The Private Canon: "Two Rivers" Rolling By

Hermosa Beach, 1985: Producer/engineer SPOT, drummer Derrick Bostrom, guitarist Curt Kirkwood, bassist Cris Kirkwood, and friend-of-band Darrell DeMarco as they record Up on the Sun

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The keyboard has its advantages for a composer, not just because you can play multiple notes on it at once but because you can see and reach them all easily; there they all are, laid out in front of you like a buffet, as easy to read as an atlas. The guitar is also a polyphonic instrument, but it can be a bit more slippery as a compositional tool. Sure, you can make lots of interesting chord shapes on a guitar neck, but the possibilities are more finite, the notes being lined up in parallel lanes rather than in one long path. In the right hands (Joni Mitchell, say, or Wes Montgomery), constraints like these can spur harmonic innovations. But in my listening experience the guitar is often most interesting when it’s used in counterpoint with other guitars, bass and otherwise. The interweaving of guitar lines is what distinguishes some of the best music of Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Beach House, Yes, Dirty Projectors.

Perhaps my favorite record in this vein is the Meat Puppets’ 1985 classic Up on the Sun, in which Curt Kirkwood’s lead guitar chimes and churrs in overdubbed layers over Cris Kirkwood’s singing bass. While I wouldn’t quite put Cris in a class with Noel Redding or Jaco Pastorius, his strong, clear bass lines are every bit as integral to his band’s big sound as the aforementioned giants were to Hendrix and Joni, respectively.

The whole record teems with tight, jewel-cut, direct-to-the-board guitar figures that belie the Pups’ rep as a loosey-goosey psychedelic jam band—“Maiden’s Milk” sounds like vintage Dixie Dregs to me. While some of these tunes do stretch out in some capacious grooves, none feel meandering or spacey to me, and the ambitious craftiness of the arrangements throughout evokes the best of prog rock (as opposed to its logorrheic excesses). Apparently the eccentric SST producer SPOT was trying to capture in sound what he thought of as the Pups’ “‘gelatinous’ vibe,” which I guess conveys some of this music’s limpid and otherworldly quality, though not its brilliance. And while Curt’s lyrics are mostly druggy dadaism, many gravitate to images of nature and water (“Swimming Ground,” “Animal Kingdom,” “Seal Whales,” even “Buckethead”).

In that context the gorgeous “Two Rivers,” the album’s penultimate track, is rich and satisfying both purely as music but also as a kind of imagistic program music, as if it’s capturing in sound what its lyrics describe.

The opening minute of the song is a whirlpool of E-minor arpeggios, often colored by an F# or a C in the bass and promising respite with some measures of B, before finally giving way to a burst of E-major sunlight for the song's chorus at 1:08. What’s striking about this chorus, which rocks between B and E major, is that both of these bright chords have suspended fourths giving them an extra glint of dissonance—the main riff over the B chord is a four-note motif (E, E-F#-B), while the E chord is adorned by little droplets of guitar harmonics on the notes B and F# (they really do evoke little sprays of mist in this context).

Adding to the cluster-chord dissonance here is the melody, intoned with signature indifference by Curt, which lays an F# right over the suspended-fourth E. Packing seconds and fourths into major-key chords as a sonic analogy for water is a trick as old as Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau.”

The last thing I’d point to, which puts this song over the top of the waterfall for me, is the surge of joy unleashed at 1:56 and 2:23, as Curt's overdubbed guitars ascend into orbit around a kind of extended F#9/F#11—more cluster-chord bounty—and Cris’s bass dances between F# and C# (giving this passage a strong ii-V feel). Two rivers, side by side.

(This vintage live performance is worth a watch, even though they don't do this song.)