Satiristas

  Unfortunately, the real impact was on the marketplace. Only after the charges were dismissed did all these chain stores kick out anything with the Dead Kennedys or the Alternative Tentacles label on it. So, in that sense, Tipper and her goons succeeded in damaging us in the marketplace and intimidating retailers into not stocking other things that might be controversial, out of fear that they might get busted.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s what happened to Lenny Bruce. Club owners were afraid they’d get shut down, so they stopped booking him.

  JELLO BIAFRA: And most of those kinds of club owners never book me to this day. Plus I have a policy of avoiding—like the plague—Clear Channel, Live Nation, and other monopolies like that. Luckily, one of the important things that punk gave us, besides the music, was bringing back the old DIY ethic: do it yourself. If nobody will put your music out, put it out yourself. If nobody will publish what you write, publish it yourself. If nobody will bring the people you wanna see to your town, put the show on yourself.

  PAUL PROVENZA: George Carlin. Lenny Bruce…You’re one of the few artists who actually went head-to-head with the government in a First Amendment case.

  JELLO BIAFRA: The prosecution was very openly trying to chop the First Amendment down. That’s why they charged me not as a member of Dead Kennedys but as the owner of the label who put out the CDs, as a manufacturer. They were deliberately experimenting with the law to see who they could convict in order to scare the shit out of any other distributor who would attempt to even sell something like this to a store in the future.

  Tipper Gore lied through her teeth all the time, saying she didn’t want to get musicians busted and that they weren’t against the First Amendment, but a year or two later, who’d they go after with an even bigger attack? Hip-hop artists, specifically the political ones. They went after Public Enemy, Ice-T, N.W.A…. “Oh my God, our sheltered middle-class teenagers aren’t just listening to political music, but by black musicians! We can’t have this.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Having fought for your First Amendment rights, what’s your reaction when people say, “America’s not perfect, but it’s still the freest place on earth.”

  JELLO BIAFRA: They haven’t been to too many other countries, have they? Just cross the border into Canada and you’ll see how even their avowedly more conservative newspapers have a lot more actual content in them than newspapers here. That kind of lack of content is censorship.

  America has a far less free press than many other countries. You can write anything you want to, but who’s going to publish it? Sure, you can put anything you want on the Internet until somebody complains and MySpace, Facebook, or Google take it down. You can say anything you want to—as long as nobody gets to read or hear it.

  Even though you’ve reached adulthood, you’re not really done with being spanked and sent to the principal’s office.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Are we actually involved in our political process or is it a machine that’s too much bigger than us?

  JELLO BIAFRA: It is a machine that’s bigger than us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sabotage it. It’s like sticking a pin in the foot of an elephant or something. There’s all kinds of ways to fight back. You can fight back through your words, through your art. You can fight back by refusing to give any of your money to chain stores or global corporate predators.

  Nobody can be as pure as the driven snow about that unless they wanna go crazy in a cabin in the woods like the Unabomber did, but I tell people it’s important to unplug from the corporate food chain, but don’t become a fundamentalist about it. Fundamentalists turn people off to good ideas. Or they’re the first to find they’re making themselves miserable. They see things in such a humorless, black-and-white way that the only way they can see out is to go completely in the other direction. Like the singer of a militant anarchopunk hard-core band I knew, whom I hadn’t run into for years; I asked him, “What’ve you been doing all these years?”

  He said, “I’m a stockbroker.” And he saw the look on my face and said, “Well…I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  It doesn’t have to be that way. If you only go this far instead of all the way on the radical meter, sure some people will put you down for not doing enough, but you’re much more likely to hang on to your ethics and ideals if you pick a moral, ethical code and lifestyle you can actually live with and live up to in the long term.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you still speak about religion and the religious Right?

  JELLO BIAFRA: Not in as much depth as I did when I was linking them to Tipper Gore and the real goals of all the people who want to censor our thoughts and sexual desires and start with music.

  Allen Ginsberg made a good point to me once: “The reason they always go after sex and what’s ‘obscene’ is because they know if they choke that off in you, even in your own mind, it’ll make it easier for them to control the rest of your mind. That’s what religion is.”

  People ask, “If America’s really as insane as you think it is, why haven’t you fled and live elsewhere?”

  I say, “I like being in the belly of the beast.”

  I like living in a country where people are so off the wall that a preacher in Niles, Ohio, is arrested for burning an Easter Bunny in the public square because he thought it was a pagan god. Or a woman from the National Abstinence Clearing House in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, goes to public schools telling kids not to have sex, while wielding rubber snakes named Herbie Herpes, Albert AIDS, Poor Pregnant Peggy Sue, and Lucy Loss of Reputation.

  There’s just that twisted edge to America that fascinates me. “Home is where the disease is,” that’s what I say.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In what ways can someone who can’t be in their own Dead Kennedys, can’t go to court to defend their rights, put that pin in the elephant’s foot?

  JELLO BIAFRA: Just to keep doing what we’re doing and not be afraid. It’s not just about voting.

  Whether we’re musicians, stand-ups, spoken-word artists, painters, whatever—we’re artists whose viewpoints people take seriously. More seriously than they take the views of corporate McNews, in fact, otherwise our corporate lords wouldn’t be so afraid of us. That’s the power we have: people listen to us.

  Pinochet was so afraid of the power of artists that one of the first people he had executed—after our own Henry Kissinger helped him take over Chile—was a folk singer, Victor Jara. He was executed for the words in his songs and what he meant to people there. That’s the power we have, and we’ll always find new ways to use it. We’ll always find new ways to sabotage what our corporate lords want everybody to accept as the only available entertainment or factual news.

  We can’t lose focus on the most important part of all—especially if we’re working with humor: we have to be able to laugh. We have to be able to have fun with what we’re doing, even if it’s about a deadly serious subject. I know I’ve written a good song when I’m just laughing with glee at how proud I am of what I’ve just created. If it’s something that really makes me laugh and feel evil again, I know I’m succeeding.

  Supposedly, you’ve become more of an adult or more grown-up when you stop shooting spit wads at your teacher. Well, some of us never outgrow that and find new outlets for that part of our personalities, because that’s the part of our personalities we liked in the first place. In some ways, I’m a very immature person—but that’s also a good thing, because I’ve never become the kind of adult that I find colossally boring.

  I’ve gone further out of my way than most of my peers to take on the industry itself and refuse to cooperate with it. The band’s name was Dead Kennedys, thus ensuring no major-label contract for us. It’s also given me the label “hard to work with” by some elements in Tinseltown, but that’s exactly the kind of “hard to work with” that I think is important. No, you can’t put my music in some stupid-ass Levi’s commercial. No, I won’t automatically agree to have one of my songs used in a rape scene in a Tarantino movie. It may give me a bad reputation
in some circles, but it’s exactly the kind of reputation enjoyed by the artists I respect the most.

  CHEECH & CHONG

  CHEECH & CHONG set the comedy world of the seventies ablaze with their unabashed celebration of the stoner counterculture. Wildly popular, they quickly made the leap to now-cult films like Up in Smoke and Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie. Following a mutually acrimonious breakup, Cheech Marin shed his outlaw-stoner stage persona, going on to mainstream film and television success in movies like Born in East L.A. and The Lion King, and TV shows like Nash Bridges and Lost. Tommy Chong’s outlaw stage persona ceased to be a persona when he was raided by federal officials in 2003, arrested, and charged with distributing drug paraphernalia, as part of a high-profile crackdown in the ongoing saga of America’s “war on drugs.” For disturbing reasons, Chong pleaded guilty, paid a $20,000 fine, and served nine months in prison—his conviction due in large part to their comedy from over thirty years ago. Since then, Cheech & Chong staged a reunion tour, are making a new film, and are helping a very uptight country learn once again to just…exhale.

  TOMMY CHONG: We always thought of ourselves as a band, really. When we started, we actually used to refer to ourselves that way when we booked gigs, because we played places that would only book bands. So we’d say we were “a band.”

  CHEECH MARIN: When we got there they’d find out we were a band that did comedy.

  TOMMY CHONG: We actually did have a band at first. We thought we’d do a little comedy, and we just never did get around to playing.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You guys were one of the first and loudest voices of the counterculture in comedy at the time. Comedy was becoming more alternative, but you weren’t just alternative comedians; you were something very particular within that. You helped define in stand-up the shift in culture in general—which didn’t really exist in comedy yet as it had so strongly in music. Carlin, Pryor, Robert Klein, and you were becoming it.

  CHEECH MARIN: We came at it from a kind of “foot soldier” point of view. We were the dog soldiers of the Cultural Revolution, the grunts in the trenches. But it was just our point of view, and we just did what we did from there.

  TOMMY CHONG: We started out in a strip club so we could say or do anything we wanted to, ’cause it wasn’t like we were gonna shock anyone. Plus…the truth is the truth, you know? So there were no repercussions.

  When we got into playing different venues, especially in Los Angeles, political correctness maybe played a part. Cheech playing Pedro, the Chicano? I didn’t know it at the time and I don’t think Cheech knew it at the time, but it upset a lot of, y’know…Chicanos.

  CHEECH MARIN: Not a lot…Most Chicanos loved that. It was their character; they were being represented. They never were before.

  PAUL PROVENZA: College audiences were your core crowd back then, but if you play colleges now, there’s a laundry list of things that you’re not supposed to talk about, and first on that list is anything glorifying drugs.

  TOMMY CHONG: Back then, we were hired because of our drug point of view!

  CHEECH MARIN: Maybe soon it’ll turn around again and they’ll start producing thinkers instead of engineers, which is what’s happening right now. All the system seeks is engineers for the machine. It’ll come around again, though. The pendulum is already starting to swing back, I think.

  PAUL PROVENZA: And it’s that current climate that really was behind your recent bust, Tommy, in that they reached back in time to all the glorifying of pot you both did thirty years ago, and busted you now essentially for that.

  TOMMY CHONG: Yeah, totally. I had the audacity to still be doing what I did before and be non-repentive. I just carried on doing what I knew was right; that’s really what I got busted for.

  And the weird thing is, Cheech & Chong were one of the big reasons marijuana could never have gotten legalized back then. We became kinda like scapegoats for the anti-marijuana people, who would always point to us as representing what would happen if it was legal. Even though we were doing these extreme characters, not the “average” or typical pot smoker, they used what we were doing as those characters as an example of what would actually happen if you let people smoke pot.

  So it really cracked me up that in the indictment they said that I’m a danger to society and they were putting me in jail because we made movies like Up in Smoke all those years ago.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That irony aside, didn’t that statement in the indictment make it a First Amendment case more than a contraband case? And you still chose not to fight it, even on that basis?

  TOMMY CHONG: Totally. See, the thing is, if I had fought it, I would have won. I would have won hands down. I would have walked away. But they blackmailed me. They threatened my wife and they threatened my kids. This was the government saying, “If you don’t give up and plead guilty to one count, we’re going to go after your wife and kids and charge them, too, and we’re going to make all your lives hell.” So…

  CHEECH MARIN: And he thought about that the whole time he was in prison. “Hmmm…Did I…? You know, maybe…What if…?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Given that we’re still dealing with legal issues like that, when you’re doing a lot of those original characters and bits now, does it feel like it’s still relevant?

  CHEECH MARIN: You know what? It feels like they’re classics. Like we’re going out and performing the Frank Sinatra Songbook. The things we did really didn’t have a time and a place; they’re kind of evergreen. We updated some to what is going on right now, and Tommy does a lot of stand-up between the Cheech & Chong bits, so we stay somewhat current that way, but the bits that we do together kind of have that timeless quality about them.

  TOMMY CHONG: And they’ve been polished and reworked and done for so many years, they’re gems. It transcends the normal comedic thing, you know?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Since not much has changed around marijuana since then, do you think performing that material now makes as much of a political statement today as it did back in the day?

  TOMMY CHONG: Actually, if we start heading anywhere near any obvious political statement, we get shouted down by our own audience! We were Obama supporters in the last election—of course, who else were you going to support?—but the minute I’d start going in that direction, McCain supporters—which were half the crowd!—shouted me down. They loved Cheech & Chong, but they were McCain supporters, too. As well as Obama supporters, Ron Paul supporters…

  CHEECH MARIN: The fact of the matter is that 80 percent of the audience who come to see us is between thirty and forty, which means they weren’t even born yet the last time we were onstage. So they’ve known Cheech & Chong in the abstract, just from movies and TV and our records. They’re not the same audience we had back then.

  TOMMY CHONG: And back then, because of Vietnam and the draft, everybody was forced into taking a political stance, and pretty much the whole younger generation was forced into being against the war, which meant that everyone in our crowd was against Nixon. But there’s no draft now, so we got McCain voters and Obama voters in our crowds now. You would’ve thought that if we mentioned Obama in the show during election time everyone would’ve gone, “Yeah!” But that wasn’t the case at all. At all.

  CHEECH MARIN: Cheech & Chong have become like butter. Everybody likes butter. There’s no one type of person who likes butter. You don’t have to have a political affiliation to like butter. And we transcend ethnic categories, socioeconomic, political persuasions…everything.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Aren’t we led to believe that those thirty-and forty-year-olds are a big part of those who vote against decriminalization? Who supposedly support keeping it criminalized?

  CHEECH MARIN: Depends on who’s writing the press, ’cause I find it just the opposite.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you feel that most people believe the war on drugs in general, and marijuana specifically, is kind of ridiculous?

  CHEECH MARIN: If they’re smoking dope in our shows, yes.

  TOMMY CHONG
: You know, when I got busted, it was my experience that people only pay attention to what affects them. There are so many people that had no idea that I was busted, or why I went to jail, or what it means in the bigger picture in this country. Nowadays people only worry really about what affects them.

  You’d be surprised how so many people are so uninformed, don’t watch the news. I’m a news junkie and Cheech is a news junkie, so we stay up to date on everything—especially since we’re in comedy, we have to be. But when you meet the average person, they don’t have a clue about anything really, except what bothers them specifically, you know? What affects them directly.

  Who’s keeping it criminalized is the law enforcement officials—because it’s their gig. Half the people in prison are in there for drugs. Locking people up is big business. I was part of the private prison industry—firsthand.

  It’s not only owned by private corporations, but the corporations change their names periodically to avoid lawsuits. When I was in jail, the corporation name went from Wackenhut to Geo.

  CHEECH MARIN: Did you say “Whackin’ It”?

  PAUL PROVENZA: That would be a perfectly appropriate name for a prison.

  TOMMY CHONG: And I was also in prison with a lot of people who are there because it’s a financial thing, too—like for not paying taxes. I was there with tons of people who had said, “Hey, you don’t have to pay taxes.” And they’re sitting there, rotting in jail forever.

  Take forfeiture laws, for instance: millions of dollars that never get reported. Friends of mine got busted with millions of dollars of cash and weed, and all they did was take them to the station and put them in a room while they went and raided their houses. They grabbed all the cash and drugs, came back, and said, “Get out of here,” and my friends just walked away. Nobody ever knew about the millions of dollars. No one knew about the pot, which the DEA and law enforcement themselves just went ahead and sold. They’re one big criminal enterprise themselves. While I was in prison, this guy from Colombia told me about a “secret” airstrip there that the DEA flies out of daily. Now, who searches the DEA when they land a plane full of drugs in America?