1994. Ah, what a time to be young and in grunge. Or if you were the Meat Puppets, slightly older and riding a wave of recognition from your recent performance on Nirvana’s Unplugged special. It would also be the time when you released an amazing gem of a record, Too High To Die, just weeks before Kurt Cobain died.

Instead of the music press fawning over the perfect record you just unleashed on the world, you got some token radio play and were ushered aside to make room for more Stone Temple Pilots videos on MTV, and about 3,000 speculative special reports on Cobain’s suicide.

What a shame. Too High To Die is grungy, melodic, features some blistering guitar lines, and includes the most listenable Meat Puppets songs to date. There’s not a bum note on the album, and for kicks, the band throws in a version of “Lake of Fire” as a hidden track.

The Meat Puppets formed in the early ’80s in Phoenix, and released a string of records on SST. Now, while many of these records were highly influential for a lot of the bands emerging from the Pacific Northwest in the early ’90s, they went pretty much unnoticed by the rest of the country.

Then, in late 1993, Kurt Cobain invited the brothers Kirkwood to perform a trio of songs from the Meat Puppets II album during their Unplugged taping, and the band suddenly seemed on the verge of success. They gained some more cred in the indie scene (not like they needed any more), but a true mainstream breakthrough just never clicked into place.

Here’s a clip of the brilliant track “Violet Eyes.”

And the super-trippy video for “Backwater,” the only track on the album to make any headway in radio. What a shame that this record gets swept to the side when we look back on rock in the ’90s…