QUESTIONING
PHOTOS BY M. FO
Jello
BIAFRA
Jello Biafra evolved from a curious and bored
Colorado hippie to singer for San Francisco's Dead
Kennedys, possibly the most well-known punk band
since the Sex Pistols. Once a candidate for mayor of
SF, he also performed in front of the Republican and
Democratic convention sites in 1984 and has gone
toe-to-toe with the hellhounds of the PMRC. Jello
and Thrasher have finally come together for this long
overdue and frequently postponed interview that
reveals just what makes this man go off.
How old are you now?
Thirty-two.
What's your favorite American band of all time?
The Stooges, as far as what they did over a fif-
teen or twenty year period.
Elaborate a bit about the origins of your music.
I got hooked on rock and roll in the second
grade. I discovered a used record store in high
school that would give away anything they didn't
think they could sell. I took every single record in
1.1
the free bin every day for three years. I got all the
Doors records in six weeks, the Seeds, 13th Floor
Elevator. I got MC5 albums for quarters, Fue House
by the Stooges for 10 cents sealed. When I hit on
the Stooges I was hooked. That was what commu-
nicated to me. At the same time I was real
depressed because I knew the Stooges weren't
around anymore and music was the only thing
that really made me happy.
Contrary to what the Washington Wives would
like people to think about music causing kids to
commit suicide, seeing the Ramones live in
Denver probably prevented me from committing
suicide. I was out of high school, I hated every-
thing, especially myself and my options for the
future. A few friends and I knew what the
Ramones were about and went down to see them
played one cord and the whole audience was hor
in Denver in January 1977. They came out. Johnny
rified. I looked around and thought, this is going
to
be great. The Ramones were the most powerful
could do this. I could do this. So then the plotting
my parents living room when no one was home
thing I had ever seen. I got a sense that anybody
began. Me and some friends screwed around in
and called ourselves the Healers.
I got every punk rock single I could get ahold of.
Over the summer I went to Europe and saw
bands. Unfortunately, being a creature of habit, I
only saw bands that I had heard of and ignored
bands like Flowers on the Streets for the Cortina's
scene had tons of bands, but America didn't.
and the X-Ray Specs. I realized that the English
Then it was time to go to UC Santa Cruz. Oh
great, a hippy school where they don't give people
Just think of it, an arena full of fans who, instead of shaking their fists in the air, metal
fan style, are all holding giant cans of lard.
grades, an alternative to the bullshit educational
system. Just what I wanted. Instead, I found a
school of mostly deadheads who were more into
smoking pot than learning anything. I was reluc-
tant to give up my hippy duds and long hair. It
meant so much to me because I was the first one
to grow it out in sixth grade, but I was the first
person at UC Santa Cruz to chop it all off. One
night, while blasting the Sex Pistols and emptying
the rest of the dorm hallway. I cut off my long hair.
put it in a plastic bag and nailed it to the outside
of my dorm door along with my pin up photos of
Son of Sam
On weekends, me and another friend began
going to San Francisco to check out the local punk
scene. The first night we got to the Mabuhay
Gardens, the CBGB's of the west, we realized after
we'd paid to get in that we got there on heavy
metal night. This guy dressed in 1977 punk garb
was making faces at the metal bands and trying to
distract them in any way he could. He turned out
to be Will Shatter and he invited us to a party the
next night with the Avengers playing in a base-
ment. Complete mayhem the whole night. I was
going, "Yeah, this is what matters here." So. I
decided, well, time to drop out of school. In retro
spect, when you think about it, what a stupid,
naive thing to do. But, there you go.
I went back to Boulder and got a job doing really
dirty laundry in a nursing home until I had
enough money to move back. I was going to act
ing school out here for awhile. I knew I could per-
form and I knew that none of the other bands in
San Francisco were into theatrical performances
at that time. So, maybe there was room for me. 1
answered an ad at Aquarius Records, "Guitarist
wants to join or form punk or new wave band."
That was Ray. Klaus then answered the same ad
and we began to play. We figured we had enough
songs to get a gig. We lied to Dirk Dirksen.
claimed we had a drummer. We made up a fake
press biography, had a photo taken with a friend I
had met at a Screamer show standing in as a
drummer. Dirk gave us a gig. We had a week to go.
no drummer, then Bruce Slesinger turned up. My
friend Carlos' band broke up that week, so we
added him as a second guitarist named 6025. So,
when we debuted opening for the Offs and
Negative Trend, we had been together one week
Dead Kennedys are born.
How about that name?
A couple of people I knew in Colorado thought it
was a great band name, but they didn't dare use
it. Strangely, there was another band called the
Dead Kennedys playing in Cleveland at the time.
They changed their name to Public Enema
because they couldn't get any gigs. My first pro-
posal for the band was to call it Thalidomide.
They didn't like Thalidomide so I proposed Dead
Kennedys and they liked that even less. But I
began mentioning it to people I knew, like people
in the Avengers and Dils. They all did a double
take, whether they liked it or hated it. I immedi-
ately knew that this name draws strong emotions.
Ray wanted to call the band The Sharks, but, by
that time we couldn't get rid of the Dead
Kennedys. Of all of the names of bands that I've
written down since then, none tops that one as far
as unmitigated gall goes. That was great in a way,
it meant that major labels stayed away from us.
So. I couldn't wind up finding myself out-voted by
the band wanting to sign with RCA or something
That was thankfully out of the question.
Why Dead Kennedys?
What it wound up meaning to me and the band,
was the beginning of the end of the American
Empire and of the American Dream. The begin
ning of the Me Generation, yuppie bullshit, cyni-
cism that you find even worse today than it was
when we picked the name and began talking
about this very same problem. The people didn't
have a word for yuppie then, but the problem was
there and we knew it. People gave up on them
selves, cocooning, in other words, figuring that
since the President got blown away by outside
forces, and Nixon is a crook, and Martin Luther
King and Robert got shot, well, I might as well be
out for myself and be a crook too. It's all I can do,
just feather my own nest and build my own little
cocoon. That's how you have the cycle of greed
and sheer stupidity today. Ray came up with the
analogy of the shattering of the American dream..
You read back in the magazines before Kennedy
was killed, it was all. "Atomic age astro dream-
world, movie star president, good-looking wife.
Great! America is just going to get better and bet-
ter and better and we're going to have more appli-
ances to make us more and more comfortable.
Wow! Bang! All gone in one second. It didn't
happen all at once, of course. I think that what
really got the whole yupple syndrome started
more than anything else was Vietnam and
Watergate. But, what got the ball rolling was the
Kennedy killings. Therefore, Dead Kennedys. If
you're going to try and tackle a problem, even just
as an artist saying something about it, you might
as well go to the roots.
What lead up to your first single, "California
Über Alles" and "Man with the Dogs"?
We recorded an earlier tape that never came out
because the producer got mad at us for not letting
him mix the band any way that he wanted to. Kind
of ironic, because I listen back to those earlier
tapes now and it sounds almost like early loy
Division or something. We were slower, a five-
piece band, and had a dreamy sense that wasn't
there as much later. I knew early on that we would
have to do our records ourselves and go with
other independent labels and stay militarily inde-
pendent. That's what punk rock gave us, the abili
ty to take the chances and turn into Flipper, The
Birthday Party, whatever. I've kept up with a lot of
stuff. One thing that's maintained the fan in me
and not turned me into a cynical musical yuppie
bureaucrat clap puncher is that I'm always after
something fresh that blows me against the wall
and makes me want to bounce through the win-
dows, bounce off of the walls, run down the street
and burn down a bank or something.
What happened after your first single?
We took the time to do the single right and get it
to sound really nasty and jump off of the record
loud. Nobody knew how to record this kind of
music, especially not in America, where engineers
are trained to record smooth, ECM Jazz style.
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