Climbing

“Dad, do you know that climbing song?”

I am backing the minivan out of the garage at 7:40am on a Friday morning.

“Sure,” I say before I start singing,

climb, climb, i always climb
out of bed in the morning
on a mountain made of sand
and i know this doesn’t rhyme
but the clutter on the table
has been getting out of hand…

“What!” comes from the back seat. “Daaaad. That’s not a real song. You’re making that up.”

And that’s how I ended up playing “Climbing” by the Meat Puppets for my kids during carpool. Which is a perfect song for the 14 year old. The free association lyrics, the monotone vocals, this is perfect stuff for a teen into Dan Palladin and the whole The Behemoth aesthetic. As for the 11 year old girl? Not so much. But she thought it was funny.

Cut to work and I am digging up Meat Puppets II on Spotify. Because after listening to “Climbing” I then needed to hear the Small Stone inflected opening riffs to “New Gods.” And also the crepuscular, Neil Young lope of “Oh, Me.” And like the trailing, lazy, guitar string bends of “Oh, Me’s” searching, “way out there” solo, it slowly dawns on me how deeply me and my friends used to wrap ourselves in this record.

Like the David Lodge character who posits that T.S. Eliot influenced the writing of Shakespeare, so too did Curt Kirkwood now influence the way in which I listened to every electric guitarist that came before him.

The Meat Puppets were a gift from the gods to me and my brother and our best friend Charlie Geer. This was the band we wanted to be. We adopted one of their doodles as our totem. And, to me at least, “II” and “Up On The Sun” were the most brilliant records ever put to tape. The guitar playing was insane. Curt Kirkwood could fingerpick like an arthritic Doc Watson and thrash like a punk Billy Gibbons. Of course, those comparisons are completely after the fact. Like the David Lodge character who posits that T.S. Eliot influenced the writing of Shakespeare (since we now read Shakespeare through the lens of Eliot), so too did Curt Kirkwood now influence the way in which I listened to every electric guitarist that came before him – everyone from ZZ Top front man Billy Gibbons, to the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, to Neil Young and all the way back to Les Paul, the very inventor of the guiat that Kirkwood played himself.

In retrospect, I realize that Curt Kirkwood was the perfect guitar teacher for me as a teenager. The songs were weird enough for me to get into at the time but underneath the off key singing and surreal lyrics was an amazing amalgamation of guitar styles – hardcore power chord speed riffing, spacey psychedelic noodlings, and hot country licks. Hat’s off to you Curt Kirkwood.