By Jon Randall
Jello Biafra: In one form or another.
GM: I recorded Social Distortion once at the compound, and the background noise level was so bad I kept hearing this British voice demanding Slitz. And Mike Ness was of coarse, you know ...
JB: Of Course. I'm very disturbed by people who amputate their talent through drug abuse.
GM: Are you a believer in Straight Edge? It sounds like military camp to me.
JB: Yes and no. The people who did that did it as a rejection of singles bar values. They just wanted to take their bands out of the public stage and it just took off from there. I notice that when we're touring I lose my stamina and my temper much quicker if I drink then if I don't. And I learned at our first gig that drugs slow me down. I took speed and my lungs started working so fast I couldn't breath. It was an experience I don't want to continue.
GM: I've never seen anyone manifest as much hyperactivity as you do on stage. You and Henry Rollins are the two most hyperactive performers I've seen. It's hard for me to fathom how you can do that. We pianists think we're put upon when we work so much with our arms; but with your whole body it must be like you're almost put into a trance.
JB: I suppose it is because you have your adrenaline working, and the more drugs you
do the less adrenaline you're going to have.
GM: How do you feel about minority businesses, like Blacks and Gays, who open up businesses exploiting their own group?
JB: It doesn't happen much in Boulder, Colorado, where I was born, raised, and escaped. But here maybe. That section of the gay community can give gay people as a whole a bad name. I use this term community loosely, because those people who jack up their prices because they're in a certain neighborhood selling to a certain clientele, who's programmed to buy certain things; they're basically ripping off their own people and telling them it's cool because they have the same sexual preference.
GM: Isn't it the same in the Black community? When the initial John Shabazz period got over with and there started to be exploitation of Blacks by Blacks; that having a Black owned business was enough to make it cool.
JB: Well, I think that always happened. I noticed that after we were in Australia for a few weeks, three croissant shops had opened in the Market-Castro area. It cost a buck-fifty for a piece of bread shaped like a half moon. With cheese that made it up to two-eighty. People who rip off their own people like that have no business crowning themselves as oppressed minorities, and asking people to do their bidding on account of it.
Those feelings go across the board. I look at the human race from both a positive and negative point of view; meaning that you can't have a business charging twice as much for something just because you're from the same peer group. It's like going to so-called punk rock stores and finding Salvation Army clothe for twenty dollars. Why bother?
GM: This leads to, although I'd like to get back to this point because I think you're expressing it very well, is the historical perspective of punk, which to me, pretty much came out of the Sex Pistols.
JB: No, that was English punk, and that had a definite effect over here, but the rumblings had begun slightly parallel in America. First there was the short lived "glitter" era, which never caught on, with the New York Dolls and David Bowie. I would have to include the New York Dolls because they were a garage band with songs that were simple and easy to play. That's an important factor in any musical movement that's really going to make an impact. It failed because it was too pink for the average K-mart heavy metal fan; and more importantly you had to be wealthy to afford the buy the rebellious fashions to conform within the glitter scene.
Out of that came the Ramones that brought an early punk look to American underground music in '76, '77. A more direct influence with them were the stooges, and Iggy Pop made a big come back at that time.
Then the English punk scene injected a youthfulness into it, because most of the New York punks were left over form the glitter scene. This brought it over to people my age, I was about 18 at the time. The Sex Pistols sung about destroying the system and destroying consumer society, and at least trying to take problems into your own hands, even if it was just a short term solution. As the Ramones were trying to bring back the teenage cars and girls innocence in an urban setting, without the cause. Thus, the sharper edge of the sword which was the Sex Pistols, caught on in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well.
GM: Who was your biggest influence when you first started going?
JB: Well, and early influence was the Ramones, I saw them when I was in Denver, Colorado. They were opening for a top-40-to-be band called Night City, and here came the country rock crowd with their Joni Mitchell curly hair with flowers stuck in it, and nice sweaters and corduroy jackets. And the Ramones came on with grungy leather jackets and torn jeans, defining a uniform in a sense. And when Johnny hit the first chord the 10 of us in the front row who knew who the Ramones were, knew this was going to be much more extreme then the record gave us any right to expect. And not only were they the most powerful thing I'd seen to that date, but they were getting across a crucial message, which was, "hey, we're human, anybody can do this." The music is easy to play, the guys just gets up and sings. We can beat the guy next door.
GM: It's interesting that was also part of the hippie movement. Anyone could get
bongos and flutes and play music.
JB: No, anyone could get the instruments but it had to be fairly improvisational in a later jazz sense. Where as the 60's garage punk movement that preceded the psychedelic era, was much more primal and required the use of the least amount of consumer goods to make the most amount of noise.
GM: Do you think punk has met a dead end with generic thrash?
JB: Not all thrash is generic. Keep in mind that any music is going to have people who start out generic until they get enough confidence to sprout their own wings. That is why I encourage even the generic people as long as they don't think that they're the greatest thing in the world and they're unique.
GM: Do you think the skinheads and the punks are becoming like the Dead Heads, as they're like mastodons frozen in Siberia?
JB: I'd have to say yes. The Grateful Dead never struck a very responsive chord with me. I liked Saint Stephen until they went into the 20 minute improvisational part. America has a very disposable culture, and even if people are punks or Deadheads until they're 40 years old, their outer halloween costume may not change, but many of their values will change drastically. While their children will try to do the exact opposite of what they did.
GM: I think a lot of these nine year old punklets may grow up to be stock brokers
like the hippie children.
JB: That wouldn't surprise me. There is a punk group in New York called Artless, that sing a song called, "When you're my age you'll be selling life insurance." The singer is one of the more punkier people I know, at least in the mind, and he's 43 years old.
GM: I think being punk now is what being Bohemian used to be. What people are trying to explain is the same thing from 1840, which is running against society in prevailing roads. Age has nothing to do with it.
JB: I think the good thing about punk versus the later hippie thing is it never caught on, and the straight media has never found a way to market it and water it down for the average mall consumer who won't ask questions. While in England the Sex Pistols were on the top 40 charts. There are cliches you can opt to in England to be a chart toping punk band. You can't do that here. Which means the first punk people who popped out of the wood-work were warped and crazy; I mean that in a complementary sense. And here in America you find more of the authentic bizarre people interacting with the scene. But if we were as big as the Clash right now you might not see that. People would have found more dangerous things to do.
GM: Does that mean it's a contradiction in terms to be a successful punk band?
JB: In a way that's true. We may be more successful than others but you can ask the people who try to collect my rent and they'll tell you I'm not always on time. I suppose the people who've ripped off our T-shirt designs and bootlegged our records have made a lot more off Dead Kennedys than we have. It may be a measure of our success that we've never been accepted in the San Francisco counter-culture-elite like Jefferson Starship.
GM: I think hippies and punks may be like fascists and communists. They may both be out of society equally but they hate each other's guts.
JB: That might not be so much as it was. Because the handful of pure activists from the 60's who didn't sell out are realizing that punks are the ones to supply most of the man power for counter activities at Democratic conventions. The only danger I see is the resolve of the punks being co-opted by the organized left who never want to go too far, for fear of angering the cops.
GM: Coming from a Communist background, I ran into this hard-core punk named Dumper
Dan who introduced me to the scene, and my initial instinct was to organize squadrons
of punks to do aesthetic guerrilla work like blowing up the Vaillancourt fountain.
I thought this would be ideal because it would bring public support for the punk movement.
JB: Yes and no. But blowing up anything considered an art object, even if it's a piece of shit is not going to bring public sympathy. If some schlock statue gets sprayed with graffiti the mayor is up in arms.
GM: But that has nothing to do with the will of the people, or beauty or art or anything else. Some trendy cocktail party group had it built. There should be aesthetic guerrilla's ...
JB: Cultural terrorists in other words. We've always tried to function as cultural terrorists in our music. I have mixed feelings about using dynamite because the people likely to get hurt are the employees, not the employers. It would most likely incite public wrath because the corporate newspapers would come down against it. Like some self styled nazi in Santa Rosa drove a swastika mobile in a high school parade and the punks got the credit for it.
GM: I'd like to talk about the Born Again punks. A lot of punks are turning to Christianity after bad drug experiences involving speed and acid.
JB: It's basically if you run away from home at an early age and you need someone
to talk to, so you're going to be looking for security blankets. Basically, going
from drugs to Christianity; and either way you become a strung out zombie who's completely useless in the creativity department. There's a group of Christians in L.A who basically function as an arm chair street gang. Most Jesus freaks try to beat you over the head with "Jesus loves you," with glassy-eyed smiles while this a macho 
"let's beat the shit out of Satan" thing. It's one of the many state approved terrorist groups trying
to co-opt the punk movement, plus the easiest way to get rid of people is through
drugs. Most of the people who inspired me to get into the punk movement aged 15 years
in six months, so I was swayed to say no most of the time. Some of those people got
out of that to lead more healthy disrespectful lives, while others ended up vegging
out on the couch talking about how it's not like it used to be.
Now the major drug around here is speed -- the favorite drug of reverend Jim Jones, which has brought out similar paranoia in people I've known. When I did it I became an emotional wreck and a crybaby for a week afterward. I decided, "fuck this," I get a lot better feeling out of accomplishment then cheap-ass escape. This isn't any better than frat boys drinking beer, let's do something else.
GM: Are your collage posters a result of using speed?
JB: No. Off and on it took about a month to do the Plastic Surgery disaster one, with Winston Smith who helped me do that in his house in Colorado by candlelight, because he didn't have any power up there. The Fresh Fruit poster was done in a sixteen hour period with no drugs involved.
GM: Do you consider punk to be more a musical or political animal? Punk doesn't mean a thing. The real punks seem to be defined by political activities and have much broader musical tastes than the suburban posers.
JB: Punk is still the generally accepted term for that which is dangerous. People
can say punk is dead, but Big Band music isn't dead in that sense. Punk won't be
dead until something more dangerous replaces it. When someone has found out how to
make industrial music teenage then that will be the new element of danger in a couple years.
GM: What I've been doing is making punk disco, which is the easiest thing to do in the world. I can program Colombian beats and cover it with seditious lyrics.
JB: My wife could do that with you, she knows all the Carmen Miranda tunes and she's a great singer. But you have to look out for that. Disco is the government's music because it's sedate and doesn't make you think. Even if you put seditious lyrics to it. Early Human League lyrics were pretty seditious but people still shook their asses to it instead of shaking loose the spider webs in their heads.
MP: Well, you know the Plato idea about how when the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake.
JB: That's why the Ayatollah banned music entirely in Iran. In this case all intelligent and interesting music has been banned because it stimulates the brain. Instead we get Berlin and in the 70's we had the Eagles. It's all music designed to make us as stupid as possible, and to go hand it hand with the television shows and the USA Today style newspapers which are also designed to make people stop thinking.