13. Meat Puppets
It’s sad that Meat Puppets are damned to be “that band that Kurt Cobain liked” but ‘Up On The Sun’ was way before that. They were two brothers who played in their garage – which is the future and the past of music at the same time. It’s the only thing [in music] worth anything – making a world in your garage. And what happens when you make a world in your garage is that you make something that you didn’t know your body or your head had in it. ‘Up On The Sun’ was so perfectly realised. The idea of not playing distorted guitars was very brave at the time. I certainly wouldn’t have done it – or not very often. It sounded weak to people. So they created these sinew-y melodic lines that could not be construed as weak in any way and that’s just the instrumentation. On top of that they had these brother harmonies that were singing beyond psychedelic lyrics. They were doing peyote, I guess, out in the Arizona desert, lost and completely high. And their voices are in tune harmonically but they’re not in tune with the track, which creates this underwater, ‘I’m fucked up too’ response. And that is such a good idea. It is such a subtle way of drawing you into their world and keeping you in it. And for me, it was my soundtrack to Throwing Muses making our first ever record. And when you’ve been working hard on a record at the end of the day you need to shake off that record. And I would play ‘Up On The Sun’ because it was its own world. You wouldn’t want to live there but its got a lot of colours in it while you’re visiting.
