Meat Puppets

Though they only had one song and one record that could squarely be called hits, the Meat Puppets stand as one of the most pivotal bands in rock’s weird history, helping push kids committed to hardcore orthodoxy toward a broader understanding of song and sound. Those kids, of course, included some of the biggest rock stars of all time. Curt Kirkwood and his younger brother Cris bounced around with their divorced mother until settling in Phoenix, where they eventually met drummer Derrick Bostrom and settled into a truly deviant local scene. They were, at first, a ferocious hardcore band, releasing an obliterative self-titled LP as SST009 in 1981. But they tired of that stylistic straitjacket and wrote and quickly recorded the broken country record of songs about sinners, false prophets, and failures that became the 1984 landmark LP, Meat Puppets II. It pissed off the punks, a reaction they happily indulged. “If we couldn’t chase the audience out,” Bostrom said much later, “we weren’t doing something right. We’ve never been about going onstage and doing what we know we can do.”

But their narcoticized songs slowly found their audience, inspiring Soundgarden and Dinosaur Jr. and, most notably, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain invited them to join his band for MTV Unplugged, a cameo that set them on a direct but destructive path to fame. Addiction and jail time followed for Cris, even as Curt continued the band. That the original lineup exists in 2026—augmented now by Curt’s son, the sharp guitarist Elmo, and keyboardist Ron Stabinsky—feels like a minor miracle, a true and unexpected story of rock ’n’ roll survival. That they still sound so fresh feels like the major miracle. Dusty Notes, the 2019 debut of the quintet that will play Big Ears 2027, was a masterclass in cosmic country-rock and more, Stabinsky’s harpsichord dancing through the brotherly grunge of “Unfrozen Memory” and his piano ushering in the wonderfully ragged waltz “Outflow.” Stabinsky’s twinkling Rhodes was the lighter that ignited the flame of the unexpected metal jam “Vampyr’s Winged Fantasy.” Meat Puppets changed the world. Nearly 50 years after starting, they’re still changing, too.