Black Flag + Meat Puppets | the Channel | April 15, 1984
By PHOENIX STAFF | October 25, 2006
.jpg "meatpuppets-2")
Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets circa 1984 |
In the early ’80s Boston had a chip on its shoulder about West Coast punk and hardcore — a friendly feud typified by the local hardcore comp This Is Boston, Not LA. And Cali hardcore was personified by Black Flag, a band that had evolved from the simple loud, fast, snotty rules of early hardcore to a more complex fusion of hard crunch, speedy pace, shards of distortion, sarcasm, irony, anger, and the in-your-face attitude that’s still Henry Rollins’s trademark. The Channel was one of the few clubs in town you could count on for at least one good hardcore matinee a month. And in April of ’84, it was a shirtless Rollins, sweat-drenched, cutting a mad path from the stage to the men’s room to rinse down, then reversing direction and heading back on stage just as Greg Ginn was finishing one of his wrecked solos. And, yes, he received plenty of friendly backslaps along the way back to the stage. That Black Flag’s SST labelmates from Arizona, Meat Puppets, were on the bill was a tribute to just how diverse punk had become. They’d taken punk in a whole ’nother direction, with brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood finding trippy bliss in whacked-out psychedelic country riffs. And they were right at home on the same stage as Black Flag. |
Were you there? Wish you were? Seen better? Tell us about it below.
Related:
Family affairs, Curt Kirkwood, War and peace, More 
- Family affairs
Good news for Meat Puppets fans: the post-hardcore band who hit on a strange interstice of country, psychedelia, and punk a quarter-century ago are alive and kicking. Curt Kirkwood, "Golden Lies" (mp3) Curt Kirkwood, "Beautiful Weapon" (mp3)
- Curt Kirkwood
As frontman of the Meat Puppets back in the mid 1980s, Curt Kirkwood blew minds marrying hardcore punk rock to sunbaked country music.
- War and peace
One of the nicer developments over the past several years has the straightforwardly quiet reappearance of one of the most productive, powerful, and unique bands to emerge from the punkinspired LA underground two and a half decades ago – X.
- Battlestar anime
Fans of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic The Seven Samurai , which spawned John Sturges’s 1960 The Magnificent Seven , are going to be surprised at what they find in Samurai 7 .
- Moz-a-mania
The disappointing thing about Henry Rollins — otherwise a paragon of American manhood — has always been the fact that he is, in public at least, a Moz basher.
- Austin city limits
So, you didn’t make it down to South by Southwest this year. Neither did I.
- Going on sale: July 18, 2008
The Walkmen, Ray LaMontagne, Jonathan Richman, Gang Gang Dance, Paul Weller, and Henry Rollins.
- Def and dumb
Fight for NY is punch-drunk
- Record reviewers
The problem with these “play your most revered album in full” shows that everyone from Public Enemy to Liz Phair is doing lately is that the correct answer is not always a no-brainer.
- Hollywood holidaze
Punk rock had jetpacked the Minutemen into a synæsthetic sound world where ideas had the same value as chords, where Reagan’s policy in Central America could be related directly to the setting of your amp.
- The Handsome Family
Attentive indiephiles and alt-country fans will soon realize that lyrics about tying a captain to a tree and trying hard not to hear his screams could only be the observations of Albuquerque’s husband-and-wife team the Handsome Family.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Henry Rollins, Guns N' Roses, The Beastie Boys, More
, Henry Rollins, Guns N' Roses, The Beastie Boys, Greg Ginn, Curt Kirkwood, Meat Puppets, Less
