An Interview with Jello Biafra on 10.17.2005
Issue 203 / November 2005 More from this Issue
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I have no patience for people who pout in their rooms and say "There's no good music anymore. I wish the Germs would get back together". Go outside! Be curious! I mean a lot of the best shit I've ever heard in my life was completely at random. At first it was the free box at the used record store right near my high school and in later years it was Tim Yohannan's closet at Maximum Rock 'n' Roll where he was selling me anything he didn't think was "punk". It hipped me to Foetus, Public Enemy, and I got all the cool and unclassifiable Japanese music coming out at that point. It was great!
SLUG: You've got Dlek, one of the greatest hip-hop groups no one has ever heard, on the new album ("Dawn of the Locusts (March of the Locusts Deadverse remix)"). How did that collaboration come about?
JB: When people started talking about remixes, (Al) Jourgensen wanted to do one ("Enchanted Thoughtfist (Enchanted Al remix)") and Adam (Jones) from Tool was gonna do one. I figured there's gotta be somebody from the hip-hop world who's gonna want to do this. The engineer I work with in San Francisco, Matt Kelly, works a lot of with Hyroglyphics people and The KU, but none of them really wanted to do it. You, know Melvins' releases are on Ipecac, so Greg Workman at Ipecac -- who used to work at Alternative Tentacles, of course -- asked around a little bit and the Dlek people were like, "Hell yeah!"
SLUG: Oh hell yeah
JB: It's a really good remix, too. It sounds nothing like the original song, and to me that makes it better. To me, if people cover my songs, I always like it best if they mutilate the fuck out of it.
SLUG: What types of demos do people send to Alternative Tentacles?
JB: They cover the musical spectrum. Occasionally, we get aspiring country singers. Of course, we get a lot of horrific sound-alike pop-punk -- sometimes with full-color press kits with law offices as a return address. The real fall out from American Idol -- besides Dead Kennedys' "Viva Las Vegas" mysteriously turning up there behind my back -- is that there are now pushy stage mothers sending American Idol type demos of their teen-age daughters to Alternative Tentacles, of all places, thinking we can somehow make them another American Idol. "Look at her, isn't she pretty? And she's a cheerleader and she's in the French club, and wait 'til you hear her sing "Redneck Woman". I'm not making this up (laughs). The weird thing is that this girl did have a good Country singing voice, but with the shit like that going on, what do you bet that she's going to wind up age 18 or 20, absolutely hating music.
But we get underground hardcore, heavy Melvin-oid shit, psychedelic stuff, hip-hop, you name it. We get demos by the crate-load. I try to keep up with them, partly because of my curiosity as a fan.
SLUG: Can you even laugh at the irony that U2 is considered a "political" band and you're viewed as a terrorist?
JB: I've never heard that direct comparison -- except for (DK guitarist) East Bay Ray justifying suing me, saying we could have gone on for years like REM or U2. But the first time I heard the term "cultural terrorist" was when a suburban daily newspaper around (San Francisco) called me that, and I took it as a badge of honor. I've always had a soft-spot in my heart for pranks, and if my music and my art is one big prank on a corporate anthill society I hate, so much the better (laughs). I'm grateful that anyone's still interested when I'm almost 50 years old; it blows me away that anyone would want to come see me perform after all this time. That sure hasn't happened with a lot bigger names from the '60s, '70s and the '80s. Of course it adds that extra pressure that I better deliver something worth listening to.
Jello Biafra & the Melvins' Sieg Howdy! is out now on Alternative Tentacles.
SLUG: You've got Dlek, one of the greatest hip-hop groups no one has ever heard, on the new album ("Dawn of the Locusts (March of the Locusts Deadverse remix)"). How did that collaboration come about?
JB: When people started talking about remixes, (Al) Jourgensen wanted to do one ("Enchanted Thoughtfist (Enchanted Al remix)") and Adam (Jones) from Tool was gonna do one. I figured there's gotta be somebody from the hip-hop world who's gonna want to do this. The engineer I work with in San Francisco, Matt Kelly, works a lot of with Hyroglyphics people and The KU, but none of them really wanted to do it. You, know Melvins' releases are on Ipecac, so Greg Workman at Ipecac -- who used to work at Alternative Tentacles, of course -- asked around a little bit and the Dlek people were like, "Hell yeah!"
SLUG: Oh hell yeah
JB: It's a really good remix, too. It sounds nothing like the original song, and to me that makes it better. To me, if people cover my songs, I always like it best if they mutilate the fuck out of it.
SLUG: What types of demos do people send to Alternative Tentacles?
JB: They cover the musical spectrum. Occasionally, we get aspiring country singers. Of course, we get a lot of horrific sound-alike pop-punk -- sometimes with full-color press kits with law offices as a return address. The real fall out from American Idol -- besides Dead Kennedys' "Viva Las Vegas" mysteriously turning up there behind my back -- is that there are now pushy stage mothers sending American Idol type demos of their teen-age daughters to Alternative Tentacles, of all places, thinking we can somehow make them another American Idol. "Look at her, isn't she pretty? And she's a cheerleader and she's in the French club, and wait 'til you hear her sing "Redneck Woman". I'm not making this up (laughs). The weird thing is that this girl did have a good Country singing voice, but with the shit like that going on, what do you bet that she's going to wind up age 18 or 20, absolutely hating music.
But we get underground hardcore, heavy Melvin-oid shit, psychedelic stuff, hip-hop, you name it. We get demos by the crate-load. I try to keep up with them, partly because of my curiosity as a fan.
SLUG: Can you even laugh at the irony that U2 is considered a "political" band and you're viewed as a terrorist?
JB: I've never heard that direct comparison -- except for (DK guitarist) East Bay Ray justifying suing me, saying we could have gone on for years like REM or U2. But the first time I heard the term "cultural terrorist" was when a suburban daily newspaper around (San Francisco) called me that, and I took it as a badge of honor. I've always had a soft-spot in my heart for pranks, and if my music and my art is one big prank on a corporate anthill society I hate, so much the better (laughs). I'm grateful that anyone's still interested when I'm almost 50 years old; it blows me away that anyone would want to come see me perform after all this time. That sure hasn't happened with a lot bigger names from the '60s, '70s and the '80s. Of course it adds that extra pressure that I better deliver something worth listening to.
Jello Biafra & the Melvins' Sieg Howdy! is out now on Alternative Tentacles.
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