We would always gauge how big our following was by the after-hours parties and if they were visited by the police. Our local gigs were always great and so were the after-hours parties. Then we would hit the road and only play in town when those big tours rolled into town. "And once we had played through those, we'd play Flagstaff at Monsoon's, I think, and Club Congress in Tucson and did this as long as we could stand it before we started oversaturating ourselves. "Prior to us getting signed to London in the early '90s, we would play four times a month and stagger different clubs so that we could make ends meet by playing every other week," recalls Bostrom.
In the '80s, Arizonans could regularly see Bostrom and the Kirkwood Brothers Curt and Cris race through their strange hybrid set of chaotic punk, bleary-eyed country rock and Grateful Dead jamming several times a month at places like Hollywood Alley and the Mason Jar but mostly in now-defunct venues like the Silver Dollar ("Which is pretty much somewhere on the field of Bank One Ballpark," says Bostrom) and the Sun Club. Once onstage, they proceeded to play their regular set at a breakneck speed that left the loud, fat-ruled Mohawk crowd speechless. So we get onstage and blow off all this weird energy, doing this crazy stuff." This was like '82 and I was pretty damn well terrified. "We were exhausted from never having toured anywhere before. Bostrom, who now works for a Valley media company and concentrates these days on writing about music, remarks that "so many things happen in the course of a career and bands get older and have varying degrees of success, and I just like that Thurston chose to talk about the first time we dragged our asses to New York from Phoenix, schlepping all our stuff," he says. It's one of Meat Puppets drummer Derrick Bostrom's favorite moments on the DVD. Moore regales at their hippie-soaked appearance, their clothes-strewn van and their noble objection to sound-checking because they felt it ruined shows. Before Sonic Youth was even signed to SST, the band was invited to open for the nomadic Puppets' New York debut, at the legendary club where Dylan played his earliest Big Apple gigs but was now close enough to extinction to cater to thrash punk. "I had heard they were rambling across the country in a van and playing doughnut shops and they were coming to New York to play at Gerdes Folk City," beams Moore. On the newly released DVD Meat Puppets Alive in the Nineties, there's a particularly alive moment from the early '80s that Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore fondly remembers.
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