POP MUSIC REVIEW : Meat Puppets Run It Up Flagpole

There is a restaurant in Phoenix, not far from the Capitol building, where the specialty of the house, no kidding, is a slab of marinated beef that they run up a flagpole in the morning to bubble all day in the desert sun.

It’s not difficult to imagine guitarist Curt Kirkwood and his fellow Meat Puppets rising every morning to salute that slab, because their music is a very kindred thing. Everything the Arizona outfit attacked at San Juan Capistrano’s Coach House on Sunday had a sizzled, heavily-spiced, sun-crazed quality to it.

And attack they did: If Kirkwood could have only one knob on his guitar, it would probably read “rampage.” Though his playing ranged from intricate finger-picking to Mahavishnu-like techno-complexity to shrieking fuzz-tone outbursts--given a particularly metallic edge by the Mexican peso he uses as a pick--all was delivered with an intensity to rival Neil Young’s thicket-of-sound approach. Making the solar power trio complete, bassist brother Cris Kirkwood and drummer Derrick Bostrom pummelled along at a furious pace behind him.

As uncompromising as the band’s sound is, it is still difficult to fathom why the Meat Puppets haven’t found the larger success of the Replacements, Bob Mould and other contemporaries. The melodic, country-harmonized material from the new “Monsters” and the 1987 “Huevos” album shows a distinctive, imaginative song-craft at work. Coupled with the trio’s blistering musicality, the Puppets were up to something that could easily snare fans from such disparate camps as R.E.M. and Metallica.