Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version - Marian Kester

 DEAD KENNEDYS - THE UNAUTHORIZED VERSION - MARIAN KESTER

Another one of those scrapbook-type books but this time on the Dead Kennedys. Vocalist Jello Biafra has recently suffered from a stroke though by all reports he's slowly but thankfully recovering, so now is probably as good a time as any to revisit this: Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version, written by Marian Kester.

Jello is 68 years-old now and the last time I saw him was around the year 2000 when he appeared at the London Anarchist Bookfair, down at the Conway Hall. The night before, he'd stayed at a friend's house in Bristol who told me he'd found Jello to be a bit strange, though that was okay by me because after all - it's Jello Biafra!

I was manning a stall at the bookfair and the place was heaving. I knew that Jello was there but I thought he'd maybe just come along to pick up a few books or at best to do a talk in one of the meeting rooms? What I didn't expect was for him to get up on the stage and deliver a long speech-type rant to the assembled hordes. And neither did anyone else. Unannounced and (as far as I knew) uninvited, there he was: some guy with a funny American accent up on the stage telling the largest, genuinely anarchist crowd he'd probably ever encountered in his life just what was wrong with the world and what we all needed to be doing about it. I looked around and it was obvious that most people there didn't have a clue who he was and were thinking 'Who the fuck is this?' It was pretty embarrassing.

Maybe it was a cultural misunderstanding thing? Maybe Jello felt he was at just another concert? Maybe he genuinely felt that he knew best and needed to enlighten us? But did he not think it strange that of all the people there, that he was the only one important enough to mount the stage and explain everything to us as if we were one of his audiences? To put it gently, there was a slight lack of self-awareness on Jello's part that day, it seemed to me.

Relaying this anecdote is not to diminish the brilliance and even the importance of the Dead Kennedys as a band, but it's just to show we all have our flaws - though most us us don't usually choose to flaunt them in a self-important fashion from a stage in front of our peers in a weird-sounding Walt Disney-character-type voice.

Musically, the Dead Kennedys were really good. Politically they were... interesting. You think of the Dead Kennedys and you think of East Bay Ray's distinctive guitar-playing. You think of the Dead Kennedys and you think of Jello Biafra's politics as amplified by his vibrato vocals. The music carried the politics, the politics supported the music, and combined a force of exuberant energy was created.

Printed in 1983, Dead Kennedys - The Unauthorized Version is, unfortunately, a bit of a cash-in. A vanity project, even. It's a muddle and a bit of a mess due to appearing not to know quite what its purpose is. A lot of the photos are lacklustre and the reproductions of Winston Smith's artwork are uninspiring. The interesting thing about it, however, is that it's almost a meditation on the Dead Kennedys. An attempt to try and understand what the Dead Kennedys are about and what they might represent. The writer, however, is on a hiding to nothing.  

Tucked away in the text of the book there's a line that acts as a clue as to why trying to pin down the Dead Kennedys is a fruitless task and to my mind it says a lot about them as a band: 'Perhaps being political in the US means choosing which conspiracy to believe in?'

For a band whose name rests on one of the biggest conspiracy theories in the world, led by a singer whose whole trip was to raise conspiracy theories as semi-alternatives to the New World Order and then shoot them all down; well, to try and come up with a viable explanation of what the band meant is like trying to nail-down jelly. Or jello. 

For all that, I'll say again, the Dead Kennedys were a brilliant band whose impact has been significant. Moreover, their song Police Truck is sublime: 'The Left newspapers might whine a bit, but the guys at the station they don't give a shit. Dispatch calls, "Are you doing something wicked?" No siree, Jack, we're just giving tickets. Let's ride, how we ride. let's ride, low ride.'

And not to mention, the lyrics to Holiday In Cambodia still stand as almost perfect punk lyrics, up there with the best of them: 'Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz on your five grand stereo... You're a star-belly sneech, you suck like a leech, you want everyone to act like you. Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich, but your boss gets richer off you...................      Pol Pot!!! 

John Serpico