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by Alan Sculley
The three musicians also endured harsh tragedies within their former bands. Nirvana, of course, was cut short by the suicide of bandleader Kurt Cobain. Sublime was just getting its career off the ground when a heroin overdose claimed the life of frontman Bradley Nowell in May 1996. The original Meat Puppets came to an end because of the drug habit of Kirkwood's brother Cris, the band's bassist.
Gaugh said he thinks the tragic circumstances somehow may have played a role in bringing together the three musicians in Eyes Adrift.
"It's invisible, almost like a ghost or a poltergeist," Gaugh said of the musicians' pasts. "And it's flying around, and it's seen these lost souls, these guys who have nothing but love for music and want to be creative and are well deserving of that. And whoosh, it swept us up together into one path, and it's just a way of the music saying, 'Hey, thanks for loving us so much. You guys have all been diligent soldiers. Now it's time to give you guys medals.'"
Last fall, Kirkwood was doing his first tour as a solo artist after his attempt to form a second edition of the Meat Puppets failed. When Kirkwood's tour came to Seattle, Novoselic came to the show. The Meat Puppets had opened shows for Nirvana. In fact, the Kirkwood brothers appeared on Nirvana's famous 1993 "MTV Unplugged" special. Novoselic asked Kirkwood if he would like to get together and jam. At almost the same exact time, Gaugh, who had quit his post-Sublime band, the Long Beach Dub Allstars, saw an ad for Kirkwood's Los Angeles gig.
"It was really weird and uncanny how it all kind of seemed to fall together," Gaugh said. "I've been a big fan of the Meat Puppets since way back. I used to see shows back in the old days. They were always one of my favorites. I knew he (Kirkwood) was doing the second Meat Puppets thing, the regrouping with the other members. And then I saw he was playing solo so it was like, 'Wow, things must not have worked out. I wonder if he wants to jam.'"
Before long the three musicians had convened in Kirkwood's hometown of Austin, Texas. Sparks flew and have carried through to the band's self-titled debut disc, which doesn't trade on the music of the trio's past bands as much as one might expect.
Those looking for traces of Nirvana and Sublime will have to dig deep. Only the imprint of the Meat Puppets' arid psychedelic sound carries through in an obvious way to Eyes Adrift, as songs such as "Untried," "Solid" and "Pyramids" bear the distinctive stamp of Kirkwood, who wrote most of the songs. Other songs explore musical territory that doesn't so easily recall any of the musician's famous former bands. "Sleight Of Hand" combines a jazzy, Latin rhythm, and a country feel in its guitars and horns into an evocative package. And "Inquiring Minds," a song about media intrusion written by Novoselic, is a ragged yet pretty rocker.
To Gaugh being in the group has been effortless, as well.
"This has been the easiest project to tour on for me," said Gaugh, who noted that drug problems within the Long Beach Dub Allstars had played a major role in his decision to leave the band. "Other outfits I've toured with before have just been a lot of stress and a lot of bad feelings between people here, there and everywhere. It was kind of a bad situation. This one has just been so easy and effortless. It really has been. Our biggest effort has been on the stage and in the studio, and that's where it should be as a band. You should be enjoying what you're doing, and you should love your talent and try to excel at that in every way, shape and form."
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Pirate? Who, me?
by Dave Kirby
Music critics-yes, we tireless and under-appreciated guardians of taste, perspective and thoughtful reflection on culture-can escape justice for our larcenous ways no longer. Epic Records is hip to our tricks.
A major news weekly reported a couple of weeks ago that Epic will start shipping advance copies of major new releases (which typically go out to critics a month or two before retail) in sealed CD players, which, if tampered with, will destroy the CD. They evidently believe, according to an Epic spokesperson, they will be saving hundreds of thousands of dollars from unauthorized copying of new releases by Pearl Jam, Tori Amos and others. Critics get the CD players, listen long enough to craft an appraisal, and send them back, with the implicit threat of being dumped from the promo list if they don't play nice. With a threat like that, evidently Epic's test program has yielded perfectly bovine compliance so far. All the CD players have come back with the precious, shiny plastic intact.
Silly idea. Most full-time music critics are too busy running themselves stupid trying to cover lousy bands, review stacks of crummy CDs, meet deadlines and feed their families on a bi-weekly columnist's wage. Freelancers, like yours truly, usually don't get the big releases unless we ask for them, and ask very nicely.
And the belief that any of us are out there lurking in the shadows by high school playgrounds, pimping advance copies of Tori Amos' latest collection of angsty etudes and pocketing thousands in the process is funny beyond description. Frankly, you don't do this job for the money, and pirating CDs doesn't make you much money.
Maybe some critics get a little charge from knowing that some underpaid grunt in a dreary factory in Indiana has glued in their advance of some CD especially for them, but, personally, I think it's the perfect marriage of recording industry greed and idiocy run amok.
Still, like most of my colleagues in the music critic business, I've been watching the evolution of music piracy paranoia with a conflicted sense of bemusement and concern. Unlike a lot of them, I've been doing this long enough to remember that this paranoia-fueled mostly by mega-entertainment cartel accountants gnashing their teeth at every $16 some schlep somewhere isn't paying for his boss' drek-du-jour-is a war-horse demon.
Who remembers Stevie Wonder testifying before Congress in the early 1970s, suggesting that entirely blank cassettes be eliminated and that every tape sold have recorded music on one side and a blank on the other-thereby ensuring that every inch of recordable tape was covered by a pre-recorded sale? Maybe Stevie was worried back then because he used to sell a lot of records.
Back then, of course, they were predicting the end of the recording industry as we knew it, with visions of ganja-scented hooligans pulling all-nighters by blacklight to copy Jethro Tull albums to cassettes and retire off bootleg proceeds. Well, that didn't happen, and despite continued escalating record prices (Tom Petty threatened not to deliver Damn The Torpedoes in 1978 unless MCA promised not to slap an outrageous $5.98 list price on it, a bit of populist protest you shouldn't expect to see repeated in your lifetime), people continued to buy, record companies continued to make a fortune, and, well, cassettes were eventually replaced by CDs.
And then came the next crisis: used CDs. The first piece I ever wrote for Boulder Weekly (in its first edition, if I recall correctly), was about the local trade in used CDs and the emerging retail paradigm that followed-people buying product at retail, copying down to cassettes (CD players were still an expensive option in cars back then) and selling the still-pristine original for 30-50 percent of the original cost. Holy leapin' lizards, we mean it this time. There was Garth Brooks making an ass of himself by threatening not to sell his new product in stores that also sold used CDs. Must have scared the holy heck out of thousands of retailers everywhere.
Not.
Well, technology caught them from behind (again), and eventually we started seeing affordable CD-rewrite players popped into home computers, and voila, another crisis: easy CD copying. Add to that peer-to-peer file-sharing capability, the development of MP3 and other compression programs, broadband Internet access, and it's Goodnight Irene all over again. Never mind that studies proved that file-sharing outfits like Napster probably increased retail sales by giving consumers a chance to hear a single or two at home, with a few mouse clicks, before actually buying a new CD. Nope, don't trouble us with facts. Napster and Audio Galaxy and all the rest are short-circuiting the capitalist paradigm, and must die for their sins against the retail empire. When we send out free music, it's called promotion. When Napster lets the public do it, it's piracy.
But they're not stopping there-now they're going after your home computer. Legislation has been introduced (SSSCA, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), that would require all new PCs to have digital signing technology that would prevent copyrighted material from being copied or shared; and pirated media would be identified and reported to the copyright administrators. Yes, Claudine, you can face a half million dollar fine and 10 years in the slammer for altering the silicon in your own computer to disable it.
Bill Gates has been slowly introducing this technology into his operating systems (witness the Product Activation technology bundled in Windows XP), and has a full-blown project in the works called "Palladium" that could, essentially, grant playback and copying rights on your PC to entertainment companies. They will be able to search your PC and remove pirated media. They can sell you a piece of media that will play 10 times, or only play on your birthday, or only play on a particular piece of hardware. They can sell you a piece of media that will play three times, and then you must pony up money to the source (Sony, Disney, whomever) to play it again. Gates' software, which will be dependent on Intel's super-secret supporting chip technology, will verify the licensing on every piece of software on your system, disable any it finds questionable, or shut the PC down completely if it's faced with conflicting or ambiguous information. And the SSSCA can provide jail time if you try to thwart it. That's right-the government, who once spent millions trying to keep you and your kids away from vulgar and obscene media, is now considering ways to ensure that you are at least paying for all the mind-dissolving effluent they didn't want you to hear/see in the first place.
This is coming, folks. Most people buy their music and movies and software, and thus have nothing to worry about-except granting access to their PCs to the copyright cops at Vivendi or Disney or AOL/Time Warner. The technology will be more or less invisible to the average user, and PC geeks will be risking their freedom by trying to hack it.
If big-time critics want to stay in the record companies' good graces by returning advance copies of Pearl Jam CDs, hey, whatever. The little guys will make due with the stuff that doesn't get much coverage anyway, and, personally, I like it that way.
But the age of media piracy (or, free exchange of media, depending on your point of view) is probably coming to a close. For all the conspiratorially minded folks who have spent their calories worrying about the government becoming the thought police majordomo, they'll be dismayed when they wake up to find that a giant mouse in a tight tux is really running the show after all.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Curt Kirkwood, Krist Novoselic and Bud Gaugh-the three musicians making up the new group Eyes Adrift-all share common traits, beginning with a history in three influential alternative rock bands. Novoselic, of course, was the bassist in Nirvana-probably the most important band of the 1990s. Kirkwood was the driving force in the Meat Puppets, a band that influenced Nirvana and a host of other '90s alternative rock bands. Gaugh was the drummer in Sublime, one of the first groups to mix rock and hip-hop within a sound.
We're busted.
