My latest Substack instalment includes a snippet about Meat Puppets, a three-piece cowpunk band that emerged (or so it seemed) fully formed from the Arizona desert haze in the early 1980s.

I first heard of the band when Kurt Cobain got founding members (and brothers) Curt and Kris Kirkwood up on stage during Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance to play three songs off Meat Puppets’ second—and probably best—album, 1984’s Meat Puppets II.

I spent the next 15 years studiously ignoring them, probably because Cobain’s decision to end his own life in 1994 made me less curious about the inner workings of his mind.

But in 2007 I attended a Sonic Youth concert in Sydney, in which the band played its 1998 album Daydream Nation in its entirety.

After the show, I paid AUD15 for a chapbook of poems written by SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo, Hello From the American Desert, and noticed that Curt Kirkwood had drawn the cover illustration.

While the illustration itself didn’t really set me on fire, Ranaldo’s poems intrigued me. But I still didn’t really feel like dipping into the Meat Puppets catalogue.

Then, one day recently, I came across a 1985 video clip of the band performing ‘Swimming Ground’ and did a massive double-take.

The band were appearing live on a local Phoenix television station, complete with an audience of young folks wearing plaid shirts and jeans in that mid-1980s way.

I imagined they all had copies of the latest S.E. Hinton novel—or maybe Z For Zachariah—in their back pockets, and had come to the city for the studio recording and then dispersed, in the eternal afternoon sun, to suburbs of rust and cactus green.

‘Swimming Ground’ is so great. In fact, it’s a shimmering, tossed-off summertime classic for people who don’t actually swim.

Curt Kirkwood’s neo-Ramones monotonal twang disguises the lyrics’ innocent adolescent joy, his guitar licks effortlessly travel through time to pattern-match 21st-century Sahel-sound bands like Etran De L’Aïr.

It’s as boppy as R.E.M.’s ‘Radio Free Europe’ or ‘Gardening At Night’ and yet more immediate than anything Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe ever produced.

No doubt the Kirkwood brothers’ notoriously insatiable appetite for experimental chemical compounds had a lot to do with the chaotic energy of their early releases.

For clarity: yes, drugs played a major part in the formulation of their unique blend of country, psychedelia and power-pop.

And as you can no doubt guess for yourselves, the unhinged lifestyle DVD included in this heady package also came with some pretty dark bonus material, including Kris Kirkwood’s stint in jail after being shot by a security guard he’d just assaulted.

Should the finer details of that incident intrigue you, I can only suggest ye get thee to the nearest search engine post-post-haste.

But while you’re here, I’ve done y’all a favour and trawled the remainder of Meat Puppets’ catalogue. And I can report back, definitively, that it doesn’t sound that good.

Nothing the band has released since comes even remotely close to the genre-defining tracks on Meat Puppets II or 1985’s Up On the Sun.

But then, to paraphrase Joseph Heller, what else has?

In hindsight, Cobain’s shrewd cover choices for the MTV session—‘Plateau’, ‘Oh Me’ and ‘Lake of Fire’—demonstrate just how much of Meat Puppets’ vibe his singing and songwriting absorbed, as well as the debt the entire post-SST generation owes to the band.

But listen to the instrumental jam ‘Aurora Borealis’ and you will hear Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh and Pavement all at once.

And the demo version of ‘Hot Pink’ contains a blueprint for everything ever released by future-pretend-outsider, Ariel Pink.

Sure, I would usually give the cowpunk a miss, even ironically, but in the context of Meat Puppets II it all actually makes sense, even to these jaded ears.

Hearing the band’s original rendition of ‘Plateau’ for the first time is also a revelation, given that Kurt Kirkwood reportedly can’t even recall writing or recording it.

Maybe that’s a good thing. I find his acerbic lack of sentimentality in interviews refreshing.

And the heartbreaking ‘We’re Here’, a blueprint for the entire ethos of indie rock, says it all anyway.