Meat Puppets and Neil Young

From American Songwriter, The Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood discusses musical infleunces on the band:

Q: When you guys first started, how did you arrive at your sort of country/psychedelic/cow punk sound, when you began playing songs that would have been labeled ‘hard core’?

Curt Kirkwood: Well we always just did that country thing. We were into Neil Young… a lot of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Of course, we tried to satisfy the kinda crowd that we had gotten in with. We liked the punk rock, we always thought it was more psychedelic, just a different style that had never been sung like that. Over the years, we had seen enough trippy jam shows and having played with enough of those bands to find out how much the hippies really don’t like punk rock, which was always a lot by my reckoning. We were never really a huge crowd pleaser at those things. And yet the Grateful Dead asked us to come out on tour with them one time in ‘89 to do some shows. Some people get it. But we always did it that way, recorded it and had a gas with it. But even the first two albums had country stuff on it, just louder.

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