From The Desk Of The Meat Puppets: “Undaunted Courage” And “The Gulag Archipelago”

To have Cris Kirkwood back as the bassist of the Meat Puppets is nothing short of a miracle. The band he founded with his guitarist/vocalist brother Curt in 1980 broke up in 1996 due to Cris’ addiction to heroin and crack cocaine. In the ensuing years, Cris’ life spiraled far out of his control as he lost his wife to a drug overdose and spent 18 months in prison for attacking a post-office security guard. Now, almost four years clean and sober, Cris is gearing up to hit the road in support of the band’s 12th studio album, Sewn Together. Before he does, Cris will spend the week guest editing magnetmagazine.com. Read our new Q&A with Cris and our 2007 career overview of the Meat Puppets.

Cris Kirkwood: Humans are such complex little creatures. I recently read 1996’s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, And The Opening Of The American West by the late Stephen Ambrose, concerning the relationship between Jefferson and Lewis, and the so-called journey of discovery proposed by the former and taken by the latter with his partner William Clark. It’s a wonderful read about the infancy of our republic, fairly bursting with optimism, hope and—slave-owning and Native American-decimating ironies aside—a vibrant eagerness to address what it is to be, and how to go about it. Now on the other hand, in support of my complex-critters theory, the tome I’m currently reading, 1973’s The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (concerning Russia’s prison system in the last century), just oozes with despair, doom and death, life as one man’s boot at the throat of another. Maybe these two different takes on humanity don’t necessarily prove complexity, though; maybe they just show that some folks just like to take extended hikes through uncharted wilderness, while some other folks like to imprison, torture and kill. It takes all kinds, I guess.