Dear Friends,
With 32 months of consecutive blogs under my belt, the feeling of déjà vu is quite strong these days. This is my third time of writing a blog on September 1 and the third one I’ve written being almost 3000 miles away from my wife. It’s like a bad dream sometimes.
Two years ago I wrote some of “The Trees” and last year I was talking about some bullshit that had happened when I first got back home from Maine that took a month to sort out. This year feels different, and I’m glad of that, but I’m not being nearly as creative with the words as I would like to be.
I still have ideas for The Trees and The Bet is swirling around in my head. It’s frustrating as fuck that I can’t just put myself away for a month to finish it. Must be nice to be a bestselling writer and just get to write your books.
I feel like that fox that wanted the grapes so bad.
I’m grasping at the straws of joy right now. I want to feel it but it’s elusive and daunting. I’ve had a few laughs the last few days, but the worry is difficult. As much as I am worried about Doug, I’m so worried about Rhondi having to go through this alone. It’s brought on so many feelings of dread and self-doubt.
This is all in my head, I know, these fears and feelings of not being able to step up for her when she is struggling, but it is like being wrapped in a fog. I spent most of yesterday kind of cocooned and I didn’t get any of the stuff accomplished I wanted to get done.
Today, though, I have music to make and that will be good. I also have some time with friends, too, so that won’t suck, either. My heart is 3000 miles away, though.
*****
Sometimes a good compilation is all the same band. Case in point, the Meat Puppets’ 1990 “best of” CD, No Strings Attached was one of my favorites as I entered the era of the compact disc. This was the doing of SST Records as maybe kind of a farewell and let’s make a little bit more money off you before you go kind of record. Either way, I was stoked to have a bunch of my favorite songs of theirs on one disc.
The Meat Puppets were local but didn’t exactly feel local when I was coming into the scene. One of the first times I saw them was at the Mason Jar (like many of the bands I saw in the mid-80s, and they were opening somebody bigger. I can’t remember exactly who else was on the bill, but what I was blown away by was all the punk kids sitting down for them.
I had heard many of their early “hits” by then as friends of mine had their records and I was excited to see them, so it didn’t really make sense that these hometown heroes were getting the cold shoulder from 80% of the audience. They were decidedly un-punk in their sound by then, but they had an attitude that said, “We don’t give a fuck” and that was attractive to me.
I have always liked them, and it was an honor for me to be there on stage doing a little speech about them when the Arizona Music Hall of Fame inducted them, and the original members played for the first time together in about 20 years back in 2017. Prior to that happening, I had gotten to know Cris and Derrick a little bit through doing interviews and the involvement Cris had with Slope Records, so it was even more of a fun thing for me.
So, this CD takes me back to the days when the idea of knowing the Meat Puppets or standing on stage with them at Celebrity Theater seemed like a pipe dream. I was big into reading music magazines and the Meat Puppets were the darlings of the college rock world. We didn’t use the term “indie rock” quite yet, so they were “college rock.”
Being that I was learning about all these bands’ catalogs and such in the late 80s and early 90s and had limited resources to build CD collection with, a CD like No Strings Attached was perfect for me. It got me classics and some relatively unknown (at least to me) rippers from all the SST releases by the Puppets. I got to explore the early stuff while sitting in my apartment shooting hoops on my trusty Nerf basketball hoop and smoking weed.
One of the byproducts of listening to this CD so much after it came out was that I went to see the Meat Puppets as often as I could when they would play. It’s not like it was frequent, but over the years I’ve enjoyed a number of their shows and they are always different. No Strings Attached is kind of set up like a Meat Puppets set list. There is a variety of different emotions and the feel of the songs drifts in a beautiful way.
Describing the Meat Puppets has gotten a lot easier over the years since I came to the grips they were really just a jam band. They are part country, part psychedelic, part roots rock, part ZZ Top, and just enough grunge and punk and no wave to make it all sound great. Yep, there is definitely some “No Wave” in there. Like I said earlier, they don’t give a fuck. They just play.
I think they do give a fuck, actually, but not while they are playing. They do want to put out good stuff and they consistently do. No Strings Attached has a lot of great songs on it. Too many to mention, really, so I’m not going to try and talk about every single one of them.
Early on, though, I was a big fan of the stuff from Meat Puppets II (“New Gods,” “Lake of Fire,” and “Plateau”) and Up On The Sun (“Up On The Sun,” “Swimming Ground” which I love a lot, and “Maiden’s Milk”…but I can’t forget “Buckethead,” either.). Those songs really stuck out to me the most. I also love “I Can Be Counted On” from Huevos, too.
There are a few tracks that I tend to skip, to be honest, and those are mostly from Mirage. It’s not that I hate them, I just don’t get into them as much. It’s weird, too, because I love the Grateful Dead and that record has a little bit of a Dead feel to me. Curt Kirkwood’s guitar work on “Beauty” is pretty rad, though, and Cris’ bass stuff is cool, too.
You know, I’ll be listening to these guys from time to time until I can’t hear anything anymore. I hope I get to see them play live again, but something tells me that “can’t be counted on at all.”
*****
See you tomorrow.
This is my brain on AI.
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