Thursday Night was spent with Couple Y at the Built to Spill (BTS) concert at the Bijou Theatre. Built to Spill is, in my estimation, the best band to ever hail from the state of Idaho. Admittedly, they are the only Idahoan band I know.
I considered taking Flat Stanley with me, but I determined that the concert was not age appropriate. So I left him locked in the car for hours. I will be a great parent one day.
Prior to the concert, we met MEV and her architect friends J and R at The Tomato Head. I had never met them but enjoyed their company immensely. I had not eaten at Tomato Head in some time but fortunately I was with regulars. I let MEV order for me and she selected the “Oh Boy.” It was delicious.
The highlight of the night came when Built to Spill lead singer Doug Martsch walked in the restaurant. While he was examining the restaurant’s art work, we spoke to him. He was very unassuming and cordial. He noted that this was his first time in Knoxville. I have seen BTS before - in Atlanta on September 25, 2001. The concert was held two weeks after 9/11 and Modest Mouse, one of the opening acts, had a video montage of planes crashing into buildings. It was too soon and rather disturbing.
Doug seemed very appreciative of our support. This photo is slightly deceptive. Doug was (a) not our waiter and (b) can really rock. Do not be fooled by his normal physique.
I must note that Tomato Head is LMM’s favorite Knoxville restaurant. LMM, I thought about you when I was there.
Having bought our seats on the first day they were available in December, we had third row seats. (In fact, my ears are still ringing as I type this.) We had an extra ticket and left it for SH at will call but she could not attend. It is for the best. The last time we left a will call ticket at the Bijou (for a Mr. Barney Rubble), we had great difficulties.
We arrived in time to hear the first opening act. They were comprised of some BTS members and another lead singer. Honestly, we were not too upset at our late arrival.
The next performance was from another veteran act, The Meat Puppets. Perhaps their biggest claim to fame was having served as guest musicians during Nirvana’s legendary November 1993 MTV Unplugged performance in New York. Nirvana covered three Meat Puppets songs on that program. The Meat Puppets began touring again after a four-year hiatus in 2006.
They were awesome! They even covered "Tennessee Stud." Cris Kirkwood’s frenetic guitar playing energized the crowd. He noted that he and his brother Curt had not played Knoxville since 1982. A fan chimed in that the duo had returned in 1991 and Cris accused the man of being on drugs. Whether that was to refute his present claim or an acknowledgment of a 1991 memory was left for the listeners to decide.
At 10:21, BTS finally hit the stage. The crowd rose and stood throughout their entire set. BTS was billed as plugging their most recent album after a five-year gap, You in Reverse. It was released on April 11, 2006. While they did perform songs from that album, they also played three new songs and a cover. After each song, Doug (decked in a Kurt Vonnegut shirt) said simply, "Thanks." They were excellent as always.
The Bijou is an interesting venue for a hard rock show. The audience is encouraged to remain at least by their seats during a performance which is not conducive to a rock show. Before the night was over, the aisles were lined with "dancing" fans. I even blasted out my rendition of BTS' "Big Dipper" along with Doug and the rest of the crowd.
Afterwards, we were slated to celebrate MWD’s 21st birthday with she and her boyfriend B at the Downtown Grill and Brewery. By the grace of God, this was cancelled at we did not return to our vehicle until after midnight. With an early drive to Atlanta awaiting me the next morning, I was relieved. Happy Birthday anyway, MDW!
This also allowed me to go home and pack. That was probably a good thing.
March 13th is a popular birthday. (What does that say about June 13th?) Thursday also marked the birthdays of church acquaintances MEH and JAJS. Also it was JECL’s 30th birthday. She was one of my best friends at West High School. As I used to tell you in high school, “13 and Bye.”
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This article on the Meat Puppets appeared in the Metro Pulse to hype the event.
Too High to Die
The Meat Puppets never fit in, which may have been their saving grace
by John Sewell
The Meat Puppets’ first—and, until this week, only—Knoxville performance, some time around Thanksgiving in 1982, was an utter fiasco. The band cruised through town at an odd juncture of an evolving music scene that was fighting to stay alive: Bundulees Lounge had closed, leaving the hardcore contingent with no place it could call its own. And the Meat Puppets were, as ever, a band caught between genres, a hybrid of country-rock, psychedelia, and hardcore punk that always defied categorization. Meat Puppets’ auteur and guitarist Curt Kirkwood remembers the event with a surprising degree of clarity, considering how long ago it was—and what happened.
“I, uh, I threw up during the show, then went backstage and passed out,” he says. “The promoter woke me up and was telling me to get up and play more songs. We played with a band called Kuru [actually Koro] and they gave me a bunch of stuff. And I told them to stuff it up their ass in true punk-rock fashion.”
Consistent with the sound of the album they were pushing at the time (their self-titled SST debut), the band was a shambolic mess. And the audience, a handful of slam-dancing teenagers in full hardcore regalia, came expecting to hear something like Black Flag or MDC. Everyone, including the Meat Puppets themselves, probably left the venue wondering exactly what had happened that night.
The show was symptomatic of the Meat Puppets’ career: The band never fit any of the numerous genre classifications foisted on it through the years; substance abuse got in the way of the playing; and no one ever knew quite what to expect.
The band’s square-peg status has been its blessing and its curse. The Meat Puppets’ catalog will never sound dated. And the group’s psychedelic country/rock ’n’ roll/punk/whatever sound will thus remain influential, if perhaps peripheral, to both the mainstream and underground music scenes. The group’s oeuvre is remarkably consistent, and the high quality continues with their 2007 release, Rise to Your Knees.
“We never really fit in anywhere, and that’s why we’re alive now,” says Kirkwood. “Back in the hardcore era we were really into the Eagles and Poco, but we weren’t like any of that cow-punk stuff. I felt like punk rock was a lot like rockabilly—like a spirit you couldn’t control—and I really related to it on that level. Oddly enough, I think the songs have held sway over any style classifications. I mean, Meat Puppets II was like [a] straight-up Hank Williams, Neil Young, Eagles kind of thing. We never wore cowboy boots and we hate cowboys—well, not really. But [avoiding trends] is why we’re alive. We’re like Led Zeppelin or the Stones; our whole goal is to have a platform to play any kind of music that we want.”
And what a wild ride the band has had. After relentless touring with Black Flag, the Meat Puppets overstepped the boundaries of hardcore, releasing college-rock staples like Meat Puppets II, Up on the Sun, and Huevos on SST. The band then went through a major-label period in the 1990s, where they were often considered to be grunge progenitors. (Cris and Curt Kirkwood appeared on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance, for example.) This era reached its apex with Too High to Die, the sort-of alternative radio hit “Backwater,” high-profile tours with Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, and an eventual derailing due to bassist Cris Kirkwood’s drug problems.
“Cris was a drug addict, so people construe that as a breakup,” says Kirkwood. “I just kind of waited for that problem to get fixed, and now we’re playing together again. I’ve always been pretty permissive, but I never took that many drugs myself. But we had some totally awful drug problems for a while, though—and I’ve always been really honest about that. I mean, when we recorded Meat Puppets II, we were rolling. Chemical engineering has taken us, as a society, to this nihilist, fake system of today that’s all about drugs, even hard-ons.”
Asked to plot future directions for the band, Kirkwood is reticent. “I’m just having a blast getting out and playing our music,” he says. “We have a deep catalog of good music and these days we don’t have to go out and hump for a new product. We haven’t done some of those songs in so long, it’s a luxury to play them again. But I don’t really like to think about things like the future. I mean, there’s another presidential cycle in five years, and I could be running by then. If there’s a god, maybe we’ll become spokesmen for Viagra."
Who: Built to Spill with the Meat Puppets
Where: Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.)
When: Thursday, March 13, at 8 p.m.
How Much: $20
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