The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Jello Biafra’s answerphone message runs thus: “Just what does our president George Bush mean by a troop surge? Well, if it means adding another 21,000 troops or so, that would mean bringing them up to the level that they were already at in November of 2005. The last time, that many troops surging apparently didn’t work… and what nobody’s telling you is, if we sent 20-25,000 more troops over to Iraq in a surge, the Pentagon estimates that we will need another 28-30,000 troops on top of that for logistical support of the surgery troops…”

It goes on like this. Biafra just doesn’t do social niceties. He’s intense, and he always has been.

It’s now 30 years since Biafra, real name Eric Reed Boucher, discovered punk rock when he summered in London prior to enrolling at university in San Francisco (he’d grown up in Boulder, Colorado). Within two years, his hardcore punk band Dead Kennedys had released their barricade-storming and brilliant debut single, ‘California Uber Alles’, on their own label Alternative Tentacles. ‘Holiday in Cambodia’, perhaps the defining single of the hardcore era, followed in 1980, while the band’s third and fourth singles - ‘Kill the Poor’ and ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ - brought both controversy and commercial success.

Despite attempts to broaden their scope beyond hardcore’s narrow boundaries, Dead Kennedys were already in decline when, in 1985, criminal charges were brought against Biafra (and other members of the band and label staff) for “distribution of harmful matter to minors”. It followed a campaign by the Parent’s Music Resource Center (PMRC) against the cover art of Dead Kennedys’ third album Frankenchrist, which included a poster of Penis Landscape by Swiss surrealist HR Giger. The charges were dismissed in 1987 but, by then, the band had split. A decade later, they found themselves back in the courtroom, this time fighting each other. Biafra was sued by his former bandmates in a dispute over royalty payments and publishing rights. To his lasting chagrin, they won.

This wasn’t the first mutiny against Biafra from the hardcore scene he was so instrumental in creating. At a gig in 1994, he was attacked by a group of punks for the crime of being a “sell-out”, suffering ligament damage and head wounds. Around the same time, sanctimonious punk bible Maximum Rock’n’Roll hilariously banned Alternative Tentacles acts from its pages, declaring that the label was no longer punk. Nonetheless, Alternative Tentacles continues to release records to this day. Its roster includes Pansy Division and The Yuppie Pricks.

Biafra himself continues to make music, most recently releasing two albums with northwestern sludge rockers The Melvins. Yet, over the past two decades he has, like fellow hardcore stalwart Henry Rollins, been more prominent as a spoken-word artist than as a singer. Tireless in his political activism, Biafra is a kindred spirit to the likes of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and John Pilger. In the Grip of Official Treason, a three-disc set released last year, found him railing against the Bush Administration, corporate rule, erosion of liberties and environmental destruction - for four hours.

Those four hours don’t exactly fly by. Most of what Biafra says is 100 per cent righteous, but his hectoring tone is hardly endearing. Indeed, he sometimes invites derision with lame puns (e.g. ‘Iraqnaphobia’, ‘Condosleaza Rice’), a reliance on name calling and mimicry, and constant, reflexive references to Nazi Germany. At one point he says, “If they change the Constitution so that Schwarzenegger can be president, then we will have ovens. I have no doubt about that.”

Biafra sees conspiracies everywhere: below, you’ll find him suggesting that the Democrats deliberately lose elections. Equally, he’s always quick to stamp on suggestions that any one person involved in mainstream politics might be preferable to another. You start to wonder if the real conspiracy is that, as a professional agitator, Biafra’s quite well served by things being the way they are.

His phone manner is graceless and condescending, but he’s exceedingly articulate and highly voluble. After all, he loves the sound of his own voice. He’s even admitted, “I like whacking people over the head with what I think they should know.”

Jello Biafra, the floor is yours…

What projects are you working on at the moment? How has 2007 been for you so far?
A lot of touring. Because of the spoken word album, and the times, and people wanting me to show up and open my big mouth or whatever. The American part of the tour has pretty much wound down now, and so I’m taking a little bit of a breather and working on a song or two for this Reverend Horton Heat tribute album that’s coming out [in collaboration with members of Zen Gorilla]. After that, I don’t know… I also have to re-gear the show for the UK and Europe. It’s become very America-centric once again, because that’s where I live - I live at the epicentre of a country that causes a disproportionate amount of the world’s problems.

I guess that with the 2008 election looming you’ll be getting active and adding your voice to the debate…
I don’t know how much speculating I’ll do this early on. I guess the reason it’s already getting so much more coverage than it deserves is because people can’t wait to get rid of Bush. At times even Bush can’t wait to get rid of Bush. He said in an interview a little while ago that he had been president too long, although the creepiest comment he made was that he wasn’t alone in the White House without a shoulder to cry on: when he got depressed, he cried on God’s shoulder. I mean, that’s one of the scariest areas of his personality that they try and hush up as much as possible. Bush has occasionally let out comments like, ‘I trust God speaks through me,’ which he said to a group of Amish people on the campaign trail in July 2004…

But back to the ’08 election. I’m getting dead sick of the coverage already. Even people from the underground press interviewing me keep asking me, ‘Who are you backing for 2008?’ My answer is, ‘Fuck them all,’ for several reasons. Number one, it’s way too early to be worrying about that election when there’s plenty going down in 2007 and, number two, it’s just the same phoney election process we’ve seen before, only worse, where already all these circus clowns are being paraded before television viewers like it’s American Idol or something. And even the one that some people are falling for, Barack Obama, has a god-awful voting record in some areas that are very important to me. He voted to make the Patriot Act permanent, for one thing, and if you watch his language he’s not nearly as anti-war as he claims. First he said he didn’t really want to pull the troops out of Iraq - he wanted to redeploy them. You know, a code word where the average TV viewer will think, ‘Ah, redeployed back to America, great…’ but redeployment really means just shuffling them around Iraq or off to Kuwait or Qatar for a little while. In Obama’s case, he came right out and said, ‘We must protect American assets like the Green Zone.’ And my eyes nearly popped out of my head. I’ve seen an aerial photo of the Green Zone. It’s four square miles. It’s not just that one palace of Saddam’s that they usually show in the pictures. It’s enormous! We stole all that prime downtown real estate, put up fences and checkpoints so Iraqis can’t even use all the boulevards to get to work - it’s not ours, we stole it. How could Obama not know that? And then he turns around and says, ‘Well, yeah, Iraq was done badly, but gosh darn it, I’m going to invade Pakistan.’ What a monstrously ill-informed remark! I mean, I almost feel safer invading Iran with Bush in charge.

Do you continue to be a member of the Green Party?
Yeah.

So I guess you might be lending your support to their candidate for the presidency…
Well, I’ll have to see who runs. I didn’t vote for the Green candidate last time. I was torn. I know David Cobb and I think he made a very persuasive pitch to me personally to endorse a vote for him, but I finally wound up voting for Ralph Nader again. He was running as an independent last time, rather than as a Green, and I voted for Nader in part to protest the Democrats spending millions and millions of dollars on nuisance lawsuits to get him thrown off the ballot in 25 states. If they’d spent that much legal effort fighting all the electronic vote fraud, their hollow man named Kerry might occupy the White House today. Although, for all I know, he’d probably spend a disproportionate amount of time sleeping in the basement. I mean, Kerry would have been great in low-budget seventies vampire movies. You know the kind - with the velvet-haired women and the blue lens over the camera so it’s supposed to be night-time, even though the sun is in the background…

When push came to shove, John Kerry, the toothless vampire, couldn’t even get out of his coffin at night to save his own election. It’s almost as though, since we have what is basically an actor pretending to be president, somebody has to play the role of the loser too. There’s no other explanation for people like Kerry and Mondale and Dukakis and, of course, Al Gore, going so far out of their way to make legitimate points of view look so bad. And people were so sick of Bush’s father that they had to change the face on television in order to carry on business as usual, which is mostly what Bill Clinton did. And that’s what the supposed opposition party Democrats are focused on as well. To quote Margaret Thatcher, ‘It must be business as usual.’ And that’s where they’re at.

The Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned recently and we’ve seen Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz leave office… Has that heartened you, to see some of more notorious figures in the Bush Administration falling by the wayside?
Not necessarily. I mean, sometimes I’d rather have the public whipping boy in there, because at least then people pay a little more attention to what’s going on, if they’ve discovered how horrible one of these people is. But Gonzales will be replaced by someone much more benign, much quieter, who could do an equal amount of damage, if not more. After all, Gonzales was John Ashcroft-lite, in a way. The only good thing about Gonzales leaving under a cloud is that it sort of torpedoed Bush’s fantasy of putting him on the Supreme Court.

You’ve been based in San Francisco for a number of decades. Has the character of that city changed a lot over that time, and do you feel more isolated there now than you did when the hardcore scene was in full bloom?
That’s a very strange question. Why would I feel more isolated?

Hasn’t it become a yuppie town?
It always was, and a lot of the most innovative and volatile underground music and culture is coming out of Oakland, across the Bay. Now Oakland is getting expensive too, so I don’t know what’s going to happen. But there are still a lot of empty warehouses over there, and low-income and high-crime areas where people without a lot of money can continue to try and start something interesting. I mean, it is kind of a shame that less and less people move to San Francisco chasing a dream and wanting to find themselves and make some mark in some area of the art world. There have hardly been any bands that have moved here in the past decade or so. On the other hand, the powers that be have so far been thwarted in their efforts to turn San Francisco into the dot-com Monte Carlo. I was getting so scared of that, I was plotting my exit. But where the hell would I go? I don’t really want to live in LA. I tried living way out in the mountains but that didn’t work ’cause I have to be closer to where stuff’s going on. I actually gave serious thought to moving to Seattle but then I got a phone call from Art Chantry, a poster and graphic artist friend of mine, and I noticed that the number he left is the area code for St Louis, one of the cities in the United States I would least like to ever live in. And I called him up and said, ‘What on earth are you doing living in St Louis?’ And he said, ‘Well, it was the only place I could afford to buy a house, plus I got really sick of Seattle because of all of these dot-com yuppies and the artists getting bulldozed out of town,’ etc. etc. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that sounds like San Francisco. I guess I shouldn’t move to Seattle after all.’

So, for now, I’m here. I realise there’d be way more opportunity if I moved to LA, a different group of bent musicians, including the greater extended Melvin family… acting, cartoon voices, you name it… but I’ve just never really enjoyed spending long periods in Los Angeles.

Are you planning a third album with The Melvins?
I don’t know what’s going to happen with that… It’ll depend on schedules and stuff, plus it kinda whetted my appetite to have my own thing going again, but, as usual, I haven’t really been able to find the right people, so we’ll see what happens… There are also some other acting projects on the horizon which I thought were going to happen before I came to England, and now they’ve been postponed to next year. One of them is playing a crooked TV evangelist who gets torn limb-from-limb by a vengeful flesh-eating Jesus live on his own television show - an independent film that’ll probably be shot in Buffalo, New York, of all places - a rather grim industrial city on the opposite side of the state from New York City. But having read the script, I’ll do just about anything to make this one happen. It’s a role I was born to play!

The other offer came from the actor Norman Reedus. He’s making a very surreal semi-monster movie and he wants me to play this corporate megalomaniac who owns practically everything in the world, but the person is kind of based on Richard Nixon - another real-life monster I’m intimately familiar with. I guess I would be wearing a rather large prosthetic mask, so I’m sort of Nixon with a lot of fangs and canine teeth and stuff.

I guess Nixon was in the White House when you became politically aware…
I was politically aware before he was in the White House. I came from a family where events of the day were discussed with everybody in the family, including the little kid, so I was a newshound from a very early age. I saw Oswald get shot live in my parents’ living room when I was five-years-old. Plus the evening news followed some cartoon shows I’d watch in the afternoon, and I saw very little difference between the two. And for me, they both have equal entertainment value. I’m actually very grateful that that happened, because even as a kid I was able to inhale and experience much more of the sixties than a lot of other people who came of age in the late seventies. I have a lot more vivid memories of stuff back then, and my pre-punk hippy days are just one more part of me that sort of broadens and enriches who I ultimately am, I guess.

Did you find that, after the hardcore scene had exploded, there was too much narrow-mindedness and that things didn’t really progress the way you would have liked? Did it become another orthodoxy?
Well, it depends on the people and the bands and so on. I mean, I always made a point of making sure that I, the music fan, kept broadening my tastes and didn’t lose my sense of excitement and adventure, and so I’d made a conscious decision well before Dead Kennedys broke up not to let the daily bickering and soap operas of the hardcore scene govern my life. I had to step back and separate myself from that, both as a songwriter and as a human being. And there were other things that had happened… I wouldn’t call it ‘post hardcore’, because hardcore never ended, but when everything from Big Black to the Swans to The Beatnigs to Head of David and Spacemen 3 and Ministry, you name it… when that stuff all started happening I got excited with all those fresh sounds too. But still, if I hear a punk/hardcore band that’s dead-on great and/or does something really new and fresh with the music, I like it as much as I ever did. But I have very little interest in people who don’t try to go the extra mile. And I have very little interest in pop punk or corporate punk at all - a lot of that stuff to me just sounds like The Eagles with louder guitars, complete with the stupid lyrics. We get tonnes of pop punk demos at Alternative Tentacles. I can’t understand why, except maybe it’s these younger people who grew up with this warped idea that that’s what punk is supposed to be… The other night at a show I saw yet another kid with bondage trousers on and a bunch of patches on them, including one for Anti-Pasti. And I’ve seen ones for One Way System - lesser-known bands, not just the usual Crass/Amoebics/Rudimentary Peni/whatever. You think, ‘What does this mean to this kid now?’ He couldn’t have been more than 16 or 17: why does this mean rebellion to this person after all this time? Part of the beauty of punk at the time was that it was such a volatile way to rebel against how the seventies destroyed the sixties. A lot of people felt that punk was anti-sixties but for me it was always anti-seventies. It was the seventies that made the sixties dumb. You know, just like The Exploited and bands like that went out of their way to make punk stupid later on. Same thing. And to me that was what it was rebelling against. I figured that in five to ten years, people younger than I am would come up with some other form of rock or punk or other kind of music that would scare the shit out of me, and that would be healthy. And I’m still waiting for that to happen! Some people would say hip hop did that, but hip hop, in a way, is a completely different kind of music. Sure, there are influences from rock and funk and soul, but it’s such a completely different thing that it doesn’t really count in that lineage.

Were you a fan of any of it?
Oh, I still am when I hear something I like. I’m mainly a rock guy though. A rock’n’roll guy.

Obviously you’ve put out a lot of records through Alternative Tentacles. Has anything particularly excited you recently, in the rock’n’roll milieu?
Boy, that’s always a hard question for me to answer, because I’m obviously really biased towards the bands on our label. I have to be. We just put out a great new album by Zolar X and a different, more brutal one by Akimbo, kind of like a more straight-ahead punk version of Unsane or something. Real savage, real good at what they do and better with every album.

Zolar X, on the other hand… it’s one of those stories that somebody should make into a movie someday. They started in the early seventies as a pre-punk glam band making the glitter scene in LA around Rodney’s English Disco but, unlike the New York Dolls or The Stooges, they wore spacesuits complete with pointy ears and even antennae. And I saw a picture of them when I was a teenager - when glam was still going on - and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the dumbest-looking band I’ve ever seen.’ But then I heard a bootleg of some of their songs in the early eighties and was just blown through the wall by how great the music was. I thought, ‘Wow, the missing link between Chrome and The Stooges with Cheap Trick pop hooks for the choruses. This is amazing!’ And lo and behold, a reporter interviewing me about that ugly Dead Kennedys lawsuit told me he knew one of the people from Zolar X and they still had all the master tapes…

So, slowly but surely, we worked things out and put out a retrospective album of the seventies band, and then imagine the chills that went down my spine when Ygarr, the leader, called me and said, ‘Yeah! I’m so happy this album came out - I feel like I’ve been reborn! We’re starting the band again! We’re having new spacesuits made right now!’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this a good thing? What have I done?!’ But the album came out really well, the new one. It’s a little more pop than the old stuff but it’s still, dare I say, light years ahead of what most people do with punky pop or glam… Even Turbonegro fans would probably dig them a lot.

You mentioned that ugly Dead Kennedys lawsuit. Did you feel betrayed by that whole experience…?
Oh, the experience is still going on. It doesn’t end with those guys. Yes, I feel deeply betrayed. How the hell do you think it felt to get the crap beat out of me and permanently injured for being a so-called sell-out, and then the next thing I know I’m being sued by greedy former band members for not selling out? If you recall, their main motive for suing was because I didn’t want to put ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ in a Levi’s Dockers TV commercial. Yes, there was an accounting error on Alternative Tentacles part and when we, not they, discovered it and figured out exactly how much we owed, we paid them - and then they sued. Never in my most paranoid nightmares did I think they’d then run off and act so stupid once they seized the Dead Kennedys catalogue like that crooked circus trainer kidnapping the Elephant Man or something. I mean, they continue to do fake reunion shows with a picture of me in the band in the ad - that’s happened repeatedly. They’ve recently okayed a cover of ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ being used as the background music for a rather graphic rape scene in a Tarantino movie [Grindhouse]. And now they’re trying to push for putting out a dumbed-down Dead Kennedys greatest hits album to be sold in bargain bins at exactly the sort of chain stores any intelligent Dead Kennedys fan would boycott. You know, they openly despise every single thing the band ever stood for, so I can’t recommend any of the current editions of the albums on Decayed Music at all. They were done behind my back - I had no input in them and the old family recipe of quality control was completely thrown out the window. I was still very proud of the music and the band’s legacy, but maybe that’s the reason I care about it a hell of a lot more than those guys and have fought as best I could to try and at least maintain some dignity for Dead Kennedys, even though I don’t have the big bad corporate lawyers behind me the way they do.

Do you think those guys changed a lot, or did a lot of the ideology and politics of the Dead Kennedys come from you in the first place?
Ray [Pepperell, aka ‘East Bay Ray’, guitarist] and Klaus [Fluoride, bass] are much older than I am. Ray’s 60 now. They came from seventies bar bands, and yet again it breaks my heart to see that, after all we went through together and no matter how much we helped pioneer a more creative, independent way of doing things, they would completely toss that out the window and revert back to the mentality of seventies bar-band musicians. ‘Well, now at least we have these so-called hit songs, and we can cover them badly and use the old name of the band and run off with the money. Won’t this be great?’

Another sad part about it is, they’re all talented, intelligent people who could have been making interesting new music, but instead they threw all that away: they’ve completely destroyed their integrity as artists at this point, and they don’t even care. They’re not even aware of it. You know, at least the guys in Bauhuas had class. After Bauhaus broke up, they came back out and used a completely different name and a completely new set of songs, and enjoyed a whole separate career as Love & Rockets. And Ray, Klaus and DH [Peligro, drummer] had the talent to do that, but they didn’t want to work too hard. I mean, they have re-registered the songs with the American equivalent of MCPS to claim that they wrote them all, and now Peligro is credited as co-writer on all the songs from before he was in the band and Bruce [Slesinger], our original drummer, is not. It’s that level of crooked corruption and petty greed going on, but, you know, they can change all the credits they want, but in the six years of doing the fake version of the band they have yet to write a single new song. They claim they wrote all the old ones but, for some reason, they can’t come up with any new ones. And I can.

So, in that sense, I just shake my hand. I mean, they’ve hired this kind of nasty, heavy-handed Hollywood guy to be Dead Kennedys’ manager and he seems to think he’s mine too… He doesn’t seem to understand why I have absolutely no interest in getting back together with those guys. It would be too painful.

Wasn’t it partly The Melvins’ disgust at what Dead Kennedys were doing that led them to approach you?
Well, that was their original motive: they wanted me to go on tour with them doing all Dead Kennedys songs. But I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, if I’m going to do that at all I want to do new songs.’ So the project was hatched. The irony to me, though, is that I brought in heavier rock songs for them while Buzz [Osborne] walked in with all these punkier riffs for me, so some of the writing credits are actually reversed from what you’d think they might be.

You continue to do both spoken word and music. Do you find yourself leaning toward one or the other as time wears on?
It’s hard to say. Music definitely makes me feel alive in a different way and I kind of felt like I got my mojo back when those albums with The Melvins got done and we did some shows. But spoken word… I suppose it helped to derail getting another proper band together but, at the same time, if you discover you have this other gift you didn’t know you had that’s making a different kind of impact that’s important, then you kind of have a responsibility to develop it and keep letting it grow. It’s obviously a very different field from a rock show and you don’t have the catharsis and the adrenaline in the same way, but it also gives me the opportunity to infect people’s minds with more brain food and deeper concepts than would fit in lyrics to a three-minute song.

On the last spoken word album you enthused about The Guardian and the relative openness of UK media. Does London and the UK feel like a home from home for you?
It’s a little different every time. Maybe London felt more like a second home the first couple of times I went there - first on my fear and loathing hippy backpack tour from hell during the summer of ’77, when I saw some of the early punk bands and things, and then after Dead Kennedys tour of 1980 it was a very vibrant time. I saw everybody from Discharge to Bauhaus the week In the Flat Field came out, and even lesser-known bands like The Sound and The Monochrome Set really blew me away too. I saw Zounds with The Poison Girls. Never did manage to see Crass or Rudimentary Peni, but I did catch Amoebics a year later… But even between ’80 and ’81, I felt like something kind of happened to London where there just wasn’t as much going on - it was just starting to be categorised and genre-fied, and there wasn’t quite as much fresh energy.

The last few times I’ve been back to London, people complain about how few actual gigs with live bands there are these days. And I look for something to see, and a lot of it is reunions of old bands and stuff. Maybe I just haven’t quite been able to penetrate the areas where I might see something that will just completely knock my socks off. The last few British bands that really, really did something special for me both wound up putting something out on Alternative Tentacles, namely Iowaska and The Heads. What does that say about the state of the music industry in Britain when Iowaska, especially, wound up coming out on a label in San Francisco because England wouldn’t put them out. They’re kind of like the missing link between The Amoebics and Hawkwind, with female vocals.

Have you ideas of what topics you might address on the UK spoken word in November?
Well, I’m trying to boil it down and toss out the things that people there already know and to try and identify the areas that people over there may not know and how it may apply to people living in Britain as opposed to people living in America… What I don’t want to do is talk about Britain because I’m not exactly an expert when I don’t live there, and it would be silly of me to try.

You’ve been involved in activism for decades and things appear to be getting worse and worse. Do you ever feel totally dispirited and tempted to give in?
If it weren’t for my bad attitude and sick sense of humour I would have pulled a Kurt Cobain years ago. But in a way, living right in the middle of the modern version of the fall of Rome is quite an exciting time to be alive.

More content of interest...

• International Songbirds (Posted in 016 May 2008 | Songbirds)