Interview: Jello Biafra (Part 2)

Posted October 16 by Jeanne F.

And so we begin part 2 of our interview with Jello Biafra. (For part 1, click here.) His new album The Audacity of Hype by Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine is the kind of bristling, cantankerous hardcore punk rock you'd expect from the Dead Kennedys founder after enduring 8 years of Dick and Bush. In this half of the interview, Jello talks about the Dead Kennedys legacy, playing a show during the Seattle protest of 1999 with Krist Novoselic and Kim Thayil, Shepard Fairey's cover art for The Audacity of Hype, what it's like to be a creative criminal, and why he'd rather you created something of your own rather than beg him to tattoo your nutsack.

We were talking about how people in the spotlight are utter knuckleheads, celebrities and politicians alike…

That’s all part of what I’ve been talking about: bombardment with useless information. They’re even trying to recycle Ana Nicole Smith again now. Even though she’s been dead for at least two years and her breasts have long since decomposed.

There are songs like “New Feudalism” and “Panicland” and “Electronic Plantation,” where you kind of try to kick some sense into the airwaves. And you can really hear the struggle in your voice to get through to people by using logic. Logic! Why do you think intelligence is so feared in this country?

Because it might threaten the people in power. Same as always. Our education system has long since been dumbed down into a factory for turning out obedient workers and drones because people who think too much and ask too many questions start questioning their teachers as well.

Were you precocious like that growing up?

Oh yeah.

You’re an elder statesman of hardcore and hardcore and punk rock itself is sort of rooted in youthfulness…

Not necessarily. It’s a state of mind. It’s a spirit. A lot of people who play what they call punk rock today have no punk spirit in them whatsoever. While others, especially several floors further underground definitely do. And I’m still a fan of punk if it does a particular style really really well or is really really extreme or is just plain different. Like the keyboard-driven punk band we had on the label called the Phantom Limbs. Good example of that. It was like Gilbert and Sullivan punk, “tied to the railroad tracks” was what I called it. And a really good frontman too. That’s a lost art. If people are going to stand there and sing, they gotta bring some theater to it. And in my case I’m not as athletic as Iggy or Henry Rollins or HR from the Bad Brains or James Brown so I figure if I’m gonna put on a show and do stage moves, especially at this age, it better be funny. After all, I’m a mere mortal doing this.

I don’t know whether it’s that you found the right band to back you or what, but on these songs you sound renewed but there’s something very classic punk rock about the whole thing.

I’m not sure that the Dead Kennedys were even classic punk rock. There was a lot more different sounds going into our music on different songs than some of our peers. One of Dead Kennedys’ best achievements since I wrote most of the music for that band too is nobody ever cloned us. There were people influenced by us, some of whom you would never expect unless they told you like Sepultura, Soulfly, or even Rammstein had singled us out. It also means that different people have different favorite Dead Kennedys releases that they’re very passionate about. We were a hardcore band for the most part on In God We Trust Incorporated, other people like Fresh Fruit, I’m more on the Plastic Surgery Disasters and Frankenchrist side of the fence. It’s interesting to me how many of my favorite most demented musicians have singled out Plastic Surgery Disasters as their favorite Dead Kennedys album as well. In the early days when we were working with the Butthole Surfers, Paul Leary even singled out Plastic Surgery Disasters as his favorite album period. That’s why I put a lot of extra time doing zillions of mixes of songs to make sure they sound as good as they can and make sure the artwork is something you can’t get away from. I grew up in a town [Boulder, CO] that wasn’t exactly a cultural mecca, so I had to find my own cool music at random. Again, magic accident! And so I think it’s important to be in people’s faces with good artwork and not waste precious album cover space with your own ugly mug on the cover unless there’s some other statement to be made with it. I’ve never put my face on the cover of an album until this one but is it my face or is it something else?

The artwork is by Shepard Fairey, famous for his Obama image. How’d you hook up with him?

Shepard Fairey had actually done another of my albums. The No WTO Combo album. Me and Krist Novoselic from Nirvana and Kim Thayil from Soundgarden and a drummer they knew named Gina Mainwal formed our own band for the Seattle protest in 1999 when all of a sudden folks like Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam were quote “unavailable.” Krist called me up and said let’s do our own band. Somehow with two rehearsals and all that mayhem going on we managed to get a gig’s worth of material together including the debut of “New Feudalism” and “Electronic Plantation” because it fit the anti-corporate spirit of the Seattle protest. There was an image on the cover of one of the weekly mags in Seattle, this hand reaching over to strangle the world. I thought “That’s perfect for the album,” but I didn’t even think there’d be an album. Krist called me up later and was like, “Did you know somebody recorded it? I didn’t even tell you.” So he and Jack Endino mixed the albums and did some careful editing. The weirdest part of that whole experience in a way was I knew what was going on in the streets, I was really pumped up and stoked and Krist called me up from the Show Box, the venue where our gig was gonna happen, and was like, “Don’t come to soundcheck we can’t do the gig, there’s all these cops raging outside the front door in a battle with protesters and they’re beating people up and tear gas is flying and I’m watching it on the tv news even though it’s happening right outside the door 10 feet away!” So instead we played the show one night later and most of the ticket holders showed up. There was debate over whether we should play the show at all. And Michael Franti who was headlining the show with Spearhead said, “Look at times like this, people need music,” and boy was he right.

Okay, so Shepard Fairey did that album’s cover image?

Yeah he did that image. And then the art guy at Alternative Tentacles tracked him down and then Shepard and I talked on the phone and he jazzed up the image and redid it for the album cover. He was happy to do it because he spent a lot of time skateboarding to Dead Kennedys as he slowly evolved into this art terrorist.

Let me make one more point about that. That to me is just a great way to spread positive disease and great payback. I mean it’s one thing to have people come up to you and say, “Oh Jello, you’re God! Please sign this or tattoo your name on my nutsack” or whatever. I like it better when people come back and say, “You inspired me to go make something of my own. Here’s a CD or a 7-inch of my band” or “This is the film I made” or “This is something I wrote” or “This is how I teach high school history instead of the way I was supposed to” or “I went into public interest law instead of becoming some corporate predator who runs around suing people.” That related directly to Shepard Fairey. In some weird way I inspired him and then he comes back and does the same with me. I wasn’t even sure he was gonna do the cover to [The Audacity of Hype]. I figured since we were friends I would at least ask him before doing a butcher job on his best-known piece and he said “No, no. I wanna do the cover, I wanna do this myself.” So eventually he had a rough version of it and I went down to his studio in L.A. and we played with it for an afternoon and into the night and got it all done.

It came out looking excellent. It’s frame-worthy.

Good. Well, it’s Shepard Fairey, what can you do.

You close the album with “I Won’t Give Up.” What gives you hope? And is hope something so audacious in these times?

Um… it might’ve even been Václav Havel of all people who warned us not to confuse hope with optimism. But he was far more hopeful than he was optimistic. And I think that’s a healthy way of looking at things. Knowing what I do about the way the world works, as I said, I could check out and pull a Kurt Cobain or give up and find some job I hate that pays enough money so that I can make my way home and watch tv or play video games or surf the net all night but I want more out of life. I get too much joy out of causing trouble. But at the same time, I realized early on that if I still wanna goof off in class, so to speak, there better be a purpose behind it. There better be some reward at the end of the day other than good old fashioned creative crime. I mean crime is the last unspoiled art form left on earth. You don’t go to art school to learn how to do creative crime. You just have to go out and do it. I still have such a soft spot in my heart for a good old fashioned prank, I still like using my art and my so-called talent as one big prank against the corporate ant-hill society that I’ve despised since I was old enough to walk and I’m very grateful that anybody is still interested in what I do so that I’ve somehow been able to get away with living off my big mouth and bad attitude. But that also means there’s the ongoing pressure to make sure I come out with good stuff. There’s still a lot of really young people at my shows and I think “What are they getting out of this?” They’re supposed to like people, artists and musicians who are rebelling against people my age. In one way, that’s the great disappointment of punk, in the sense that it’s become some formulated and conservative in some ways but in other ways it’s like hey great, people still dig what I do so I’m really grateful to be here but it also means I better give you some good stuff. So we do what we can.

Check out The Audacity of Hype by Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine and buy the album because you’ll be contributing to creative crime and that’s what a real American does, damnit. Alternative Tentacles will be celebrating its 30th anniversary with three shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on November 5–7. Tickets are available here.

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