Trivia / Meat Puppets

• Based on a Dream: As a child, Curt Kirkwood had a nightmare about a lamb eerily floating above his backyard in the moonlight - this inspired part of the chorus to "You Love Me" ("My lamb / Hoverin' in the moonlight").
• Black Sheep Hit: Their most sucessful single, "Backwater", is a fairly straightforward 90's alt rock track, featuring no traces of the psychedelic weirdness or frenzied, country-tinged punk that they're best known for.
• Executive Meddling:
  • During a temporary breakup of the band, Curt Kirkwood formed a new group called Royal Neanderthal Orchestra. However, the one label interested in releasing their music would only do so if they could promote it as a Meat Puppets album, so they changed their name and became a new lineup of Meat Puppets - thus Curt is the only original member featured on Golden Lies.

• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Forbidden Places and No Joke!, being two out of their three albums released by London Records, are out of print - however, in 2021, both albums became available on Spotify.
  • While Meat Puppets were on hiatus between 2001 and 2006, Curt Kirkwood had three side projects that released one album each, all of which are currently out of print: namely self-titled albums by Eyes Adrift and Volcano, and his solo album Snow.
• What Could Have Been:
  • For the band's 2006 reformation, the band initially announced Tim "Herb" Alexander (of Primus fame) as their drummer. That would have been awesome...
  • The band had auditioned second guitarists to tour in support of Too High To Die, and one of them was John Frusciante, who had just left Red Hot Chili Peppers and had apparently stated in an interview that the Meat Puppets were the only other band he'd consider joining.
  • During the Too High To Die sessions, the label was pushing for a single that could be marketed to Alternative Rock radio - As a joke, Derrick Bostrom wrote a song called "Don't Touch My Stuff", which was a stylistic parody of bands like Nirvana and Jane's Addiction, and had thinly veiled lyrics about Executive Meddling: the label actually liked it, so they stopped working on the song altogether, and it's still never seen the light of day.
  • In the oral history book Too High To Die, Curt muses that hypothetically he could have billed the supergroup / side project Eyes Adrift as a new Meat Puppets lineup for the brand recognition, with Golden Lies setting precedent for it. However, he also notes this might have offended the other members - particularly Krist Novoselic, who had the idea to form the band in the first place.