Curt Kirkwood (Meat Puppets) and D. Boon (Minutemen) [photo: Ann Summa]

Wait, the Meat Puppets and the Minutemen played on a boat?! Yep, it happened. The outing was part of a series of events staged by the Desolation Center, a Los Angeles collective guided by a pioneering punk promoter, whose creative concepts resulted in some of the most memorable punk rock shows of the 1980s. There’s a fantastic new documentary about this subject in the can, though it’s not ready to set sail just yet.

The Desolation Center concerts were organized by Stuart Swezey. He started out booking punk bands into the usual venues, but once the intimidating presence of the LAPD became commonplace at punk shows, Stuart began to think of non-traditional sites. This led him to come up with the idea of putting on a concert in the Mojave Desert.
 

‘Mojave Exodus’ [photo: Mariska Leyssius]

The first of these happenings, dubbed the “Mojave Exodus,” was held on April 24, 1983. Minutemen and post-punks Savage Republic performed, and the ticket holders—who were clueless as to the location of the gig beforehand—were bussed in. Though there were unforeseen circumstances, like sand blowing into band members’ faces as they played, it was an extraordinary affair for all concerned. Stuart had pulled off what had previously been unthinkable: a punk rock show in the desert.
 

Minutemen (photo: Bob Durkee]

For “Mojave Auszug,” which took place on March 4, 1984, Stuart booked the German industrial band, Einstürzende Neubauten, Savage Republic-related group, “Djemaa el Fna, and performance art outfit, Survival Research Laboratories—who blew shit up.
 

Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten) [photo: Fredrik Nilsen]

A few years back, we told you about the final Mojave Desert concert, “Gila Monster Jamboree.” Held on January 5, 1985, it featured Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, Redd Kross, and lots of free LSD. Psi Com, the opening act, was fronted by a young Perry Farrell. It’s no coincidence that Farrell later conceived the traveling outdoor festival, Lollapalooza, as he was very much inspired by his desert experience. Other events like Coachella and Burning Man also owe a debt to these Desolation Center concerts.
 

‘Gila Monster Jamboree’ (Spy the Blue Öyster Cult logo?) [photo: Bob Durkee]

After two events in the desert, Stuart started brainstorming other ways the Desolation Center could present shows. He thought, ‘What’s the opposite of desert? Water.’

Stuart had gone to a number of backyard parties in San Pedro, a neighborhood of L.A, and the hometown of the Minutemen. The Port of Los Angeles is partially located in San Pedro, and on his evening drive home from these parties, Stuart would pass the illuminated harbor, the giant cranes positioned there lit up in the night sky. It looked incredible. This is where the next Desolation Center event would be.

Stuart invited the Minutemen to play on a boat as it went around the harbor. The band, who rarely had proper gigs in their hometown, jumped at the chance, and told Stuart they could get the Meat Puppets to do the gig, too.

Continues after the jump…

 
I don’t expect that many people think of Phoenix, AZ, as a nerve center of punk rock. My go-to Phoenix bands have long been the Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, and The Feederz, but that’s been about the extent of my knowledge of that city’s contributions. Little did I know that it was a hub where a surprising number of crucial spokes met.

The Exterminators were a short-lived Phoenix punk band whose existence has long eluded the outside world. They existed only in 1977 and 1978 and never released a single note of music, but its members went on to play in The Germs (drummer Don Bolles), 45 Grave (bassist Rob Graves, Bolles), The Gun Club (Graves), The Feederz (singer Dan “Johnny Macho” Clark), and Mighty Sphincter (guitarist Doug “Buzzy Murder” Clark). The only known surviving documents of the band were a raw sounding and totally unheard cassette recording of a 1978 gig, and a few songs, among them “Bionic Girl” and “Destruction Unit,” which Dan Clark brought with him to the Feederz, and which appeared on their debut Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?. This gap in the historical record has been corrected: Slope Records, a Phoenix-based archival label with a local focus, has released Product of America, a brand-new recording of that 1978 material by the original band, minus the deceased Mr. Graves (RIP 1990, many punk points awarded for pseudonymous irony), whose spot has been filled by another Phoenix lifer, Cris Kirkwood of The Meat Puppets.

The album is a primal emission of toxic hate-noise, recorded quickly so as to preserve the younger band’s raw directness, though it’s being played by now-seasoned musicians almost 40 years after the fact of the songs’ creation (though when we chatted, Bolles wisecracked that just because he’s made a lot of music doesn’t mean he’s learned to play). It contains “Bionic Girl” and “Destruction Unit,” plus 14 other blasts of malice, with themes ranging from sexual depravity to nihilistic politics. Dangerous Minds was privileged to speak with Bolles and Kirkwood about the early Phoenix scene (such as it was), the formation of The Exterminators, and the circumstances that led to the release of Product of America.
 

 
Cris Kirkwood: The Exterminators were a band from about 77-78, and I never saw them when they were active. Derrick Bostrom, the Meat Puppets’ original drummer, was a lot more hip to the local scene, and once I started hanging around with him I became aware of things that had happened before I started playing. My first Phoenix punk rock show was this thing called “Trout-O-Rama” and one of the band’s was the Brainz, which was Doug Clark’s band, and he was “Buzzy Murder” in The Exterminators. He was friends with someone I’d gone to grade school with, and eventually I got to be friends with Doug and his brother Dan, who was “Johnny Macho” in The Exterminators. 

Don Bolles:There wasn’t really a punk scene at that time, just this band The Consumers, which I tried to be in but I wasn’t a good enough. I tried to start things in Phoenix but nobody else I knew was into punk, except Paul Cutler and David Wiley of The Consumers. I’d moved back to Phoenix from an unsuccessful foray to San Francisco, and I called Paul and David to see if anything was happening, and they said their bass played had been hit by a car, and I said “Well, I just got a bass. How about I come and jam out with you guys?” So I went to play with them, and those guys were GOOD. They had like 50 amazing songs, and they were super tight. But I was so terrible. One day I showed up for practice and they hid from me, and I could hear them snickering behind the kitchen door.

We started having all these other weird bands with all the same people. There was The Consumers, there was my band Crazy Homicide, and there were like five other people, and that was our “punk scene.” We started doing shows, and then I started hearing about this other band, and I was livid that I wasn’t in it. They were called The Exterminators and they were really young. They had done a show already and the cops had come. The Exterminators had covered themselves in Saran wrap and tinfoil and painted themselves, and this was at a pool party and there were police helicopters, and it was total chaos. They needed a a drummer, so I borrowed a drum set, which was tough, because nobody wanted me to use theirs because when I played drums I’d break them, but I dragged some drums over to this storage warehouse where they rehearsed, and they were like 14, 15 years old. I tried out with this broken stuff, and I guess it still sounded good because I was in the band. Then they lost their bass player, so I got Rob Graves to play with us. He had a bass, and their guitar player was this crazy kid, Buzzy Murder, and the singer was his brother, Johnny Macho. They were actually Dan and Doug Clark.

Kirkwood: There’s this guy in Phoenix, Tom Lopez, and he came up in the Phoenix punk rock scene, and he managed to get himself in a financial position to be able to start a record label, so he started Slope Records to kind of document the old Phoenix punk rock stuff that was happening. It was a part of his early experience and he was working on a record with Doug, who was in Mighty Sphincter. Tom was asking about the older stuff that had happened before, and Doug brought up The Exterminators as a sort of infamous band that had caught on to that whole thing early on.

Bolles: I didn’t know Tom, I moved out before he was old enough to actually meet people, I was 21 when I moved out of Phoenix. But Doug called me up and told me “this guy wants to put out an Exterminators album. Me and Danny and you, and Cris Kirkwood would play bass.” So I talked to Tom, who flew me out to Phoenix and put me up—in the fucking Clarendon hotel, which has a bust of the real Don Bolles, who was murdered there [Clarification: Bolles’ real name is James Giorsetti, he took his stage name from an Arizona journalist who was killed by a car bomb in 1976]—and I went and recorded all The Exterminators’ songs from back then. All the songs. We tried to do them as faithfully as we could. I had a tape of one of our shows. I had a rehearsal tape for a while but I lost it, probably in the ‘90s.

Kirkwood: A cassette still existed of an entire Exterminators show, from like ’78, and Tom had the idea of recording the songs, but Rob Graves, the bass player, is unfortunately no longer with us, so I was asked to play bass. Some of the songs are kind of Phoenix punk rock classics that had been recorded by other bands, so I knew them. With very little practice, we went into the studio—we had one practice day with the full band and on the same day we did a photo shoot—and it came up surprisingly cohesive. It was funny, Doug was like 15 when they had the band, and here we are, pretty seasoned players, doing this batch of youthful songs that had never been recorded, and now we’re these old farts taking a stab at them. It was a very fun, very fucking satisfying experience, and it came out well.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
Meat Puppets scholar Matthew Smith-Lahrman, the author of The Meat Puppets and the Lyrics of Curt Kirkwood from Meat Puppets II to No Joke, has posted a number of his in-depth interviews with the band on his blog, Perspective. Toward the end of one such conversation with main Puppet Curt Kirkwood, the singer and guitarist breaks down which drugs the band used while recording each of their first five albums for SST:

The first album was, “Let’s do it all on acid.” We thought that our heroes did. And I always thought, “Wow, the Grateful Dead and Jimi were trippin’,” and so we did it in the studio, Meat Puppets I sounds like that because we really are on drugs. Meat Puppets II we had MDA: lots of it. Really good MDA. We just had a ball with the stuff for about four or five days and recorded the record, but nobody is going to do that again after that. It’s like, “This record depends on this.” Well, it kind of does. Up on the Sun is just a big pot and beer album. “Now this one we’re going to go smoke pot and drink beer.” Then we go do Mirage and Huevos and snort cocaine.

 

 
For the Meat Puppets fan whose response to the above paragraph is “tl;dr,” here’s the Dangerous Minds easy-reference, wallet-sized taxonomy:

Meat Puppets: acid
Meat Puppets II: MDA
Up on the Sun: pot and beer
Mirage: cocaine
Huevos: cocaine

And here’s a story from Gregg Turkington’s liner notes to the Rykodisc reissue of Meat Puppets that should help you remember which drug goes with that album:

Curt once told me a story of a night he spent in the Arizona desert under the influence of hallucinogens. Wandering around in a patch of barren desert far from town, he came upon what appeared to be a beautiful Persian rug, laid out in the sand. Under the influence as he was, he couldn’t help but lie down on the rug and attempt to commune with its cascading patterns and beautiful colors. He eventually wrapped himself up in this gorgeous rug, and drifted off to sleep. Upon awakening to the heat of a desert morning, he was instantly sobered up by the realization that the rug was in fact, an extremely dead coyote, covered in maggots and stinking like the bowels of Hell from days spent rotting in the sun. The influence of incidents like these (and there are others!) definitely gave the Meat Puppets their particular and peculiar edge.

Continues after the jump…

 
Sonic Youth’s West Coast debut took place at the Gila Monster Jamboree, one of three not-totally-legal shows Desolation Center put on in Southern California during the mid-‘80s. If you wanted to attend, you had to buy a ticket, sign a release form, and then make your way to a remote rock in the Mojave Desert. Run by Stuart Swezey of the great AMOK bookstore and press, Desolation Center specialized in setting up wild shows at nontraditional venues, as the ‘90s Sonic Youth biography Confusion Is Next explains:

Previous Desolation Center events had included a boat cruise around San Pedro Harbor featuring the Minutemen, and a Mojave Desert show starring the coruscating German band Einstürzende Neubauten and high-gauge explosives. The Sunday-night bill pitted Sonic Youth against the Meat Puppets, an acid-punk trio from Phoenix, Arizona, signed to SST; Redd Kross, a seventies-inspired punk band led by teenage brothers; and Psi-Com, a [sic] unfortunate group headed by one Perry Farrell—later front man for the infinitely more successful Jane’s Addiction.

A map to a halfway point, Victorville, was provided with each ticket; exact directions to the festival site were given verbally from there. Despite a rash of free LSD and a late-night slot that forced Sonic Youth into the chilly desert air, the show was an unqualified success. Regardless of the prevailing hippie aesthetic (which the members of Sonic Youth found nothing if not anachronistic), Sonic Youth for the first time met their true contemporaries face-to-face: postpunk musicians who regarded rock and punk with equal doses of admiration and derision.

 

Directions to Gila Monster Jamboree (larger image here)
 
A more recent Sonic Youth bio, Psychic Confusion, includes eyewitness detail from Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert and Meat Puppet Curt Kirkwood:

“We went to this weird goth guy’s house the day before, to check out the drum kit I’d be borrowing,” remembers Bob. “The place was full of wild reptiles. He was the singer of Psi-Com; years later, I would realize he was Perry Farrell, of Jane’s Addiction.”

“Gila Monster was a pirate thing,” explains Kirkwood, “the kind of thing Meat Puppets used to play in Arizona, where people would bring kegs. But Stuart did it on a much larger scale.” The generator and crappy PA system were set up at Skull Rock, a knoll deep in the Mojave Desert, eight miles from Joshua Tree.

~snip

“It was well lit, because it was full moon,” remembers Kirkwood. “Clear viewing, you can go hiking around, you don’t need a flashlight or nothin’. It’s real nice. You were surrounded by the desert, you kinda had to sneak in. There was slippery stuff going on all around; there were 500 people there, and I think a lot of them were on LSD. There was this bizarre feeling of paranoia. Loads of people were just sitting there going, ‘woooah, woooah’, tripping in the desert, all these punk rockers from LA. It was a pretty SST-heavy affair. Like I said, we’re all friends, Redd Kross, Sonic Youth, all the attendant freaks from SST. It wasn’t real loud, it was pleasant.”

 

Sonic Youth in Southern California, 1985
 
I’ve yet to come across any recordings of Redd Kross at Gila Monster Jamboree, and while audio of Psi Com’s bad night (according to Perry Farrell: The Saga of a Hypester, after their set ended, the frontman hid behind a rock and sobbed) certainly exists, all the links I’ve found are dead. However, you can hear all of the Meat Puppets’ performance, comprising most of their not-yet-released masterpiece Up on the Sun, in glorious FLAC or just-fine MP3 at the Meat Puppets Live Repository.   
 

A ticket to Gila Monster Jamboree
 
And here’s Sonic Youth, two months before the release of Bad Moon Rising, busting a gut for “Brother James” under the desert stars. We learn from Lee Ranaldo’s liner notes for the VHS of Sonic Youth’s set, released in 1992, that a crew from Flipside Magazine shot the video, and that the Meat Puppets were the last band to go on, playing “on into the night as the desert cold set in, under a big ring around the moon.” If you’ve ever wondered how Sonic Youth pulled off “Death Valley ‘69” without Lydia Lunch, wonder no more.
 

 
When the Meat Puppets released their first, eponymous album on CD, they generously included, as often happened during that era, a bunch of bonus tracks, such as, ahem, “Meat Puppets,” which had appeared on the 1981 Light Bulb “emergency cassette” compilation, and “H-Elenore,” which came from the Keats Rides a Harley comp from Happy Squid Records that also featured a track from Gun Club.

Tucked in there without much fanfare was a rendition of Fred Neil’s song, which he first recorded in 1966, of “Everybody’s Talkin’.” The song became far more famous after the release of Midnight Cowboy, which included a cover of the song that helped put Harry Nilsson on the map. That version was a palpable hit, and if you think you can hum the song from memory, it’s probably Nilsson’s version that you know.
 

 
The provenance of the Meat Puppets’ cover of “Everybody’s Talkin’” is unknown, at least by me, but I do know they sometimes played it at concerts during the 1980s. To be candid, they pretty much dismantle the fucker—I suspect satirical intent. You be the judge.