Book Review: Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years by Alex Ogg

Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables:

The Early Years

by Alex Ogg

      “I can’t believe they’d let them name their band something like that.” This was a common parental reaction the first time kids in the 1980s brought home a Dead Kennedys record. I’m not sure who “they” are supposed to be. Is there some committee that decides what band names should be allowed? If there isn’t, I’m sure someone in the Reagan administration tried to set one up in those days of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right pulling the president’s strings. In any case, that aforementioned Dead Kennedys record would either end up on the turntable or in the trash depending on how cool your parents were. Lucky for me, my copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables went straight to the stereo and found its way back there thousands of times since then although I’m sure it was annoying enough to my parents, and my neighbors, that they must have considered tossing it in the garbage quite a few times. This is one band whose music was meant to tear up the world and as rock journalist Lester Bangs said, and I paraphrase, “If it doesn’t bother people, I don’t want to listen to it.” Alex Ogg’s Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years tells the story of how the band got together and what went into their first LP.

It starts off as a band biography. The scheme and layout are predictable. The original band members, Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, and Ted, the drummer later replaced by D.H. Pelligro in later years, get introduced; they mostly didn’t come directly from a punk rock background, but then again in 1978 there wasn’t too much punk around anyways. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that surf music is a huge influence on the DK sound, but it might be more surprising how influential Buddy Holly was in the beginning.

Most of the book is told through interviews with band members and associates so at least a couple points should be obvious from the start. One is that lead singer Jello Biafra is a guy who likes to talk a lot and the other is that conflicting accounts of their history are inevitable. Due to disputes both personal and legal, the band members aren’t talking to each other anymore although East Bay Ray and Klaus Flouride appear to have buddied up in opposition to Jello. Klaus Flouride, by the way, is a great stage name because the guy really does look like a dentist. By the end of the book, you get the sense that Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray are two guys who would be difficult to work with so we’re lucky they got anything accomplished at all.

Maybe it was the friction of the band members that brought out the genius level of punk rockmanship they created. After all, no other punk band in 1978 was creating anything so abrasive, angry, confrontational, fast, loud, aggressive, and calculated for maximum controversy as the Dead Kennedys with the exception maybe of the Germs and Bad Brains. The creative process is a central theme throughout the whole story. While the band members differ in their accounts, it does sound like they did their best work when each members was bringing their own unique style into whatever songs they were working on. That creative, democratic process extended through all aspects of the band including stage performance, artwork, management, and naming the band. And you might be surprised to know that they were not the first band to use the name Dead Kennedys.

The lyrical and artistic themes of DK get a good examination here too. With songs titles like “Kill the Poor”, “California Uber Alles”, and “Holiday in Cambodia” you will easily conclude that this is no ordinary rock band. Jello Biafra’s lyrics are works of satire that prod at the hypocrisy and psychosis of American politics, the pathological greed of capitalism, the bullshit of religion, and the hollowness of American culture. The band members give explanations and analyses of what each song on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is about. This is probably the most useful part of this book for those unfamiliar with the world view and wicked humor of the band.

The anti-commercial stance of the band is looked at also. With the band name, the musical style, and the offensive lyrics, they were almost guaranteed to get no airplay. Dead Kennedys were a calculated attack on the music industry. In the 1970s, DJ’s and record executives were forcing soft rock, over produced riff rock, and disco down the throats of the listening public. Punk rock rose up in defiance of it all, but the record companies couldn’t effectively market it. Even worse, the bands and their audiences were out of control so when Sid Vicious allegedly murdered Nancy Spungen and the Sex Pistols broke up, they gave up and moved on to other genres. This left a huge gap in the music business because the kids wanted something authentic and stimulating. So in starting the music label of Alternative Tentacles, the Dead Kennedys broke ground once again by allowing bands complete artistic freedom, giving them a chance to be heard without being promoted by the commercial music industry. So we got not only the Dead Kennedys and the first two Butthole Surfers releases, but also works of anti-establishment musicianship from bands like The Fartz, Part Time Christians, and The Crucifucks. If you really want something irritating, check out the five song, 12 inch EP by Teddy and The Frat Girls called I Wanna Be a Man. Dead Kennedys would later attack the music industry more in songs like “MTV Get Off the Air”. The suits in the corporate boardrooms have never forgiven Jello Biafra and I’m sure that’s how he wants it.

On a less exciting note, there is a long section of the book that goes into minute details about the recording of DK’s monumental debut album and early singles. The descriptions of studio equipment and techniques is too much to bear. If you don’t know or care about what goes on in the recording studio, this section is a waste of time. A luddite like me can’t understand any of it and in the end, as long as the vinyl sounds good when I play it, I don’t worry about how it was made. But at least you learn the secret of the producer’s identity; he was listed as Norm in the credits of the album. Don’t expect him to produce your album.

Along with the excessive writing about studio techniques, there is a lot of filler in this book. It has a few band photos that vary in quality. There is some collage artwork by Jello Biafra and Winston Smith that also varies in quality. The black and white format and smallish page size detracts from the quality at times. There are also a few too many photos of the sleeves and vinyl pressings of every edition of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and other early singles. Again, they are all in black and white so you can’t really get a feel for how they actually look considering some variants only differ in terms of the colors used. In the end, this project is a little short in content. I don’t know why the author didn’t just make this a full band biography following DK until the time they broke up and a little beyond. The full career of the Dead Kennedys, as well as the artistic output of Jello Biafra and the explosion of the hardcore punk movement didn’t end when Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was released. That was actually the starting point.

A Jungian psychologist might cast the Dead Kennedys as the shadow side of the human psyche. Actually, they fit the trickster archetype a little more closely. The trickster is the mythological figure that brings chaos into the world, only the trickster doesn’t just rip everything up without a purpose. The trickster functions by causing societies to step outside of their conventions in order to re-evaluate their values. The trickster induces a crisis in order to test a society’s ability to sustain itself during times of stress and challenge. Overcoming the trickster’s madness forces a society to progress. In their artistic critique of America, that is exactly what the Dead Kennedys, and other counter culturalists, have done. Look at the legal troubles they had with the PMRC and the inclusion of H.R. Giger’s Penis Landscape poster in their Frankenchrist album. And all of this was set to great music, provocative enough to initiate a turning point and expansion of punk rock as it entered into its second wave, the hardcore years. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables may not be the best punk album ever made, but it is one of the most unique and influential. Alex Ogg captures the spirit of its production along wth the rise of the Dead Kennedys. It probably won’t appeal to people outside the DK fan base, hardcore punk nostalgia junkies and collectors, or music historians. It’s not a great book either, but it does have value as a document of an important LP coming from an important time and place. 

 

Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.