By Duane Davis
This review of the Dead Kennedys show at the legendary Mercury Cafe came out in our rough and tumble pulp newsprint fanzine, Local Anesthetic, in October 1982. These were the glory days of the Merc, the 80s, when it was just around the corner from Wax Trax. (The DKs show had been in August of that year.)
Jello Biafra was 24 years old at that show. He just turned 67 a few weeks ago on June 17.
My, my. Time does fly.
The Dead Kennedys as a band is still around – but without their original lead singer and front man: apparently there isn’t always room for Jello! The story of the band’s break up in 1986 and subsequent acrimonious legal battles over song writing credits and royalties makes for an absorbing, but depressing tale.
We take no sides in all that, but here at Wax Trax, Jello is a long time customer and good friend of the store. He usually stops by a few times every year to rummage our stacks of 7” singles. Jello, as you may be aware, is a fanatic vinyl collector of music of every style conceivable: everything from Mrs. Miller to Sun Ra, from Heino to the Azuma Kabuki Musicians, Jello’s got it, he’s listened to it, and, incredibly, he likes it: of the aforementioned Mrs. Miller’s ‘psychedelic’ album, Jello enthuses, “Here she is doing ‘Green Tambourine’, a song called ‘Renaissance of Smut’, ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’, ‘The Roach’ – how can you go wrong with her little green hash brownies?”
How indeed??
My favorite story about Jello, in fact, has to do with his fanatical collector-mania. We love him of course, but Jello is one of those guys (and, yes, they are almost always guys) who becomes an immovable object once he is in the groove of sorting through singles and listening to them at our listening station. Closing time rolls near and the counter staff warns him, and Jello nods and nods and keeps on sorting and sorting and listening and listening. Time ticks by. Closing time recedes into the dark.
One night this was going on and Dave Stidman just couldn’t hang around. So he loaded a few boxes of records and a record player into the trunk of Jello’s car and sent him off into the night.
When I asked him about the wisdom of this the next day, Dave replied in a weary, rueful voice, “Well, I’m a collector too. I understand record collectors. I understand Jello.”
Record collectors are their own tribe and operate by their own set of customs and social mores.
If you are so inclined, you can check out the newest Dead Kennedys band on stage – they’ve got some dates lined up in New Zealand coming up this Fall.
Jello pops up here and there as well, DJ’ing and motormouthing at various venues and events.
It is interesting to note that since kicking the old century to the curb and entering the glory that is the 21st Century, Jello has been on a roll: in addition to four or so spoken word albums, a butt-load of collaborations and one-offs with such luminaries as Sepultura, Napalm Death, and Revolting Cocks (among others), Jello has released two essential full-length albums as Jello Biafra & The Melvins: ‘Never Breathe What You Can’t See’ (Alternative Tentacles, 2004), ‘Sieg Howdy!’ (Alternative Tentacles Records, 2005); and five more from 2005 to 2020 as Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine.
That’s pretty good for a busted-up old punk now in his 60s! Maybe there is always room for more Jello.
THE DEAD KENNEDYS AT THE MERCURY CAFE
W/Susan & God, White Trash, Massacre Guys
8/12/1982
[Originally printed in Local Anesthetic, October 1982]
“Without Cruelty there is no festival.”
-Nietzsche
The problem may simply be that I’m getting old: I’m actually a little bit ashamed to admit I had a good time at the DK show.
I imagine that the DK’s think of themselves as a political band. Certainly their pronouncements, anthems, banners, slogans & sermons amount to a virtual campaign for a vote. Jello once ran for Mayor of San Francisco & they seem to see alot wrong with this country & are not at all shy about pointing out a few of those things to us. As with almost all politicians, of course, they are usually speaking to those who already believe what they believe. I doubt the DK’s have played at the Cherry Creek Country Club Cotillion.
What then is the point of campaigning for the beliefs that your audience already holds?
The answer is simple: when you’re up there on stage you have to have something to say. Content is irrelevant — it is the situation that speaks to us. Jello says something that closely resembles something I believe, but that is only his access to something else, a code sequence to an altogether different program, a set of reactions that lie deep along the neural paths close to the bone and hidden in that core of irrational needs long ago banished by the refinements of social living.
What Jello fashions is a beast, an animal without History, without Belief, without Time. As though he could crack your spine and peel out the white fiber like so much string cheese, he strips away the cultured layers of learned response and leaves a naked animal that is, essentially, free – at least for a moment.
But free to do what?
Put it in this light: what he strips away is you, the “you” you and your Mom know and cherish. Ridiculous? I’m not so sure.
The DK’s are a theater, a ritual, a sacrament of sorts, and “…all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.” (Nietzsche again)
Perhaps personality, character, is a modern construct, a fabrication of society that enables large groups of individuals to be classified by behavior — action broken into psychology, into the discreet units of knowledge the manipulation of which make up the systems of controls that in turn make up living together. Tear that away, destroy psychology, jolt being into action & what do you have: Mystery Rites or Mob? Ecstasy or Fascism? Dance or Lockstep?
In the dense heat, in the air drenched with sweat and beer, in the pack of bodies turning like worms in a jar, we were approaching critical mass, a moment stunned into timelessness, an action warped into ritual.
On stage, Jello prowled, pushed, crowded and leaped, his hands clawing furiously into the air before him as though fighting a web we couldn’t see from the dance floor. Like a man struggling to escape, he would fly into the audience & be held above the dancers’ heads until they suddenly shoved him back onto the stage. The intensity of the performance was virtually incandescent, with Jello burning away the difference between performer & spectator, subject & object, viewer & viewed.
That was what I liked: the way Jello created a performance that fused artist & audience into something far more dangerous, far more radical than the shallow, student-take-over rhetoric of his song lyrics. Jello seems to me to be the 80s equivalent of the 60s Abbie Hoffman: a man engaged in symbol, in gesture, in a flamboyance of word & action that fixes the moment & its desperation like a butterfly on a pin.
A remarkable performance marred by a couple of problems:
1) There were far too many people in the Mercury. For their $5, many people had to be content with a rather more close than comfortable view of someone’s dandruff or heels depending on whether they managed to stay standing.
2) Related to this was the inescapable fact that there were also far too many assholes at this show. A few are expected and, I suppose, tolerable. Tales of scum hanging around the fringes of the dance floor clubbing dancers from behind, of creeps using studded leather wrist bracelets as brass knuckles, of broken glass and jabbed eyes, of a mayhem unrelated to the usual risks involved in slam dancing were all too common the next day.
All this elevated the action from the level of a blood sport to that of a mob. So: Assholes take note – next time stay at home & pull the legs off mice or spy on your little sisters in the bathroom or whatever else you do to amuse yourselves when not involved in the hit & run antics that pass for socialization in your crowd.
Finally, I missed both Susan & God and White Trash (who reportedly traveled with the DK’s to open for them the next night in Salt Lake City). The Massacre Guys sounded tight, loud and abrasive, tho a little standard in their execution: competent but not particularly exciting.
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