Vegetarian Meat

My friend Dave put out a fanzine called Filler from the mid 1990s through the early 2000s. One of the things he got sent was a promo cassette of Let’s Pet, a debut album from a band/duo called Vegetarian Meat. Horrible name, yeah, and the press release that came with the tape, clearly band-penned, was a wince-worthy Gonzo Lite attempt involving, I think, a fantastical anecdote about a run-in with a cop.

So we sneered, and passed the tape around like a hot potato, and joked that sooner or later one of us would end up listening to the thing. And one day Dave did end up listening to it, putting it on out of idle curiosity while he was developing photos in his darkroom. And what do you know, he said, it’s actually really good.

And when I listened to it I thought it was really good, too. It had a lugubrious stoner vibe sometimes, and it snapped you to attention with its pep-rally chords at others. It was always tuneful, and always had a light touch, with spaces between the sounds. It was bratty & funny, but dryly so, not novelty-song so. (From the song “Trip”: “Whenever we get together, we always fool around, she was my girlfriend on a 10th-grade trip to Germany.”) It was varied in tempo & mood, but still of a piece sonically & thematically. You felt like the singer was expelling raw autobiography (“Whenever we get together…”), but he had some distance on himself, too, or at least he seemed to with his occasional vocal goofing and the wry keyboards & arrangements.

Great album, in short. But yeah, the band name was bad, and check out the album cover:











Yikes.

Dave wrote appreciatevely about Vegetarian Meat in Filler, but Let’s Pet never took off, not even in a minor indie-rock way. These days the album seems to be long out of print; it came out in 1995, and the used copy I bought in NYC that summer was one of two copies that I ever saw anytime, anywhere. (The other one was on sale for $2 at Vortex a few years later.) So I’m taking the unusual step of posting a full four tracks from the record, with the usual assurance – directed toward anyone connected with the band who happens upon this – that I’ll take these down lickety-split upon request.

• Vegetarian Meat, “The New Policy”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Not You”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Bypass the Telephone”
• Vegetarian Meat, “Sway”

To be continued, sort of.