Yesterday, Sub Pop reissued a deluxe edition of Bunny Gets Paid, a singular 1995 album by the unheralded Chicago band Red Red Meat. News of the reissue came as a pleasant surprise: When first unveiled, the album was greeted with little fanfare, a strange and fantastically gloomy work by a group that, just a year prior, had been hyped as “grunge” hopefuls. When, later in the ’90s, Red Red Meat broke up—or, more accurately, morphed into Califone—the album seemed to have slipped permanently into the shadows. The warm reception of this two-disc set is one of several examples that, after some initial misdirection, the reigning rock cognoscenti are getting a handle on the beast that was the 1990s. (The band recently played shows in Chicago and at SXSW.)
Bunny Gets Paid was Red Red Meat’s third album; it followed 1994’s Jimmywine Majestic, which featured scorching, bluesy guitars. Bunny was sleepier, softer and infinitely weirder, a mess of howls and shifting instrumental textures. It sounds morbidly depressed, concluding with frontman Tim Rutili singing a mournful cover of “There’s Always Tomorrow.”
In my own highly subjective narrative of Red Red Meat, I have always credited the band’s aesthetic shift to a single show: a late-night, sparsely attended appearance at the Chicago club Metro, during which Jim Ellison, the Material Issue singer who would commit suicide the following year, approached the stage and threw a cup of urine at the musicians. I believe the act was Ellison’s retribution for some minor dispute involving a member of Red Red Meat. But as a teenage audience member, the troubled musician’s sudden outburst proved the most jolting thing I had ever witnessed at a performance. And every note Red Red Meat played following the incident—Bunny Gets Paid and its less satisfying sequel, 1997’s There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight—seemed pained and demented. It was as if the music itself had been drenched in urine that night, never to be freed of the stench.
