory is a fifth is the normal natural shadow harmony in pop music.)

Amazingly, this led to hooks that made us all want to sing along. “Up on the sun where it never rains or snows.” “Awaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy.” “Best place I ever found was a little swimming ground.” It didn’t take a perfect voice to sing with the Kirkwoods. Hitting a note anywhere around what they sang was fine – you could be slightly off Kirkwood pitch and hit the pocket where the chords were telling you to sing, anyway.

The two times I met the Meat Puppets, I remember Curt spending a lot of time talking while practicing little guitar figures. You can tell how that paid off – this album has so many filigrees and riffs and arpeggios and other assorted guitar tricks. That’s how the songs are built, I think. Up on the Sun often gets compared to early Grateful Dead, but I think that band played more traditional folk and rock structures. Curt Kirkwood mashed all these guitar ideas into separate components of a song, and then added interesting vocal melodies – or in the case of “Maiden’s Milk,” whistling tunes - above them.

The words could make sense or not, “A long time ago / I turned to myself” and said “You are my daughter.”” Yeah, I’ve never figured that one out. But then again there’s “The sun is up and beating down / It’s hot enough to melt the ground / A little water would do us good / The clouds would help us if they could.” From that same interview I mentioned, I asked Curt if the swimming ground that provided the wetness in that song was real, and he insisted he completely made it up out of whole cloth. I wouldn’t be surprised if, on the other hand, while on acid, he did tell himself he was his own daughter.

Before continuing, let’s just quote “Buckethead” because what other song has ever been so exuberant about a receptacle for water or dirt or whatever? “Got no head / It’s a bucket with teeth . . . /It knows what’s what / It’s no fool / Fill up the bucket with whatever you got / Make sure it’s something that the bucket likes a lot.”

Curt Kirkwood generally by this time was overdubbing two or even three guitar parts to make the songs more compex. Cris Kirkwood’s bass playing, while holding down the bottom end and providing a connection to the kick drum, was practically an extra guitar with the frequent forays away from obvious notes and lines, and melodic figures that served as extra hooks. I used to think Derrick Bostrom was a pretty simple drummer, but while he preferred to lay down grooves that were a) just behind the beat and b) used a simple combination of snare, kick, and cymbals or hi-hat with little deviation, he nails all the tempo changes and stop start bits these songs can require. Nobody ever played like these guys. (I haven’t seen them since they switched to a five-man band, with Bostrom being the latest of a series of drummers, and Curt’s son Elmo on second guitar along with a keyboard player.)

There is no easy path to nail musical influences of the Meat Puppets themselves or the way they inspired later musicians. I will say that this album reminds me in places of the last Captain Beefheart album, Ice Cream for Crow, especially the instrumental “Semi Multicoloured Caucasian.” And I am fairly convinced that Uncle Tupelo took ideas from the Meat Puppets in general, especially this album and Meat Puppets II, to mix with their love of Neil Young, the Carter Family, Black Flag, Hank Williams, and 60s garage rock, to lead the charge in alt-country when they started playing live around my home town about two years after Up on the Sun was released.

I’m thinking this album holds up really well, and deserves 9.5 out of 10 points.