Dead Kennedys – Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables
42 years ago the Dead Kennedys released Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables. Marco Pandin tells us about it from his point of view
Mid-1970s. I was eighteen when I had the good fortune to meet the English band Henry Cow: for a concert in the area organized by Radio Mestre, they arrived in a couple of old vans poorly adapted to camper vans and soon proved to be fascinating people. They were a few years older than me and had already released three records with Virgin (at the time an independent label founded by wealthy hippies and in full commercial expansion and fortune), they hung out with musicians of the caliber of Robert Wyatt, Mike Oldfield, and Steve Hillage, but they didn’t show off at all as one might have expected. I remember that it was nice to get together, joke around, and talk to each other: we spoke freely to each other in our typical bastard mix of school English, Italian, and Veneto dialect. To be honest, they didn’t seem like normal musicians to me, in the sense that they were getting by on setting up their equipment and even making their own food. In the evening, more like a party than a concert, a kind of mysterious and happy circus set up in a living room – no psychedelic lights, just a couple of abatjours. We all sat around. That handful of young wanderers, boys and girls together, offered sounds and vibrations that had little or nothing to do with the music they had heard before, but above all with their simple, open and smiling attitude they had managed to perform a miracle: the roles of ‘musician’ and ‘spectator’, the labels ‘rock’ and ‘jazz’ had suddenly become completely meaningless expressions. I liked their commitment to finding new ways. I liked that they could change the rules of the game, that they could express themselves without regard for mental cages and definitions. Later punk moved this philosophy one step further, widening the area of rumbling for me from the stage to the whole of life.
So much of our music really sucked, but we had fun anyway: music served as social glue, kept us close, and kept us together. Growing up in a patchwork of small country towns quickly transformed into risky neighborhoods by concrete and asphalt, my friends and comrades and I were from working-class families, used to walking around with empty pockets and making do. It would have been technically impossible for me to escape: my mum spent long periods in hospital and my dad was killing himself working shifts in the factory. I loved those two, and I was convinced they wouldn’t have made it without me: despite bad anarchist company, shitty music and bad books I was a good kid underneath. One day I planted a huge mess: I was assigned to military service in the navy, so I showed up for my conscription check-up but refused to submit to blood samples by filing a declaration of conscientious objection. At the time it was not an easy decision: alternative civilian service would only be introduced some time later and renegades usually ended up behind bars. By chance and luckily I didn’t end up in jail, but this decision nevertheless caused me to lose my job and created a lot of difficulties in finding others unless they were temporary, underpaid and/or off the books. It was an uncomfortable and frustrating situation that dragged on for a couple of years, until I was offered a permanent job as a computer designer in 1980, a job that I kept for the next forty years, amidst ups and downs and company restructuring.
Working was important, it allowed me to emancipate myself and be an active part of the household economy. In the early years it was even fun and instructive. In the summer of 1981, I took my first train trip to London and on my return after a month, my backpack loaded with stuff to read, watch and listen to, I involved some of my circle of friends and radio buddies in making a fanzine. Obviously, we didn’t know what to do and how to do it, but we did it anyway: we called the fanzine Rockgarage and for a few years we poured dreams, frustrations, and provincial delusions into it, all very messily. That was our little revolution: we learned to be together, girls and boys, without bosses and without labels or roles. We did everything on our own. From the noise that came out of the newspapers, from the stages, from the rallies and demonstrations, it seemed that revolution was just around the corner, from the street with the protest, a lot of agitation came into my head but I just couldn’t read into it the possibility of any real change. Sure, we went to concerts in packs, we had fun, we shared beers, sandwiches, apples, and spliffs, and above all we could choose which rock to listen to from punk, experimental, new wave, dark, reggae, and a hundred other sub-genres and contaminations. But after every gig, it was back to sinking into the same black shit as always. Nothing ever changed.
One of the things we liked to do at Rockgarage was to understand what our peers abroad were saying inside the songs. So many of my friends loved the Clash, others preferred things more related to the past like Neil Young and John Martyn, but our different musical preferences were never a cause for division. Me and some of my mates liked certain English anarcho-punk bands and we used to spend half-days trying to decipher the covers of their records and transpose their contents into a form that everyone could eat. We also liked a lot of other rattling American bands: Ermanno and Gino from the Wops had taken ‘GI’ by the Germs, ‘Condition red’ by the Red Rockers and the early MDC and Toxic Reasons albums, records that we soon recorded on cassette and learned by heart. Another of the bands that attracted a lot of our attention was the Dead Kennedys: active in the late seventies and early eighties, they were clearly distinguished from the rest of the stars and stripes hardcore magma by what we here at the time interpreted as a marked political and social awareness. Looking back on it now, we could invoke extenuating circumstances at our young age and the ease with which we in the provinces at the time were caught up in the turmoil. The fact remains, however, that the Dead Kennedys reaped wide acclaim among Italian punks, and in Europe in general, for their fiery irony against everything and everyone, which often bordered on the most ruthless cynicism. I remember a telluric concert in Gorizia in October 1981, with Warfare at the opening, an event that I find contributed a lot to the adjustment of the aim of the local punks, who were already well disposed to devote themselves to what at the time was called subversive activity. There wasn’t a band from Friuli or the region of Giulia that wasn’t involved in leafleting, counter-information, and active participation in rallies and demonstrations, and after that concert, the scene in the entire north-east found itself undoubtedly more effervescent and motivated.
I don’t know if the Dead Kennedys, roughly read here in Italy as anti-American aliens, were anarchists or if they were driven by some political purpose: I have always remained rather skeptical about this over the years, but I do know that like the Crass they seemed to move according to some sort of strategy. Each of their songs was the equivalent of an assault on the establishment and their lyrics were absolutely explicit, direct, and incisive: songs used as fists, as sticks, as incendiary bottles with the intention of causing damage and doing harm. This worked well at home, and the band was indeed watched by the authorities, and it also worked great abroad, especially in explosive combination with European enthusiasm. “In a way, we are cultural terrorists, we use music instead of weapons” – this was stated by the group’s singer Jello Biafra. The others were guitarist East Bay Ray (joined for a while by another guitarist, 6025), bassist Klaus Flouride and drummer Ted, soon to be replaced by D. H. Peligro – all fictitious names, easy to understand why: they were among the worst ambassadors of their country’s foreign policy. An uphill career, built by collecting boycotts (several concerts at home were organized under false names), denunciations, and trials.
Democrat Jerry Brown had been an activist and opponent of the Vietnam War in his youth and was popular among young Californian liberals as a staunch supporter of environmental policies. As governor, however, he had distinguished himself by very conservative positions on law and order: this is how the Dead Kennedys came to imagine their country dominated by hippy fascism in ‘California über alles’. The song dates from 1979, Biafra stuffed the lyrics with literary references, from Orwell to Shakespeare, and then modified them for the presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 (and again with the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California in 2003). After all, as Fabrizio de André had done in his translation of Dylan’s ‘Street of Poverty’ suitably modified from the record at concerts in the 1980s, all one has to do is change the names of the old politicians by updating them with those of today and the song still works perfectly.
I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles and never frowns
Soon I will be president…
Carter power will soon go ‘way
I will be Führer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
California Über Alles
Über Alles California
Zen fascists will control you
Hundred percent natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Close your eyes, can’t happen here
Big Bro’ on white horse is near
The hippies won’t come back, you say
Mellow out or you will pay
California Über Alles
Über Alles California
Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It’s the suede denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Come quietly to the camp
You’d look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don’t you worry, it’s only a shower
For your clothes, here’s a pretty flower
Die on organic poison gas
Serpent’s egg’s already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
California Über Alles
Über Alles California
The name of the band and the cover (some police cars on fire, a scene from the riots in the streets of San Francisco following the murder of Harvey Milk, late 1978) made the commercial distribution of the first record ‘Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables’ impossible for their label – IRS, the same as Police Buzzcocks Damned Cramps, etc. – which soon ‘forced’ them to self-produce and sell it on the alternative market. – which soon dumped them, ‘forcing’ them into self-production and the alternative market.
The Dead Kennedys’ debut, paradoxically, sold more in Europe than in the US, the first of a handful of albums and singles that they took pains to keep off the radios, official sales charts, and shop windows: soon they were all confiscated, censored or banned.
Mr Master let them be, but one day he got pissed off. In June 1986, the Los Angeles prosecutor issued formal charges against Biafra (as well as Michael Bonnano of Alternative Tentacles, Ruth Schwartz, manager of the Mordam Records distribution center, and the owner of the record production facility where the record was printed) for ‘trading obscene material to minors’, thus violating Section 313.3 of the California State Penal Code. The charge stemmed from the inclusion of a poster deemed ‘obscene’ on the Dead Kennedys’ album ‘Frankenchrist’ – it was a reproduction of ‘Landscape #XX’ by Hans Rudi Giger (the creator of the xenomorph from the ‘Alien’ films). After a year and a half of trial, and a huge mobilization campaign with an international collection to pay the legal fees, the case was acquitted. The punishment for such an offence is relatively mild and involves the payment of a $2,000 fine or, alternatively, one-year imprisonment, according to the laws then in force in California. So why take action? Because this was the first case of its kind brought in the United States against a record: any negative verdict would have set a dangerous legal precedent for thousands of other musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers and performers.
To silence the group, police and government officials, wealthy imbeciles and lobbyists, parents’ associations, record shop chains, FBI and MI5 agents and perhaps a few local cops, the BBC and MTV were called in, but failed to scatter the seeds – it’s hard to find a pop-punk musician nowadays who doesn’t claim to have listened to them as a child and not been influenced by them. Uncomfortable songs like ‘Too drunk to fuck’, ‘Let’s lynch the landlord’ and this ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ will be echoed in thousands of rehearsal rooms:
So, you’ve been to school
For a year or two
And you know you’ve seen it all
In daddy’s car
Thinking you’ll go far
Back east your type don’t crawl
Playing ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo
Braggin’ that you know
How the niggers feel cold
And the slum’s got so much soul
It’s time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear
Brace yourself, my dear
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
It’s tough, kid, but it’s life
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
Don’t forget to pack a wife
You’re a star-belly sneetch
You suck like a leech
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
While your boss gets richer off you
Well, you’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where the people are one Now you can
Go where they get things done What you need, my son…
What you need, my son…
Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people are dressed in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll kiss ass or crack
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll do what you’re told
It’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul
They took care of the disarming, fighting over the division of royalties and ending up bickering through a law firm. I kept in touch with Jello Biafra by letter for a while, he was intrigued by my collaboration with A/Rivista Anarchica and even contributed one of his spoken word pieces to a compilation I had edited in support of the magazine. By then the group had already disbanded, he was running Alternative Tentacles, but the air around it had really changed: I write this to try to make sense of the drift, of the progressive dismantling of something that I and many other guys like me thought was beautiful and important. While it lasted, it was a great story. A dirty and convulsive but healthy and vital fun despite the desperation, despite the threats, despite the horror. A sound that bounced off walls still solidly standing, the Dead Kennedys were the perfect musical décor for Ronald Reagan’s imperial America, stockpiling nuclear weapons and smiling through electronic TV windows. And for a Europe that continued to hoard fear and hide toxic waste under every overpass.
Article by Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it
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