DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live @ KCRW Studios, 1-16-86
(contains live versions of many of the songs from On My Way)

The Meat Puppets’ Up On the Sun (1985) was a staple of my college radio days and there was a rumor circulating at the time that the popularity of the disc was going to lead to the Pups signing to a major label. At this point in the band’s career, Curt’s songwriting had significantly matured, leaving no trace of the speedballing freaked-out punk from the band’s first disc.

Drummer Derrick Bostrom noted that, after the lengthy Up On the Sun tour, “no longer were we scruffy punks making noise for the party-soundtrack of our peers, we were now the proprietors of a prosperous new franchise”. As such, the Pups decided to record their next disc outside of an SST studio and planned test the chemistry at a local Phoenix studio with a stop-gap EP, “Out My Way”, prior to recording a full-length disc later in the year. (Those plans quickly changed after Curt broke some of his fingers and Mirage was delayed until almost a year later).

Out My Way was originally released as a 24 minute six track EP and this reissue has now been expanded to 52 minutes with the addition of seven bonus tracks. Most of the songs are straight-forward country-flavored 70’s rock with a little bit of Byrdsian psychedelia (“Other Kinds of Love”) thrown in. The disc opens with the rave-up “She’s Hot”…and the original disc closed on a similar note with Pups steamrolling through a cover of “Good Golly Miss Molly”. There isn’t a bum track on the disc but two of the stand-out tracks are “Not Swimming Ground” and "Mountain Line", which captures the classic Pups sound.



The bonus tracks, which were recorded around the same time as the EP, show the influences on the band range from George Jones (one of the bonus tracks is the Jones popularized song “Burn the Honkey Tonk Down”) to Foghat / ZZ Top-style southern boogie to Grateful Dead style jam bands (“Everything is Green” is a 8+ minute instrumental of Curt jamming to a drum track). The one oddball track of the lot is “Backwards Drums”, which has a trance dance- club sound. Derrick Bostrom describes this last track as being cut during Curt’s wood-shedding period for Monsters. The disc also includes a bonus live video of the Pups covering Hendrix’s “Little Wing” live at The Stone in San Francisco which shows just how tight the band had become musically.



Links:
Meat Puppets