***
I got the chance to see The Meat Puppets again last week. They have long been a favorite band. I may have written here before that seeing them at the Foolkiller in 1985 opened up my world to music by people who drove around in station wagons touring original music for low pay--more like poets or shoe brush salesmen.
I may have even reminisced here about cleaning ashes out of the trash incinerator at the United Super grocery store in Liberty with my piddly boombox connected to a 50’ extension cord, listening to Meat Puppets 1 and feeling the tingle of awful and sublime in equal parts. It was hot, dirty, solitary work for a horny teenaged intellectual, keeping company for the afternoon with broken grocery carts and discontinued Little Debbie end displays and ten cubic feet of burnt cardboard boxes. The squealing, unintelligible, acid-addled singing on the record made a lot of sense. I may have turned into an armadillo for part of the afternoon, and had not yet kissed a girl.
