by Roni Sarig
Before he became Jello Biafra, he was Eric Boucher of Boulder, Colorado. Politicized at a young age by events such as the Vietnam War and later Watergate, Boucher early on developed a healthy skepticism for government and a contrarian attitude. While most kids in school enjoyed the Eagles, Boucher sought out the Stooges and MC5. After a trip to London in the summer of 1977 – where he encountered Wire and other punk bands – Boucher moved to the Bay area for college. Inspired by early San Francisco punk bands like the Nuns and the Dils, and more artsy groups like the Residents, Boucher dropped out of school after one semester to form his own band.
After only a week’s rehearsal in July 1978, Boucher – now Jello Biafra – and his band the Dead Kennedys debuted. Joining him was bassist Klaus Flouride, drummer Bruce Slesinger (a.k.a. Ted), guitarist East Bay Ray (Glasser), and briefly, the enigmatic 6025 (a.k.a. Carlos). Centered in what has long been a hotbed of liberal activism, the Bay area punk scene was naturally more politically oriented than the L.A. scene, and the Dead Kennedys thrived in this environment. Their first single California über alles, released in 1979 on the band’s own Alternative Tentacles label, targeted then-governor Jerry Brown and his mob of “zen fascists.” A few months later, Biafra caused further controversy by running for mayor of San Francisco on the slogan, “There’s always room for Jello.” Despite the campaign’s absurdity, Biafra proved himself an intelligent and impassioned public speaker, and even earned 3.5 percent of the votes.
Leaving political aspirations behind, in 1980 Biafra and the Dead Kennedys released an equally provocative second single called Holiday in Cambodia and a debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. On songs like Kill the Poor and Let’s Lynch the Landlord, Biafra railed against militarism, consumer culture, conformity, and complacency in a quavery voice that all but codified American punk’s political agenda. Overshadowed by the rhetoric, but equally impressive, were East Bay Ray’s dynamic guitar and a garage pop rhythm section that kept the songs moving in unpredictable directions. Like Biafra’s lyrics, the band’s music challenged existing conventions – even punk ones.
Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:
Hearing Holiday in Cambodia was so exciting, they sounded really aggressive and kind of psychedelic too. It appealed to me in a way Hendrix had appealed to me when I first heard “Purple Haze” – “How do they make those sounds?” The combination of surf guitar, psychedelic, heavy metal – but played really fast – appealed to me a lot. After that I just got into faster and faster music.
When the band’s next single, Too Drunk to Fuck, became a hit in England, the DKs decided to use Alternative Tentacles to export American punk to Europe. While British punk styles had influenced American music for years, with the 1981 compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans, American bands like Black Flag, Flipper, Half Japanese, and Bad Brains were able to have a large impart on expanding European punk sounds. At home, the Dead Kennedys’ EP In God We Trust, Inc. took aim not only at organized religion and the Reagan administration, but also at divisive elements within the punk scene (Nazi Punks Fuck off). While the record’s faster pace reflected an influence of newer hardcore bands like Hüsker Dü (released by Alternative Tentacles in Europe), 1982’s Plastic Surgery Disasters returned to the more varied sounds of Fresh Fruit, with songs like Terminal Preppie and Winnebago Warrior.
Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses:
DKs were my soundtrack for a whole year, when I was 16. I was just making copies of demos and sending them off to record companies all day and night, and doing terrible paintings for art school. I played the DKs all the time... I sang like Jello for years. I thought it was a really cool voice, but now there are little chickies who think they sound like me when really they sound like Jello Biafra, who they’ve never heard of.
As the Dead Kennedys’ appearances at demonstrations – including rallies at the 1984 Democratic and Republican conventions – established the band as punk’s most committed agitators, their third album, Frankenchrist, landed them in the midst of a political battle of their own. The album’s poster insert featured a work by well-known Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger which depicted uniform rows of penises as a comment on consumerism and conformity. California law enforcement deemed the image pornographic and, in a raid on Alternative Tentacles offices, seized all copies of Frankenchrist. Charged with “distribution of harmful matter to minors,” Biafra and four others faced a possible year in jail and a $2,000 fine.
The attention and resources devoted to Biafra’s obscenity trial exacerbated tensions within the band. By the time their long-delayed fourth album, Bedtime for Democracy, came out – filled with inserts detailing Biafra’s case and the right-wing crusade against music – the Dead Kennedys had already decided to call it quits. Though Biafra eventually won his war against censorship when his case was dismissed (the jury deadlocked), with his band dissolved and his records banned from stores across the country, he seemed to have lost most of the battles along the way. What remained, though, was his integrity and a new career as an anti-censorship spokesperson.
Michael Franti, Spearhead:
I always admired the fact that he was doing things for himself, and kept that spirit alive. He tries to balance making music that people want to listen to and music that’s saying something.
After the DK’s breakup, Biafra appeared on talk shows, gave lectures about his court battle, and recorded a number of spoken-word albums on that and other subjects. In addition, he has continued to make music with a variety of groups – including members of Ministry (as Lard), D.O.A., NoMeansNo, and Mojo Nixon – and to run Alternative Tentacles. Both Klaus Flouride and D. H. Peligro made solo records, while East Bay Ray plays in a band called Candy ASS.
DISCOGRAPHY
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (Alternative Tentacles, 1980); a classic debut, containing early singles California über alles and Holiday in Cambodia.
In God We Trust, Inc. EP (Alternative Tentacles, 1981); a faster, more hardcore eight-song collection included on the CD version of Plastic Surgery Disasters.
Plastic Surgery Disasters (Alternative Tentacles, 1982); a less successful blend of hardcore with outside styles.
Frankenchrist (Alternative Tentacles, 1985); originally containing the H.R. Giger artwork that spurred an obscenity trial, this is the DKs’ best latter-day record.
Bedtime for Democracy (Alternative Tentacles, 1986); a studio finale with typically topical songs, though lacking the color of earlier records.
Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death (Alternative Tentacles, 1987); a posthumous collection of their best singles and less-than-essential rarities.
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, Virus 100 (Alternative Tentacles, 1992); for AT’s 100th release, artists such as L7, Kramer, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Mojo Nixon record Dead Kennedys’ songs.
THE MINUTEMEN
Mike Watt, Minutemen:
“In the late ‘80s, early ‘90s I thought music had sunk pretty low. But hearing Superchunk, I heard our whole scene in them, and I realized that this thing will never die.”
In the SST dynasty that produced the greatest documents of ‘80s hardcore, Black Flag ruled the roost while the Minutemen were always next in line for the throne. In many ways, though, the Minutemen were American punk’s most endearing band, hardcore’s great populists. Their intimate sound and nonflashy appearance made them favorites of the “regular guy” punks drawn into the music not by its sense of danger or spectacle, but rather by the camaraderie of the scene. The Minutemen came across as the kind of band you wanted to be friends with. After all, the band always functioned as an extension of its members’ friendships.
Doug Martsch, Built to Spill:
It could be said the Minutemen were the most important band ever. In so many ways they were perfect to me. They were the band I thought all punk bands were like. They seemed like completely decent people who understood priorities the way I did, and the importance of love. They were totally people I wanted to know.
In high school, Mike and D. started hearing about a new music called “punk,” and when they discovered punk was not much different than the amateurish guitar rock they’d been playing at home, it became clear that their music could be more than something to pass the time. After graduating in 1976, they started checking out the Hollywood punk scene that was developing around bands like the Weirdos and the Germs, where they found misfit kids like themselves transforming the accepted notions of rock. Inspired and empowered, Boon and Watt decided to form a band.
With their friend Martin Tamburovich as singer and San Pedro High classmate George Hurley on drums, Boon and Watt formed the Reactionaries. Though Hurley was wary of punk (as Watt explains, “In Pedro, ‘punk’ was what you called someone who let some guy fuck him in jail for cigarettes”) he was quick to pick up on the energy. As punk began to reach outlying towns like San Pedro, the group identified with the populism of hardcore bands like Black Flag, which was very different from Hollywood punk’s insularity. They decided to apply democratic principles to everything they did and got rid of their singer, who they felt took too much of the limelight and didn’t contribute enough musically. As a trio, they renamed themselves the Minutemen to reflect the length of their songs.
Scott Kanriberg, Pavement:
Minutemen were a band for the masses. They should’ve been huge. I saw them like ten times in high school. They made you feel like yelling – yelling anything they said to yell. They had passion and great songs, too. We had a Minutemen party on the tour bus a couple weeks ago where we listened to Ballot Result. It was so fun, we hadn’t heard it in so long. We were just bouncing off the walls.
After opening for Black Flag, the Minutemen were invited in early 1980 to release a record on Black Flag’s SST label; they made Paranoid Time in one day for $300. With seven songs in less than seven minutes, the single perfectly delineated the Minutemen’s early approach: short bursts of energy, with jerky riffs and politically charged haiku lyrics. The following year’s debut album The Punch Line made even more clear that while the band was hardcore in spirit and association, the music eschewed overpowering guitar chords for a sound that better expressed the equality of the band’s three members.
Boon’s guitar combined punk’s speed with the angularity of Captain Beefheart, while it respected the other instruments’ territory by staying in treble range and never getting too rhythmic. As Watt explains, “D. Boon was very political about the music. He wanted three fiefdoms, and nobody in the way. He thought the heavy guitar bogarted the bass.” Watt’s bass, in turn, held its own with a springy, melodic style. With the sonic landscape divided, and Watt and Boon sharing vocals, the trio created an amazingly dynamic sound that was sometimes labeled “jazz-punk.”
Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses:
D. Boon’s guitar style was influential in showing you didn’t have to take up so much space. If you have a great rhythm section the song will keep going.
Eric Wilson, Sublime:
I’d never heard anybody play bass like Mike Watt before. He’d just go off. He wouldn’t be doing the slap thing – I hated how everyone was into slap bass – Mike Watt would just lay into it with his fingers, playing the real shit. I pretty much picked up that style listening to him.
With an EP on the Thermidor label and the formation of their own New Alliance Records, the Minutemen asserted an identity apart from SST. They returned, though, for What Makes a Man Start Fires? and the Buzz or Howl under the Influence of Heat EP, both of which retained the group’s character while pushing them into new stylistic territory. In 1984, as labelmates Hüsker Dü offered their definitive musical statement with the double album Zen Arcade, the Minutemen set about creating a similarly sprawling and powerful work. The result, a 75-minute 46-song opus called Double Nickles on the Dime, was the ultimate expression of the band’s personality. Political and personal, anthemic and jokey, acoustic and psychedelic, the record touched on styles from garage and country rock to moody avant jazz and at the same time was a completely unified slice of San Pedro no wave funk.
Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:
They were part of that hardcore proto-indie thing, when hardcore could mean anything. It had nothing to do with the mainstream, just with people discovering their own style, making the most of what they had and stretching the boundaries of their influences in a way that wasn’t precious or pretentious or condescending. As far as full-bodied inspiration, the Minutemen were totally it for me.
In 1985, the Minutemen released Project: Mersh, a self-parody of a band on the verge of going commercial (or “mersh”). But with arrangements of horns, synths, backing vocals, fadeouts, and slower tempos, the EP veered dangerously close to becoming everything it ridiculed. After a tour with R.E.M. offered another taste of where greater accessibility might lead them, the group’s 3-Way Tie (For Last) indicated a more pop-oriented approach was not necessarily a joke. Within days of the album’s release, though, questions whether the Minutemen were destined for the mainstream became irrelevant. D. Boon’s van crashed in the Arizona desert, and he died at age 27. The Minutemen were suddenly a thing of the past.
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco:
I was really a huge fan. I feel lucky that I got to see them before D. Boon died. Those records meant a lot to me and I think early Uncle Tupelo [Tweedy’s first band] took a lot from the Minutemen.
After D.’s death, Watt and Hurley remained largely inactive (though Watt was part of Sonic Youth’s Ciccone Youth project), until a devoted fan named Ed Crawford (Edfromohio) convinced them to form fIREHOSE with him. Though the group made a number of memorable albums before disbanding in 1994, they remained in the shadow of the Minutemen. Hurley has since played part-time with the Red Krayola and other groups, while Watt continued his side project DOS with then-wife (and former Black Flag bassist) Kira.
Watt’s 1995 solo album, Ball – Hog or Tugboat? – which featured appearances by members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees, and Geraldine Fibbers – underscored the Minutemen’s influence on ‘80s rock. More recently, Watt toured as a member of Porno for Pyros and released a “punk opera,” Contemplating the Engine Room, that brings his career full circle. A celebration of three sailors’ camaraderie, it’s an obvious allegory for the Minutemen. Of Boon (cast as “the boilerman”), Watt sings, “I’m a lucky man, to know that man / a hell of a man, the boilerman.”
David Yow, Jesus Lizard / Scratch Acid:
It seemed like jazz-punk, all the syncopation and odd times were influential. I know with [Yow’s first band] Scratch Acid, [drummer] Rey Washam had a truckload of respect for George Hurley. Their song Cut drove me fucking nuts. I remember the Minutemen played Tacoland in San Antonio – this really small place with a low stage – and I was really drunk, right in Mike Watt’s face all night going, “PLAY CUT! PLAY CUT! PLAY CUT!” I felt like a fool when I found out what I’d done. I talked to Mike Watt years later and he remembered some stupid little idiot in his face in San Antonio.
DISCOGRAPHY
Paranoid Time EP (SST, 1980); the band’s seven-song-in-under-seven-minutes burst of passion.
The Punch Line (SST, 1981); a mini-album along the lines of the debut.
Bean Spill EP (Thermidor, 1982), a five-song extended single.
What Makes a Man Start Fires? (SST, 1982); the album where the Minutemen begin to stretch out songs
and hone their eclectic sound.
Buzz or Howl under the Influence of Heat EP (SST, 1983); an eight-song collection that shows the band’s expanded sound.
Double Nickels on the Dime (SST, 1984); a sprawling masterpiece of a double record that captures everything great about the Minutemen.
The Politics of Time (New Alliance, 1984); a compilation of outtakes and obscure early recordings.
My First Bells 1980-1983 (SST cassette, 1985); collects everything up through What Makes a Man Start Fires?
Project: Mersh EP (SST, 1985); a six-song, tongue-in-cheek stab at writing mainstream rock songs.
3-Way Tie (For Last) (SST, 1985); a final studio album that further shifts the band toward accessibility.
(w/ Black Flag) Minute / Flag EP (SST, 1986); a mostly instrumental four-song collaboration featuring the members of Black Flag.
Ballot Result (SST, 1987); a double live album whose tracks were voted on by fans.
Post-Mersh, Vols. 1-3 (SST, 1987); the first volume collects The Punch Line and What Makes a Man Start Fires?; the second includes Buzz or Howl and Project Mersh; while the third compiles Paranoid Time, the Joy single, Bean Spill, The Politics of Time, and Tour Spiel.
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, Our Band Could Be Your Life (Little Brother, 1994); features Tsunami, Meat Puppets, Dos, Jawbox, and members of the Beastie Boys, Sebadoh, and Sonic Youth doing Minutemen songs.
HÜSKER DÜ