Spray Paint the Walls by Steve Chick

Author:Steve Chick [Chick, Stevie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-064-9
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2009-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

In Arizona, meanwhile, Black Flag would meet rag-tag local group The Meat Puppets. Led by the Kirkwood brothers, singing guitarist Curt and bassist Cris, the Puppets had no truck with punk purism, and scarcely described their own feral, avant scree as ‘hardcore’. “ We were pretty much a punk-rock band, I think,” says Curt. “That was our intention: we tried to play things fast. I think we also liked to play things really shitty; that’s probably what was unconventional about us, we were more in the Germs camp than the hardcore scene. We didn’t take as many drugs as The Germs. We could play our instruments well, pretty much, we just liked to be irritating.”110

The Kirkwoods had discovered punk rock via their drummer, Derrick Bostrom, who introduced them to the calamitous sounds of UK punk, though with typical idiosyncrasy Curt declared a love for Stiff Little Fingers over The Sex Pistols, “because they were funnier. I was into PIL, it was an art thing, Lydon was trying to be a parody of snotty. I got into a lot of other LA stuff too: Black Randy, The Germs, Weirdos… The Plugz were really good. The Dils, I loved them.”

Like The Big Boys, however, The Meat Puppets’ tastes strayed far from the three-chord chugga-chugga blueprint hardcore often clung to. “We were into Seventies art rock, any of that ‘out’ stuff – Henry Cow, even Yes, and I loved Gentle Giant. Any kind of well-played, progressive rock. I liked jazz, I’d go see stuff from Ramsey Lewis to Art Ensemble to Mose Allison; you name it. I saw Thin Lizzy, who were amazing. Lynyrd Skynyrd is still one of the best bands I ever saw. I didn’t have any boundaries. Stylistically we probably ripped off a lot of punk rock, but we were incorporating a lot of earlier influences. I’ve played in bands that had to play Barbra Streisand songs, Steely Dan, Earth Wind & Fire. I’ve played in a hard rock band that played Thin Lizzy covers, I’ve sung Kansas songs…

“We could play music, and some people really liked it, and a lot of people really didn’t, and would leave the bar. When we saw we had the capacity to clear the room, that was amazing. It was like, if you’re not gonna get anywhere, why kiss these peoples’ asses? We opened for a San Diego band called The Penetrators, one of the biggest ‘new wave’ bands, because they were sick of their yuppie crowd. We’d go through women’s purses while they were playing, pour peoples’ drinks on ’em and stuff, really upset people, and they thought that was funny, because they couldn’t get away with it – they were making good money entertaining people. And we didn’t care, their crowd didn’t like us anyway, they didn’t like our music. We thrived on that.”

After opening for Black Flag on Wednesday March 4, 1981, at Tumbleweeds in Tucson, Arizona, Greg Ginn asked the group to record an album for SST Records, which they would cut with Spot in LA, later that November.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.