The publicist for the Meat Puppets sent a note out today announcing that the band had been picked to open three dates for the reunited Stone Temple Pilots, urging recipients to "Party like it's 1993!" I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

It's great to have the band back in fighting shape after more than a decade in the wilderness, and I for one would like to keep it that way. But to casually invoke 1993 is to ignore why the band went away for 10 years. Bassist Cris Kirkwood's drug habit went into overdrive around this time, and most acknowledge that it was... wait for it... a tour with the Stone Temple Pilots that sent him over the edge.

The result? The band recorded a lackluster follow-up to its commercial breakthrough, Too High To Die, and split up. Cris Kirkwood spiraled down, eventually getting involved in an assault on a security guard at a post office. He ended up shot and spent two years in jail.

Kirkwood seems recovered, and clearly understands that this is his second and perhaps last chance to make the band work. "I wrecked the Meat Puppets," he told Rolling Stone recently. "This thing that we'd cherished, that we'd worked our whole lives for, I fucking wrecked it."

As far as second acts go, this one is a doozy. Kirkwood and his brother, guitar/singer Curt Kirkwood, have crafted a fantastic album in Sewn Together (their second since reforming). It feels like the more logical successor to Forbidden Places, an album jam-packed with hooks, all delivered in that slightly spacey desert-inspired boogie that the Meat Puppets have made their own.

In an interview with Curt Kirkwood last month, he told me that the band was eager to make good new music; the reformation was not going to be an exercise in nostalgia.

“We said, ‘Let’s see what we can do with this, make this thing fly. Not something on its laurels, its past standing,” he said. “We didn’t break up because we had some sort of artistic disagreement. We took a break because he was sick, messed up. When he came back, we didn’t have anything to get over. We just got back to it.”

Here's hoping that everyone involved with the Meat Puppets/STP shows realizes that second chances are rare and is willing to leave the baggage of the past back where it belongs.

Labels: music