|
Jello Biafra
Speaking out of turn as a way of life
Interview by Steve Kreitzer
From the WUSB 90.1 FM Program Guide, Fall/Winter 1987, Vol. 4 No. 1. Copyright © 1987, 1997, WUSB 90.1 FM.
On August 27, 1987: pornography charges against Dead Kennedy's lead singer Jello Biafra and Michael Bonanno were dismissed after a Los Angeles Municipal judge declared a mistrial when jurors reported that they were hopelessly deadlocked 7-5 in favor of acquittal. Both had been charged with distributing harmful material to miners for having inserted a graphic poster by H. R. Giger in the now defunct Dead Kennedy's 1985 Frankenchrist album. The following interview took place after Jello Biafra's spoken word performance, September 29th at SUNY Stony Brook.
Steve Kreiher has been a long time supporter of the underground music scene end coordinated Jello Biafra's spoken word performance at SUNY Stony Brook. He can be heard every Wednesday night as host of Turmoil.
WUSB: What made you decide after the Dead Kennedys broke up, to go into spoken word?
BIAFRA: I had done that already. With no band, this became the new way to perform. It's been an interesting adventure. I don't know whether it's improved me as a writer. It wouldn't as a lyricist, because with lyrics you have to compact everything and fold it and make it fit into a song, and here I can ramble on and on at length, which is the same kind of temptation as a guitarist who gets to play long solos. I'm just basically trying, to spread out right now, to try different things, because with no Dead Kennedys I can go one of two ways, either be a relic slogging it out on the rock circuit doing cover versions of my own songs with a new band, which would be humiliating for me and the audience, or I could try to grow. One way to grow is to try different things. I've done a little bit of acting; I might do more of that.
WUSB: The show is billed as a spoken word performance. I consider it more of a seminar; it's more of a teaching type thing.
BIAFRA: Well I call it what you will. I didn't want it called "lecture": because I hate the idea of lecturing. Would you go to a Lecture? I'd never go to a Lecture. Spoken word seems to be the best catch all term so people dan interpret it any way that they want. It's basically me, naked, without a wall of noise to hide behind.
WUSB: Any fears about performing like that?
BIAFRA: It's actually not as taxing as Dead Kennedys was because Dead Kennedys was more physical. Plus, the singing would mean that my voice would go out on tour which was a real murderous thing to deal with. It depends on the situation, too. I would say I'm probably more high strung at musical gigs because I'd get really nervous before them. It depends. If everything's fucking up at the last minute, nothing's prepared and I have to go on, that's when I turn into a very short tempered person.
It was nerve-wrecking reading my stuff at the River City Reunion in Lawrence, Kansas. It was a celebration after twenty years of~a counter culture movement. They had William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ann Waldman, Ed Dorn, John Giorno, oh lots and lots of people. One of the last segments was me co-billed with Timothy Leary. I went on first, and never had I realized what a 'horrible writer I was when I was trying to read to that audience knowing that Ginsberg, Waldman and the rest were all in the crowd. Husker Du played the final night, too. It was mostly spoken stuff but some: people used occasional music backing. Ed Sanders, the guy who founded the Fugs, had a bit of musical accompaniment, including playing home-made instruments such as electronic gardening gloves... it was quite fascinating. Marianne Faithful did one night. Jim Carroll was there too. It was an interesting meeting of the minds. I was added on at the last minute. I thought the trial would have eaten into the time.
WUSB: I'd like to move on to the trial. When you decided to put the poster in the album, did you expect any backlash like you got?
BIAFRA: Klaus (Fluoride, bassist) thought there might be some, but I kind of shouted him down as I was known to do... "What do you mean, this is 1985, why would anybody be that dumb? Nobody prosecutes people over things like that anymore." Was I ever wrong. On the other hand, if we forced the issue to gel this out in the open a little bit... it's just as well somebody did.
WUSB: Now the trial had various postponements... it took over a year and a half. Do you think that was a deliberate delay on the part of the prosecution?
BIAFRA: There were deliberate delays on both sides. We wanted to get the charges thrown out ahead of time without a trial. So we filed a legal action called a demurrer. That was tossed out of three different courts, which had me real frightened, seeing how hard line they were. We got it up to the State Court of Appeals, who were appointees of Governor George Dukmejian. They wouldn't even read our briefs; they just tossed them aside and said "Ha ha, send them to trial." We wanted to avoid trial partly because people had to take time off from work. Michael Bonanno is a bicycle messenger now; he doesn't even work for Alternative Tentacles. He had to risk losing his job. People didn't have the money to go move to LA for a month. That was punishment enough, having to go to LA for that long. It was actually three long weeks.
WUSB: Part of the trial tactics was for you not to take the stand. Was that a decision by yourself or by your lawyer?
BIAFRA: It was by the legal team. There were six lawyers on our side; one for each defendant as criminal law etiquette requires, plus Carol Sobel of the American Civil Liberties Union. It was kind of a last minute thing and I fought it back and forth, because I thought they were going to need me to explain the record to the jury. We went over the evidence the night before I was supposed to testify and realized technically Guarino had never nailed me on the distribution part. He had to prove that I was a distributor regardless of whether or not it was harmful. He hadn't. We realized that if I was on the stand, I would have to cop to the fact that I was an active participant; though not in the way he thought I was. We realized he had so many eggs in the Biafra Basket, but he couldn't get any of it admitted into evidence if he never got to cross examine me. Guarino was visibly furious when he found out he wasn't going to get to me. He came in expecting to rip me apart on the stand all day, and then Phil Schnayerson (Jello's lawyer) said "The defense rests": which left him (Guarino) about fifteen minutes to prepare his closing arguments.
WUSB: How did it feel to have someone explain your position... not allowed to do it yourself?
BIAFRA: It was very frustrating. It was especially frustrating when the cop was lying on the witness stand. I don't know why I had the illusion that they just wouldn't do that in America, but for some reason I did. It wasn't stuff the guy even had to lie about. That just really, really stunk. Guarino would make stuff up about me, or call me names in front of the jury hoping to draw a reaction out of me. Phil would have to try to keep me from bursting out. The strategy was to make me as generic and innocent as possible. You know the suit and the tie, just kind of sit there with my hands folded, listening to all this crap go on. Michael Bonanno was sitting on the end of the defense table, so he had to watch the jury face to face the whole time, which I couldn't do from where I was sitting. I was quite concerned about their initial reaction from where I was sitting. I was quite concerned about their initial reaction to the Giger poster, which varied with the jurors. Some of them shoved it as far away from themselves as possible, immediately; several of them opened the poster up upside down when it was first presented to them.
WUSB: What are your feelings about the media coverage of the case? Out here on the east coast there was very little of it except for the Daily News-- what was it like in California?
BIAFRA: About the same-- it was covered each day in the Los Angeles Times, and I think there was one article in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner where Frank Zappa got the main side bar and everything instead of Guarino, which undoubtedly pissed him off no end since he filed this as a publicity stunt for himself. I strongly think he was hoping to run for political office off of this case, make a big name for himself. Even if he'd won, his manners with the press were so poor that it would be an uphill battle... these are people with no charm whatsoever in this world, who just can't act charming if they tried.
WUSB: Somehow with the (mainstream) media they become like vultures, they dig into your past-- I heard somewhere that your parents had to change their phone number...
BIAFRA: Ho that wasn't true. I just kind of kept people away from them, to respect their wishes. My dad came to the trial and was very talkative with reporters there, kind of giving them history lessons on the McCarthy era and before. He's kind of a history encyclopedia anyway, going back 5000 years, he knew plenty of cases. He had one interesting comment to somebody where he said he felt he was sitting in a 1930s movie waiting for Spencer Tracy to appear there, but mostly I wasn't really as interesting to them as the case itself, and neither was Mr. Guarino. I'm sure he would have loved to tell his life story to the press and nobody ever asked him. Plus I'm fairly private in a lot of ways so I drew the lines on some things.
WUSB: It seems the PMRC takes a very strong stand against the occult and lyrics like that and those bands never gave their support...
BIAFRA: Well that's because those bands are mainly in it for themselves, and they all are owned and operated by major labels who have some say in what they're allowed to say to the press. One journalist I know tried to interview different major label artists about censorship and people said, "No, we don't want our artists talking about that, but hey what about the new album!" The major labels are in bed with the PMRC. They're willing to put the warning stickers and make little deals with them in a classic political horse trade. Their first hope was the PMRC could [intimidate] their husbands into passing a tax on blank cassettes. The first time in American history there would be a federally imposed tax to benefit a certain sector of private corporations. And even the Reagan administration finally came out and opposed it, much to my surprise. So what they're trying to do is tax ghetto blasters and tape copiers, which in effect is taxing the poor. People who can afford to buy records and pre-recorded tapes are going to do it-- making their own tapes takes too long. If the art work with an album is interesting enough, who the hell wants some dumb ass blank tape with nothing but the name on it. We make our art interesting for a reason. If they can't think of anything but a blow dried photo of their boring, generic artist to put on the cover, then home taping will happen. Our attitude on home taping is on the In God We Trust, Inc. cassette. "Home taping is killing big entertainment industry profits, we left side two blank so you can help." What they're trying to do now is to tax that plus digital audio tape (DAT). I think they're trying to suppress technology and rip off the consumer. Even Stevie Wonder is opposed to a DAT ban, seeing it would prevent young musicians from making studio-quality demos. The industry would like to have only a few artists they toss out to everybody. They'd have less paperwork and less personalities to deal with, and have everybody buy the same 20 bands and get rid of everything else.
One statistic I turned up was when the industry moans about "oh, moan, groan; home taping is killing our sales", well, their sales have risen dramatically in the past few years. Of all the cassettes sold in America, only three percent are blank.
WUSB: Let's move on to your representation on MTV, which I'm surprise they covered. Do you think that's a result of Dweezil Zappa...
BIAFRA: It had nothing to do with that, Dweezil had never been on MTV until after the case started...
WUSB: He was one of the first ones to bring it up, though...
BIAFRA: I didn't know he had. No, actually what happened was I met an MTV news reporter at the New Music Seminar in 1986 who was English and had never heard of such a thing so I explained to him how things are done in this country and why there is far less freedom of the press here than there is in England or Australia or in most of Europe...
WUSB: That was Doug Kersoff?
BIAFRA: No, that was Dave Kendall. So he began trying to plant things in MTV whenever he could, saying there was group of disgruntled employees there who sang our song "MTV Get Off The Air" to themselves, while at work. The first report he put in, I strung together a really long quote about how most pop music television was meant to sedate people and make them stupid, obedient shoppers, and here Mark Goodman had to read that from a teleprompter. I could see his eyes getting bigger and bigger like "I'm reading this?!" Being accessible to the straight media and getting things like that across can make it worth it. I even got the Orange County Register, a major newspaper down there, and they somehow left a quote in of mine about how most american newspapers lie in almost all their stories to keep people from finding out what's really going on. Occassionally that kind of thing slips through.
WUSB: I wanted to ask about your private life...
BIAFRA: You can ask any question you want. I just don't guarantee I'II answer it.
WUSB: You were born in Colorado, dad was a social worker, mom was a librarian...
BIAFRA: My mother still is a librarian.
WUSB: What kind of influence did they have. Are they the ones who geared you towards the political?
BIAFRA: In a way they were. Partly it was my own doing, because I used to come home from school and watch cartoon shows, and then the 6 O'Clock News would Come on. I saw very little difference between the two, so I watched both with equal fascination. My early favorite cartoon characters were...oh, I liked George of the Jungle, Sen. Everett Dirksen and a few others, I mixed and matched. Plus they would always explain to me what was going on the news and why we were having race riots. When I was eight, my dad drove me through the slums of Detroit and a week later the riots happened. He just wanted me to see first hand why people were so angry. I saw the Berlin Wall go up on television; I saw Oswald get shot live on television, and I remember my dad taking me for a walk in the park when I was real little trying to explain the Cuban missile crisis to me. Plus I was just an opinionated, loud-mouthed person about everything anyway, and had it in for authority from an early age; this fit right in. Boulder, Colorado was a politically volatile town; during the Vietnam war era, even in sixth grade people knew who was for and who was against the war. There was a really right wing teacher that year who had editorialized for it and what a great country America was and how great it was they shot demonstrators at Kent State, and someone had to argue with him so I did.
WUSB: You moved to San Francisco to go to school? Or was that Santa Cruz?
BIAFRA: I went to school in Santa Cruz for two and a half months then I left and went back to Colorado, got some money together and came out to San Francisco, going to acting school by day and diving head long into to punk rock and starting a band by night.
WUSB: How was the original meeting between the other members of the Dead Kennedys?
BIAFRA: I answered an ad that Ray had put up in a record store, I think everybody found each other through Ray's ad.
WUSB: What made you decide to form Alternative Tentacles, was that to stay away from the major labels to do what you wanted to do?
BIAFRA: I kept seeing all these bands and saying "boy, wouldn't it be great if they could make records. God, if I ever had the money, I want to help get these people's records out." So it was something I just wanted to do.
WUSB: Is there any philosophy behind Alternative Tentacles?
BIAFRA: Music that thinks.
WUSB: Because of the trial you've pretty much lost a year and a half of your life, what plans do you have, do you expect to...
BIAFRA: I don't believe in plans, there's no way you can make up for year and a half in your life, that's like blaming your parents when you're upset when you're thirty years old, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I feel years behind in my work anyway, compared to how many songs I have in my head that I wanted to have done, recorded and out there. I'II probably always feel that way, so I'll just do the speaking tour for a while to keep the issue hot, make a living, save up some money; then unplug the phone, write some songs and do another band.
WUSB: Your idea of a perfect band?
BIAFRA: It changes every time I hear a new record that I like a lot. It's the old artistic jealousy of "Oh, wow, this is great, I want to sound this good." I think Frankenchrist in closer to my heart than the Bedtime for Democracy album in terms of the musical syle, there's more songs kicking around in that vein. I'd like to add more of an industrial edge, perhaps; expand the band with sheet metal percussion or even keyboards. I listen to all kinds of things, the most extreme of the harcore stuff I still like. I like Head of David, Big Black, Scraping Fetus Off The Wheel, Evan Johns and the H-Bombs, all kinds of things. It would be fun to have one foot in the 1950s and one foot in the 1990s and see what happened.
WUSB: Ten years from now, if we're still around...
BIAFRA: That's a real big if.
WUSB: Do you see yourself acting, still doing bands or politics?
BIAFRA: Straight politics is for people with no sense of humor. People rely on artists for the truth far more than they rely on politicians. Taking journalism into account as an art here. If I was ever to enter politics again it would be for the same reason I ran for mayor in San Francisco, namely an act of sabotage. I've always tried to use my life and my art as a prank as much as possible.
Bullshit detector
Jello Biafra cuts to the politics of pop
by Ted Drozdowski (July 10 - 17, 1997)
What's up? Poverty, crib death, hunger -- they've risen in the US. Meanwhile literacy and employment have fallen. And what are our elected representatives doing about it? Well, when they're not busy blaming all of the above on immigrants, which they did earlier this year in sweeping federal welfare-reform legislation (and that's a whole other story), they're still trying to censor the lyrics of pop music. Thanks to Texas, which on June 20 became the first state to bar any of its government agencies from investing in companies that make or distribute music with obscene or violent lyrics, the matter before us again is the battering of the First Amendment by the very people who are charged with upholding it.
Ironic? Jello Biafra, the San Francisco-based musician and activist who was the target of the most notable censorship prosecution case of the Reagan/Bush era, sees it as more than a political smokescreen -- a little distracting fiddle playing while Rome burns -- intended to convince us that our moral interests are being protected. Biafra instead hears the crackling fires of class war, American style.
"The people from the upper class are waging an active war against the rest of us," says Biafra. "They want to bully people into not singing -- or speaking out -- about unemployment, downsizing, or the increasingly dire need to overthrow the rich. The basic message coming down from the Texas legislature and the music industry is `Shut up and shop.' I'm sure major labels, which already have in-house lyric-screening committees thanks to Tipper Gore, are already saying, `Oh shit, we better make sure this is not gonna get busted in Texas.' Now that so much of our media is controlled by multinational corporations that have a vested interest in making people dumber and more obedient shoppers, we're going to see more censorship."
It's Biafra's denunciation of consumer culture as the yoke of class slavery that got him in trouble in 1986. On April 15 of that year, a squad of San Francisco and Los Angeles cops trashed his home under the direction of the LA district attorney's office. They were looking for copies of an H.R. Giger poster -- depicting rotting penises penetrating decaying vaginas -- included in copies of the 1985 album Frankenchrist by Biafra's seminal agit-punk band, the Dead Kennedys. The artwork was intended as a critique of consumer culture. But Biafra, who operates the label that issued the album, Alternative Tentacles, was brought up on obscenity charges.
In August '87, the charges against Biafra and his co-defendants from the label were dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in LA, where Frankenchrist was judged not to be "obscene." But albums by Biafra, the Dead Kennedys, and other Alternative Tentacles artists were nonetheless banned from many chain record stores.
"This is exactly the type of de facto censorship Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center had in mind," Biafra asserts.
Adding a new wrinkle of irony to the story, Michael Guarino, half the DA team that went after Biafra, recently admitted -- from his new post as associate dean of John F. Kennedy University's law school in Walnut Creek, California -- that "the whole thing was a comedy of errors. About midway through the trial we realized that the lyrics of the album were in many ways socially responsible, very anti-drug, and pro-individual. We were a couple of young prima donna prosecutors."
Biafra says he feels vindicated and ecstatic over Guarino's admission. "Let that be a lesson to other people who keep trying to put musicians and poets and comic-book artists in jail. History is never on the side of the narrow-minded censor."
But vindication has a price. "Publicly I was courageous and survived the whole experience; privately, it took a year and a half out of my life and the stress was enormous. It contributed to the break-up of the Dead Kennedys. But there were silver linings, too, like getting to spend some time with Frank Zappa [a censorship fighter until his death]. And suddenly I was no longer called a paranoid lunatic for saying the religious right were out to prosecute rock musicians, so my viewpoint got a higher profile.
"We could have pleaded guilty and got off with a small fine. Guarino even asked my lawyer, `Why the hell didn't he just pay the $50?' I thought I was looking at $2000 and a year in jail. More important, Guarino let it slip to an LA Weekly reporter that his office had an entire file cabinet on other musicians. They were hoping that by convicting me, or by my copping a plea, they would set a precedent and go after bigger fish to make a political name for themselves."
Which brings us back to Texas. The ban -- which prohibits the investment of state money in companies that own 10 percent or more of a business that receives income from music describing violence, illegal drug use, degradation of women, necrophilia, assault of police officers, bestiality, pedophilia, or criminal street gangs (there goes West Side Story) -- was a slimy, perhaps illegal backdoor maneuver. Shot down as a bill by the Texas State House last month -- as similar bills had already been in Maryland and Pennsylvania -- it was passed as a rider on the 1998-'99 budget (effective September 1, 1988). Cary Sherman, vice-president and general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, the country's leading record-label trade organization, told the New York Times last week that "under Texas law, you can't use an appropriations bill to make a general law." The governor of Texas has no line-item veto power over riders, but it's hard to imagine George W. Bush Jr. choosing to exercise such authority in this case anyway.
Additionally, the longhorn and oil capitalists who approved the rider may have shot their own system in the foot. The ban may force state-employed pension-fund managers -- who invest not only state money but that of state employees -- to breach their fiduciary responsibility by compelling them to make investments they know are less enriching. For example, the Texas Permanent School Fund, Employees Retirement System, and University of Texas have a total of $15.5 million invested in Seagram, which the New York Times reports has an 80 percent interest in CDs by Snoop Doggy Dogg, Marilyn Manson, and the late Tupac Shakur. But, as Biafra would contend, the rich (Seagrams, the lawmakers, the record labels, and corporate CEOs) don't give a damn about the retirement income of the little people. It's those folks, not Seagram or Death Row Records, who'll get hurt.
For artists, there's perhaps a more pressing danger in the subtext of this ban. A cornerstone in obscenity judgment cases is the determination of whether a work of art is obscene within the context of community standards. (No wonder Biafra got off in LA.) Since it tars the musical subjects targeted by the ban with the brush of obscenity and thereby makes them unfit for investment by agents of the state, there's a risk that any writ-happy Texas prosecutor may attempt to cite the ban as a community standard applicable to the entire Lone Star State. And where does it end? Will the 1999-2000 budget have a rider banning investment in publishing or filmmaking? Joe Stalin is merrily rolling in his coffin.
Biafra, meanwhile, has jumped into the haves-versus-have-nots fray with a new organization he's formed with the Offspring's Dexter Holland that's called FSU. Jello says that stands for "Fuck Shit Up"; Dexter opts for the gentler "Freedom Starts Underground." Whatever it means, FSU has organizations like Amnesty International, AIDS Project LA, Poor Peoples United, and the Tree Foundation in mind as beneficiaries.
"I figured if I ever blundered into the kind of money that the Offspring now have, this is what I would do with it," Biafra explains. "That hasn't happened to me, but that didn't prevent me from suggesting it to others."
Jello Biafra: Before we begin this interview and since this is a net magazine let me say this: I think the internet is a good thing and should remain as uncensored as humanly possible, but at the same time I have some cautions. Number one--- Don't let it turn into the C.B. craze of the seventies. With some net surfers I have seen this happen. They are not just net surfers but net junkies, and their significant others can't get them to come to bed for sex until 4:30 in the morning. The other parallel is "Breaker. Breaker. Am I talking to real truck driver? Yipee! Yahoo!" How different is that from thinking you are chatting with Courtney Love when you could be chatting with anybody?
The old dictatorships controlled people by depriving people of information and numbing their senses that way. In America, we are so bombarded with information, our senses are numbed in a new way. Another thing I advise people on the net to beware of is this naive belief that if it is on the net, it must be true. There are several unofficial web pages on me, and when people were inspired by Maximum Rock N'Roll to argue whether or not I was a sell out, rich rock star and therefore deserved to get my knee maimed for life, a lot of misinformation was bandied back and forth.
David Grad: I don't have the new record, so I'm operating a little blind here.
JB: I don't either, but it's called Pure Chewing Satisfaction and hopefully it'll be out in April. The songs include "War Camp Renaissance," which was originally written as a sequel to Ministry's "N.W.O." [It concerns] the post Gulf war scenario that with the fall of the Communist Bloc, the arms dealers are running amok trying to arm these third and other world despots in the hopes that they will all shoot each other and buy some more weapons: a very, very dangerous situation, to put it mildly.
I also think that was the reason that there was no Marshall Plan for the former Soviet Union. The corporations were hoping for a Latin America style slave labor force that they could treat like absolute shit because they would be desperate enough to do anything the corporations wanted. Now we know that the infrastructure in the Soviet Union is so poor that they couldn't do that anyway. In the meantime, it's been allowed to become as corrupt as hell without any real financial aid coming except from Germany. And so I think what the Pentagon and arms merchants are doing is grinning ear to ear scrooge-like hoping for some crackpot like Zhirinovsky or a Milosevic type to take over so they can start the arms race up again go from there. They claim that we have to keep the defense budget high in this country or people will lose their jobs. Fine. There are all kinds of things you can do with that kind of technology and know-how: more space exploration and, more importantly, more and cheaper mass transit in the United States. Europe is light years ahead of us in the development of high speed trains. We need those desperately in this country to move people back and forth. Instead we are making more bombs.
DG: There was a piece in the New York Times today which says that just to maintain and monitor the present nuclear stockpile will cost forty billion annually, which actually I think is more than it actually took to produce them....
JB: I like the proposal from Paul Leventhal of, I think, the Nuclear Policy Institute (or something like that) to stop making the radioactive isotope tritium and slowly but surely the entire world's nuclear arsenal will be rendered impotent at the rate tritium naturally decays which is a lot quicker than the other elements.
DG: [On the subject of the corporate music business] Brian ( AKA Dexter Holland of the Offspring) has done some productive things with the money he's made. For instance his record label Nitro has signed bands like the Adolescents who never really got their due.
JB: What I mean by "constructive" [when talking about how punk bands handle their fame] is finding a way to put that financial clout back in the community. Punk politics have never had financial clout in this country. What can we do with it? One model is to look at what the Grateful Dead, of all people, did with a good chunk of their money, which was to form a grant foundation called the Rex(TK) foundation. They would play benefits for it every year. It started out with an endowment of thirty thousand dollars from a couple shows. Last time they did it, Rex got 1.2 million.
One of the people who works with Rex boils down all the grant applications, presents a synopsis to the board [of directors] and they vote how much to grant these people. It's from $1500 to $10,000 or more, and it's helped prop up soup kitchens, rape crisis centers, Earth First's Redwood Summer and rural school districts in California who don't have money for music programs (because the Republicans stole it all through tax swindles etc.). It was a way of putting sixties radical politics into practice by granting money to people who knew what to do with it and putting money where it would mean a lot, instead of just giving money to The American Way or The American Cancer Society or another organization like that, which spends the majority of money on advertising. So what I'm hoping to see someday, whether I'm involved or not, is a punk Rex foundation. The Beastie Boys have already been in touch with Rex about continuing their work for the people of Tibet.
DG: What are the political implications of all this [corporate takeover of punk]? Do you think the fact that bands like Rancid or The Offspring (that were at least perceived as having a radical agenda) sold millions of records has had an effect on mass consciousness?
JB: All those bands got to where they are in part because they are good at what they do - not even the most vehement back stabber can deny that. And if they have a political impact, it will be greater if they take the bull by the horns and come out more in support of political organizing and organizations in such ways that I have already suggested. Green Day did a high profile benefit for Food Not Bombs, who are so controversial even in the radical world that I know of no other large rock band that ever went to bat for them. They raised $50,000. I don't think a small underground show would have benefited Food Not Bombs as much. They would raise $400 or $500 bucks and everybody would feel good in the end, but Food Not Bombs could spend that money in half a day trying to feed homeless people.
I'm curious to see if there is a long term ripple effect or not. People who work in record stores tell me that some of the mall kids who get into punk through Bad Religion or the other bands you mention, six months later look into the roots and pick up a Dead Kennedys record. They then find that the lyrics have a little different vibe and attitude connected to them. I'm frustrated about how many new people who discover Dead Kennedys through this scene have no clue as to where we were at, and they can't understand why I don't want to reform the band and do a Sex Pistols' Filthy Lucre Tour. They don't understand what punk was or what it is still supposed to be. Not only that, they refuse to understand.
But what I'm really hoping it will ripple down to is people taking a long hard look at clouding there future with what their parents, teachers and the mass media tells them to do. The ripple effect has happened to some degree already. It doesn't mean so much to me when people come up to me and say, "Jello! Dead Kennedys rule! You're God! Blah! Blah! Could you please give me an iron-on tattoo for my nuts! " That doesn't mean too much. What does is when somebody says, "I listened to your music and listened to your words and decided to quit majoring in business and do something else with my life." And then sometimes they'll hand me a record or a magazine or a video they have done. In another case, somebody I knew in childhood went the fast track to a cushy job as a professor at the University of Colorado and then got so disgusted by being thrust into a room of three hundred frat boys and rich kids, that he quit the job (where he had guaranteed tenure) and went off to teach history in a rural middle school where he could actually help kids learn. He said a lot of people in his class don't speak English very well. Some are so discouraged that they have never written a paper in their life, so he grades according to effort. People who don't show up for other classes, show up for his and even try to write something. I think that's really important. So that's an example of what I think is the heart and soul of punk. Just as I think it was the heart and soul of hippies of when they were radical - the beats, and many others throughout history.
DG: Many punks seem to assume that radical culture can replace radical political practice...
JB: It can't. Culture can help initiate better politics, while politics can be used to suppress culture -- they go hand in hand. Look at the investigation into Death Row Records. They would like nothing more than to pin some kind of criminal indictment on Dr. Dre, so they can discredit every word that every Death Row artist ever said. I think the only reason why major labels picked up on grunge and punk to begin with was to avoid a whole generation of suburban white kids getting their political knowledge from angry black rappers. They don't want white kids to know that things are that bad for a large number of people.
DG: But going back to my point. So much of the punk community seems to think that cultural activity is a replacement for political practice ...
JB: I would counter to that that there is no punk community among that group of people. It's a safe little punk womb to have Maximum Rock n'Roll as your bible and to think that world's most important issue is whether Jawbreaker sold out, while ignoring the homeless people outside. That's not community. Bickering endlessly over stuff that doesn't matter is not community. It's junior high.
DG: So you think there is no cohesive social group that can be referred to as "The Punk Community"?
JB: There are threads of it, but punk has gotten so popular that the name gets attached to all sorts of things - everything from Jawbreaker to Brutal Truth. There are all kinds of communities there, all net-working with each other. None of them are as tight culturally as the death metal community where you have people in Norway swapping tapes with people in Malaysia, and all the bands sound more than a little bit alike. And isn't it ironic that death metal is the first form of rock music that has caught on with poor people over the world. When I was in Brazil, I was told that all rock music and punk was scorned by the people of the slums. It didn't speak to them. They thought of it as a bourgeois [art] form they didn't want to have anything to do with. They would rather listen to samba or death metal. Death metal is popular from Moldavia to Cuba.
DG: Why?
JB: Partly because in the grindcore form it's easy to play and have a lot of attitude and fun with it. Also the violent and anti-Christian imagery has a world wide appeal.
DG: A radical response to a Catholic education...
JB: You would have no Brujeria without a pope to beat up on. I've been told that a lot of the illegal youth in L.A. have been blowing off Mexican music and hip hop to listen to death metal. A lot of them have their own bands and have been attempting to play on the street and the cops drove their cars right through it. Anything the gangster rappers say about the LA cops is true. Everything! I've seen Dead Kennedys fans treated just like Rodney King in front of the Whisky and at Wilmington - which wasn't even in the L.A.P.D.'s jurisdiction.
DG: Brian (AKA Dexter Holland from the Offspring) has told me that the first time he got beat up by the police was at a Dead Kennedys show.
JB: It was Wilmington. They stormed a show we were playing at an independent municipality surrounded by the City of Long Beach with a history of labor union flare ups the cops were down on Wilmington to begin with. They left one exit open and routed two thousand people through two double doors, and outside there was a gauntlet of cops swinging nightsticks at people's heads. Helicopters were flying overhead, and tear gas was being thrown. Other cops in helmets and riot gear were seen smashing windows of small businesses up and down the streets of Wilmington and smashing the windows of cars. The L.A. Times of course claimed this was caused by Dead Kennedys, but it wasn't. East Bay Ray knew a woman who worked in a local hospital who said that an L.A. Sheriff was down there that afternoon saying, " You better have extra people in the emergency room tonight, there are going to be a lot of casualties." This stuff does go on in The United States Of America.
DG: Maximum Rock N'Roll seems dead set on this line of sectarian purity where anything that creates a basis for mass support is looked on with suspicion and ultimately rejected as a sell out.
JB: It's the same kind of fundamentalist mind set that makes fundamentalist Christians so dangerous. And the same mind set that has isolated the animal rights and Vegan movement. You take one step out of line, and they bite your head off. Young people who are curious about the politics spend ten minutes with people like that, and they would rather be apathetic. This could be a major turning point in their lives and instead . . .. This is what has turned a lot of people off to punk politics.
DG: Why do you think that punk, which started out so all inclusive, humanistic and anarchistic evolved so rapidly in the direction of the worst traditions of American radicalism?
JB: Tim [Yohannon of Maximum Rock N'Roll] is also a music fan and keep in mind that fan is short for the word "fanatic." There are certain sounds he likes and other stuff he doesn't. He has allowed the fan side to cloud the political side, and somebody who makes music that doesn't fit his narrow definition of punk is considered politically incorrect. If "Holiday In Cambodia" were released today, it would be banned from Maximum Rock N'Roll for not sounding punk.
DG: So what are the solutions? Where do we go from here?
JB: The underground scene is still a cool way to meet a lot of cool people, see a lot of interesting bands and get a lot of food for thought, but people have to remain curious and get their brain activity food from other places besides punk. Many of my spoken word shows are at universities, and [some of] the people who bring me in are either political activists, who may listen to Tracy Chapman or The Cocteau Twins or something like that. In fact, there was a whole tour where people kept saying, "I'm really getting into alternative rock now. Do you like The Cocteau Twins?" It happened again and again, and to this day I've never heard them. But what I'm saying is that I discovered that a lot of vibrant minded activists either had nothing to do with punk by default or actively despised punk because their opinion of it had been tainted by fundamentalists and crusties.
The other people who brought me in were conservatives, who just happened to be on the student activities committee. Since my fee was lower than other people's, they figured they would get their money's worth. So it's a fascinating spectrum of people to talk to and absorb ideas from.
(Breaks for phone call)
Writing the name of a British band that broke up fifteen years ago on the back of the jacket you bought at the mall does not make you radical. It doesn't even make you intelligent. In some cases it makes other people laugh and ask whether they have heard a single note of the Abrasive Wheels before they reproduced their album cover on the back of the jacket they bought the day before. I think being radical means interacting more with a lot different kinds of people and making up your own mind about where you fit in and what you want to do. I didn't agree with the hard line Crass or MDC took over the years, but it helped me decide what line I wanted to take instead. Namely, live my life the way I wanted to but not to the point where it made me a miserable, dangerous person.
You have to identify what can you as an individual do. What are your skills? How do they fit in? Are you somebody who is making a lot of money at a lawyer or computer job but doesn't have a lot of free time? Well, funneling money to organizations that need it is one good place to start. Phil Ochs ridiculed that [idea] in his original version of "Love Me I'm A Liberal," but it's far better than spending your money on Wall Street, rare coins or old colored vinyl punk collectibles. Or if you have a lot of free time, there are a lot of people with activist skills who need help--- be it clinic defense, environmental work or grass roots political campaigns to get somebody with a heart elected to a city council or a school board or even the mayor's office, depending on the town. Richard Hunter, who used to play bass for Killbilly and is now in I,The Jury, just ran for mayor of Fort Worth Texas because he gave a shit. What really terrified the powers that be is that he was running second in the polls up until election day, when a "family values" guy, who had gone the stealth candidate route through right-wing churches came in ahead of him as did a black activist. But he made a lot of noise and inspired a lot of respect, and hopefully he inspired a lot of people to try doing the same thing.
I'm down with both radical resistance and trying to do what can be done through the system. That is one of the reasons I ran for mayor way back when. And all this should have an end goal in mind. Corporate dictatorship in my opinion is heading for a train wreck and that train wreck will happen in our lifetime. They are throwing so many people out of work in this country that the people they depend on to buy their products won't have money to buy them anymore, and a lot of them are already hopping mad. They may be falling for Rush Limbaugh and the militia movement in the short run, but in the long run when the shit goes down I hope it doesn't become like Romania or the L.A. Riots.
I fear that deeply because we live and die by the gun so much in this country. In Czechoslovakia, it was a non-violent change of power, same ultimately with South Africa. The reason those change-overs worked is because people who had been involved in very radical resistance movements knew there had to be a plan afterwards-- even some loose idea of who should be doing what. The time has come to start planning now, at least mentally, for what happens if there is a big takeover and the corporations fall. You don't want some horrendous dictatorship cooked up by multi-nationals and the Pentagon taking our current system's place.
This whole thing could be accomplished democratically, but if there are going to be rock musicians and film makers in the legislature (like in Czechoslovakia), it better be people with ideas and some knowledge and a network to implement them. It's time now to start thinking, "What do I do if I suddenly find myself in charge?" I don't think it's egocentric for everybody in this country to go beyond calling Clinton a sell-out corporate asshole and start asking themselves, "What would I do in his shoes?" Take the hard issues - the Middle East, Bosnia, and how about giving everybody a place to live and a livelihood in this country. Meaningful work is almost extinct in the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
What are we going to do? Write down ideas. Bounce them off your friends. If you don't have intelligent enough friends, get new ones. Talk to your parents, your teachers. In some ways that sounds like jive, but I'm trying to find a better answer to that myself. It may take me my whole life, but this is what I've come up with so far. And above all, most of the people reading this aren't going to be radical activists or punk rockers forever... unfortunately. So it is important to learn from the mistakes of people who came before us, people we admire like Tim Yohannon and people we no longer admire like sixties radicals who turned around and became right wing cyber-yuppies. And don't let the attitude you have now evaporate if you start making money working for I.B.M. Always keep that with you and make sure it's passed down to your children. Don't give up and don't mellow out.
|
