Chris DeLine

While the history of the Meat Puppets is unusual, what’s even more rare is that they lived to tell about it. The band started out punk, but eventually moved toward a more balanced rock sound as they worked their way through the ’80s. Surviving a tumultuous first decade together, they found their greatest success in 1994 when Kurt Cobain requested that they join Nirvana for their MTV Unplugged appearance. Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood sat in for three songs from their 1984 release, Meat Puppets II, including the brilliant “Lake of Fire.” They released their most successful album, Too High to Die, later that year, which spawned the group’s biggest commercial hit (“Backwater”) and sold over 500,000 copies. The band soon collapsed, however, as Cris’s disastrous drug abuse led to the band’s first breakup in 1996. The brothers’ well-documented history of having a large appetite for a life less legal carried them for another decade, with a three-year reunion sprouting up along the way. Meat Puppets reunited again in 2006, and their 12th studio album, Sewn Together, has received critical acclaim. The band will be wrapping up the current tour in Minnesota, and six local performances are lined up, including a pair of in-store gigs at Minneapolis’s Electric Fetus and this show at the Entry. With Retribution Gospel Choir. 

[This critics’ pick was originally published by City Pages.]