Review – Meat Puppets with Adam and Dave’s Bloodline @ Johnny Brenda’s, 12.13.08

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (12/15/08)

By Andy Pareti

The Meat Puppets shuffled onto the stage at Johnny Brenda’s on Friday like three guys that got lost on the way to the Salvation Army. Lead singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood had his rat’s nest of tangled locks tied in a ponytail and sported a plain purple t-shirt as he led the band into an opening instrumental that included “I’m A Mindless Idiot”, off the band’s masterpiece sophomore album, 1984’s Meat Puppets II.

Opening the show with a pair of instrumentals was somewhat appropriate, as the band was short on words that night. They came to play, and play they did, indeed. There was very little mid-set banter, and even less pause between songs themselves as the trio stampeded through their discography, including a decent fistful of highlights from their back to back crowning achievements: the aforementioned second album and its follow up, Up On the Sun.

In fact, that album’s title track, which was one of the set’s best performances, epitomized the band’s trend that night, which was an acid-wash combination of whiskey-soaked bluegrass and flying-off-the-rails psychedelia including, but not limited to, covers of both country staple “My Baby’s Gone” (as delightfully sung like a mentally-imbalanced boozehound by bassist Cris Kirkwood) and the Beatles’ kaleidoscopic “Tomorrow Never Knows”, which was broken down into a punkish fury of crashing symbols and wah-wah guitar effects, rendering it all but unrecognizable if not for the lyrics.

About three-quarters of the way into the show, the Meat Puppets settled into an even flow of country twang that turned a good majority of the captivated audience back into chattering bar patrons, culminating in a hazy, extended version of “The Whistling Song” that stretched on a bit too long. This could have been, for all intensive purposes, intentional, because after some acoustic noodling by Curt, the band exploded abruptly into a high-intensity version of fan favorite “Lake of Fire” that stopped all conversations in their tracks. So hastily did the band blast through the song that Curt could only fit in one complete verse before the vocals crumbled into unintelligible noise above a firestorm of guitars and drums.

A cozy crowd at the multi-layered and personable Johnny Brenda’s was treated to a forceful and effective show by the SST veterans, which incidentally was preceded by an equally impressive opening act, the Philadelphia-based Adam & Dave’s Bloodline. Bloodline’s opening couplet of barnburners suggested a throwback to the Sex Pistols and other punk 101 acts, but further into the set the band conveyed a much deeper sense of texture and depth, like on the keyboard-led “It’s a Crime” (from their upcoming album Boycott Classics) and “Untouchable”, which evokes Let It Be-era Replacements. As Bloodline began their set, singer Adam Garbinski asked the crowd why they weren’t at the Neil Young show. It didn’t take long before they, and then the Meat Puppets, answered that question for him.