Too High To Die

Watt mumbles his way through a pained bonus-footage interview, still undone by the death of his Minutemen bandmate d. boon, who would come to mind not only because d. boon loved the Meat Puppets — the guy also died in a van wreck just outside of Phoenix. But for core Meat Puppets fans, those who wore holes in the grooves of their vinyl copies of Meat Puppets II, the Thurston Moore interview will be the most affecting moment of Alive in the Nineties. The Meat Puppets were alive in the ’90s, but they were amazing in the early ’80s, and those are the years Moore details with an early fan’s unabashed enthusiasm. He remembers when the Meat Puppets were the weirdest, most surprising of all punk bands, and he had the privilege of opening for them. A vanished, pre-Nirvana, pre-alternative-radio, pre-so-many-things band scene comes alive as Moore recalls being “super excited” to land that gig, making a flier for it at the copy shop where he worked.

Sonic Youth was yet to tour the country then, and the long-haired, oddball Meat Puppets in their van packed with tattered clothes seemed almost untouchably cool and road-wise to Moore. The gig he described — “country-baked thrash played 20 million times faster than any hardcore band,” with both Kirkwoods continually circling around their mic stands to keep their vocals projected into the microphones (which had a screw loose and a mind of their own like everything else on the stage) — was, he said, the “coolest fucked-up thing I’d ever seen.” You won’t see anything quite that cool or fucked up on Alive in the Nineties, but it’s an honest and likable portrait of the twilight of the rock gods that were the Meat Puppets.

THE MEAT PUPPETS | Alive in the Nineties DVD | (Cornerstone RAS/

Music Video Distributors)