I found a 12″ single of this in a bargain bin 20 years ago and it’s been one of my favourite records ever since. It came in a plain cardboard sleeve with awful markerpen handwriting on it.
It’s flat, badly recorded and off key in places, and yet seeing as the song is all about unreliable slackerdom, it rides.
The nimble riff climbs up and down the scale as a myriad of examples are given as to why the lyricist is not a safe bet.
‘I’ll come up to your house and attempt to fix your sink, Do a mediocre job, as I’m leaving you will think…’
and so it goes on. The band are frutting away at nineteen to the dozen behind the laid back vocal. The production of their instruments is so thin what might have sounded like a heavy or angry racket in other hands is almost folk like or even skiffle-ish.
‘My eye is on the pork, the pork is in the pan, if something needs a doing, well you know I’m not your man’
The Meat Puppets in 1987 seemed to be nailing 90’s Lemonheaded post-grunge well ahead of the curve. Not bad for a bunch of unreliable lazy slackers.
Great track! I found the Meat Puppets via Nirvana’s Unplugged album. I went out and bought a few albums including this one, Too High To Die and Up On The Sun. I also picked up the Classic Puppets album a good while back and that’s a statement of just how ramshackle and preposterous they really were. Excellent band.
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The Nirvana numbers aside I don’t know much else by them but I really like what have heard. The flip side is a Ramones cover too so it really is an object of rare beauty
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Worth checking out the Classic Puppets compilation, I reckon.
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I’ll get on it
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Love it. I’ve always dug the Gin Blossoms’ line, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” This is that line made as long as an entire song. Fantastic. Is it self-deprecation? Could be, but it might just be right on. No matter which way, he and his band made a bangin’ little number this time around.
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Man i looooove that song
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Yeah, great song, great album. It really would have been interesting to see how much differently they progressed if Doug had lived. Still, they’re still out there at it, making music and making the rounds.
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Hey Jealousy may well be a future entry on my site. That song has some stories attached to it. A huge part of the past for me
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It’s just rock and roll, you know? Some songs are rock and roll, but they’re also this, and other songs are rock and roll, but ther’re that also. “Hey Jealousy” is just good ol’ textbook rock and roll, no mysteries or grand revelations, just a good movin’ tune that doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t.
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