Dead Kennedys by Alex Ogg

Author:Alex Ogg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2014-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Fallout #4, March 1981, featuring a collage designed by Jayed Scotti.

‘Stealing People’s Mail’ owed much to Biafra’s abiding affection for ’60s garage rock. “That was the first rock ‘n’ roll I ever heard. Even later, when I was blundering into Music Machine, 13th Floor Elevators and Seeds albums for next to nothing in second-hand shops, I realised how much I still liked that music. And how those songs were written and put together in a different way from Led Zeppelin songs. Another inspiration for ‘Stealing People’s Mail’ was the Screamers, too. That was kind of the structure of it; it could be played on a distorted keyboard as well. We even brought Paul Roessler from the Screamers up to play on the studio version of that song, and he wound up doing the solo instead of Ray, who played something completely different live.” Roessler would also provide keyboard accompaniment to ‘Drug Me’ alongside Ninotchka.

In terms of pushing the envelope, the frantic ‘Drug Me’ predicted the lightspeed thrash Dead Kennedys would explore through In God We Trust, Inc. – which in turn became a staging post for the coming ‘hardcore’ generation. ‘Drug Me’ seemed almost a manifesto statement, as if they were pushing themselves musically as far as they possibly could. “I don’t know what we were thinking!” admits Ray. “Nowadays, with ProTools, we could make everything lock up perfectly. But we were just playing it. Now that you mention it, ‘let’s see how fast we can play this and make it still hang together but still rock out?’ I guess there was a little bit of that.” It became something of a rod for their own backs, however. “It was impossible to play that song live,” notes Klaus. “I’ve got videos of us doing it live. We did it, amazingly enough, but I’m sure that was the one we had to record most times in the studio to get it right … sure, we were trying to push as hard as we could. ‘Stealing People’s Mail’ was rippingly fast as well, whereas ‘Let’s Lynch the Landlord’ is pretty straight ahead. If anyone wants to do their study, they can find the roots of that riff real easy.” We’re thinking the Blues Magoos’ old Nuggets classic, ‘(We Ain’t Got) Nothing Yet’.

The lyric to ‘Drug Me’ bounces between the fantastical and the utterly mundane – from ‘fuck machines’ to ‘crossword puzzles’. “Part of what I was getting at was not just chemical additions,” Biafra says, “but what David Thomas of Pere Ubu called ‘Psychobulk’ in his interview with Search And Destroy. That’s where you have television, or some other thing to go in and out of your head, but not be remembered, as kind of a soothing narcotic. That’s the crossword puzzles. And thus trends, and fads and rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t put TV in the lyric, because that’s such an obvious example.”

Its sheer velocity, the evolution was conceptual as well as musical. “Sometimes I have this problem,” notes Biafra, “where

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