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Spreading the Positive Disease
conducted by Chris Molnar and Skippy Shaftlick
As a doped up San Franciscan youth, Jello Biafra was the typical bored kid who decided to
start up a punk band with all the intentions of pissing off everyone they could. Hence, the
Dead Kennedys.
In 1987, the Frankenchrist album brought national mainstream media attention (the cops
busted Biafra by raiding his home) and arresting him on obscenity charges. The main reason
being the H.R. Giger (famous for the creation of the set designs for the film Alien) poster of
erect penis' entering vagina-like holes that was the artwork on the cover. Looking back, this
whole fiasco could be considered an obscenity trial/witch-hunt that failed miserably (he was
acquitted).
Attacked because the DK's had their own label (Alternative Tentacles) and virtually no
capital to fight back in court, they were a classic scapegoat. The D.A.'s office stated then
that the DK's were "a cost-effective way to send a message to the music industry."
The stress of the trial caused the unfortunate break up of the Dead Kennedys and they
ejected in separate directions. Biafra wound up on television courting the mayorship of San
Francisco. Also unfortunate was that he lost.
With encouragement from his friends he took up the art of ranting on stage about anything
he liked - preferably vehement government-bashing conspiracy-ridden anecdotes on
everything from drug legalization to Bush and the Iran-Contra scandal to the old Dead
Kennedy days. And he was good, very good. He traveled the country talking to college kids
and anyone that would listen and ended up recording these 'spoken word' sessions to disc
and releasing them on Alternative Tentacles.
Later projects included film cameos in Tapeheads as an FBI agent, a corporate-junkie
power-mad head of the Secret Police (as well as getting the soundtrack rights and doing the
actual soundtrack with D.O.A. and NoMeansNo) in the Vancouver-produced Terminal City
Ricochet, and more recently as the arch-villain in GWAR's new movie Mr. Skulhed.....Face.
His current musical adventures are known as Lard with Al Jourgensen and then Tumor
Circus. With no real 'band' to call his own, he is frequently collaborating with other A.T.
artists and friends. Out now is the joint effort with Mojo Nixon & The Toadliquors, Prairie
Home Invasion, which is definitely some new musical ground being experimented with here.
Biafra makes a great many jokes and is in high spirits for a man who is a primary target of
the censor-lords in this country. For most people, the skin would be running very thin after
all the harassment and thwarting he has undergone. But he barrels forward with his artistic
and political pursuits, always building on the foundations that he has constructed. Often
criticized as a loud-mouthed liberal and treated by the media as a crazed fanatic of the punk
fall-out, he is both and exponentially more. Give him a mic, he'll scream into it; put him on a
stage, he'll blow your mind; let him make records and challenge the fundamentally corrupt
and bigoted right wing of this country with his literal interpretation of the 1st Amendment,
and watch them make assholistic narrow-minded blowhards of themselves. And don't get him
started on "Yuppie-scum Clinton" because the following is what happens.
I enter the interview session while Mr. Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon are recording radio
promos for another gent partaking in the discussion.
Jello:
Hi there boys and girls, this is Jello Biafra, you're listening to Radio Parameter. Why?
Good day, this is Jello Biafra. and I've heard the good news. From now on all radio will have
good family values music, like the President's favorite tv show, Donna Reed, and his favorite
music, Michael Bolton and Kenny G. Things that will keep you quiet, obedient, ignorant, and
very very happy. If you're sick of this kind of thing, stay tuned 'cause this is Revolution
Radio. I'm Jello Biafra. At this point, Biafra finds out that this radio program is part of the
Armed Forces Network. We all laugh and he re-records his 'greeting.'
Hi, this is Jello Biafra, and I knew enough not to join the Armed Forces, but you're stuck
there anyway listening to Radio Perimeter. Peace.
Hi, this is Jello Biafra and you're listening to Radio Perimeter. Wouldn't it be great if
conversion from the Cold War really did happen instead of trying to start a new one. Think
of what you could be doing to help prevent war - like rebuilding neighborhoods all over the
world, helping feed hungry people, helping clean up toxic waste on your own base, preferably
with the proper protection instead of what they gave people in the Gulf War, and be sure to
read On Guard magazine, available from Citizen Soldier and support the Conscientious
Objectors. Over and out!
Mojo Nixon:
Hey y'all, this is Mojo and we're deep in the woods, deep in the hills of West Virginia with
the Rebel Alliance. We're gettin' ready to storm the gates. We're goin' to Washington!
Those pointy-headed nuts will be swingin from lampposts!! This is Revolution Radio
baby!!!!!!
ON CENSORSHIP
Yuppie scum Clinton has turned out to be very disappointing. As I say in my spoken word
shows, one of the worst forms of censorship is what people are not being told. Like the
NAFTA treaty being negotiated totally in secret with only corporate representat ives invited.
Or has anybody noticed that there is no more talk of post Cold War conversion and cutting
back the defense budget anymore. Sure they're closing a few bases, but Clinton's new
[defense] budget for next year is 15% back up again. What are we supposed to do with all
these bombs? Are arms manufacturers crossing thei r fingers hoping that Zhironovsky will
get in and we'll have a new Hitler to fight? Or go after the oil sheiks again, or what!?! I'm
really disappointed and a little horrified that as everything falls apart all around us, here we
are spending more money o n bombs in an arms race only with ourselves. When the military
could be converted to decent civilian use, not necessarily like in Somalia, but there are
plenty of places where people do need to be fed. People could use some new buildings and
some shelter right here in the United States. Some of the worst Superfund sights now that
the lid has come off of are on Army bases. Somebody could be helping clean this up, instead
of preparing for a war that Arms manufacturer probably don't even hope we fight in fear of
having their tennis courts blown up.
The release of the new Biafra/Mojo Nixon record is a spit in the eye of every conservative
whiner who thinks that 'alternative' means Michael Bolton. With titles like "Are You
Drinkin' With Me Jesus" and covers of Phil Ochs' "Love Me I'm A Liberal" and "W ill The
Fetus Be Aborted (a mock of the melodies from the old gospel standard, "Will The Circle be
Unbroken")," Biafra is up to his old tricks. I've been toying with the idea of making a record
like this for a long time and talked to a lotta different peo ple about it. But when Mojo called
up and said let's do it and lets do it at this particular time, I figured what the hell, why not? I
admit that part of my ulterior in doing this record is getting the opportunity to work with Pee
Gordon, the keyboard pla yer for the Toadliquors. I've been in awe of him for awhile after
seeing him play. How anyone my age or younger could have the fire of Jerry Lee in the
fingers was unbelievable. I actually met Mojo and Skid [Roper] when he opened for the very
last Dead Ke nnedys show. It was one of those rare cases in the mid-to-late 80's where there
was real genuine variety on the bill - DK's, Mojo Nixon, Skid Roper, 7 Seconds, and Phranc
[an old folk singer]. What got me more into Mojo was when I saw him stray from mater ial
from Martha's Muffin and the safety of college humor when doing a show for what seemed
to be a bunch of frat boys. During a sing-a-long, Mojo yelled "Ollie North" and the audience
replied "Ollie North" and Mojo said ".....is an ass hole!!" Everyone ju st kind of stood there
looking dumb and surprised. I thought "YESS!" And then he did a really cool version of
"This Land is Your Land" talking about how it's not for people who fenced it, inherited it,
owned it, etc., this is OUR land. So we were more on the same side of the fence than I mighta
thought.
ON THE MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL "POLICY CHANGE"
That's what happens when a die-hard music fan can involve into a music bigot. He's got a
good point when he says it's "his magazine," that's something he never admitted before, and
that he wasn't having any fun when all the 70's cock-rocky grunge and othe r things he didn't
like was getting covered in the magazine. He wants to take it back to what he sees as the
'roots' but the key phrase that alarms me is 'take it back.' I don't like anything going
backwards, you just build on the roots. He also singled out Alternative Tentacles because I
openly disagreed with him at a Mordam Recor d Convention, which really turned into a
nit-picky argument over distribution. He's very fundamentalist and his faction is something I
call 'punk fundamentalist.' He came out and said that distributing a record partly through
Caroline is just the same as signing with EMI (as smelly a multi-national corporation as
General Electric or Coors), and I argued that there are varying degrees. The wobbly axiom
of using an opponent's machinery against him applied here and I used it on him and he
stormed out of the room to smoke a cigarette. I used that argument the next time I saw him
and he just disagreed and called me a "corporate sellout" because I disagreed with him. And
so A.T. was chosen to be made an example of and Tim Yohannon strongly denies this but
let's look at the evidence. Subpop and Amphetamine Reptile both still run ads in his
magazine and they are distributed exclusively through Caroline. And on last month's
superhero parody cover, A.T. was depicted as "Arty Farty Man." And he still does not ask
Dischord to edit their ads, and it's well known what he thinks of their music and he also
would not let Chris Dodge review a Relapse record but was happy to take an ad from them
and yes they distribute through Caroline. So the standards are not being evenly applied.
Right now I should depersonalize this cause this goes way beyond A.T. or myself versus ol'
uncle Timmy. It's important to point out that not all people who are into the spirit of punk
music and everything that came before and after it are fundamentalists and there is an
alternative to this and it sure as hell is not Alternative Inc. Part of what they're doing is
overreacting to the Major labels' attempts to gut the independent scene and how quickly
peoples' minds get changed with money. That would have happened all along except the
Major labels have had an unwritten policy of no t signing any punk or any independent band,
until they took a chance with Husker Du and later Sonic Youth. Before that the Dickies were
the last band signed to a major label and one of them had an uncle at A&M. There was a
claim going around [attributed t o Robert Fripp] that there was a meeting where President
Jimmy Carter told record executives not to sign punk bands because we don't want another
60's.
So I don't wanna end up like Tim at the same age. Part of me is very hard line political, but
the other part is a decadent hedonistic free spirit. So I try to reconcile these two in such a
way that I can live with it and not have to change my code of ethi cs every six months cause I
can't live up to it. I really dislike people who read the punk gospel according Pope Tim, or
Krass, or whoever and they get really militant about it. Then after six months they drop it
and rather than taking anything good away from the experience they get into computers and
then it's "Hey look at this nice new Lexus I bought." That doesn't have to happen. And I
believe in communication and giving people the opportunity to make their own decisions. And
I do my music at the same time and I don't feel like I've 'sold out' or have been an ass hole.
Nobody tells me what to put on my records, nobody tells me how I can sound, what I can
write, when and when not to tour, and I can get away without making videos for MTV. In
other words, I'm a free man.
ON TECHNOLOGY
He claims to read such demo-liberal mags as Mother Jones, Spin, and The Progressive, but
his tentacles dig much deeper than that. Getting most of his spoken word material from
Internet junkies and anomymous mail hounds who send him stuff, he claims to be 100%
technophobic..... I'm completely computer illiterate. I believe in a quote the Ayatollah
Khomeini once said, and that is "All Western countries are bad. Nothing but evil comes from
them." And that's what I think about CD's, digital recording, computers, and video games.
But I do have a lot of friends on the Net that print up stuff for me and people are constantly
flooding my mailbox with mutant informatio n. So I try to absorb as much as I possibly can
and figure out what I believe and spit it back out for more people. I guess I should quote
more sources more during my spoken word shows. But I believe that actually talking to a
real person who's been in a real situation, that's a helluva lot better than reading some guy's
analysis coming out of Manhattan of what he thinks is going on in the Midwest.
ON HIS SOURCES
Some of the information could really get some people in trouble if I mentioned their name.
Like somebody wrote me from prison about what a drug war boot camp was like in Wisconsin
- how they made inmates run ten miles carrying heavy logs and if they puked they're forced
to eat their vomit and if they quit from exhaustion they're thrown out of boot camp and
forced to serve 3-5 years in prison. In this case the guy was caught was because he had pot
in his dorm room. A law that Clinton has shown no interest in changing by the way. So the
information finds me whether I like it or not. I've been a news hound since I was a little kid.
For other kids it was sports trivia, for me it was stuff like this.
ON RUNNING FOR MAYOR
In 1987 (actually, it was 1978. Ed) Biafra entered the mayoral race of San Francisco on a
dare. He cut his hair, got petitions signed, paid his fees, went on tv talk shows and basically
showed what a complete farce the election process is in America. Miraculously he placed
fourth out of ten candidates. But would he run again..... I think I'm a little late to gear up for
Governor of California but I gave it some thought. I'm in a different position now so if I did it
as a gag it would like repeating myself. And now I know enough about the inner-workings of
how the city of San Franc isco is run or the state of California, to know that I don't know
enough. So if I was going to try to do it again, it was take some serious research even as a
gadfly campaign.
ON MOM & DAD
They're very proud. I don't hit 'em up for money, I don't live at home, I didn't become a Born
Again Christian or join the Armed Forces, or go yuppie or republican. They would describe
themselves as liberal but I think they're more radical than most peopl e in their 60's. They
went through the heavy parts of the 60's and the 70's. My dad was a psychiatric social
worker who traveled around the country setting up adult education programs in the ghettos
and on Indian reservations. He came home one night from a trip from Santa Barbara, CA.
saying the LAPD had shoved a shotgun in his belly. The Bank Of America had been torched
the night before in a fairly well-known incident and the hotel he was staying in was raided
and interrogated by police officers.
ON ANYTHING
Here's one for you. There was a recent study jointly done two people at Auburn University
and Wayne State University. They said that while it is debatable that rock lyrics cause
suicide, they concluded that country music does. Therefore I figured that whi le Tipper Gore
is in the White House and she hasn't given me enough shit lately, it's time to make a country
album!
ON THE PMRC
They claim they're disbanded but they don't really have to be around now. Especially due to
Hillary and Tipper's profile in power. Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tipper Gore
[Family Circle, 9/94], endorsed the PMRC and said "we need stronger parental
responsibility," which I agree with because letting the PMRC or fundamentalists and the
cops telling your kids what to listen to is not 'parental responsibility,' it's chicken shit. So she
went on to say that "that has to [helped] by actions like the one Tipper led, so parents have
good information," ha ha ha "to base their decisions on." And then there was a TV Guide
piece where Bill Clinton said his favorite tv show is Donna Reed and there should be more
shows like that. But that he and Chelsea watch Am erican Gladiators for yuks, and Hillary
doesn't join them.
ON GANGSTER RAP
The past months have seen two major hearings on Gangster Rap and its detrimental effects
on society and its rampant misogyny. Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH sponsored one in
Chicago where Carol Moseley Braun officially condemned Gangster Rap as borderli ne
criminal activity. Biafra's name came up more than once in these hearings as a culprit in the
spreading of this so-called urban decay..... Reportedly Clinton has called for a legally
mandated rating system for records. But of course a lot of rap lyrics and political lyrics and
weirdest of all, even my lyrics, were ghettoized in the hearing. I am a gangster according to
Rep. Cardis Collins and Sen. Carol Moseley Braun. I am not a gangster. It's a very clever
ploy this time in using black women as the front. There is a lot to object to in hip-hop lyrics
dissing women and portraying gang violence, but a lot of that is just painting a picture of
what's going on this country. Blaming the messenger is not going to keep more people from
getting killed. In my opinion, it's about to heat up again and get pretty bad.
ON MTV
Notice who just got their fingers into MTV and Viacom? Wayne Huizenga, head honcho of
Blockbuster video who is hard-core religious right, he is a major contributor to the
Republican party, he got his money to start the video chain from his former business , Waste
Management, Inc. One of the most notorious toxic waste dumpers in the world, the ones that
have whole entire ships that burn waste at sea and than we get breathe it in weeks later, and
paying off Third World dictators so we can dump sludge in their backyard. So as part of the
deal of Viacom taking over Paramount, he was the other partner with Viacom, and in return
he gets a vice-presidency inside Viacom. Now, considering that Blockbuster does not carry
any NC-17 movies, and when he took over three m usic store chains, all the adult and
X-rated movies were pulled from the shelves and in some stores all the metal rap were
pulled too. And now, if MTV is not bad enough, this man has some power in their
programming. I'm sure if he had his way, Beavis & Bu tthead would be reading the Bible
next season.
ON LIMBAUGH
Limbaugh. There is another example taking shape in what we're not being told. It's amazing
that a bigot like blunder-blubber can get on the air and get hyped to the gills by experienced
tv producer Roger Ailes [who gave us the Willie Horton ads], but you will never see
someone like Noam Chomsky or somebody like that even getting on tv or in straight print at
all. The idea in newspapers, most of which have been bought out by corporate multi-nationals
thanks to de-regulation and the Reagan era, the choices given in editorials are multiple
choice on a complicated issue - conservative a nd ultra-conservative, no other points of view
are provided.
ON TABLOID GOVERNMENT
Jesse Jackson has said that we've degenerated from tabloid news to tabloid politics and now
I think we even have tabloid government. Notice how little attention people pay when the
president gives a State of the Union address, but when Clinton goes on Larry King Live, it's
news. In order to make the case for NAFTA, as boneheaded as it was, the only way to get
people to pay attention was to put Perot and Gore on a talk show. That's tabloid government.
Society is manipulated by tabloid news and tabloid government.
ON FORMING ANOTHER BAND
Oh, I've thought about it since before the Dead Kennedys broke up. When the band broke
up I wanted to broaden my artistic and personal base so I don't end up on some rock-n-roll
nostalgia treadmill singing "Holiday in Cambodia" for my meals for the rest of my life.
Harvey Kubernick had been prodding me to go into spoken word and that took off thanks to
the L.A. Police Dept. and Tipper Gore [the Frankenchrist trial]. So I ran with that. Then I
would start projects like Lard [with Al Jourgensen] and Tumor Cir cus and then had to carve
out more time to finish them. So pulling the plug on everything and hiding and writing a whole
shit load of new songs has been a real struggle because I keep getting yanked in all these
different directions. I'm not talented enou gh to magically come up with a great song. I don't
play any instruments so I keep my musical ideas on cassette tape and jot lyrics down in a
huge folder. Then I compile them. It's not very efficient but the results speak for themselves.
ON PRANKS
I think this record is one considering how the fundamentalists have reacted to it. On my part,
it's doing exactly what I wanted it to do. There is a prank that people are doing on the
Internet where they are downloading letterhead from multi-national corp orations and
sending out fake press releases admitting how corrupt they are and then sending it to the
media and see if they will print it.
ON THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW
Well there's two different appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show. The first one was with
Bob Guccione Jr., Tipper Gore, a token teenage music fan who turned out to be more
articulate than anyone expected, and a psychologist trying to sell his book. On tha t one we
were all put up in the same motel and there was one limo to take us to the show so we all got
to ride together. [In a falsetto voice] 'Jello, this is Tipper Gore, how are you?' She was
disarmingly friendly. So I was sitting across from her in the car and she tells me that her
daughter is starting to get into 'the punk rock' thing like The Clash and Bunny and the
Echomen. So on the show, everytime I tried to say something, Oprah would motion to the
cameraman to cut the tape and Tipper would get the floor. Oprah is after all a Christian and
said in her autobiography that all the answers to life's problems can be found in the Bible.
The second time around I came prepared. They put me and Ice-T [who has sampled stuff
from the No More Cocoons album] in one dressing room and we got to meet and that was
cool. Now it's been documented that Tipper Gore has denied having anything to do with the
Frankenchrist trial and told the Philade lphia Inquirer that she had nothing to do with it. Then
I got a copy of the Metro Times out of Nashville where she says she'd like to take credit for
it. So I brought it with me to the second show, which I was shocked to invited back to and I'm
convinced that neither Oprah nor her producer realized I was the same guy until I was
actually in the room on the air. So brought it up on the air and or course she denied it, so I
pulled it out of my pocket and read it. The audience starts hissing, except for the ones Tipper
planted, and Oprah immediately cut to a commercial and said "Oh we've all been misquoted,
haven't we Jello?" So did I get to say anything more for the rest of the show? Uh uh.
ON THE LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS AND THE IMMEDIATE EFFECTS
I think the people who hinder the legalization process are people like William Bennett and
Bill Clinton far more than Cypress Hill. Clinton, after Joycelyn Elders floated the trial
balloon about decriminalizing some hard drugs, which even George Schulz an d William F.
Buckley supported from an economic standpoint. Like in Holland where they call it Harm
Reduction. Under this policy, anyone hooked on heroin can get it on prescription from the
government for a much cheaper price than the dealers charge. That way, it keeps the drug
trade out of the dealers and gangsters hands. So they know who the junkies are and they can
get treatment on demand if they want it. None of this three strikes you're out vigilante
bullshit that goes on in this country. And the res ults are the crime rate is lower, HIV rate is
lower and even the drug use rate is lower than ours.
I'm no scientist but my uneducated guess would be that in the short run drug use would go up
and in the long run it would go down. Because of the skewed priorities in this country. In San
Francisco, if you want to quit doing crack right now, the line for rehab is over six months
long. That's six months more of the ravages of the chemical, of trying to scrape up the
money, etc. In prison, there is almost n o rehab services, they just throw people in prison or
boot camp where you can still get the drugs and when they get out they're still hooked on the
stuff and they've been lifting weights and are bigger and madder at the world. Only a
Government Expert cou ld fail to see the obvious in these problems.
ON THE BUDGET
In the state of Tennessee, they were openly considering closing the schools because they
needed the money for prisons. What does it say about our country when one of the few
growth industries in some places in California is prisons? Someday this has to im plode.
Someday this is gonna suck the budget away more than Rush Limbaugh's welfare cheats or
the Pentagon welfare cheats combined. And then and only then will Conservatives see that
it's time for prohibition to end cause it simply hasn't worked.
ON INHALING
I've tried most drugs and smoked a lotta pot at the end of high school and probably would
have jumped into the punk world a year earlier if I wasn't so busy smoking pot and freezing
in a corner and being afraid of everything and feeling sorry for myself. The pot stopped
getting me high and I kept smoking it anyway, which was a lesson to me when I moved to
San Francisco and everybody I knew was taking speed. And if I had that much trouble with
pot, I shouldn't be using speed. I decided to use my money to buy records and not drugs, I'm
a vinyl junkie. So my attitude towards hard drugs is try them if you want, learn from them,
but once it starts to wear off get the fuck away from it. The first time I did acid I felt and saw
a lot of stuff that I hadn't seen i n the same way since like first grade. So I figured if I did it
once without acid, I could probably do it again. As far as helping kids with addictions and
education in schools, simply telling them that "drugs are bad" and "sex is bad," cause who's
gonna listen to that shit anyway, why not offer them elective classes, as early as junior high,
where the students try the drugs on a supervised basis. Then they can work out and talk out
how the drugs affected them and if there might be an addictive personality problem in the
future.
ON EDUCATION
Another overhaul in the educational system, mainly because there is none at all, is I'd like to
see is a class on how to be a parent. Why not have a mandatory class on how to take care of
children before students get out of high school? Even if you're lik e me and have no plans to
have kids, it would be a really good thing to know. Most people go in to parenting blind and
this should not be, that's why people turn out as fucked up as they are.
ON LOUIS FARRAKHAN
Well I'd like to see him speak sometime, I hear he is a very charismatic guy. His 12" disco
single I mail-ordered form the Nation of Islam is pretty entertaining. The cover has got him
with a fake sunset behind his grinning face and the song is like some early Agnostic Front
lyrics. "Let us unite, black and white, unite and fight, let us unite."
I think it's the fault of white racists that somebody like that on a fundamentalist religious trip
could get that powerful. When the middle ground gets wiped out - like killing Martin Luther
King Jr. and running the Black Panthers into the ground, jail, o r out of the country - this is
what takes its place. It's like in Iran where all the level-headed opposition was wiped out with
the help of the CIA. So when the people had had enough of the Shah, the only alternative
that people thought they could turn to was Islamic fundamentalism.
As soon as the middle merchant class sided with Khomeini, it was over with the Shah. That's
what happens. Compare the kinds of things Farrakhan says with the things Rush Limbaugh
says and notice how differently they're treated. Time magazine's cover story ran as what a
horrible, wicked, ogre, the new national arch-villain for this week is Louis Farrakhan. While
also letting Rush Limbaugh write a guest column [2-3 pages] o n the missing Marine weenie.
On the front cover it's touted as something we're supposed to buy the magazine for, "Rush
Limbaugh on the Bobbitt Case." How different are Limbaugh and Farrakhan? Look at the
way they're both treated and perceived in the media. What 's the point in 'don't believe the
hype.' The guy handling Limbaugh is the same guy that masterminded the 'Willie Horton' ad,
Roger Ailes. He produces the Limbaugh show. Senator Ollie North, just you wait! Maybe I
should stop writing songs and maybe they would stop coming true!!!
LOVE ME I'M A LIBERAL
It's from a folk singer named Phil Ochs who was at one time touted as the leading rival to
Bob Dylan in the early 60's but they went their different ways and Ochs turned up at protests
and Dylan was at the Isle of Wight. He became really cynical about the music industry and
frustrated there was no labels besides the majors. It was originally written about LBJ and
Hubert Humphrey liberals and it was amazing to me how few words I had to change to update
it to Clinton yuppies.
ON THE DEAD KENNEDYS
Well I'm proud of what we did. We broke up before we sucked so don't ask about any
reunions. I love punk music but punk nostalgia is poison just like any nostalgia is poison.
This is what happens when people listen to nothing but other punk music or metal , etc.
ON CHICAGO POLITICS AND RUNNING FOR OFFICE
This is Chicago? Whoa! Where voting is a sport! I hope you have fire-proof apartments
there! I did it on a dare. I was so young and naive that when my drummer said that I have
such a big mouth that I should run for mayor! I said what the fuck, why not. I helped force a
run-off. But usually you should just get petitions out and put someone on the ballot. In San
Francisco, you can just the pay the difference if you don't have enough signatures. That's
how the LaRouche people always get on the ballots. Also in San Francisco, you can run for
mayor at age 18 but you can't drive a cab until you're 26. Check the mayor's story on the "I
Blow Minds For a Living" record and that might help you out.
ON POLITICS VS. ART
Part of the lesson for me in running for office is that my art is more powerful than any
position could be. Like Stevie Van Zant has said, an artist can say the same thing to
everybody and it can come from the heart and a real belief, but a politician say s different
things to different people and ends it all with "vote for me." When I was running as the
prank candidate, people were trying to nibble into me. I was getting a whiff of how the game
works. After that, it's easy to see why Mondale, or Dukakis, or a Clinton winds up not
knowing what they believe when they get in office. Most impo rtant, I would have to drop my
art altogether to have a full-time position. It's more of an accomplishment to me when I hear
that the people in Czechoslovakia who were part of the dissent movement before the
Communists fell were really into the Dead Kennedys.
Taken from Lumpen Times. Look for the Lumpen Times at finer newsstands and bookstores
everywhere... Or order a sample subscription ($10 for 4 issues/ 4 months) from: The Lumpen
Times, 2558 W. Armitage, Chicago IL 60647
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