Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years
Music journalist Alex Ogg combines dozens of first-hand interviews from the Dead Kennedys along with photos from Ruby Ray and original artwork from Winston Smith in the punk band’s biography, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years. Read an excerpt from the book below!
Chapter 4: Are You Believin’ the Morning Papers?
Biafra was by now, clothed or otherwise, already the consummate front-man. “I come from a theatre background. I like mood. I like vibe. I like characters. I didn’t realise for years how much the method acting I went through influenced both the music and lyrics I write, and how I match them up. When it comes to production and mixing I’m more like a film director, more interested in vibe or mood than each instrument being perfect. The lyrics are very visual, often, a ‘you are there’ scenario, instead of ranting and raving about a particular subject I have opinions on.” Back home in Boulder, in a delectable piece of casting, he’d previously appeared as the lead Nazi in a high school production of The Sound Of Music, as well as playing the Boris Karloff role in Arsenic And Old Lace. “Some of my best moments on stage are when the characters do come to life from inside me, and I can see parts of where the character is at in my mind’s eyes.”
It also gave Dead Kennedys an immediate visual signature. “I realised early on that I should bring out parts of myself that I didn’t see in the main ‘visionaries’ of other bands,” he continues. “There were voids I could fill. I was more theatrical on stage than any other singer I knew of in San Francisco. I saw a distinct lack of that and tried to fill that hole, but at the same time get some Stooges and Germs energy into the mix as well. I still do that, it’s the same thing I do today.” Similarly he was keen to mark out lyrical turf away from his peers. “I try to write songs about things other people haven’t already written about. Granted, the Circle Jerks and [the Washington, DC] Youth Brigade came out with songs about the Moral Majority at the same time I wrote mine, but in the long run I knew mine was going to be the most cruel . . .”
The theatrics went hand in hand with a lifelong devotion to troublemaking. Never as po-faced as some critics maintain, Biafra always enjoyed a mischievous wheeze – for more on which you are directed to his interview in RE/Search Publications’ Pranks! compendium. However, it was his mayoral challenge in the fall of 1979 that won him most notoriety. A benefit for his campaign was held on Labor Day in early September. The Symptoms, Anti-Bodies, Eye Protection, Contractions and Pink Section were among the support bands, which together with a spaghetti banquet raised a budget of $1,500. The Mabuhay was synonymous with cheap spag-bol, as nutritious a meal as many local punks could afford, as well as late-night music, so it all seemed appropriate. Most of the budget went on buying a place on the ballot. “If a person doesn’t get enough petition signatures to run for local office in San Francisco,” says Biafra, “they can make up the difference by paying something like $10 a head.” The manifesto was written on a napkin while watching a Pere Ubu concert – after Ted had ribbed him about having such a big mouth he should stand for electoral office.
His policies had several strands, including hiring laid-off city workers as panhandlers at 50% commission to replace funds lost through the deeply unpopular Proposition 13 tax dodge. This particularly irksome slice of legislature appeased property owners while ballooning the state’s budget deficit by fixing the maximum tax take to 1% of any property’s cash value – assessed at 1975 values. “It is actually popular to the point of being sacred now,” Biafra updates us. “Thus the state is bankrupt.” Police would have to stand at elections, and squatting would be legalised in disused buildings. A Board of Bribery would be established to set ‘influence’ rates. Most enterprising of all Biafra’s manifesto commitments, downtown businessmen would have to dress as clowns between the hours of nine to five. Despite this, Biafra’s manifesto was supported by the most unlikely of sources; but then Sheriff Mike Hennessey was a huge fan of punk rock and a regular at the Fab Mab. Only in San Francisco . . .
‘There’s always room for Jello’ was one of the campaign catch-phrases (parodying an actual 1964 advertising strap-line used by Jell-O’s manufacturers, Kraft), as well as ‘Apocalypse Now, Vote for Biafra’ and the simple but emphatic ‘What if he wins?’ Other coups included vacuuming leaves from the front lawn of opponent Dianne Feinstein’s lawn (debunking her publicity stunt of sweeping ’Frisco streets). “I did it because ever since I was about six or seven,” Biafra related, “I discovered I had a peculiar talent for annoying people and I got more and more interested in perfecting ways to do it over the years.”
The headliners for a second benefit show were British band The Members, who were on their first tour of America. “We were playing a gig through the FBI booking agency run by Ian Copeland at the Waldorf Ballroom,” remembers vocalist Nicky Tesco, “We turned up to play and Jello was down the front going bananas! We’d heard of Dead Kennedys and he came backstage, and boy, can he talk! I really liked Jello. The times I spent in San Francisco hanging out with him were brilliant. Jello wanted to do a fundraiser, so he asked us if we were up for it. That was at a place in Geary Street, a de-sanctified synagogue (The Temple) where a lot of punk events took place. We said yeah, let’s do it. It was probably the best gig we did on that tour – because it wasn’t a bar or club, younger people were able to get in and it raised quite a lot of money. That night Jello and I went out drinking, and that was a blast. He took me to this place where there was a long narrow bar, and I wasn’t really paying attention – and I’m not at all homophobic – but I must have clocked that I was in a gay bar. I looked behind the bar and saw a middle-aged woman in a Dior dress and . . . she had a beard. Jello was always very focused. It was quite difficult times – America wasn’t London. America has a lot of crazies walking round, but Jello would really speak his mind. All the crazies in America head west, and when they reach California they can’t go any further. And if you read the things he said, Jello was very prescient and very articulate. A lot of his lyrics were highly intelligent; I remember him being funny and sharp. Still to this day me and my kids play ‘Cambodia’ and ‘California Über Alles’.”
The upshot was that Jello came fourth of ten candidates in the November poll with 3.79% of the vote and more than 6,500 votes. Feinstein’s campaign manager was heard to bemoan the fact that if “someone like that” could achieve such a turnout, “this city is in real trouble”. Feinstein held office for ten years before becoming a Democratic senator. In a strange twist of DKs’ related trivia, she officiated at Jerry Brown’s 2005 wedding, and was all set to run against him until pulling out of the race for governor in February 2010.
More importantly, Biafra’s candidature proved a focal point for the San Francisco underground and punk community (Damage fanzine editor Lap would crow: “We have our own paper, our own television station [Target] and our own candidate for mayor”). Whether directly related or not, a welter of new bands formed and found themselves with new venues to play beyond the Fab Mab: X’s, The Hotel Utah, Rock City, The Back Dor, etc. There was a symbiotic resurgence in local performance and visual media hosted at ‘art clubs’ such as the A-Hole and Club Generic. All of these developments may well have occurred without the mayoral campaign or Dead Kennedys; but it didn’t hurt. However, despite the notoriety of the campaign, and the immediate success of ‘California Über Alles’, Biafra maintains that at this time, Dead Kennedys were only just moving ahead of The Dils and Mutants in local popularity.
“My memory of Jello Biafra as a performer is that he interacted with the audience more than a lot of punk singers,” notes author Jennifer Egan, who watched the band at several Fab Mab shows and elsewhere. “He’d leap into the audience and get passed around for quite a while before returning to stage. I seem to recall his pants being torn off on at least one of these occasions – an exciting thing for a high school girl to witness! I was at that [supporting The Clash at Kezar] show. My sense is that Jello was less troubled than a lot of the punk singers – he had energy and vitality, a kind of playfulness that was very different from, say, Ricky Sleeper. Jello didn’t seem genuinely angry or depressed. I have no idea what his drug use was like, but I’m guessing he wasn’t a junkie. The fact that he ran for mayor of San Francisco also suggested a broader vision than a lot of punk singers seemed to have.”
The success of ‘California Über Alles’ also earned the group an appearance at San Francisco’s BAMMIE Awards on 25 March 1980. “Bay Area Musician, or BAM for short, was kind of the Rolling Stone for San Francisco,” Ray recalls. “It would have these award shows every year. You get to give an award to people and that strokes their ego. That’s what the BAMMIES were about. As a journalist, one of your biggest fears is being uncool. And the BAMMIES figured they were being uncool, because The Clash were coming. All this stuff was coming out in England, all this new music in the Top Ten. And there’s nothing like that in the States. So they asked us to play, in order to give themselves some street cred, I guess. And of course, we were meant to play our big hit, ‘California Über Alles’. But we changed it a bit, and it became ‘Pull My Strings’.”
Dead Kennedys took the stage at the Warfield Theatre in ‘new wave’ attire, comprising white shirts emblazoned with a large ‘S’. During the intro to their ‘hit single’, Biafra took the microphone. “Hold it. We’ve got to prove we’re adults now. We’re not a punk band, we’re a new wave band!” The differentiation in genre affiliation – not explicit in Ray’s original band advert – is important to note. The American incarnation of ‘new wave’ was regarded as a dilution, a way for the biz to continue selling records with a decorative coating of fake ‘edge’. “The BAMMIES acknowledged new wave because of the runaway success of The Knack,” Biafra elaborates. The latter’s insipid new wave was widely derided within the punk community as a paradigm of this hybrid, right through to a jokey ‘Nuke the Knack’ campaign. Thin black ties were then draped over the band’s shirts to form a dollar sign, the parody completed by the opening chords to ‘My Sharona’, rechristened ‘My Payola’. Biafra goaded the bemused audience to sing along. Ray played a fine hand too, regurgitating a thoroughly loathsome guitar solo, Hendrix-style, teeth and all, while his compatriots stood around yawning. “‘Pull My Strings’ is also the only song where Ted wrote the music,” Biafra adds. “I think I did give him the lyrics ahead of time. We needed a new wave song so I turned to the guy in the band who most wanted us to be more pop! And he really came through.”
Among the audience members to witness these surreal events (later voted the 26th greatest ‘rock moment’ of all time in the NME) were Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia, Ronnie Montrose, Francis Ford Coppola, Eddie Money, Boz Scaggs and Journey. “That was a different world we hated so much we didn’t want anything to do with it,” notes Biafra, who maintains that the stunt was his idea and the rest of the band were resistant to it, but “had fun with it” in the end. Scaggs was particularly outraged, and Coppola allegedly shoved Ted into a wall as he passed him backstage; though both Money and Journey drummer Steve Smith saw the funny side and congratulated Biafra on the evening’s antics afterwards.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables to read the rest!
Photo credit: Ruby Ray
