In Brief (for now...)
The Meat Puppets came from the State of Arizona, but moved early to LA to find a decent venue for their sophisticated music.
Their first release was the EP In a Car, that featured some crazy blasts of powerful punk, with an insane voice and very original and maniac music. It was also extremely fast and I rather say HardCore, even if they refuse any contact with those bands. Actually some critics say that the lyrics of the title song are a critic and a mocking of the typical LA hardcore kids.
Unluckily, they got so fed up with the hardcore scene (or simply wanted to evolve in different directions) that slowed their pace down already in their following release, even if it was on SST and was still clear a punk album...
From their second LP they began to move in even more directions, drawing influences from various genres and became step-fathers of 90's rock and grunge bands. They got back into the line of normality (and boredom, in my opinion)
Recollections by Derrik Bolstrom (Meat Puppets' drummer)
Anything after 1981 is pretty much post-punk. The 1978-1980 years are the golden punk age [...] Punk just suited what we liked to play. However, once it became "hardcore", we quit. We hated the term, and we disliked most of the "hardcore" bands. We considered most of them to be too one dimensional.
To me California "hardcore"
is the second wave of west coast punk. The first wave was The
Germs, Dils, X, Plugz, etc. These were old-school
art-damaged bands. We enjoyed these. When we got to LA, however, we hung out
with non-hardcore groups like Monitor, B People and Human
Hands. The hardcore groups were younger and straighter.
Punk rock made by jocks and rednecks, it seemed to us. Even bands like Minutemen
and Black Flag were lacking in our opinion.
In A Car was done before the term "hardcore" was coined. It was supposed to be psychedelic. It was not supposed to be a reaction to anything or anyone. Once we started playing out with other hardcore bands, and we realized how blockheaded the hardcore fans were, we changed musical directions.
We did not care to be spit on, nor did we enjoy having things thrown at us.