(While you tear through this tasty l'il interview, check out "I Quit," the first single from the reconstituted 'Pups 2000 release, Golden Lies!) The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end, came on a day way back in 1993. Taking a short cigarette break in the midst of filming Nirvana's Unplugged special for MTV, Kurt Cobain said 11 words that would change the bank accounts, and the lives, of Curt and Cris Kirkwood forever. "These are the brothers Meat Puppets," Cobain said between puffs. "We're big fans of theirs." Until that fateful day, the Meat Puppets had toiled, tripped, and ripped year after year in relative obscurity. The Kirkwoods and drummer Derrick Bostrom began jamming together in Phoenix about when the mood ring '70s melted into the me-first '80s, and soon they stumbled onto a deeply personal groove that incorporated the independence and impatience of punk rock, the down home nihilism of George Jones, and the psychedelic lyrical stance of Syd Barrett, often within a single song. The band's self-titled LP on the Black Flag-founded SST label failed to make much of a stir, but later in the same year, 1984, with the release of Meat Puppets II, they provoked an underground buzz almost as big as the one that was obviously rattling around in their heads. Their third record, 1985's Up on the Sun was certifiably brilliant, but it didn't put much money in the bank, and even though Huevos (1987) and Monsters (1989) were capable of placating fans of the Minutemen and ZZ Top in one fell swoop, the Pups were tired of being larger than life fish in an underground pond. So the band jumped ship to London Records (a subsidiary of mighty Polygram), but their first release on the label, Forbidden Places (1991), failed to live up to anyone's expectations. It looked like 1994's Too High to Die might be headed for a similar fate -- B.C. (Before Cobain), that is. But once Nirvana's Unplugged in New York began airing regularly, popular interest in the Pups started snowballing, and almost as soon as Cobain killed himself, the great mass audience considered the Meat Puppets to be legends by proxy, and the single "Backwater" became an instant hit. Eleven little words and a shotgun blast did what 15 years of hard work and relentless touring had failed to do: propel the Meat Puppets into that rarefied, precarious state that John Lennon used to call "the toppermost of the poppermost." From there, things went straight to hell. Cris Kirkwood's heroin habit blossomed into full-blown addiction during the sessions for 1995's disappointing No Joke, and his life has been a series of tragedies since. The band went into hiatus, Curt moved to Los Angeles, and then to Austin, Texas, where after a long fallow period he formed a new act called Royal Neanderthal Orchestra that eventually morphed into Meat Puppets Mach II. While the lineup may have changed, this year's Golden Lies (released on Breaking Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic), is proof positive that Curt Kirkwood remains one of rock's most idiosyncratically talented songwriters, not to mention a flat out wizard on guitar. The soundscapes he creates are alternately comforting and confounding places, where jangle masks profound melancholy, where contradiction and confusion are not to be feared but embraced. And isn't that the way it should be? What's going on with your brother these days? It's kind of a mystery. I do know he's in Phoenix. He's been trying to get his shit together, and I think he's been doing better than he had been. When you've got that kind of thing going on, a lotta times it's a matter of fortune whether or not you're gonna get over it, but that's all I really know. 1 | 2 | 3