Jello Biafra
Rebel With Many A Cause
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Jello Biafra has been working the spoken word circuit for over a decade, but he is still probably best-known for fronting the controversial punk band Dead Kennedys. Other notable events in Biafra's public life were his bid for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, his prosecution in the first album-related obscenity trial for distributing the Kennedys' album Frankenchrist (the first of many of Biafra's legal troubles), and his early '90s run-in with a few "punk fundamentalists" who beat the punk legend down and permanently injured his knee. Through it all, Biafra has never slowed or toned down his fight for what he believes is right. Here the free-speech spokesman shares his views on censorship, punk rock, corporate America, and more.
NATN: You released a new spoken word CD (If Evolution Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Evolve) fairly recently. Do your performances basically just consist of what appears on the CD?
JB: A lot of it is [what's on the CD], some of it is older. The "Talk On Censorship" part is generally updated as time evolves.
NATN: Do you keep finding material to add to that?
JB: The problem is finding things to subtract, my shows are too damn long already, but more and more things keep happening.
NATN: Do you write your material down?
JB: The censorship stuff is mostly off the top of my head. I've wound up using note cards or at least a few notes on a sheet of paper lately because there's just so much going on.
It was easier when all I had to do was chew on Jerry Falwell and Tipper Gore. But now, when I say, 'It's a talk on censorship,' I can talk about just about anything I want and guarantee that it's been omitted from the national news by the corporate media.
It's not really somebody drawing a line through the story as much as people forgetting to report important issues and going on and on about Monica or O.J. Simpson instead.
NATN: You're probably a busy guy -- how do you stay so well informed?
JB: I'm not as well informed as I make it look like I am. It finds me.
I mean, I've always been a news hound since I was a small child. I was very interested in current events. I saw the Vietnam War go down and all the assassinations in the '60s as well as some of the good stuff, even as a child. Luckily, my parents did not try and shield me from everything that was going on and change the channel on the TV every time Vietnam or riots came on the screen -- they explained it all to me.
That's a very important lesson for future parents: not to keep your children in the dark about events going on around them. It makes them smarter later on. It's important people have a memory of something besides "Brady Bunch" or "Seinfeld" episodes by the time they're functioning adults.
So, the information finds me. I get a lot of it out of The Nation and Progressive, the local weeklies -- especially the San Francisco Bay Guardian, we have a real good one here -- and just people sending in their stories sometimes too.
NATN: Do you ever get so much information in your head that it gets jumbled?
JB: Yeah, I try to avoid that though. If I'm gonna regurgitate it back to people, I'd like to keep it factual and not just play games with it like Rush Limbaugh does.
NATN: How do you maintain clarity?
JB: I don't know. It's just the way I am. I mean, some people have room in their brain for sports trivia, ups and downs of the stock market. I fill my head with white-collar crime trivia instead. You don't have to look very far to find it.
NATN: Do you ever get frustrated, talking about the same things year after year?
JB: If a point is important enough to a person, it's important to hammer it through again and again and again.
NATN: What effect do you think you have on your audience?
JB: It's hard to say. Well, no it's not hard to say: A subtle, but incremental, sabotage of the corporate system that's taken the place of democracy in our country.
It doesn't happen en masse, but on a one-to-one basis people come up to me and say, "Yeah, I heard your music or your words when I was thinking of what I wanted to do with my life and decided instead of getting an MBA, I'm working in the community."
Or, people say "Well, you inspired me to get off my butt and do this. Here's my CD, or here's something I wrote." It's a positive way of spreading disease.
NATN: Is that what keeps you going night after night?
JB: That's one of them.
NATN: What else?
JB: Well, I'm grateful that I've somehow stumbled into a way to make a living off my big mouth. Instead of washing dishes or swallowing hard and pushing papers for some ungrateful boss in an office.
NATN: You've been able to stick to your beliefs and you've gotten to do what you want to do. Do you think everyone can live his or her life that way?
JB: It's different for every single person. Some people fall for the great American myth that the only thing that will bring you happiness is making a lot of money, while others try to reject that. Each individual has to figure out their own moral code to live by.
I mean, the first step to freeing ourselves of corporate dictatorship is not to cooperate with their agenda as an individual: Try not to buy their products, try not to work for them. If you must work for them, at least the computer age has ushered in a whole new frontier of sabotage on the job.
But each person has to decide for themselves what their own moral code is. I've known so many people who were militant, hardcore radicals one year and decided that it made them miserable and went completely the opposite direction next year. From vegan and a squat to yuppie with a computer job -- I'm not exaggerating.
There's got to be a way to separate oneself from corporate domination without becoming as miserable as Ted Kaczynski. That usually means not going quite so far into fundamentalist extremes, but picking a moral code you can actually live with and live by instead.
NATN: On "Space Shuttle Sequel" (off If Evolution) you describe a scenario in which everyone finds out they are going to die and there is mass chaos. It reminded me off people's predictions for the turn of the century
JB: I'm sort of passing on Y2K and the millenium and all. It doesn't really interest me. There's so many other things going on in the here and now and that one is just a lot of hype and paranoia designed to sell more commemorative Pepsi cans when the big night goes down.
NATN: So, in addition to your spoken word, are you working on any musical projects right now?
JB: Right now, not much. A lot of my time is being wasted by maybe the ugliest and most bitter of all legal harassments that's come my way.
The former members of my band are suing me with the express intent of destroying Alternative Tentacles Records, stealing the Dead Kennedys albums, selling them to corporations, and putting the music in TV commercials. They claim it's because I ripped them off on royalties, but I did not and would not do that.
It just seems like a little too much of a coincidence that this whole thing got started when I wouldn't let them use "Holiday In Cambodia" in a Levi's commercial. Political reasons aside, can you think of anything more nauseating than "Holiday In Cambodia" in a Levi's commercial?
It may go on for years. And if it does, than everyone involved is going to be broke and the lawyers involved will laugh all the way to the bank.
NATN: But you still have time to tour?
JB: It's the only way I have of raising money to survive these days. I've never taken a salary from Alternative Tentacles: The label is for the bands.
NATN: Is the touring keeping you sane amid all this?
JB: Yeah, I think it helps to connect with other people and reaffirm that I'm doing something that matters.
NATN: Were you and the rest of the band on good terms before this happened?
JB: As far as I knew. Yeah, 20 years of friendship down the drain because of greed. The whole thing makes me sick.
NATN: And who would've expected it from that band?
JB: Well, East Bay Ray has turned out to be the greediest person I've ever known in my life. He gets worse every year. Anyway, enough on that.
NATN: Okay. What's going on with Lard (Biafra's collaboration with members of Ministry)?
JB: Well there's a new Ministry album coming out in June and that's those guys' main focus. So, there are three other Lard songs sitting in the can. Two of them are mixed, but the only good one hasn't been mixed yet. So it kind of depends on when Al [Jourgenson] finds the time and interest to finish it. It's such a great song -- it's called "'70s Rock Must Die."
NATN: Would those three songs be released on an EP?
JB: If it could ever get done. The other two songs make a good B-side, but I don't really want to release it as a single because "'70s Rock Must Die" is such a cool song.
NATN: How did you hook up with Ministry in the first place?
JB: I went to Chicago to hook up with Al to remix some tracks by Christian Lunch that we eventually put out. And when that kinda stalled out, and wasn't going so well, we just decided, "Well, maybe we should make our own thing instead." And Al said "What do you wanna call it?" and the name that came into my head was "Lard." Al fell on the floor laughing and Lard was born.
NATN: Since you don't have your own band right now, are you happy just doing collaborations?
JB: It would be nice to have a band again, but maybe I hid too long trying to get all the songs written. When I came out of my cave, most of the interesting people were either strung out on drugs, strung out on major label aspirations, or in bands they'd be fools to leave. So I'd rather wait and find people to do something really different and interesting but keep the punk energy than just do some formula re-hash of Dead Kennedys.
NATN: With all the commercially driven music out these days, do you ever miss the days of the Dead Kennedys?
JB: No. That was then, this is now. I'm proud of what we did and there's a lot of good memories, but I don't like living in the past. Punk was never supposed to be some nostalgic, rose-colored glasses trip about some wonderful old days and old school. We were blowing up the school.
NATN: Do you think that's what punk has turned into?
JB: For a lot of people, yeah. It's turned into a real cartoon for a lot of people too and I'm not interested in being part of cartoon. I like punk better when it actually threatens people.
NATN: Do you think that "punk fundamentalism" ties in with the punk nostalgia?
JB: That and what I was talking about earlier with people trying to find out what they want to do with their own life and becoming so militant an monastic it makes them miserable, and then they go too far in the opposite direction.
NATN: What do you think about supposedly Anarchist bands such as Atari Teenage Riot and Chumbawamba?
JB: It depends on what they do with their money. Even the Grateful Dead of all people had a foundation called the Rex Foundation that they played benefit concerts for each year. And by the end of their existence they were so damn popular, they were able to pump one or two million dollars a year into this foundation that would then give out grants to people who couldn't get grants elsewhere. Things like soup kitchens, battered women shelters, rural school districts who had to cut-out their music program because Republicans cut their budget to the bone. I thought that was a good use of financial power. Chumbawamba has been doing some of that as well. I don't think Atari Teenage Riot is that huge yet.
NATN: Tell me about your charity organization, FSU.
JB: It's an attempt to duplicate the work of the Rex Foundation through the bands that came out of the punk community and reached mass success. Dexter from the Offspring was the one who kept calling me back, wanting to get the idea off the ground, so it's off the ground a little ways, but it's nowhere near the size of Rex yet. I'm not sure it ever will be.
NATN: I wanted to ask you what you thought about the shootings in Colorado and the blame placed on Marilyn Manson.
JB: There's never been any scientific proof that music causes crime in any way. It's all attempts to avoid the truth that: 1) That was a horribly cliquish and repressive school, 2) Who knows what the hell these parents were up to when these guys were making bombs with loud power tools in the family garage. If they were really that big into Marilyn Manson, why didn't they wait a few days for when he played live in Denver, then go kill the jocks?
NATN: Well, I thought it was interesting that even though Marilyn Manson refused to take the blame for it, he cancelled his last five shows out of respect.
JB: Some of that may have been in fear of his life, too. There was also huge pressure from local do-gooders to cancel the shows. It was a Christian group that got the Reno show cancelled, from what I understand. In Denver, there was all kinds of pressure.
NATN: I read a quote from another interview you gave that said, "I like art that inspires people to think and in order to do that, you have to have something interesting to say." Do you think you'll ever run out of interesting things to say?
JB: As long as people in this country keep making fools of themselves, I doubt I'll ever run out of material.
KATHARINE KELLY |