Dear Friends,
My thoughts will soon be my own again. It feels weird. But really, I have shared them with just a handful of people each day. A handful of people that I appreciate greatly, too.
Merry Christmas to you all. Enjoy the day with your people. That’s what I aim to do. I will be thinking of a lot of you today, though. My friends and family…I am nothing without all of you.
*****
I’m on a bit of an island with this one, but my favorite Dead Kennedys record is Frankenchrist.
I don’t know why. Maybe it is the songs, maybe it is the time of my life when I heard it for the first time…maybe it is just the cover art with the old dudes driving mini-cars and they are all wearing a fez.
“We’re sorry, but you’re no longer needed or wanted or even cared about here/machines can do a better job than you/and this is what you get for asking questions” is one of the best opening lines on any of the records I love. “Soup Is Good Food” kicks things off on Frankenchrist and I was in from that point on after the first listen.
In those days, 1985 and 1986, I was on the fence about a lot of things, but never when it came to the Dead Kennedys. I liked them immediately. I liked the name. I liked how Jello Biafra sounded, and I particularly liked what he had to say. He’s a guy I admire a lot and I’ve had some good times with him, too.
I also like the way East Bay Ray (guitar), Klaus Flouride (bass), and DH Peligro (drums) did their thing on this record. I got to share my love of Frankenchrist with DH while we were driving to get a salad from Mad Greens back in 2017 or 2018. He used to call me occasionally because he thought I could convince my friend Tom to put out his solo stuff on Slope Records.
Life is a funny thing sometimes.
I have never gotten a chance to talk to either Ray or Klaus, but you never know. Stranger things have happened in this life and I met yet get that chance. They are fucking rippers and I love to hear them play, but I’ve also never gone to see Dead Kennedys live. I just can’t bring myself to do it. I missed them when I had the chance back in the 80s.
And poor DH died a few years ago. He was a bad ass drummer. I did get to see him play in person and it was a thing of power and beauty.
One of the things about Frankenchrist that I will freely admit now, too, is that I don’t love every song on it. I like them all and I listen to them when I play the record, but my mind can easily drift here and there.
“Hellnation,” for example, is a song I really like but if I never heard it again I wouldn’t miss it. “This Could Be Anywhere (This Could Be Everywhere)” on the other hand is just as good, if not better, than “Soup Is Good Food.” I love Biafra’s lyrics on it.
I stole the first section these, “Kids at school are taking sides/Along color and uniform lines/My dad’s gone and bought a gun/says he’s fed up with crime in this town,” for our Father Figures’ song, “Transparent.” It was an homage, I suppose. The line just worked for what we were doing.
East Bay Ray’s guitar line at the start of “This Could Be Anywhere…” is also just fantastic. It’s not just the beginning, either. He’s awesome on the whole thing.
I love “A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch” and like “Chicken Farm” but “Jock-O-Rama (aka Macho-Rama)” and “Goons of Hazard” just kill it. Musically, I do really dig “A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch” a lot. Ray’s guitar on “Chicken Farm” rules it, too, but those next two are fucking killer.
Biafra’s lyrics on “Jock-O-Rama” are classic. The part where he talks about the star quarterback breaking his neck used to make me giggle when I was in high school. I still find it pretty entertaining.
This probably makes me a bad person.
“Goons of Hazard” into “M.T.V. Get Off the Air” is pretty fucking powerful, too. DH’s drum roll at the beginning of “Goons…” is rad. The latter of the two used to put another smile on my face. MTV ignored so many of us for so long that it was easy to hate them. There was just no money in punk rock for anyone back then.
“At My Job”is a nice set up (and some really good filler) for “Stars and Stripes of Corruption.” I think “Stars and Stripes of Corruption” is one of my all-time favorite songs. It’s such a great punk rock song. Biafra spits out the lyrics in a way that every punk rock singer should learn something from. The band is just cooking on this one.
“Tell me who’s the real patriots/the Archie Bunker slobs waving flags/ or the people with the guts to work for real change?/Rednecks and bombs don’t make us strong/We loot the world/yet we can’t even feed ourselves/our real test of strength is caring/not the war toys we sell the world.”
And these:
“Saying ‘Love it or leave it’/I’ll get beat up if I criticize it/you say you’ll fight to the death to save your useless flag/If you want a banana republic that bad why don’t you move to one?”
And these, too:
“But what can just one of us do/Against all that money and power trying to crush us into roaches?/We won't destroy society in a day/Until we change ourselves first from the inside out/
We can start by not lying so much and treating other people like dirt/It's so easy not to base our lives on how much we can scam/And you know it feels good to lift that monkey off our back!!!”
I added the three explanation points. It was necessary. Those lyrics are so good. As I type this, I realize that I’ve let Biafra hijack this writing and it’s exactly what he would do if given the chance.
Frankenchrist is a great record. That is all. Merry fucking Christmas.
*****
See you tomorrow.
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