Mudhoney and Meat Puppets Join Forces: What a double bill this is. Garage rockers Mudhoney (it does them a disservice to land them with the grunge? label just because of geography and timing) join forces with cowpunks the Meat Puppets. Quality, start to finish.
Mudhoney are the subject of a new book,The Sound and the Fury, by Keith Cameron. Cameron?said in a statement, Mudhoney are still around thanks to a shrewd assessment of how important rock'n'roll really is. By never actively playing the game, never striving for commercial success, and never buying into the system, they enabled themselves to do what they wanted, the way they wanted. Mark Arm was once asked how come his band survived when so many of their contemporaries fell apart. He replied: 'Not giving a shit.' It's an admirable philosophy that serves them well to this day.
This writer chatted with Chris Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets back in 2017, and he said that There was always this sense that we could do it forever. There was a purposeful way that we went about things so that we never really painted ourselves into one particular corner. We were careful about the material from the very first, and had the idea of carrying for as long as we could maintain it. It's still kind of the same thing now, but we've gotten older. You don't have that youthful thing that you had when you were a kid, but you have all of this experience in exchange for that. By having not put any parameters around ourselves, it allowed us to continue to grow artistically. It's as vital as it ever was, in a way. We don't go out and try to recreate something that we did when we were younger. We still play songs that are real old, definitely, but we also do newer material, and there's still this improvisational part where we go off on different tangents.
Check them out!
Mudhoney and Meat Puppets Join Forces: The event takes place at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 20 at the Regent Theatre.
