Listen to the article:
On Nov. 18, 1993, brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood were in New York City. That night, the pair of seasoned punk rockers joined Nirvana, one of the biggest rock bands in the world, in covering three of their own songs for Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged" performance.
Overnight, the Kirkwoods' band Meat Puppets skyrocketed from '80s underground icons to '90s mainstream rock stars. But in the '70s, Curt, Cris and their drummer Derrick Bostrom were high schoolers in Phoenix.
"We met each other through the underground grapevine," Bostrom said. "At the time, they weren’t into punk rock. I was, and I was trying to find anybody who wanted to start a band with me."
In 1979, after Bostrom introduced Curt to some of his favorite punk records, Curt agreed to recruit his brother so the three could start playing together. However, Cris had more of an aversion to punk rock than his older brother. Bostrom described two concerts that changed Cris’ perspective on the genre, the first of which occurred at ASU.
"Around 1979, artists (that the Kirkwoods might have wanted to see) started coming to town — Iggy Pop, bands like DEVO, Talking Heads, stuff like that," Bostrom said. "Cris had gone and seen Talking Heads when they played at Neeb Hall."
According to Bostrom, Cris was impressed by the Talking Heads' integrity after seeing them get into a fight with the promoter, as well as their more structured style of punk rock compared to groups like the Sex Pistols, which Bostrom preferred.
In 1980, Cris and Bostrom saw Lucy LaMode, a Phoenix punk rocker later known for her satirical group Killer Pussy. The show was disrupted by "jocks," as Bostrom described them, and a riot broke out in the audience.
"We got our picture in the paper, and Cris and I were in the New Times pogoing in the audience," Bostrom said. "Cris was amazed because he didn’t take it seriously and didn’t believe it was real."
The Meat Puppets officially formed in 1980 with Bostrom on drums, Cris on bass and Curt on guitar and vocals. They soon became one of many influential punk and alternative bands to emerge from the Phoenix area in the following decades.
Hardcore origins
"By the time we did our first shows, we had developed an extremely feral style," Bostrom said.
"We liked the idea of really getting out there, … challenging the audience and creating a safe space to go crazy on stage. … I was on what I considered to be a spiritual quest to lose my freaking mind. I’m sorry to say that I was successful in that aspect."
The Meat Puppets weren’t the only Phoenix-based punk band producing a "feral" sound — JFA formed in Phoenix in 1981. Their debut EP, "Blatant Localism," released that year and quickly became a staple of ultra-hardcore and a pioneering skate punk album. The record featured six songs and clocked in at just seven minutes long, perfectly capturing the volume and speed of first wave hardcore punk.
According to Tony Beram, the founder of local label Placebo Records and manager for JFA, skate culture became paramount to JFA’s success. "Their fans had things in common," he said.
Bands like Meat Puppets and JFA entered a unique scene. "The older kids that we looked up to were getting into punk rock and forming little bands," Bostrom said. "They were smart enough to know that they weren't actually from Britain, so their punk rock bands were kinds of parodies of punk rock bands. …They weren’t angry; they were amused."
Oftentimes, these bands intentionally provoked their audiences to the point of getting into fights during the set. "The Phoenix scene always had this heavy sense of irony to it; you weren't supposed to take it too seriously," Bostrom said.
Crude irony and unapologetic noise were guiding principles of early '80s punk bands in Phoenix. Its groups were perfect microcosms of this. JFA stood for Jodie Foster’s Army — a reference to John Hinckley Jr.'s obsession with an underaged Jodie Foster being his motive for shooting Ronald Reagan.
The Meat Puppets' 1982 self-titled debut album has been described as "unintelligible" and "incomprehensible" by both its biggest fans and its harshest critics. The band's off-the-wall live performances were even more chaotic than they sounded in the studio.
"You take our first album … then add no sleep, bad sound, inexperience, and you’re going to get a magnificent noise," Bostrom said.
Mad Gardens
As punk bands in different pockets of the Valley discovered each other throughout the late '70s and early '80s, there was no venue to host consistent shows for the developing scene. According to Beram, "It was the wild west back then." Many venues wouldn’t allow bands to come back after one performance, he said.
"Maybe it would get closed down by the police before it ended, maybe it would make it until the end and someone would break their collarbone," he said.
It wasn’t until 1981 that Phoenix punks found their home. Phoenix Madison Square Garden, a shoddy venue on a sketchy stretch of Van Buren Street, became the heart of the Phoenix punk scene.
In 1981, the spot was owned by Beram’s uncle and used primarily to host amateur wrestling events. After briefly announcing wrestlers there, Beram — who was known by his moniker Tony Victor in the punk world — received approval from his uncle to host punk rock concerts on Saturday nights.
Quickly, Phoenix Madison Square Garden earned the nickname "Mad Gardens" from its patrons, who witnessed bands perform in the wrestling ring. "Just about every punk band in the country came through and played Mad Gardens," Beram said. Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat and Social Distortion were among the bands who performed there.
"The local bands were now in a position where … a headliner from out of town could draw a few more people in, so it gave the bands a little bit more of a steady place to play for a while," he said.
Violence was a regular issue at Mad Gardens. Beram received calls from angry parents threatening to sue over injuries their child sustained. One night, the lead vocalist of Adolescents threw a bottle into the crowd, prompting security to chase him into the bleachers. They eventually grabbed him, picked him up and dropped him, splitting his head open and starting a riot.
"You wake up the next morning wondering if you're still going to be in business after something like that, and we had incidents like that every so often," Beram said.
The venue's wrestling matches were even more dangerous than its concerts. After a string of audience injuries, they were forced to stop operating in late 1983. With Mad Gardens needing both wrestling and concerts to stay open, it hosted its last shows in early 1984 before closing.
Branching out
"By the time (Mad Gardens) ended, we had graduated into a national act," Bostrom said.
The Meat Puppets had signed with indie label SST Records, which played a substantial role in facilitating the growth of punk, indie and alternative music in the '80s that became the blueprint for '90s rock. Suddenly, they were touring with punk heavyweights like Black Flag. However, this meant spending more time performing to hardcore traditionalists who detested the band for the ways in which it veered from punk norms.
"Over the course of a couple years, we ended up falling into the hardcore scene, which was not really our scene," Bostrom said. "We had already experienced having stuff thrown at us and getting spit on because we dared to open for Black Flag and have long hair."
The Meat Puppets were ready to branch out. They spent time listening to artists like Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. "What we discovered is we could play any kind of song," Bostrom said.
"Meat Puppets II," released in 1984, was a complex mash of punk, psychedelia and country music that has since been hailed as one of the most influential albums to come out of the '80s underground. A Rolling Stone review following the record’s release called it "a kind of cultural trash compacter," and compared it to "wandering into a drug-detox center and overhearing twelve strung-out conversations at once."
The Meat Puppets’ third album, 1985's "Up on the Sun," stripped away most of what remained of the band's hardcore roots, favoring an upbeat but mellow style of psychedelic post-punk with country-inspired lyrics. Like its predecessor, "Up on the Sun" sold well and received positive reviews.
In the mid-1980s, the norms in underground punk began to shift on a national level. Bands like R.E.M. made indie music enveloped in punk ethos that still appealed to mainstream sensitivities. This was the beginning of alternative rock in earnest.
As these kinds of indie bands began migrating to the major labels for more money and greater popularity, the Meat Puppets struggled to adjust. "We could not get a major label deal," Bostrom said.
Touring with their current label was also difficult. "When we went on tour with (SST), it was such a shoestring affair," Bostrom said. "It was eating from giant pots of spaghetti at night and sleeping on people's floors and playing for $25. … They refused to take us on some of the harder tours."
The Meat Puppets finally left SST for a major label in the early '90s. London Recordings attempted a hail mary by trying to rebrand the group as country artists for their 1991 major label debut "Forbidden Places." Despite positive reviews, the album sold poorly.
While it seemed like the music industry had moved on from bands like JFA and Meat Puppets, ASU was fostering the growth of a new scene in the Phoenix area to meet the shift in demand.
The alt-rock boom
Gin Blossoms formed in Tempe in 1987. Following R.E.M.'s lead by matching indie sounds with pop songwriting and mainstream sensitivities, they gained notoriety in Phoenix — particularly around ASU’s Tempe campus — in the late '80s and early '90s. Deemed 'college rock,' upbeat alternative bands like Gin Blossoms dominated student-run college radio at the time.
In its early days, the Gin Blossoms frequently performed to ASU students at clubs on Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe, earning them local fame by the time of their 1989 debut album "Dusted." They catapulted into the national spotlight with their major studio debut "New Miserable Experience" in 1992. Two songs on the album, "Hey Jealousy" and "Found Out About You," reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Gin Blossoms' mainstream success came largely from the band's close ties to the ASU community. The band's memorabilia can still be spotted at restaurants near the Tempe campus, and in 2022, a stretch of Eighth Street in Tempe was renamed Allison Road Avenue, after "Allison Road," one of the band’s most iconic songs.
Along with the Gin Blossoms came a fledgling scene of alternative college rock bands in Tempe. The other most successful was the Refreshments, who landed a minor hit in 1996 with the chronically-catchy and mindlessly-rebellious "Banditos," which peaked at No. 71 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains a cultural keystone in Phoenix-area rock history.
"It was tons of fun," Refreshments vocalist and ASU alum Roger Clyne said of the Tempe scene. "Everybody knew everybody else, everybody slept on everybody else's couches, borrowed everybody else's guitars. There was a lot of camaraderie and competition, but the whole scene was really good for art. Everybody was excited to create music and share it with an audience and collaborate with other bands. It was just a really electric-feeling scene."
It was also in the mid-'90s that the Meat Puppets saw a new surge in popularity after joining Nirvana on stage for the band’s iconic "MTV Unplugged" performance in November 1993. But Bostrom said he and the Kirkwoods had not always seen the group as career-savers.
"We were at a difficult time because Nirvana had kind of taken the wind out of our sails," he said. "They were selling, we weren't. They were doing big shows and we knew that the label wanted us to ape Nirvana — they wanted us to 'go grunge.'"
However, after reading a Spin article where Kurt Cobain cited "Meat Puppets II" as one of his favorite albums, the Meat Puppets linked up with Nirvana and landed a gig opening for them during a short tour. According to Bostrom, Cobain's decision to invite the band to join him for "Unplugged" at the end of the tour and cover three of their songs was spontaneous.
"Somehow Cobain decided it would be a good idea to have Curt help him face down MTV," Bostrom said. "We can’t ask Cobain about it, but he obviously drew some sort of strength from the Kirkwoods, who are fucking wild men. They’re feral and nuts, but they can also be reassuring in their craziness."
While Bostrom decided to head home after the tour, the Kirkwood brothers joined Nirvana in performing covers of Meat Puppets originals "Lake of Fire," "Plateau" and "Oh, Me." Overnight, the legendary concert transformed the Meat Puppets into a mainstream act.
The band's 1994 album, "Too High To Die" almost immediately became their best-selling record, moving over 500,000 copies and becoming their first and only album to be certified gold by the RIAA. Its single "Backwater" became the group’s biggest hit, nearly crossing into the Billboard Hot 100's top 40.
However, the album's production was marked by hostile disagreements between the Meat Puppets and their label about the direction of the album, with London Recordings pressuring the band to lean into grunge tropes despite their wishes for creative control.
Between wrestling with their label for creative control and Cris' addiction problems leading the band’s management to demand Curt fire him, Meat Puppets went on hiatus in 1996 — just two years after their greatest success.
"Because of Nirvana Unplugged, we were able to stop," Bostrom said. "We were able to get off the road and quit without throwing (ourselves) into working at the Burger King window. It worked out well for us, and it allowed us to stop doing what we didn’t like doing."
For the second time, Meat Puppets were relics of a bye-gone era. The Gin Blossoms would have one more hit, 1996’s "Follow You Down," before joining them, while the Refreshments’ last hurrah was creating the "King of the Hill" theme song. Meanwhile, music in the Phoenix area continued evolving.
The Phoenix Effect
The Phoenix punk and alternative scenes in the '80s and '90s were unique to the Valley. Some would argue they could not have happened anywhere else. Pitchfork described "Meat Puppets II" as "a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert."
Beram said bands in Phoenix sounded very different from one another compared to other cities' scenes. He believes this may have had something to do with how spread out the Phoenix area is.
"I went to Maryville High School, so my experience was quite different than somebody that was going to Brophy," Beram said. "You can grow up in the Valley, and depending on where you are, you can have a very different experience than somebody else that’s growing up 80 miles the other side."
For alternative bands like the Gin Blossoms and Refreshments, ASU provided a perfect scene for them to platform music that appealed to the listening habits of students.
"You have 40,000 ready, willing and able young people with a couple dollars in their pockets who would pay a cover charge and go drink a pitcher of beer and cheer on their bands," Clyne said. "It was indispensable. I don't think that without the support and receptivity of the student body that any of these bands would have had nearly the audience we were blessed to have."
"The Wallace and Ladmo Show" was a children’s show that aired locally from 1954 to 1989, partly known for featuring performances by rock bands. Bostrom explained how growing up watching the show shaped the Meat Puppets' music.
One band, Commodore Condello's Salt River Navy Band, made an album that parodied the Beatles’ "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club" with lyrics about the show’s characters. "So here you are, seven years old, and your kid's show's going 'check out this fucking acid rock, kids,'" Bostrom said.
The show may have also impacted the uniquely satirical and ironic nature of the Phoenix punk scene.
"There was a subversive element to the show," Bostrom said. "A lot of young people who came up watching that program developed a very wry sense of humor, a tongue-in-cheek approach. And to us, not taking it seriously is taking it seriously. That's the way we do it; that's how you came up in Phoenix."
Edited by Savannah Dagupion, Leah Mesquita and Audrey Eagerton.
This story is part of The Culture Issue, which was released on February 26, 2025. See the entire publication here.
Reach the reporter at evansilverbergrep@gmail.com and follow @evansotherstuff on Instagram.
Like State Press Magazine on Facebook, follow @statepressmag on X and Instagram and read our releases on Issuu.
