Reunited Meat Puppets serve up fun, fury

CAMBRIDGE - Long hair pinned to his face by sweat and elation, Meat Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood grinned like a dazed Cheshire cat from the Middle East Downstairs stage on Thursday night. The Puppets had just ripped through a torrid take of "Touchdown King," an old tune that, nearly 20 years later, had lost little of its free-spirited vitality - and proved that the band had lost little of its own.

"Hey everybody," Kirkwood said, gazing out at the crowd. "It's been awhile!"

And so it had, certainly since the 46-year-old bassist had been reunited with his brother, singer-guitarist Curt Kirkwood, onstage - or anywhere else for that matter. A decade of life-shattering heroin addiction had cost him almost everything: He lost his health; was expelled from the Puppets, a fiendishly idiosyncratic, enormously influential band whose most famous fan was Nirvana's Kurt Cobain; and even served a prison term.

No wonder the songs, and the night, felt so obviously good. Cris was alive and well, and the Meat Puppets were, improbably, "back" (albeit sans original drummer Derrick Bostrom, who retired and was replaced by Ted Marcus). The Puppets even have a new album out, "Rise to Your Knees," although on Thursday they basically skipped it in favor of rekindling old fires - make that pyres - and revisiting one of underground rock's most stylistically scattershot canons. As Curt explained later backstage, the brothers had a lot of catching up to do. "There's a huge discography there, and we haven't plumbed it for so long," he said. "It's fun to play, and it just snowballs."

Into what, exactly, has remained an open question since the Arizona band started making records for the seminal SST label back in the early '80s. On Thursday night, the music was a free-for-all free fall into the Puppets' old sunbaked, hallucinogen-caked desert daze. For roughly 100 minutes, tidy genres such as folk, country, punk, psychedelia, and even prog-rock were gleefully scrambled into wickedly warped shards of dissonance, delirium, and delight, and then tossed like kaleidoscopic pinwheels into the audience at every conceivable angle.

A furiously focused "Sam" opened the show, and along the wild, winding road we got "Plateau," still as vaguely creepy as ever, and an oddly reverent, straightforward reading of the Porter Wagoner-Dolly Parton number "Just Someone I Used to Know."

The highlight was a ferocious "Backwater" that cut a swath miles wide. Powered by a burly, burnished melody and replete with an exquisitely knotty, soaring guitar solo by Curt, the group's biggest commercial hit sounded epic, like an alternative-universe answer to "Stairway to Heaven." It was towering and classic, epochal in its own woolly way, just like the Puppets themselves.

Two Boston-based outfits opened the show. First up were the Self-Righteous Brothers, who offered a pungent mix of trumpet and saxophone-accented indie-rock stoked by feverish left-field melodies, witty lyrics, and snarling guitar. The Sterns followed with a chipper set of bouncy Britpop-by-way-of-Boston tunes that sounded a tad out of place given what was to come, but sharp nonetheless.