A conversation with Curt Kirkwood of Meat Puppets from 2001

We all know the story of how the legendary country-punk band got a second lease on life from Kurt Cobain's endorsement. This is the story of how they got their third... from Hootie and the Blowfish.

May 09, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Stereogum editor Chris Deville (who occasionally lets me write generously long features on bands I love) is putting out a book about the evolution of indie-rock in the 21st century called Such Great Heights, which hits stores on Aug. 26 (but can be pre-ordered now). In the run-up to its release, he’s launched a Substack to explore some of the book’s themes in more granular detail—like this week’s entry on the early-2000s Canadian indie explosion, featuring an interview with yours truly.
Last week, Montreal-via-Toronto singer/songwriter Bells Larsen released his new album on Royal Mountain, Blurring Time, which I highly recommend if you’re in the mood for a bedsit indie-folk record nestled in the Elliott Smith/Adrianne Lenker/Hayden cozy zone. (The album also has a fascinating backstory, which you can read all about in Emilie Hanskamp’s excellent feature for the Toronto Star.) At the end of his show at Mills Hardware last weekend, Bells previewed a new song about moving to Montreal, falling in love, and trying not to freak out over the fact that the winter months now feel like spring and the springs feel like summer. He offered a couple of working titles but invited the audience to suggest their own; my vote is for “Non-Hiver.”

Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:

Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.
U.S. Girls, “Bookends”: A new 12-minute, slow-burning soul number from Meg Remy backed by Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs, Dillon Watson of Savoy Motel, and harmonica hero Charlie McCoy, and accompanied by a video that looks like a Nashville Network variety show if it were directed by '80s Richard Kern? Yes please.
Cory Hanson, “Bird on a Swing”: Within and without his long-running group Wand, Cory’s been on one helluva hot streak these past few years, and with this new single from the upcoming I Love People (out July 25), he strikes honky-tonk Rundgren gold.
The Hidden Cameras, “How Do You Love? (Pet Shop Boys Remix)”: If you click on my interview with Chris Deville linked above (and here again for convenience’s sake), you’ll see me talking about the massive influence The Hidden Cameras had on the early 2000s indie-Canadiana movement, and by fortuitous coincidence, Joel Gibb just released his first new music since 2016’s country-inspired set, Home on Native Land. But this single sees him pivot from the rodeo to the discotheque, with a Hercules-strength house hymn that’s been given a ravishing remix by the patron saints of sardonic queer-coded alt-pop.
Preoccupations, “Focus”: On their new album, Ill at Ease (out today), the Calgary-bred quartet let a few flickers of sunshine into their grey-clouded dystopia, evoking that Cold War-era moment when bands like the Psychedelic Furs and Echo and the Bunnymen were polishing post-punk into the new pop.
Greet Death, “Country Girl”: Over the course of six entrancing minutes, the Michigan shoegazers namedrop John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Nick Cave’s Push the Sky Away, Johnny Five From Short Circuit, and KFC into a song that sounds like a less dreamy, more earthy version of The Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored,” as if they were taking a scan of my brain and algorithmically processing it into a piece of music like a Black Mirror episode with a happy ending.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Curt Kirkwood

The date: January 31, 2001

Publication: Eye Weekly

Location: I was in my apartment in Toronto; Curt was calling in from Raleigh, North Carolina

Album being promoted: Golden Lies

The context: For the ultimate affirmation of Kurt Cobain’s game-changing cultural influence, look not to the 30 million copies that Nevermind sold, but to the fact that, for a few months there in ‘94, he managed to make the Meat Puppets a household name. After being invited to perform three of their songs with Nirvana at the MTV Unplugged taping, the Puppets released their eighth album, Too High to Die, in January 1994 and scored their first bonafide hit single with “Backwater.”

But by the time I did this interview with singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood in 2001, that moment felt like ancient history. While touring Too High to Die with Stone Temple Pilots, Curt’s bass-playing brother Cris became drug buddies with Scott Weiland and came away with a crippling heroin habit that prompted the Puppets’ label, London Records, to kibosh its support budget for 1996’s dead-on-arrival No Joke! Before long, Curt found himself without a label or a functioning band, and the grey clouds hovering over the Meat Puppets would only turn darker: When you consider this 1998 Phoenix New Times article on Cris’ downward spiral—still one of the bleakest pieces of music journalism I’ve ever read—it’s nothing short of miraculous that he’s still alive today.

Tired of waiting for his brother to clean up his act, Curt relocated to Austin and formed the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra with guitarist Kyle Ellison, bassist Andrew Duplantis, and drummer Shandon Sahm (son of Texan garage-rock legend Doug Sahm). But after failing to attract label interest, Curt rebranded his new group under his old band’s name and soon found himself with an offer from an Atlantic subsidiary called Breaking Records—a.k.a. the label founded by Hootie and the Blowfish. But as Curt made it clear throughout our conversation, this turn of events didn’t exactly instil him with a renewed sense of optimism:

So I was just listening to the Live in Montana set recently, and just thinking back to the Meat Puppets shows I've seen, and it seems like your gigs usually end in some sort of meltdown craziness. Is that still the case?

Yeah, that can happen, but I don't know if that’s still the mood right now. If it happened now, I think it would be twice as disturbing. People really want their money's worth right now, and that doesn't mean chaos. It means nice costumes and good merchandising.

So the days of four encores and instrument-swapping are over?

No, that's not over—I mean, I'm just getting started again. That’s a running sort of thing. You got to get it up and going and see what it's going to be like. There was nothing contrived about that—it’s a reaction to people just standing there with their hands up their noses while we're trying to play. You know, you can blame cocaine for a lot of things—I'm talking about the audience.

So did you ever think you'd still be doing this after 20 years?

No, not really. I never really thought about it like that. It's inconceivable.

What's gotten lost in the whole turn-of-the-millennium thing is that the ‘80s are now 20 years ago.

Yeah, that's something that happened. I can hardly remember the ’80s—I mean, I remember it was sort of a harsh time for the band, all through the ’80s, and it's easy to forget that shit. I always just looked at it as a job. I’ve not got anything else that I've ever made money at, and like everybody else, I have to have a job. So this is my job. And I really like it a lot. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do it.

And you're not watching the clock.

Generally, no. That's the thing about it: It's mine. I can do it when I want to. That's why it's good to have it be yours.

So there's a tendency now to really romanticize the early SST days…

Yeah, well, I do that too. It was a lot of fun. Once again, the frustrations I had back then are the same ones I have now: you know, baby bands that have as much integrity going for them as the record company behind them wants to pay people to think they have. And that's just how it was back then, too. You just go, “fuck, how can people stomach this shit? It’s gross and obnoxious.” And it’s not like “they should listen to my stuff instead,” but, I mean, what they're listening to is just bought and paid for. And that reminds me of the ’80s: We’re totally full circle, it’s just louder music now. It actually sounds a lot cooler compared to some of the stuff they were pushing off back then, like Huey Lewis and the News. Some of the mainstream hip-hop/rock stuff, some of the heavy stuff, sounds really good. It sounds kind of challenging. There’s elements of Metallica in the mainstream and extreme hip-hop and stuff—but hardly any of it is as catchy as Huey Lewis and the News.

There’s an argument to be made that all the nu-metal bands like Korn are just hair metal with new haircuts.

Absolutely—I mean, is there an argument? It’s like Garanimals for adults.

It’s almost like the ‘90s were a complete aberration and now we’re back to seeing the same division between mainstream and underground that existed in the ‘80s.

We treaded the line. I think people know who I am, but whether they buy the records is a different story. Even some young people might say, “oh, I know the Meat Puppets,” and some of them even come to the shows, it's not that hard to get into it. But what they're buying is a different thing.

So do you find it ironic that the Meat Puppets incurred their fair share of abuse for bringing country music into punk rock, and now there's an entire international network of bands and magazines devoted specifically to that sound?

Are there? I didn't know.

I’m talking about the whole No Depression scene.

I knew that I had something going, along with Rank and File, but not very many other bands did what we were doing. I knew I wasn't going to get any credit for it. I’ve slipped through the cracks on so many levels. It was left up to another artist—and that was Cobain— to go, “look, this is what this meant to me.” And that's not uncommon, and a lot of artists were into the band, and that's where you get some dues. But I'm also not about dues. That's an ape-cage thing. It's from the Gorilla Files. I’m more about picking fucking nits off of my fellow gorillas’ asses.

Was it your intention to release an album called Golden Lies in the midst of an election season?

I don't know. It's always a good time for golden lies—that's the way I look at it. It was a song, and I really have trouble naming albums—I'll admit that freely. My albums have stupid names and this one is stupid. It's taken from another song title, but I left the song off the album. How ironic!

So how are you enjoying life in Bush country?

It's fine. I'm sure he knows what he's doing. I’m not at liberty to discuss the government. I’m sure they have their own agenda, and everybody knows it. Are you in Canada?

Yes.

Well, then it's obvious, right? They have their own agenda. There's not very much that people here can do about it. And I'm going to make the best of it. I've been living in Bush country for a long time, and now the whole country will be Bush country. And I can't begin to understand how and that stuff works any better than I can understand any other country. I don't try to. I'm sorry that America sucks. It's a Gulag.

It’s interesting that Austin has a reputation of being this liberal oasis in the middle of Texas, but that's right smack dab where Bush’s headquarters are.

Yeah, I don't believe in liberalism anyway. People are fucking liars. There's relative liberalism. People are totally on each other's fucking cases. And they grow up and become nasty fucking adults. Bunch of fucking assholes. That's the bottom line: Everybody fuck off. Isn't that mature?

How has playing with the new guys affected your outlook on the band?

It's really good. It's what makes me want to do it. It’s really a fun band to play with. It wasn’t like I contrived to a new lineup for the Meat Puppets. I kind of thought that I'd get something going while the other guys repaired their lives—I didn't know this band would have to pinch hit, but that's the way I felt like going after a while and it was convenient, because the band's good. And I also knew that, if nothing else, I could get the songs out, even if some people don’t think it's the right way for me to do it. It's kind of funny because I know some of the people into the old band might have some resentments towards the new one, but I just wanted the old fans to be able to hear these songs, and I figured that it would be easier for them if it was under a name that they knew. Everybody's such a brand-name suck-up. It’s my Disneyland, and [these new bandmates] feel a part of that. They don't revere me; they give me as much as anybody else.

So is it true that when you submitted the album to the labels under the Royal Neanderthal Orchestra name, people ignored it?

Yeah, totally. I couldn't get any attention for years. I couldn't get attention for this very record. It's been very specific how we got this thing out. And in a lot of ways, it has jackshit to do with the record. It came out because some of the guys in the Hootie and the Blowfish band were fans when they were college-radio DJs. And so when my A&R guy got fired from London, he went over to Breaking and got hired and he said, “these guys have a record,” and Mark Bryan, Hootie’s guitar player said, “I love that band.” So, “ding!”—signed. If they had gone and actually listened to the record, they probably wouldn't want to sign it either. I'm fairly cynical about the whole thing right now!

Could you have ever imagined five years ago that this band would be saved by Hootie?

I really didn't. I was over at their lawyer's house here in Raleigh last night having dinner. And it's just beautiful, and everybody's really nice… and it's really strange. My life has been strange that way. When Nirvana came out, I was like, “look at those fucking little mallrat freaks,” and the next thing I know, I'm playing with ‘em. You never know what's going to happen. It could probably be a lot stranger, considering the scope of my work, considering how varied what I do is. If I didn't have such a disgusting name, I could probably have a lot broader appeal. I just know that a lot of the stuff that I do is fairly functional, so it's just a matter of perception.

What was your mindset going into making this record? On the one hand, It must’ve been awkward playing with a completely different crew, but on the other hand, it must be liberating just to be able to play all.

No, the old crew was awkward. Cris is a really sick person and Derrick [Bostrom]’s heart wasn’t into it as much as it could have been without Cris being sick, and we just don't know how to fix that stuff. A lot of what the Meat Puppets meant was that it's not really up to us. And I learned that lesson really hardcore, and there's a reverence towards that name now to me and the whole thing that's very personal. I see it more than I ever did, and it was really awkward to have it fucked with by people from the inside. And that's a lot like how I grew up. My mom was married six times, and I'm just fucking sick of people fucking shooting my shit at my feet. I rarely shoot myself in the foot, right? And I'm just like, “You know what? You can't do that to me.” Mom could do it to me. School did it to me. I got thrown out of school. I’ve lost every fucking real job I ever had. And I'm not that bitter a person going into stuff, and I'm not that hard to get along with. I'm just kind of honest—a little too, sometimes. And a little too vocal. So I've had a hard time getting by in any other fucking frame of life, and it remains that way. I'm a misanthrope and I try not to hate people for it, but they're not fucking very giving, by and large, to weirdos. They want to fucking put you on a stage. So that's where I belong.

Most people don't want to hear honesty. They just want everyone to put on a big smile.

Yeah, they’ll hear it, and they’ll take it personally and they probably should. And I should probably be more honest. But I would never have any friends. I'd probably be institutionalized. Or maybe I'd be president. I'm sure if I was given any kind of power, I'd start making people eat their own shit too much.

That’s the Marilyn Manson argument: the same sort of egomania that drives people to want to be on TV is the same thing that makes them want to kill people.

Yeah, I would say so. It's all part of the conscious mind. Like the Apaches say, the dream world is more real than this one. This world here is fraught with external distractions and separation seems to be the norm.

It’s like when you wake up from a dream where your friend did something shitty to you, so you’re mean to them in real life the next day.

Yeah, or sometimes I fuck my friends—the ugliest ones—in my dreams.

So is the fact that all of you guys in the new Meat Puppets have had a lot of personal shit to deal with over the past few years a uniting force?

Well, we try to make it be. You know, Shandon lost both of his parents in a year. It's just normal natural tragedy and stuff, and I think it does kind of bond us, to the point where we just kind of fall into the playing a little bit more. At least I do. These guys are a little bit younger, so I'm not going to try to talk for them. But we've bonded together in a situation where it could be hard to go out and say, “you're going to be the Meat Puppets” and have these three new guys who’ll try to fill these issues and then there’s the pressures of the record-company business and all this stuff. A lot of it could be really hard. And I think what these real life things have shown us is that all that [music-business] stuff is fairly trivial compared to what's really going on in your life a lot of times.

The band is a really important thing, but it just takes the carpet right out from underneath you. For me, that’s what made me realize I could still do Meat Puppets. You know, my brother is so much sicker than anybody realizes. I've tried to explain it. And my mom died of a cancer that was so hideous that it just totally blew his mind. And mine, too. It went on for a long time, and it was really, really painful. I just sat and watched somebody in hospice for 13 days just fucking rot. We live in a medieval shell of a fucking planet. And all that stuff considered, I look back at my fucking special little band and go, “I'm going to fucking Disneyland. You can all get fucked, totally. You have no idea what I've been through.” I'm not even going to be defensive about it.

And I know that other guys feel that way about the band, too. I don't know that we've been allowed to bond together because it's been so fucking caustic in a way, where we’re a little bit shocked. And I know we're all amazed that the music is as cool as it is, in spite of the fact that we've been kicked around so fucking much—not just personally, but by the business too. Honestly, the business fucked us royally. Not personally, they just did it because we got caught in some corporate snafus. It's like a near-death situation there, too.

So the fact that the music is still good is what bonded us. As individuals, we're a little scar-tissued-out right now. I think we'll probably bond more later on, when we go, “god damn—we got across something!” And I just met these guys too. I mean, time is going on—I've known Kyle for five years now and this band’s been together for three years. But considering what we've taken on here too… not many people have tried what I'm doing, either. To take something that's a virtual tradition and rewrite it entirely. It’s like moving Prairie Home Theater to Florida.

In retrospect, do you think the success that happened with Too High to Die threw the band off course and fucked up the natural momentum you had been building over the previous decade? .

Oh yeah. I think it threw Cris off course. It happens all the time. It's an old movie. The old bad movie that you've seen so many times.

And the irony is that the Meat Puppets are always portrayed in the press as the survivors.

Yeah, there's no irony—that's lost on me now. I gloated about it up to a certain point, and I thought that my will had a lot to do with this. I couldn't get fucking arrested for years, and now that I have something out, it's like, I understand that my will is important, and I have to have the will to do it if the opportunity arises. It's not even just opportunity…. The world is so chaotic, so to have something beautiful come to flower without hurting people, it's just weird. It’s like I'm relearning my own arrogance through one of the most arrogant things I've ever done.

[Curt’s publicist gets on the line to tell me I can ask one more question before he has to go.]

So was the song “I Quit” reflective of your overall mindset at the time of making this record?

No, that’s just more like teasing. That’s more like: “I quit thinking”—just, like, don't think. I’ve been through it, you know, I've listened to your side, I believe you, and I'm not going to think about it any more and move on.

I’ve heard you’ve got four albums worth of stuff in the can.

Yeah, I’ve got a ton. This is just a random representation. I tried to please these guys. I don't know where their allegiance to a song lies. Some say they like this, some say they like that… “I'm like, well, okay, I'll trust you. I'll put it on the record.”

What’s the lead single?

I don't know. Once again, I've left the record companies scratching their heads.

It’s the return of album rock.

Yeah, I don't know how else to do it. I refuse to hire a DJ. That really would have been weird.

Well, there is a bit of a hip-hop thing going on with your flow on a few tracks…

Yeah, I do that—I was always a big N.W.A. fan. I love how Eazy-E put the comedy in rap.

ENCORES

Unfortunately, a Hootie and the Blowfish endorsement in 2001 didn’t quite carry the same cultural cachet as a Kurt Cobain endorsement did in 1994, and, as such, Golden Lies did little to reverse the Puppets’ flagging commercial fortunes. But the Puppets have kept on keepin’ on throughout the 21st century, with a clean-and-sober Cris Kirkwood returning to the fold for 2007’s Rise to Your Knees, and original drummer Derrick Bostrom coming back for 2019’s Dusty Notes alongside two new recruits: keyboardist Ron Stabinsky and guitarist Elmo Kirkwood (a.k.a. son of Curt).
In the period between Golden Lies and Rise to Your Knees, Curt Kirkwood formed Eyes Adrift, a psych/country-rock supergroup with Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic and Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh. After Novoselic dropped out to pursue his political ambitions, Kirkwood and Gaugh formed the even shorter-lived Volcano, whose 2004 self-titled release was available only at the band’s merch table. Until now, that is: On June 20, Don Giovanni Records will be giving the album its first proper release. You can check this recent Stereogum interview with Curt and Gaugh for the full backstory, and listen to the full album here: