ZOUNDS
Left field is home to Arizona's desert space truckers the
沉
Meat Puppets. Licks cascade from Kurt Kirkwood's guitar and weave
electric webs of harmonic convergence. Brother bassifier Cris Kirkwood pounds
thick rhythmic elaborations and drummer Derek Bostrom releases a steady flow of
automatic mojo. Brian Brannon cornered the cryptic Cris prior to a reeling show at the
Warfield, in S.F., where the 'Pups cranked to the outer limits of stoke.
Tell me about this new album.
It's a whole new concept in
records, it's not flat. It's a big melon-
shaped record made to make people
feel nauseous, alienated and
depressed. It also makes a great
soup stock.
What are some of the songs?
There's one called, "My Tongue
Got So Fat That It Made My Head
Pop," and another called, "I'm
Busily Attaching My Fingers to the
Refrigerator Door and Then Slam-
ming It Shut Real Hard, (Spilling my
Jell-O, spilling my Jell-O, before it
hardens)." That's a socio-political
song that has to do with taping the
roof of your mouth to the bumper
of a truck and then getting dragged
through an ice field without any
cares in the world. Really, you're
not who you think you are, you're
Mary Poppins. Friendly operators
are willing to explain everything
at any point during the listening.
Each song has it's own 900-number.
Some will tie you up, others will let
you tie it up.
How long have the Meat Puppets
been together?
Well the actual rib-coupling took
place last week. We're really joined
together. It's like a double-dip cone
or that swirly chocolate vanilla ice
cream that comes out magically
mixed together or the Jell-O in that
toothpaste that has two colors in it.
So you guys were in different
tubes, but you recently
got squeezed.
Into the same tube, but they didn't
smear it all together. There are these
nice separate distinctions of color in
the tube itself, but how they did it,
no one knows. It's one of the mys-
teries of modem science.
And when you guys play your
music, it's like squeezing the tube?
It's more like cutting the tube open
and crawling in and sewing it back
shut, and then wriggling out
through the opening
Do you hope to reach a mass
audience with this toothpaste
tube theory?
The mass audience, yes. A big
messy mass, a pile of audience. this
big, seething, smelly, brown gloop of
an audience.
What's the main problem in the
world today?
From where I stand, it's a really
beautiful planet, the only problems
anyone has are ones they make up.
Everything's okay in my book. But,,
if it were up to me, it would be a real
cantankerous, little mess of a planet.
Seriously, planetial problems are
dealt with down the hall. I'm only
MEAT PUPPETS
into the
good parts.
If I was into
the other parts,
then I'd have
become a fuckin' human being.
Good and bad is too nebulous a
concept for me
to bother deal-
ing with, for
your guys' sake,
anyway.
If you're not a
human being.
what are you?
A really warm,
caring, luscious
dip of walking, vile
human shit a big
molten turd. I'm a
turd that just hit the
ground from about 40
million feet up, thrown
by The Hulk and Thor
and The Thing, all at the
same time so that it
would hit really hard.
Have you changed from
your earlier sound?
Nah, we're exactly the
same, haven't changed a bit.
I'd say we were probably bet-
ter at it in a way and worse at
it in another way. We're
eleven years older, but I don't
feel it. It seems like
fifteen minutes.
What does the new album
sound like?
It sounds like a big blast of
fart gas escaping out of every pore
in your body, of everybody
on the planet.
Why do you look at things the way
you do?
I was dropped on my head
as a baby
What about the other guys?
Uh, them too!
HELMET
"We're not
singing about people getting
bludgeoned to death," says singer/
guitarist/foil of frustration Page
Hamilton, "that would be too easy.
We're interested in the psychological
effect, how it affected three weeks of
my life when somebody got beaten,
stabbed and left wrapped in a rug
across the hall from where I lived." Any-
one who has heard Strap It On knows
Helmet means business. Anyone who
By Mike Gitter
Helmet is an
exercise in tension
and control, the most
devastating noise
New York has
spat up in
ages, capable
of blowing even
CBGB's previously inde-
structible sound system
with the twist of a knob. It's
a sound borne of several
shades of loudness and pain
with the emphasis on over-
drive and hate. And for the
vicarious pleasure of just
gritting your teeth.
has caught them live is
still waiting for the bruises to fade.
Hamilton formed the band two years
ago after stints with Glen Branca and
Band of Susans. With Hamilton's jazz
schooling, drummer John Stanier, Aus-
tralian bassist Henry Bogdan and gui-
tarist Peter Mengede, Helmet has taken.
its sparse, anger-addled sound from the
cutting edge to the bleeding edge, a
sledgehammer that pounds louder with
every gig. "Yeah, we are powerful,"
says Hamilton, "hard rock, in the most.
literal sense of the word." I
62 THRASHER MAGAZINE