Tall, thin, with long black hair framing a face that, when relaxed, takes on an angelic sweetness, Curt Kirkwood, the singer, guitarist and main songwriter of the Meat Puppets, sometimes comes across as a starry-eyed dreamer, a mystic of sorts. Other times, he’s just kidding around. But even when he’s not entirely serious, he often makes a great deal of sense. You have to listen for the logic buried in the seeming non sequiturs.

“I tend to speak from an imaginative viewpoint, as opposed to a social viewpoint. What i want to hear is something that has a newness to it. I don’t want to hear brashness. I don’t care about not pulling punches or something like that. I’m interested in splitting atoms. I want to see what the whole thing is made of.”

You might expect talk like this from the writer of an album as other-worldly as the Meat Puppets’ third album, Up On The Sun, which they released last year. But astral cruising ain’t the Puppets’ only ride, as they’ve proven on their new SST EP/minialbum Out My Way. In the steaming rave-up of “She’s Hot” and the wild work-out they give to Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly,” the Meat Puppets rock hard and make it moving, while “Out My Way” and “Other Kinds Of Love” continue their penchant for melodic enchantment laced with Curt’s guitar playing, as clear and fluid as a mountain stream. The Meat Puppets, then, have range.

“To me,” Curt says, “that’s what Elvis had. He took things down to the finest point that you could see, and yet he still had balls. So what you had was a real whole.

“I think that trees rock in the wind, and that’s something I like to see in music.”

The Meat Puppets—Curt, his brother j|

Cris on bass and drummer Derrick Bos■ trom, all natives of Phoenix, Arizona— formed sometime in the late ’70s, and ill released their first record in ’81.

Musically, the Meat Puppets have H had a chameleon-like career of shedH ding skins. Their first album was a rough, speedy affair, almost hardcore in 1 its aggressiveness. “We tried to sound H real tough at first,” Curt says now. W,

“That was just a phase.”

Meat Puppets II found them moving tjl towards a skewered country-rock, a trip out to the desert among ominous cacti, with vultures circling overhead.

With Up On The Sun, their trip to the desert turned joyous. It’s a gentle album, full of cryptic lyrics and beautiful melodies imparting a warm, psychedelic glow.

Out My Way has some of Up On The Sun’s sense of spaciousness and mystery, but it also has a hard-rocking sensibility, a sharp focus to the sound that cuts through with a new clarity.

“There are a lot of different elements in it,” Curt says. “Up On The Sun was a bit monotonal in its attitude.”

But it was great for that—almost like a concept album.

“Yeah, it just whipped right through your head, like a breeze, whoosh.

“Now we have a group sound that’s cohesive, but we are still real elemental in that we draw all this stuff in and put it down without really thinking about it.”

Some of it, like “She’s Hot,” is as close to “normal” rock as you’ve come.

“That one is embarrassing for me—because I’m really involved in my sex life. In fact it’s one of my top priorities, and I’ve never been so blatant before. You know, it’s like I’ve picked my earwax out and laid it out for people to see.”

It is one lyric of yours where the listener can say, oh, I know what that’s about. ,

“I have a lot of songs like that, I’ve been writing them for years. But I was having such a blast with the way that we were perceived, that I never wanted to record any of them. But then I got to the point where I said, OK, I know how people will receive the broad side of me, now I’d like to hit them on the head a bit.”

Having created the image of the Meat Puppets as mystics in the desert, it was time to hit them with some sex, grunge and rock ’n’ roll.

“We didn’t really contrive to be mystics in the desert. We just contrived to be sick and weird. And it just turned out that there’s a lot sicker stuff.”

In a world that contains the Swans and the Butthole Surfers, you have to work hard to be considered sick and weird.

9°k'm together imto iMPS! as Curt Kir

“Yeah, we figured we’d just leave that to them. We do get preoccupied with our buttholes when we’re in the van, touring.

I told a newspaper guy in Raleigh that one of my biggest influences was the shape and smell of my own turds.

“But, that’s it. We had created, almost inadvertently, the concept that we were some kind of crazed dust-devils, sidewinders coming out of the desert. So now I want to show the Thompson Twins side of me.”

“I’ve got stuff that rivals Culture Club in its, I don’t know...in its affinity to style. We haven’t done our Led Zeppelin imitation yet.”

So there are surprises in store.

“Yeah, we have tons of styles. I want to put out our version of the opening music from The King And I. That was one of the first covers we did. We really had that thing wired.”

How did you hit on doing “Good Goliggffik ,7^ ly Miss Molly”?

HHHjj “We’d been doing that live for a long time. I always loved the Creedence version of that, and yet for all the screaming that John Fogerty did, I always wanted it to be more nasty. I don’t think we really got it. It’s a studio version of a thing we do live, where it can be so charged. I wanted to do it a little more true to Little Richard, not stylistically but in spirit.”

We should mention here that Curt Kirkwood is a captivating and truly original guitarist. His playing can be as gentle and ethereal as his most spacey r lyrics, or it can shudder with electricity.

“Tone is something that I work on very specifically. I tend to use a guitar that has a real rich tone. I never liked jangly guitar. I always went for a sound where you could hear the wood of the guitar.”

Where does music come from? What’s it supposed to do?

“Well, the thing about the brain is that it’s an organ that keeps things separate, but there is also a place in the brain where things melt together. There are elements of what I do that have nothing to do with reality at all. I have no idea where it comes from.

“I heard Peter Buck say that good music could go beyond emotion. That’s one of the few things I’ve heard said about music that I’ve agreed with.

“Still, for what music is supposed to be, the purpose it’s supposed to serve, mostly it’s hardly doing that. It seems it’s only serving the market, the way shoe stores do.”

But what, specifically, about the Meat Puppets? Where does this enraptured music they make come from? The desert is definitely an influence on this music, which sounds as if it were conceived in isolation, in a free space that is both peculiarly Southwestern and totally unique.

“It does come from the fact that we live in that region,” Curt says. “But I don’t think anyone else could do it. Most of the other bands there just ape Nashville or New York or L.A. We were never involved in that scene.

“I love it there. I start to despise it after I’ve been there too long, but when I go on the road I realize how much I love it. It’s strange to come out here to New York. I appreciate the culture, but I always feel too locked in. I like looking at people, but, there’s nobody in Arizona. It’s so sparsely populated, it’s a blast.

“It’s great to be able to go out into the desert, where you can find a place in 15 minutes and take your clothes and run for miles in any direction and not see anybody. We used to go out and get wasted and romp around n&ked and throw rocks at each other. That was a big inspiration for us in forming the band. We wanted to be able to project the craziness and freedom that we found out there.

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“It’s a fantastic place to grow up. Riding motorcycles all over the place, shooting things up, going as apeshit as we wanted to. With nobody around. Around here, even in the country, everything is owned by somebody, there’s always a fence. That would drive me crazy.”

But seriously, folks.

Curt: “For a band called Meat Puppets, we’ve done really well. It’s a weird world. We tried to do nothing more than to mess around as much as we could. Like, Hemingway is one of the people who come to mind because he never denied being really sick. And he was really popular during his time, though he was known to be a real idiot. He just pushed it. I really like that.

“The reason we got together was to be as stupid and imbecilic as possible. And we’ve both succeeded and failed. We remain as imbecilic as we can be. But we get less immature as we go on. That’s nature for you.”