What, you want another rare recording of a cult band playing live in Arizona, one which has never been posted to the internet? The Fall wasn't enough? You people are greedy. OK, then, how about the Meat Puppets?
I recorded this show on a Sharp "ghetto blaster" with the MP's permission. Excuse the quality, please? This may have been one of the shows where they let us pretend to be "roadies" so that we could get in (read about this and other Meat Puppets reminiscences here). This was also a weekend when we stayed in Phoenix overnight so that we could see them twice more the next day, and I have vague memories that ordeals were experienced. Yay for obsessive teenage fans!
The show is classic Meat Puppets at their best, between Meat Puppets II and Up on the Sun, with plenty of songs from both. You can tell that they're still working out the kinks in the new songs from the latter. There are also covers, such as "Poke Salad Annie" and "Voodoo Child" and the inevitable random bits of sonic mayhem the band was likely to spin off into at any point during this period.
It's over 70 minutes long (!), in two parts (I didn't break it into songs), and you can download the 101mb zipped archive here.
And if anybody wants more, there's more.
Oh, and Derrick, if you're out there, I hope you don't mind me posting this!
UPDATE: Very little response! Probably not worth digitizing the others.
9 comments:
Awesomu!
This fills in the 1984 gap in the Wohler's repository quite nicely.
I'm seeing the Buzzcocks tonight here in Minneapolis.
thank you for posting this! enjoyed it very much!
I really enjoyed listening to this today! Please post more! Surprisingly listenable quality! I got a contact high listening while driving to school today.
Thanks,
Ann
Yay! OK, I'll consider digitizing more.
The problem with this era is not the performances -- they're among my favorites as well. The problem is I had no money and no real place to live. So I never kept complete shows. Just new stuff and unique bits. It didn't help that I lost a box of masters in 1985 when our van was broken into while on tour. (Sure, we lost other stuff, but nothing as irreplaceable as several weeks of live board tapes from 1984-5.)
Derrick, I made this offer several years ago, but never followed through: I'll happily send you these cassettes. I'm sure you'll probably be able to make them sound a lot better than I can, seeing as how I'm imbecilic when it comes to music equipment.
Yeah, but you probably have more time than I do! I'll gladly take 'em, but you should digitize and post them first.
I was at these shows! Meat Puppets at the Mason Jar was the highlight of my just out of high school life. Best live band ever. I saw them first on Halloween night in 1985 (?) at some movie theater on Mill Ave. Blew my mind. I think the brothers ended up naked and the Bostrom smashed the drum set (?).
Thanks for the awesome recordings, and if you have more, we're hungry out here for more meat!
Kirk Bromley
NYC
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