Meat Puppets

Meat Puppets were never going to be a normal punk band. Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood met drummer Derrick Bostrom at Brophy Prep and got going in Phoenix in January 1980, then decamped to Tempe, where the Kirkwoods bought two houses side by side and bashed it out in a backyard shed. They landed on SST alongside the hardcore crowd, then wandered off somewhere nobody else on the label was headed.

Meat Puppets II, in 1984, was the turn: punk energy bent into cracked country and dusty psychedelia, Curt warbling like a desert prophet over "Lake of Fire" and "Lost". Up on the Sun, in 1985, loosened up further, all sun-baked jangle and loopy grace. One fan in particular, Kurt Cobain, brought the brothers on stage for Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in 1993 to play 3 of their songs, which he sang himself.

The next year Too High to Die became the most successful record of their career, and "Backwater", a swaggering, hook-heavy rocker, became the song everybody knows them by. The band came apart in 1996 and again in 2002, but they were back by 2006, with Shandon Sahm and Elmo Kirkwood now in the fold.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.