Meat Puppets

While the history of the Meat Puppets is unusual, what's even rarer is that they lived to tell about it. The band started out punk, but eventually moved toward a more balanced rock sound as they worked their way through the '80s. Surviving a tumultuous first decade together, they found their greatest success in 1994 when Kurt Cobain requested that they join Nirvana for that band's MTV Unplugged appearance. Brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood sat in for three songs from the Puppets' 1984 release, Meat Puppets II, including the brilliant "Lake of Fire." They released their most successful album, Too High to Die, later that year, which spawned the group's biggest commercial hit ("Backwater") and sold over 500,000 copies. The band soon collapsed, however, as Cris's disastrous drug abuse led to the band's first breakup in 1996. The brothers' well-documented history of having a large appetite for a life less than legal carried them for another decade, with a three-year reunion sprouting up along the way. Meat Puppets reunited again in 2006, and their 12th studio album, Sewn Together, has received critical acclaim.