Confusion Fog

You can't really talk about Nashville Skyline for more than maybe three minutes (at most) without the Nashville Skyline voice. Maybe it same some roots in Dylan's past, maybe he just conjured it up, whatever. The point is, that it was sort of inexplicable--or seems like it initially, at least.

Which brings me to the Meat Puppets.

And now, I realize that the Meat Puppets aren't as talked-about as Bobby Dyl, but why is it that nobody ever asks what the eff was up with Curt Kirkwood's voice in(/by) 1987?

Somehow, over the course of five years, Curt went from this warbly-voiced kid to doing this weird faux-Stevie Wonder growl thing half the time. There are two Meat Puppets records from that year, and the real offender seems to be the second one, Huevos. Listen to "Look at the Rain," for instance. The frequency, and seeming random nature, of his weird growl is incredibly comical if you pay any amount of special attention to it. The way it just works its way in seems a lot more like some condition of the vocal cords than a conscious decision. Even on a mellower song like "Bad Love (though "Look at the Rain" isn't 100% blazin')," when he seems to be singing much more casually, it is all over the track, in essentially every line. Really it seems like one of the most bizzare moves the band ever made, and nobody seems to make note of it. Probably the funniest example comes at the 40second mark of "I Am a Machine" from Mirage, when he mixes it with George of the Jungle and lets out a solid three-second yelp of it, though the truly bizzare aspect of the growl is how it just pops into his vocalization so casually.*

Though really, by 1985's Up on the Sun, things were starting to get a little weird. I'm mostly speaking of the classing "Swimming Ground," which could be one of their catchiest, summer-iest songs. The only hang-up is that Curt sings it in this really, really odd Van-Morrison-on-a-mead-binge slurg-garggle thing, swallowing his tongue the whole time.

http://www.last.fm/music/Meat+Puppets/_/Swimming+Ground (this effect is best heard in the last second or two of this sample)

I suppose that maybe Curt Kirkwood is one of the most Dylan-esque vocalists of the last couple decades. But whereas it always seemed like Dylan knew exactly what he was doing (and why) with his voice, Kirkwood's vocal choices seem a little less....clear. And definitely more scattershot. And that is probably the genius of the whole thing. When you think of singers with odd, ever-changing voices, who comes to mind? Dylan, Tom Waits? But the difference is that Kirkwood is very WTF, whereas with Dylan and Waits, it is generally quite clear TF they are up to, if you think about it for awhile. Kirkwood's voices seem to often run against ANY kind of clear aesthetic, and in these mid-80s albums his vocals seem to even be working against the breezy-beauty of the music. Beyodn that, how many vocalists can resemble Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison AND Rodney Anonymous, as well as having a "signature" voice (that warble of his) which doesn't resemble any of those? And then people don't even talk about it? So much was afoot in that warped Kirkwood mind of his. And to think people don't even really talk about his guitar as much as they probalby should.



*Strictly as an aside, isn't the marimba (or marimba sound, whatever it is) in "I Am a Machine" totally killer?