![]() Friends haven't seen him since a few days before Halloween.Ĭurt says drugs began taking control of Cris about four years ago. Not even close.Įfforts to locate and interview Cris Kirkwood for this story were unsuccessful. But all that was over years ago, and neither of them ever spun out like Cris has now. And, he says, he and Cris both toyed with heroin in their early 20s. Rare is the pothead who picks through the fibers of his living-room carpet for hours, looking for a tiny nugget, or the acid eater who finds himself paging a dealer at 4 a.m., jonesing for another hit.Ĭurt, at 39 the elder of the two brothers by a year, says he misspent a few nights of his youth staying up all night, snorting coke. But they were known for pot and acid, not coke and heroin. The Meat Puppets were always a drug band. I can't say he's in the band when he doesn't know what fucking day it is." "My brother is on all the Meat Puppets records up to this point, so he's still a Meat Puppet. "Basically, we have a nonfunctioning member of our organization," says Curt, who now lives in Austin, Texas, where he has formed a new band under the Meat Puppets banner. The two haven't played music together for almost three years. He describes Cris as "a suicide in progress." Overweight from binging on Ben & Jerry's ice cream, he's pocked with the sores and boils that result when a junkie misses a vein and shoots impure, infectious heroin directly into muscle tissue.Īfter numerous, futile attempts to convince Cris to step back from the abyss, Curt now seems resigned to his brother's fate. He's smoking cocaine and shooting heroin in death-wish quantities. Regardless, according to his brother and close friends in the Valley, Cris Kirkwood is lurching pell-mell toward the reaper, track-marked arms open for the embrace. He may have run because he had felony drug warrants out for his arrest, or because he cracked up, or both. Cris called the band's manager in Austin, Texas, then fled the house before police arrived. He had been passed out in the living room, and when he came to in the early afternoon, Michelle had been dead for hours. This was in mid-August, three days after Cris' wife, Michelle Tardif, had died of an overdose in the master bedroom of their Tempe home, where the two had been holed up for months. All at once, the Puppets were lifted from underground heroes to certified-gold recording artists by sales of their 1994 album Too High to Die.Ĭurt says the last time he saw Cris, his brother was probing inside an abscess on his stomach with a needle, searching for a vein. ![]() Six months before he splattered his brains, Nirvana superstar Kurt Cobain cited the Meat Puppets as a primary source of inspiration. Yet as the lens of retrospection contracts, their band, the Meat Puppets, is viewed as one of the most influential groups of the past two decades of rock music, and arguably the most. When they sang together, the Kirkwoods were purposefully seldom in tune. Curt played guitar and wrote a lot of songs. Your brother's holed up in a Motel 6 on the Black Canyon Freeway, smoking rock like it's judgment day.īorn in Texas, raised in Sunnyslope, Curt and his brother, Cris, became the most famous modern rock stars ever from this desert metropolis. ![]() Your brother showed up at my house yesterday with a crack pipe and a bag of needles, and he looks like hell. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. ![]() He calls them "incomings from Tempe." They go like this: Your brother's wife overdosed this morning she's dead. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood's.
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