Here's an interview from the time of the album release and supporting UK dates that Jello did with Record Mirror. In it he sets out the band's plan to shake America out of its torpor and 'Me' mentality.
Record Mirror 27th September 1980
IN the early, hours of the morning the packed dance floor of San Francisco's Fab Mab is a sweaty mess of jerking flesh. It's time for Jello Biafra's finest gesture and before you can say 'Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad', the Dead Kennedys' lead singer and strategist has taken a ' flying dive into the audience. Dirk Dirksen, the club's owner, strolls on stage and reels Biafra 'back by his mike cord. Before you know it, Jello's up again, gesturing manically to illustrate a lyric, singing in a punk whine that threatens to become a shriek.
This has been going on for two years. The Dead Kennedys have perfected their act 6,000 miles and four years away from the English punk explosion. Is San Francisco a cultural backwater or just a different battlefield? How come an American punk band are zooming up the charts in a land supposedly taken with 2 Tone and the new psychedelia, with an album recorded on a British label and unreleased in the States? Questions, questions.
A few nights after the Kennedys' farewell gig at the Mab and three days before he leaves for Britain , Biafra meditates on such topics before and after dancing his head off to Texan punkband Really Red. Biafra is an ex-hippie, something of an anarchist and ex-Mayoral candidate for San Francisco. He got over 7,000 votes because he's a good tactician and because he's got a sense of humour. When the Dead Kennedys toured in the sticks of California they called their visit to redheck territory the 'Turd Town' tour. Biafra's tactics are to be as tactless as possible.
When he explains why, Biafra sounds like he's issuing an official statement, pre-written and composed. He talks like an emphatic newsreader, laying emphasis on every other word: "Americans are governed by fads. They are kept together like rodents by their fear of failing to keep up with the Joneses. They are constantly on the watch for new products to be fed - but only ones that everybody else is buying too. They're very afraid of being weird which is what we've got to convince them is the best thing they can be in these circumstances.
"A lot of the people in this country are basically zombies. You must attack them, annoy them, get under their skin, make them as uncomfortable as possible. Our live shows are basically ways of torturing the audience so that they enjoy it but also go home.feeling different. Unglue the minds of the zombies. We re trying to combat the obedience training."
Now this is all very well, but does a band that specialises in head banging punk really liberate its audience or just create a bunch of media-mirror zombie punks? Punk . still has d very different status in the US however, still remaining firmly underground and thus retaining a vital part to play.
Biafra explains: "Americans are so conservative . They don't have the same access to the media. People in England are primed to be . interested in what's going on; America's a much larger country. News travels slowly and people are conditioned to stick with the old bands."
Biafra contends that "America's behind but it's very much alive. " He swears his allegiance to punk rock while saying the Kennedys are gradually moving from buzzsaw to more morbid, diseases rock, "a further descent into hell.
"Punk rock and garage rock never die, People are always going to like getting hit in the guts with rock and roll . I have since I was seven. Every time bands like SLF, Crass, Cockney Rejects or the Ruts come out they immediately catch on . because people don't care if they're dated, they like it. We' ll keep the . punk base but build on it. We don't want to wimp out and go pop or get so arty that you're basically playing to yourself in the mirror."
'Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables' was the statement of the Kennedy's a year to six months ago. While musically and sometimes thematically derivative of the Pistols and Co. it has manic tinny tranny quality of its own, particularly on such speedy little operas as 'Kill The Poor', which dances as merrily and hysterically as a drowning rat towards the apocalypse. Satire has always been the strength of Californians like the Tubes and Zappa,and Biafra's commitment and love of psychosis takes the satire one step further, towards the mania of Napoleon V's ‘They're Coming ToTake Me Away'.
Jello's favourite scenario, one that is repeated in such songs as 'Chemical Warfare', 'I Kill Children', and 'Stealing People's Mail', is the trashing of the normal, fat, complacent white consumer by a psychotic on the loose. Biafra takes as much delight in portraying psychotics, red-neck and otherwise, as does John Cale, whose 'Sabotage' Jello admires. Don’t you get a little carried away there Jello? Are you criticising the culture that produces such warpoes or becoming one yourself? And why don't you go out and literally eat the rich if it fascinates you so much?
"In a sense it's more effective to put these things across in a song than do them in real life. Son of Sam never got to make a record, he got put away instead. I think it helps people who are stuck in ruts but have violence bubbling inside them in their daydreams, to find that/there are people who think the same as they do."
Somehow I don't feel Jello's real interest is in comforting the psychotic in everyone. As America boringly drifts towards a neo-fascist President like Reagan, Jello is more concerned to see the slumbering anger released. In any form.
"A vacant stranger is someone who may seem perfectly quiet and normal for decades on end and then suddenly breaks out and performs some violent act that forever brands his name in the history books. Vacant strangers are the creative criminals, there's one in all of us, and it's about time he came out.
"Vacant strangers' do good things as well as bad things," Jello adds as an unconvincing afterthought, fact is, like any decent satarist or home loving boy, Jello is half in love with the monsters that his country produces and thus the diseased state of the country itself: "I think in order to expose something completely you have to immerse yourself in it. I learned, as a method actor, to immerse myself in other characters. Some of the characters in the songs are characters, some are parts of me."
There's a part of 'Jello that wants revenge, that wants the blood of his complacent compatriates. It's a nasty, giggling, bullying side and Biafra indulges it - in his songs at least: "Evil fascinates me. In order to expose situations rather than just say 'I hate it' I prefer to immerse myself in it and expose it from within. "
Yes sir, there's a vacant stranger in all of us and as far as Jello is concerned it takes a band as tactless and tasteless as the Dead K's to put us in touch with him: "Americans have very thick sugarcoated skulls and they have to be beaten over the head." Jello admits the dangers of being misunderstood by his audience as encouraging the monsters the band's attacking through immersion and, for once, is stumped: "The irony worries me and I haven't really thought of a solution to it yet."
There probably isn't one. Because Jello belongs in that great old American tradition, the trash syndrome. He loves and hates the trash, the sheer godawful tastelessness that is so much a part of America. So he attacks it in his songs, particularly the normal white middle-class version that eats polyester and wears popcorn (spot the deliberate mistake!) while championing it in the band's name and elsewhere.
Oh yes, about that name which still works a lot more powerfully than, your average mega-chord: "The Kennedy assassinations torpedoed the American dream. In the fifties there was nothing but talk of big cars and better this, life here was supposedly getting better everyday. Nobody believes that any more. The assassinations were the end of the American Dream and the beginning of the 'Me' generation.
Jello Blafra lives-in a melodramatic world of B Movie . scenarios .. America is a lot sicker than he is and he's a dab hand at diagnosing it, even if, as he perhaps worries, he's a part of that sickness. He's part patient, part doctor, part mutant, part moralist. He hates the 'ME' spirit of America most of all.
"We're coming from a tradition that is no tradition, a culture that has no soul unless you count lust and greed. That's the Protestant work ethic, 'God helps those who help themselves' Americans have twisted this so they believe, 'I must help myself above all so I don't care whose back I stab'. I want everything right now for free. The American empire is crumbling right now due to the same sort of mental laziness and corruption that brought down the Romans and the English.”
I enjoy it when Biafra says these things. Shock and confrontation are not in fashion right now, probably never are in California. Serious as he sounds, the Dead Kennedys are above all humourists with trash comics as an inspiration, B Movie camp and garageland .They are second generation punks putting out the first San Francisco punk album because only England would put up the money. There's still no one doing that here, though maybe the arrival of.Rough Trade will change that.
The Kennedys are proud of their San Franciso scene roots: "We come out of a scene that's been thriving for three years and we' re very thankful to finally get an album out when so few bands have been able to do so. It's kind of a sick joke when you think of the people over here like the Dils or the Avengers who didn't get an album out when they deserved to and were slagged off in the European press for being clones of bands that had started off with influences from American bands. There's a lot more where we come from."
Well , there you have it, the arrival of another spokesman and another band from San Francisco with 'Dead' in their name. There's not much that's grateful about this lot however. Thank God someone's treading on a few toes in America today.
Sure the Kennedys are dated, headbangers in style and music, trash anarchists in Iyrics. Sure there's a nasty adolescent bully in Jello's lyrics just bursting to get out and get violent with a few innocent bystanders (innocent bystanders and vacant strangers, what a . combination!) but Jello's right, punk is here to stay and the Kennedys . are saying the unsaid, being loud and obnoxious, in California at least.
Maybe Jello, East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride and Ted will upset a few city councils on the English tour. About time too. California Uber Alles.
