I saw the Meat Puppets this week when their reunion tour made a swing through Chicago. Seeing the Meat Puppets at the Newport Music Hall in Columbus in August 1987 was one of the transformative events in my life. It was as close to a religious experience as one can have at an event that ends in the crowd being pelted with cold cuts from the band’s deli tray.

Our live shows are external combustion and a lot of drool. Curt Kirkwood .

You can download a 1987 Meat Puppets show via the Meat Puppets website, which will give you a pretty good idea of what it all sounded like. You’ll miss the visual component, though, things like the Kirkwood Brothers looping their belts together and somersaulting across the stage, or giving each other piggy back rides while playing, all while playing like demons and singing like Grover being strangled.

Emulating Curt Kirkwood’s guitar playing became my raison d’etre. I learned in Guitar Player that Curt used a peso for a pick, so I began playing with a peso. Curt ripped through the major pentatonic scale in his solo on Paradise, so I started using the major pentatonic scale on everything. And, with my friends Rob and Jose, began writing Meat Puppets-y songs with interminable guitar solos. The Meat Puppets music was a gateway drug that led ultimately to the very roots of modern American music, spending countless hours alone, transcribing tunes from scratchy 78s.

And now they’re back. I saw them at the Double Door Wednesday night, and my first thought upon seeing the Kirkwood brothers take the stage was this: Curt Kirkwood is still a great guitar player. His brother Cris Kirkwood is a dog playing chess. What is remarkable is not how well Cris plays, but that he is playing at all. He’s someone that I never expected to see again as a fully ambulatory human being, much less as a credible performer. Like Shane MacGowan, the fact that he remains a fully ambulatory human being is both eternally baffling and cause for celebration.

This 1998 piece on Cris from the Phoenix New Times is one of the saddest things you’ll read. And this is before he hit bottom. Before he was shot twice in the stomach. Before he went to jail.

Throughout the house, I noticed what appeared to be circular blood spatter patterns on the walls and ceiling. The circular patterns resembled what appeared to be the contents of a syringe being squirted against the walls and ceiling.

The house was littered with used syringes–113 total–and other drug debris: bent, burnt spoons, glass pipes, and “cupcake-type saran wrappers,” lightly dusted with cocaine residue.

He’s lost his teeth, the lines on his leathery skin are terrifying, and he’s lost something off the top of his vocal range. But there he is, on stage. Standing on two feet like a little Rory Calhoun.

Cris’s playing is conspicuously less nimble than it once was. He didn’t execute the unison lines on ‘Maiden’s Milk’ especially cleanly for example, and The driving eighth notes on songs like ‘Looking at the Rain’ were a little flabby sounding. But he’s playing with his brother again, and for that I am grateful.