Meat Puppets at Mercury Lounge

In the late 1970s in Phoenix, Arizona, bassist Cris Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom played a few local shows in a band called Atomic Bomb Club. As the band dissolved, the former high school buddies began rehearsing together with Cris' brother, guitarist Curt Kirkwood, by learning songs from Bostrom's collection of punk rock 45s. The three then moved to suburban Tempe, Arizona, where the Kirkwood brothers purchased two adjacent homes, one of which had a shed in the back where they regularly practiced. After briefly toying with the name The Bastions of Immaturity, they settled on the name Meat Puppets in 1980 after a song which appears on their first album. Meat Puppets gained significant exposure in 1993 when Kurt Cobain invited the Kirkwood brothers to back him on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance, where Cobain sang his three favorite Meat Puppets songs. Meat Puppets' 1994 album Too High to Die subsequently became the band's most commercially successful release. The band broke up twice, in 1996 and 2002, resuming the brand with a different lineup in 2006. In 2017, Meat Puppets was inducted into the Arizona Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame, leading the original trio to reunite for the first time since 1995 and adding two touring members, Curt's son, guitarist Elmo Kirkwood, and keyboardist Ron Stabinsky. The band released its 15th studio album, Dusty Notes, on March 8, 2019.

Meat Puppets headlined at Mercury Lounge tonight as part of the venue's 25th anniversary celebration. The performance marked not only the reunion of Meat Puppets' three founding members but also the first time the band toured as a quintet. Intertwining six new songs with familiar songs from the band's first wind in the mid-1980s and its resurgence in the early 1990s, the band combined its earlier cowpunk and acid rock roots with its heavier alternative rock riffs for a blend perhaps more polished than the band's earlier incarnations. The set allowed for pop, punk, country and psychedelic passages to crank into extended guitar jams. Meat Puppets remained faithful to uncompromising creativity, performing an honest yet quirky rock set that did not conform to conventions and waved the adventurous alt-rock flag once again.

Setlist:

1. Comin' Down
2. Warranty
3. Sam
4. Oh, Me
5. Dusty Notes
6. Movin' On (Curt Kirkwood song)
7. Sea of Heartbreak (Don Gibson cover)
8. Seal Whales
9. Flaming Heart
10. Unfrozen Memory
11. We're Here
12. The Great Awakening
13. Lost
14. Up on the Sun
15. Outflow
16. Nine Pins
17. Plateau
18. Lake of Fire
19. The Selfishness in Man (George Jones cover)
20. Goober Peas ([traditional] cover)