who: Jello Biafra

what: punk legend (lecture/spoken-word performance)

where: Lesar Law School Auditorium

when: Thursday, May 1 at 7 p.m.

by Roger Trexler

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it." While many people might sit on the sidelines and let the government do as they please, Jello Biafra isn't content to do that. He is a spoken-word recording artist who fights for what is right in this world. On the other hand, he is also a musician who explores music styles as easily as most of us change clothes.

Biafra first came into prominence as the leader of the Dead Kennedys, a punk rock band from the late 1970s/early 1980s who were not afraid to say what they were thinking-- and a lot of that thinking was on politics. His stage name was taken from the fall of the Republic of Biafra, where our own government helped starve out the revolutionaries that were eventually squelched by the Nigerian army. It is, perhaps, a tribute that helps him remember that no government should be allowed to do that to its people, or people of other nations.

Biafra, an eloquent free-speech proponent who once ran for mayor of San Francisco and in 2000 challenged Ralph Nader for the Green Party's presidential nomination, will present a free spoken-word performance tonight, Thursday, May 1 at 7 p.m. in the Lesar Law Building Auditorium. Don't miss it.

Nightlife spoke with Biafra on the telephone during a rare moment of downtime, and he was kind enough to answer some questions.

Alternative Tentacles Records was formed by you in 1979. Was it formed to give you musical freedom or was there another reason?
We wanted to operate completely outside the mainstream entertainment industry, including the corporate punk industry that's sprung up in the past few years. There's no pressure to make MTV videos or make a certain amount of albums in a certain amount of time, or put music in commercials or go on tour with bigger commercial bands.

Do you still have an executive position at Alternative Tentacles?
I can't be an artist and run the label at the same time. So ever since it became my baby in 1984, I've always had somebody else who had a better head for business actually be the person in the hot seat who runs the thing and makes sure the books are clean and everybody gets paid and whatnot.

You ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979. you finished fourth out of ten candidates. Was that the beginning of your political aspirations?
Oh, I don't know. I mean, even when I was in grade school, I figured I would make a better president than Richard Nixon. Then again, so would most houseflies. The same applies to our current president, to put it mildly. I've always been a news hound-- I've always been interested in issues and current events, even when I was very small. That's partly because when really ugly stuff came on the television, the bloody Vietnam War footage, the race riots, the Biafra war in Nigeria where I got my name or whatever, it wasn't hidden from me. My parents didn't jump up and change the channel so as not to upset the children. It was all discussed in an intelligent manner, which made me very passionate about many things at a very early age. Plus, my childhood was during the whole uprising against the Vietnam War, which was such a volatile issue that even in fourth grade every single person in the class had a very passionate opinion on that war, for or against. So, that's always been in my blood. I wanted to rock and I wanted to sabotage the capitalist system in any way I could, in any way one small human being could.

You had an H.R. Giger poster in the Frankenchrist album (Penis Landscape). It was very controversial and caused you a lot of legal problems. Do you have any regrets about that?
Not at all. I thought that poster was the perfect metaphor for a consumer culture on parade. The Frankenchrist [album] came out three-quarters of the way through the Reagan era, when this whole idea that is still being pushed now, that there should be no such thing as community, [that] everything, from schools to prisons to the water supply, should be a for-profit enterprise, not to mention our healthcare system, and people shouldn't give a damn about each other. As that crooked stockbroker Ivan Boesky put it, "Greed is good."

Unfortunately, both major political parties have been operating under that mantra ever since. I thought that particular drawing, that painting by Giger, was a perfect way to illustrate that. The minute I saw it, I had all sorts of ideas swirling through my head, which is what good art does. I even rewrote some of the [Frankenchrist] lyrics to try and tie some of the different songs together.

I don't regret fighting the obscenity charge either, because it was basically the city attorney of L.A. trying to make a political name for himself to run for higher office by seeing if he could throw musicians in jail for using their constitutional rights. And the prosecutor had a file on many other musicians he was thinking of going after if he could nail me.

So, this was a piece in an exhibit that you saw and it moved you?
No, a roommate of mine showed it to me in a magazine. It was a feature on Giger's work, and I immediately thought, "Oh, my god, this is the greatest artist since Heronimus Bosh." He just opened a museum in Switzerland, in Gruyères, however you spell that, and anybody anywhere near Zurich should go see that. The paintings in the books are spectacular enough, but when you see them six or seven feet tall, taking up a whole wall, you could be in one of those many rooms for hours, staring at one or two paintings, at all the other things in it that you don't see in the books. I don't know whether he deliberately wanted all these little subliminal faces in them or whether they're just characters he painted over as he finished the work, but there's layer upon layer to those things.

I first got into Giger's work when he designed the sets for Alien.
Giger was supposed to do the sets for Dune but got run off the project, but a lot of his designs got swiped. There was a different director at that point too.... Alejandro Jodorowsky, who did El Topo. Then Dino DeLaurentis, so the story goes, finally went to Mexico to see some rushes from the movie, to see what Jodorowsky was up to, and he realized when he saw it that what he was shooting had absolutely nothing to do with Dune at all. [laughs] Apparently, what I heard, it was right about the time he got to see a shot where Jodorowsky had a shot of the Pope being horsewhipped.... He decided he wanted to get another director.

At the height of the Frankenchrist controversy and the Parents Music Resource Center's stronghold on the music industry, a lot of your concerts were cancelled at the last minute.
A few were.

Biafra at his SIU lecture.

What a lot of people don't realize now is that punk has become such a toothless commercial commodity in some areas. Back then, it was a struggle in San Francisco even to be able to play. I mean, there were many, many acts of serious police brutality against punk-rock shows and the people who attended them. The Rodney King incident in Los Angeles was no surprise to me when I saw it, because I'd seen the LAPD do that to our own fans on several occasions. A lot of struggle was put into even carving out a scene in a place where commercial rock promoters didn't want to let it happen.

Your house and your cat litterbox were the subject of a search by the police. Was theBedtime for Democracy album in response to that violation of your civil rights?
Uh, we had already started recording at that point.

Did you later on write songs in reference to the incident?
Not that particularly, no. I did score it into a song called "Triumph of the Swill" about the bad state of commercial music, that they wanted to start rating the albums and start placing a tax on blank cassette tapes to benefit the major labels. The sponsor of that, by the way, was Al Gore.

Do you think Tipper Gore had him by the short hairs in that situation?
I don't think Tipper even needed to have him by the short hairs. I have very little patience with people who whine and whimper that Ralph Nader and the Green Party cost Gore the election, and if Gore were president now, everything would be wonderful. That's horse pooh-pooh. Gore cost himself the election in so many ways it would take me hours to go into it. Even as strictly political strategy, first of all, instead of even bothering to campaign in his home state or in Arkansas, or put real money or effort in there, he spent a lot of his money and effort the last couple weeks [before the election] running attack ads against Nader and the Greens in states he was already going to win. Then, when the Florida fiasco happened, he bitched and moaned about the infamous "dimpled chads" in south Florida, and adamantly refused to have a statewide recount. If there had been a statewide recount, it would have exposed that as many as twenty-thousand African Americans were not allowed to vote because they were black. This is documented in a book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by a guy named Greg Palst.

Apparently, Katherine Harris, who should be in jail for her conflict of interest in that election, hired a computer company called Choice Point to purge the voter roles of convicted felons. Palst actually looked at their data and a lot of the people on there were listed as convicted of felonies in 2004 or 2007 or something like that. Plus, there are many incidents of buildings being locked or neighborhoods having streets blocked off to prevent African Americans from voting in different places in Florida-- Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and others.

Where was Gore? Was he that allergic to being photographed with civil-rights leaders?

The reason so many people deserted the Democrats and voted for a different candidate, even if they knew the alternative to Gore was Bush, was because Gore and the Democrats' party platform was so far to the right that he wasn't even a real opponent of the Bush agenda anymore. There are millions of us now who refuse to vote for anybody who is pro-death penalty, pro-drug war, pro-Star Wars, pro-Iraq war, and pro-NAFTA.

Gore even bragged about being the one who got Clinton to sign Newt Gingrich's welfare bill that's multiplied the homeless exponentially in this country. Gore even proposed teaching biblical creation theory in public schools again. And, of course, his choice for Vice President, Joseph Lieberman, is like Tipper Gore on crack when it comes to freedom of expression, and is notoriously corrupt and pro-military. One of the biggest cheerleaders for going to war in Iraq since September 11 onward was Lieberman. So I have pretty much given up on the Democratic Party for the most part. We're a one-party state masquerading as a two-party state. Might as well be called the Republicrats. Or, better yet, the Corporate Party. I mean, compare [Illinois Gov. Rod] Blagojevich's campaign promises to his policies. No more need be said.

You were in a classic cult film, Tape Heads, as an FBI agent. Was it the director's idea to give you the part?
It may have been the producer's. It may have been the director's. That was quite cool. I even wore the same pinstriped suit I wore during the Frankenchrist trial. Both Tim Robbins and John Cusack were very friendly and very helpful and went out of their way to tell me what was going to happen next and what I should be aware of. They weren't pulling any Hollywood star trips at all.

You explore different musical styles from album to album. Is that a conscious thing or a case of whatever comes out in the studio gets released?
Maybe both. I'm proud of the fact that no two of my music albums ever sounded alike. The Dead Kennedy ones don't, the Lard ones don't, and of course my one with DOA isn't going to sound like my one with Mojo Nixon, that's for sure. Now, I've started work on another one with me and the Melvins, which will sound different still.

What do you think of the whole terrorism-alert level thing and, for that matter, terrorism in general?
I think this whole terror-alert system is just one more way of bullying the American people through propaganda. They tore that page right out of the Nazi bible.... and they know it. I feel far more frightened by John Ashcroft than I do by al-Qaeda. Let's say I feel far more terrorized by the Bush-Croft than I do by al-Qaeda.

Scarier still, there was hardly any fanfare a few weeks ago when Bush quietly announced he was going to put [the] Star Wars [missile defense system] on fast track. They're going to start putting those nuclear weapons in outer space without testing them anymore. Even though most of the tests haven't worked. I'm far more frightened about one of those weapons blowing up like the Columbia did and scattering plutonium all over the atmosphere and poisoning most of us breathing critters than I am of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or big, bad North Korea combined.

The sad thing to me is that nobody has been more exploitive and manipulative with the horrible events of September 11 and showed more disrespect and pissed on the graves of the victims than the Bush administration themselves. I mean, the [USA] PATRIOT Act basically is designed to do with the Homeland Security Act what the... hijacked planes did to the Twin Towers.

Terrorism is a real problem but we're going to make far more headway against it if we sit down with all sides and get to the root cause of terrorism in the first place, and one of the main reasons is the inequality in the world that's being made worse and worse through the policies of our government, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. We can't treat entire countries all over the globe as our own slave plantations forever without some serious opposition.

I've found the best way to get through to other people just how wrong this war on terrorism incorporated is, especially now that it's been used as a cover to conquer Iraq, is that, in the long term, it's piss-poor military strategy. All we do, every time we blow people up in the Middle East, is plant the seeds for more Osama bin Ladens, more al-Qaedas, more suicide bombers, thus making our country and our own lives less and less and less safe.

What do you think of file sharing and the music industry's attempt to stop it?
I have mixed feelings about it. I think that the toothpaste is out of the tube and there's no way you can ever get rid of it now, and the idea of billion-dollar businesses like the major labels suing college students for file sharing is vicious and arrogant as can be. As far as major labels go, they look for any excuse in the world not to pay their bands and artists in the first place. So it's not as though the artist is getting ripped off if you file share with major-label releases.

On the other hand, small independent labels like Alternative Tentacles and the artists we work with have taken a pretty severe hit from this as well. So I would hope that people who file share, if they hear something they really like by an independent artist, they'll go out and support the independent artist. Pick up the album, go see them play.

I mean, in the early days of Napster, it worked very well. Sales of both major-label music and independent music went way up because people were able to bypass all the boring radio that has been monopolized by cutthroats like [the] Clear Channel [radio conglomerate]. Just explore music at random on the net and find some cool stuff they'd never know about otherwise, and it was obviously inspiring people to buy more music when they found all this new stuff they could enjoy.

It's a double-edged sword. I'm just hoping that people who do file share the underground stuff will find it fit to support the artist, too. If it really gets out of hand, a lot of people who work crap jobs to save up money for years to make one album are probably not going to make another one. There's a long piece on that that I did on the previous album [The Big Ka-Boom, Part One], not the current one [Machine Gun in the Clown's Hand].

What do you think about censorship?
The worst form of censorship going on today is not Tipper Gore or Falwell or even Ashcroft or Lieberman, it is deliberate omission of important stories and facts from mainstream corporate-controlled news. I mean, Fox News, everybody knows it's biased, and a lot of people watch it for that reason. But people think that CNN or NBC or the New York Times are not biased, and that's not true at all. That's why it's great that the Seattle uprising has spawned and helped jumpstart this huge independent media movement too, [at] <http://www.IndyMedia.org> and another one of my favorites, although it's an older daily paper in England, is the Guardian at <http://www.guardian.co.uk>. If people want to know what the rest of the world really thinks of us right now, that would be a good place to start.

Did you consider rereleasing "Die for Oil, Sucker" [a song about the first Gulf War] during the current Iraq conflict?
Yeah, I did... and then I checked back and a lot of the words are very specific to Gulf War number one. So I didn't want to confuse the issue, although there's a proposal afoot to rewrite it and do it as a hip-hop project with members of the Coo over in Oakland. I may or may not have time for that, but I hope I can somehow work it in.

You are a very busy man. How do you find time to do anything?
Um... it gets harder every year. At least I can somehow survive off of my main obsessions, which are music and causing trouble. I'm grateful that when I rant and rave about what I think about the Bush regime and how this country could be improved, at least I can do it and have people listen, not just be yelling my head off from a barstool. It's a privilege and I'm very grateful for people's interest and support.

That leads into the next question-- there are very few successful spoken-word artists these days. Why do you think you're so popular?
I'm sure my Dead Kennedys legacy had something to do with it. Taking on Tipper and the LAPD with Frankenchrist, and then I was very upfront in opposition to the first Gulf War, where there was even more bullying against antiwar people than there has been this time. So people are very into that. It's just a matter of not listening to what people tell me to do in order to appeal to more mainstream tastes. I have no interest in that. If I just stuck with doing nothing but play in bands and trying to tone down the music... I don't think I'd have been invited to these huge Nader campaign rallies like the one in Chicago. I couldn't believe it. There I was on the same stage with Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Studs Terkel, Phil Donahue, John Anderson, Eddie Vedder, and more. If somebody asks you to do that, you damned well better do it right. It just adds to the pressure of trying to make sure my work is as good as I can make it be, instead of sitting on my laurels and doing nothing but play old songs or reminisce about the past.

What do you think about the Dixie Chicks dilemma where they spoke out against the president and people smashed their records?
Michael Moore has recently sent out an email claiming that the sales of Dixie Chicks albums has gone up, not down, since Natalie Maines did that. They were on with Diane Sawyer a couple of nights ago, and they were much more adamant in preserving their right to speak out than I thought they were going to be.

I haven't paid much attention to their music, but I think that all this bullshit coming out of Fox News that artists should automatically have no say in political matters-- that's ridiculous! An artist has a platform. A lot of people listen to them. If something's on your mind, why not say it? Whether or not an artist wants to be, an artist just by being an artist is in a position of leadership. If an artist takes a stand, it'll be taken more seriously than if a politician does. So, I'm very grateful to the Dixie Chicks and even to Sheryl Crow, whose music I have heard and absolutely can't stand, for taking public positions against the... behavior of our President.

You've lived an interesting and chequered life. What one thing are you most proud of?
Oh, boy. There's been a lot of things over the years. I would say never giving in. Not necessarily following the path of least resistance. I guess hitting that nail on the head would be the decision to drop out of college with some naïve dream of singing in a punk-rock band. My father told me, "No, you shouldn't do that. You should stay in school and get your degree and maybe do this some years later as a hobby." I thought, no, this is important. I want to do it now. A very naïve thing to do, but in the long run, it worked. At some point, you have to dare to be wrong.

What one thing would you change if you could?
As proud as I am of the Dead Kennedys' legacy in music, if I had known what those guys were going to turn out to be like, I might have worked with somebody else. I mean, they've been suing me for five years now, as you probably know, via a dispute that got ugly because I didn't want to put "Holiday in Cambodia" in a Levis commercial. I mean, they went up on a witness stand and lied and claimed they wrote all the music to the songs, that I'd ripped them off when I actually hadn't. There was an accounting error on our part, but when we-- not they-- found it, we paid them. And only then did they sue. So now they run off with all the albums and pimped it off to a label called Manifesto that I do not respect or trust at all, and then send me a letter that they don't intend to pay me any more on them. And, they say they won't pay me until I pay them $140,000-- as if I had that kind of money-- because they say that's my band member's share of their legal bill to sue me. That's how greedy they are.

Meanwhile, they've been doing phony reunion shows with a different band member. You know, a former TV child star named Brandon Cruz, who hasn't even bothered to learn the words and has reportedly been calling me a terrorist on stage and said I didn't love my country because I didn't support the president. And then our drummer supposedly dedicated "Holiday in Cambodia" to our troops in Afghanistan, hinting a support of the war.

You know, they're doing everything the exact opposite of what we were like when we were a band. I feel like I'm married to the mob. They're suing me for a second time now for objecting to the way they've behaved.

What do you think about people who allow their music to be used in advertisements?
It's a decision the individual artist has to make. For Dead Kennedys, I thought it was really wrong. That's not what our music was made for.

One last question-- what's in the future for you?
Well, um, hopefully not going postal because of all the legal hell, but otherwise continuing to actively oppose the Bush agenda, especially the war, and hoping that this huge antiwar movement can mushroom into a much greater version of the spirit of Seattle-- a much bigger, thoughtful uprising against the abuse of corporate power. Also, hoping to get some music out. An album with the Melvins, maybe a couple other ideas down the road, too. Just keep on keeping on.