Back in the late seventies, I broke my jaw in a car accident. It wasn’t my fault–a telephone pole ran out in front of me–but the next thing I knew a physician was wiring my mouth shut, leaving me to mumble like the elderly Don Corleone and forcing me to spend the next six weeks sucking my meals through a straw.
As if that weren’t torture enough, there was my housemate Steds, who sadistically insisted upon consuming colossal Dagwood sandwiches in my presence when my entire diet consisted of cheese soup and vile vanilla protein shakes. This infernal torment went on for five interminable weeks before Steds, dead drunk, fell flat on his face in a Virginia Beach McDonald’s bathroom, and you guessed it–broke his jaw.
Karma, friends, can be a bitch.
That’s a lesson my friend Steds learned back in 1979. It seems that former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra still hasn’t learned it. After all, more than a decade has passed since a jury found Biafra liable for malice and fraud and ordered him to pay $200,000 to his former bandmates following the discovery of inconsistencies in their royalties from Biafra’s record label, Alternative Tentacles, after which they took some karmic revenge of their own by returning to touring under the Dead Kennedys name, hiring a succession of ringers to fill Biafra’s “Fuck the Draft” t-shirt.
This might have been an occasion for Biafra to move on and let bygones be bygones. Jello, though, has opted to remain in the realm of Manusya-gati by ranting and raving in permanent apoplexy. He has denounced the revamped DKs (original members East Bay Ray on guitar, Klaus Flouride on bass, and D.H. Peligro on drums, with Ron “Skip” Greer currently in the role of Biafra manqué) as “the world’s greediest karaoke band” and a “rock’n’roll swindle.” Scariest of all, he has threatened to “hunt down the infidels and lop off their heads with this two-handed battleaxe I got for a song at a Molly Hatchet lawn sale. They’re flirtin’ with disaster!”
Of course, this begs the question as to why any sentient human being would slap down serious shekels to see the current DKs, when they’ve managed to write (but not record) only two new songs in the 12 years since their reformation and replaced their legendary front man with a guy named Skip. Well, actually I can think of at least one good reason to see the gelatin-free DKs, and it’s the fact that you just never know what’s going to happen at a Dead Kennedys show.
The last DKs gig I attended, in Philadelphia in the mid-eighties, turned into a near riot, and as I was leaving a very large unidentified flying object came sailing by at chest-level before crash landing in a twisted heap in a stand of folding chairs. It turned out to be a human being, and one I was certain had gone to meet that other musical test pilot come to a lethal end, John Denver. But instead he disentangled himself from the folding chairs and rose Lazarus-like to his feet, evidently none the worse for wear, at which point I realized I was looking at my Shrek-sized pal Scott Decker, whom I hadn’t laid eyes on in years. In short, the show was a blast and a reunion all in one, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbor the hope that the Dead Kennedys still possessed some of that uncanny ability to inspire magic and mayhem.
Besides, I’ll let you in a secret: I’ve always had my misgivings about Jello Biafra. Sure, he was the band’s songwriting genius and moral compass, and I will always admire him for risking his neck by writing such songs as “Chickenshit Conformist” and “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” which blasted hardcore’s collapse into flex-your-head bloodlust, rampant homophobia, and neo-Nazi thuggery. His has always been a left-wing voice crying in an increasingly right-wing wilderness, and I admire him for that too. In short, Biafra’s heart is in the right place, and that’s a rare commodity on the hardcore scene, or anywhere else for that matter.
That said, I’ve never much cared for Biafra’s sense of humor, which has always struck me as both preachy and snide. And I’ve always been of the opinion that some of the targets of his scathing sarcasm weren’t worth the expenditure of his adamantine spleen. “Winnebago Warrior”? “Trust Your Mechanic”? Really, Jello? That’s the best you got? As for his apocalyptic screeds of the Reagan years, even I–a bat-rabid Bonzo hater if ever there was one–considered many of them hysterically overheated. “Building a police state with the Ku Klux Klan”–Jello, me thinks you’ve been eating those weird berries in the woods you sing about in “Forest Fire.” Finally, I’ve never been enamoured of Biafra’s vibrato, which has always led me to suspect him of being the bastard offspring of a one-night stand between Geddy Lee and a yellow-rumped warbler. I could never figure out why I was so damned ambivalent about the Dead Kennedys–I’ve never owned a DKs album in my life–until the day I realized it was Jello’s Tiny Tim on steroids falsetto.
So who can say, I thought, maybe I’ll like the new Dead Kennedys more than I did the old ones. True, the DKs will always remain but a creative shell of a band without Biafra, no better or worse than other nostalgia acts like Blue Oyster Cult who tour continually but lack the skill or initiative to produce new songs. But even if they are just an oldies band, I was willing to bet that the DKs–especially with the right singer–could still search and destroy live, and that was enough for me.
Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? The show could blow chum. No biggie. Because no matter how bad the show is, I guarantee you I’ve seen worse. To cite a particularly egregious example, I once attended an Emerson Lake and Palmer concert–completely straight. Forget about not talking to strangers; this is the kind of thing parents should warn their children about. “Did you remember your drugs?” they should cry as you’re walking out the door. Why, I’m lucky I lived. The top-secret government research team that examined me afterwards found that “at the very least, Keith Emerson’s pitiless piano prognoodling should have transformed subject into a slobbering simpleton.” As for Carl Palmer’s half-hour gong solo, they hadn’t a clue how I survived it. They finally threw up their hands, concluding that “Subject doesn’t appear to have a brain.”
But let’s get down to the DKs show at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel on February 13. I arrived late due to an unfortunate delay—I dropped a tab of acid, then proceeded to spend the next two hours down on my hands and knees unsuccessfully searching for it—but arrived just in time to see the final opening act, Boston’s The Welch Boys, perform a song the chorus of which went, “Pete Townsend is a pervert/Keep him away from the children.” Properly warned–I planned to promptly cancel a play date my kids had with Pete the next day–I then watched the Dead Kennedys take the stage. And from the opening song on, it saddens me to report, they were a disappointment.
The reason was Skip Greer, who turned out to be a nonentity with a bland voice and negligible stage presence. Greer, who sounded like your typical indie rocker, simply lacked the nasty vocal edge necessary to squeeze the bile out of Biafra’s vitriolic songs. No screams, snarls, or sarcasm for our man Skip; he simply seems too nice a guy. As for the band, it demonstrated that it still possesses that old hardcore magic on such songs as “Holiday in Cambodia,” “California Uber Alles,” “Bleed for Me,” and “Kill the Poor,” not to mention “Police Truck,” “Buzzbomb,” “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” and the inevitable “Viva Las Vegas.” But all of East Bay Ray’s savage guitar riffs couldn’t save the evening, not with Skip’s forgettable cipher of a voice dragging the whole band down.
The guy behind me kept shouting, “Bring back Jello Biafra!” And despite all my complaints about Jello, I actually found myself agreeing with him.
How disappointing was the show, exactly? Let’s just say that my evening’s personal highlight occurred during “Too Drunk to Fuck,” when a fat shirtless guy climbed the stage and then just stood there. Too drunk to fuck? This guy was too drunk to even stage dive. That’s not much of a highlight, and as for low moments, there were plenty. First, the DKs changed the chorus of “MTV Get Off the Air”—a song I’ve never cared for—to “mp3s get off the web.” Now there’s a critical social issue, not. To make matters worse, Greer introduced the revamped song by saying, “You are all responsible for killing the music industry.” Moi? Responsible for the murder of a monstrous money machine that has shoved the likes of One Republic and The Jonas Brothers down our throats? “Guilty as charged!” I shouted with pride.
The DKs also insisted upon performing such forgettable tunes as “Winnebago Warrior” and “Jock-O-Rama,” not to mention “Area 51,” one of the two new songs they’ve managed to squeeze out since they reunited in 2001. It wasn’t much of a song, but look at the bright side—if they continue to write one new song every six years, you could be holding a new Dead Kennedys LP in your hands by around 2070.
The bottom line is, rarely have I been so bummed out as I was watching Skip Greer and company flog a dead Dead Kennedys at the Rock’n’Roll Hotel. Turns out that’s the thing about karma–it keeps going from soul to soul until somebody says enough. That’s the reason I didn’t turn around and torture Steds by eating huge sandwiches in his presence. But when it comes to the long-running Dead Kennedys soap opera, the wheel of karma just goes on spinning. And until the DKs call it quits–or better yet find themselves a singer who can successfully channel the rage of Biafra’s songs–it’s never going to stop, until we all have broken jaws and find ourselves sucking our meals through straws.
Alexandra Lohse contributed invaluable editorial input to this review. I couldn’t have written it without her.
Photos: Richie Downs
