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"That was the Meat Puppets."

It's been 16 years since the late Kurt Cobain uttered that memorable line, during Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged" performance that saw the pioneering grunge band perform three Meat Puppets songs with brothers Cris and Curt Kirkwood.

Sixteen years, and the Puppets -- who stop by Barley's Taproom in Knoxville's Old City on Wednesday -- still get some confused looks whenever they perform "Lake of Fire" or "Plateau," Curt Kirkwood told The Daily Times in a recent phone interview.

"There's a good percentage, probably a good third of the people who come to see us, who got into Nirvana in the 1990s," he said. "Occasionally, we'll hear, 'Oh, it's a Nirvana cover band -- weird,' or, 'I'm not getting the Nirvana covers.' But I don't really care.

"You can't teach people everything. I think people, by and large, leave bands if they're just curious and coming in to check things out. But we're definitely supplying them with the tools they need to discover their true musical sexuality, and through that, their orientation becomes more clear to them."

Such grizzled ambivalence might seem haughty coming from the leader of a rock band, especially in this day and age when declining CD sales, rising ticket prices and greater overhead costs for independent artists leave most of them scrambling for every fan they can get. But you won't find any such whorish tendencies in the Meat Puppets camp. After all, this is a group that's toiled in relative obscurity, tasted major-label success and exploded in an airstrike of chemical excess that left the two brothers estranged and Cris Kirkwood near death.

Given the hedonistic nature of the band's early years, Curt Kirkwood said, it's a wonder they even made it to that "MTV Unplugged" taping, much less 16 more years that have them touring on a new album ("Sewn Together") and a new mission. Not necessarily a musical one, although that's been their cause since day one. But with so much history behind them -- so much life and near-death and estrangement and reunion -- the Meat Puppets, according to Kirkwood, are about taking care of business and channeling all of that experience, strength and hope into the next 29 years.

The band first started in 1980 in the Phoenix area, after Cris Kirkwood and the group's original drummer brought Curt on board to jam to punk rock singles. The band's early sound was classic punk hardcore, which attracted the attention of legendary punk label SST Records. In 1982, the band released self-titled debut album; in addition to the band's punk-skewed originals, they covered an old Doc Watson song that hinted at what would become the band's signature sound.

That same year, Kirkwood remembers, included a memorable Knoxville show that was also a harbinger of the band's future -- chemical excess.

"I remember I drank way too much Jack Daniel's, threw up behind the PA on the stage, then just walked in the dressing room and passed out," he said. "The promoter woke me up 20 minutes later saying, 'Can't you just play a few songs?' I said, 'Hell yeah,' and we went out and did a really drunk, sloppy set.

"It was the first time I ever got sick on stage. I was pretty young and didn't know my limits; people in the opening band were telling me how awful I was, how I should be ashamed to come all the way to Knoxville from Arizona and suck so bad."

Time and a modicum of self-restraint, however, soon propelled the Puppets to greater heights. "Meat Puppets II," released in 1984, established the band as one of the forefathers of the genre dubbed "cow punk," a mixture of punk rock and any number of roots-oriented genres. Albums like "Up on the Sun," "Out My Way" and "Huevos" defied expectations -- from acid-rock to extended jams, the Kirkwood brothers constantly reinvented themselves and held fast to the do-it-yourself ethos; ceaseless touring led to popularity that, while never reaching mainstream status, endeared the band to a legion of fans to this day.

One of those fans was Cobain, who saw the group open for Black Flag, so the story goes, and subsequently invited the brothers to perform on that MTV special. That exposure led to the Puppets' only charting single, "Backwater," and 1994 gold-selling album "Too High to Die." With Cobain's suicide that same year, however, the Meat Puppets began to spiral down into their own dark abyss. Although the paths of Nirvana and the Meat Puppets couldn't be more divergent, Kirkwood was still deeply affected by the death of the singer-guitarist, and even today he finds himself looking back in both anger and discomfort, he said.

"Let's see anybody handle that much attention and responsibility," he said. "If he was any other dude, he'd have been (viewed) as a rat f-----, and nobody would even let him in their house because there's no real charity out there. I mean, I don't blame him. I don't know what I would do. The more you look at it, the more you could see how it was going to happen. People question, 'By his own hand?' But really -- what unseen force pushes my finger toward the trigger?

"It's just such a profoundly weird story -- sad, yeah, but just weird to the point it got sad. It's very, very extreme to say the least. It was big and caustic and definitely not coated in 'give peace a chance,' no matter how much people tried to make him the new John Lennon. The dude was on his own, and it took me a few years to get my own spin on it. But the way I kind of see it is that the world killed him.

"You would think somebody would have said, 'We have enough money; let's quit pushing him,'" Kirkwood added. "Where's the quiet space for our heroes? We kill them here, and then we gloat over them and hold candlelight vigils. It's a creepy human race, I gotta say."

The frustration in Kirkwood's voice is palpable -- some of it, no doubt, traceable to the situation with his brother, Cris. By 1996, Cris Kirkwood was so addicted to a number of drugs that he rarely left his house except to score. Two people died of drug overdoses in his house during the 10 years that Cris Kirkwood dropped off the radar; although he's been no angel himself, Curt was able to stop before plunging over the edge of that metaphorical cliff, and while he pushed his brother to get help, when it became clear the path Cris was on, Curt had to pull back and follow his own path.

"It was just self-preservation," Curt said. "I stopped talking to him, and just about everybody else did, too. He had been completely disenfranchised. Even when he got shot (in 2003), by then he was so out there I was like, 'That figures.' I hadn't dealt with him for ages, when I quit playing with him in 1996 and had to cancel a tour because I figured he was going to OD out there on the road.

"We never really had a break up; it was just kind of suspended animation. I just kept at it, and during that time I would get phone calls -- 'Ambulances, cops and the fire department are at your brother's house,' but it turned out it wasn't him who overdosed -- it was his wife. Then I'd get another phone call and figure, 'OK, this is it.' But no, it was a guy we went to high school with who had taken up residence there. I got a couple of those calls."

After being shot -- by a security guard at a post office in downtown Phoenix, after Kirkwood attacked him -- Cris spent two years in the Arizona penal system. One year after being released, the brothers reunited as the Meat Puppets -- although without original drummer Derrick Bostrom -- and released a new album, "Rise to Your Knees," in 2007.

"It took me realizing he was in recovery and seeing how deep he was committed to it," Curt said. "I wasn't wounded over it all or pathetic or anything like that; I'm just really good at accepting ugliness. I said, 'Let's take this ugly story and put a great spin on it,' so we just kind of went for it."

Last winter, the brothers recorded another album, "Sewn Together," released last May. The band has been on the road, stripped down and leaner than ever -- no drugs, no puking on stage, no fights. Their history isn't ancient, but neither does it control their present or set a course for their future. If anything, it's a reminder of just how far they've come, and how every decision counts.

"'Sewn Together' is kind of like the beginning, but kind of not," Curt Kirkwood said. "I had been making records all along, and Cris had kept his skills up. It's real easy for him to keep them up; none of the problems ever caused that much of a problem in the studio, other than him nodding out. But the studio always has its own demons, usually from the outside -- people. It's a struggle there to eliminate the BS and the overthinking, to just get down and do this thing."