Red Red Meat
Bunny Get Paid
Deluxe Edition
Sub Pop
By Jose Fritz
The first and most important thing to be said is that Red Red Meat did not break up. Red Red Meat was a very liberal-minded girlfriend that introduced the band to a more open polyamorous relationship with other music. Bassist Glynis Johnson started the Gore Gore Girls and guitarist Tim Hurley started Sin Ropas in 1999. Tim Rutili founded the band Califone in 1997 and brought drummer Ben Massarella with him. Since then, almost every “ex-member” of Red Red Meat has played on one Califone album or another. Their reunions started almost immediately including some recently in 2008 and some more scheduled for 2009.
In the early 1990s a grievous, unforgivable transgression was committed against a young nobody band from Chicago. They were bluesy and often acoustic in a way that was nothing like Violent Femmes or Bruce Springsteen. It left them hanging exposed without an obvious peer group. They toured with the Smashing Pumpkins, Chemlab, The Late Great Danes, Blind Melon, Songs:Ohia, Velocity Girl, and even the Flaming Lips. But there was something wholly different about them from these supporting acts. Red Red Meat just sprang from nothing; there was no scene for their sound. For all the twang they weren’t cow punk. For all the mud they weren’t grunge. Their fans appeared from the void and always returned to it after the tour ended. In 1996 who else was so twangy and muddy at the same time? This was a decade before Hank Williams III had his much belated metal-phase.
Red Red Meat can get dark, dark-as-a-dungeon dark, dark as Johnny Cash’s shirts dark. They can be messy, messy as the-floor-at-CBGBs messy. But their career had a trajectory, they moved through stages of development. Bunny Gets Paid was in the middle of their recording career. Their Loftus collaboration in 1999 was their antapex, the lowest nadir in their explorations of twangy and morose country music. Their first Sub Pop record was Jimmywine Magestic, which was by far their grungiest lunge into guitar fuzz. Their last Sub Pop outing, There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight was noisier, loaded with pitch and wail, click and hum, bent chords and broken instruments. They were hugely different, but equal in their anemic melancholy.
From the outside, it seemed like there was a disconnect between the three albums, they seemed too separated as though these writing phases were disconnected. Bunny Gets Paid lies in the DMZ between them. In the deluxe edition we find the missing link. Again we find tracks as morose gothic poetry. But on the 2nd disc we find the buzzing strings and clonking drum bodies. The missing material is equal parts Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street and Captain Beefheart’s acid blues. They slinked down a tunnel of hayseed victory and later-day barrelhouse blues.
While their original bassist Glynis Johnson died in 1992 that ended nothing. Today their footprint is evident everywhere. You can hear the influence of Red Red Meat directly and indirectly in hundreds of bands: in Wilco, Langhorne Slim, Rock Plaza Central, Bobby Bare Jr., Handsome Family even Paul Westerberg’s Grandpaboy material. They, like Vic Chestnutt, played the part of a conduit through which Americana re-entered indie rock producing the herd of dark and psychedelic rock bands that exist today. While the path from there is uncertain we all should know how we came to be here.
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