The many flavors of: Meat Puppets – In a Car 7″

The first release by the Meat Puppets is nearly tied for my favorite record of theirs with their first album. It is quite a contrast listening to this record and then listening to anything that followed the first album because in most cases you’d be amazed that it was the same band.

This single has gone in and out of print over the years, and that led to a handful of variations.

The first pressing was on World Imitation Records and had a foldover sleeve. Some copies came with a handmade insert (which I need a copy of for the vault).

After being out of print for a handful of years, it was reissued in the mid-80s by SST Records. It came with a glued sleeve (as all the SST variations did).

Around 1989 or 1990, SST started doing color vinyl runs of its better selling records. According to a phone call I had with Chuck Dukowski a handful of years ago, there was 1000 pressed on colored vinyl and then if the record sold rather quickly, they would do another 1000 on another color with a maximum pressed of 5000. This means some colored vinyl SST records could come on up to 5 colors of vinyl. The variations for this particular record are…

Translucent yellow vinyl,

opaque yellow vinyl,

opaque green vinyl,

and translucent green vinyl.

After the colored vinyl run, they went back to pressing them on black vinyl until it finally went out of print. The Meat Puppets ended up suing SST for their back catalog (which I guess SST copyrighted without the Meat Puppets knowledge back then, or took claim to the publishing or something to that effect) and won. They reissued their entire catalog remastered to sound much better and released them on Ryko. All the vinyl, and SST versions are out of print. Allegedly SST had boxes of Meat Puppets records in their warehouse that they legally were not allowed to sell. I don’t know if that ended up getting destroyed as a result of their losing the suit, or if they are still sitting there. I guess only Greg Ginn can answer that one these days.