Meat Puppets: The First One Wasn't Just Hardcore

Meat Puppets: The First One Wasn't Just Hardcore

Yeah, the second Meat Puppets album is on par with just about any other record released in the eighties. The musicianship is shockingly adept and while most of the songs wouldn’t pass as songs to most folks, the way it’s all soldered together is pretty interesting. More over, for a trio to rave up such a huge racket’s pretty impressive.

The group, though, existed for something like four years prior to that 1984 album. There’s even a self titled disc, released in 1982, to prove it. Most discussions of the album, though, wind up going something like, “It’s pretty good. But it’s just a hardcore album apart from those two country covers.” And while human beings really enjoy categorizing everything, music especially, there’re easily more songs on the self titled disc that don’t fit into the hardcore genre than those that do.

Granted “Love Offering,” the album’s second track, could probably have worked if tossed onto the Blasting Concept. Pretty much the same could be said for “Blue-Green God,” even if that guitar figure has more to do with wacked out hard rock than anything else. But the quick step drumming clocking in at too fast a tempo for most long hairs of the time might make it an easy target for the hardcore tag.

“Melon Rising,” at fifty-two seconds, is probably the most reductive hardcore thing the Puppets ever recorded. And considering the sessions for this album were done under the guidance of LSD, it’s all miraculous – hardcore or not.

A few songs on, when listeners arrive at “Our Friends,” there’s no good way to understand this as a hardcore album. Even prior, introductions and such possessed a similar feel. That feeling? It’s all tripped out rock and roll. It’s what the Flaming Lips would have sounded like eventually if that group wasn’t just boring (good job on fooling the masses, though).

Sticking with “Our Friends,” what disallows this album from being categorized as a hardcore disc is the tremendous amount of space that’s simply left open to chance. There’re underlying structures here, but each only serves as a jumping off point. And surely that sounds like a way in which to describe jazz. And while the Puppets wouldn’t characterize their music in that way (or in the following way), it’s kind of a punk jam band. Think Saccharine Trust, but better. The progressions are always as willfully odd, but the improvisations are in a place no other SST band could muster.