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/
Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys
It makes me either too old or too young, depending on the crowd, but here’s the truth: The Dead Kennedys’ 1987 live compilation album Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death was the first cassette tape I ever bought. I didn’t know what a star-belly sneech* was then any more than I do now, but I listened to it over and over on the glitter ghetto blaster I inherited from my last babysitter til it sounded like “Toooooooo Druuuuuunk To Fuuuuuuuck” because the tape was so stretched out. Then, I named my cat after Jello Biafra, even through DK had died before that record was even released.
Biafra was also the first famous person I ever met. He was in Vancouver for the premiere of Terminal City Ricochet at the Capitol 6 on Granville, which I wasn’t allowed into because I was underage. But I went up to him outside and told him about the cat thing. I don’t think he was used to the adulation of tweenage girls, because instead of getting sleazy with me, he just looked perplexed and said, “why’d you go and do that?” 
Biafra is a principled man, his disinterest in adolescent girls notwithstanding. He proved that again on Friday night during a sweaty, sardiney and totally chaotic show at Studio Juste Pour Rire with his new band, Guantanamo School of Medicine. He’s also deadly serious, and the lesson of the night was: If you want something done right, do it yourself. He came out on stage in fine Biafra form, all about the torso props (first a doctors coat and then a garish button-down American flag shirt and finally an Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt), and sweating and shimmying and carrying on like a creepy Southern televangelist, only without the camera crew and the God. But more on that later. He was also possibly wearing blush.
So the moral of the night was DIY, Biafra-style. The crowd was going nuts and the stage was too slippery for “safe” stagediving, which was a matter of some concern since the crowd looked like a Monday night at Foufounes, circa 1986. So after gesturing a couple of times for his goons to wipe it off, Biafra finally grabbed the rag and swabs the floor down himself. Merely a precursor of things to come. There was also some scruffy methhead trying to cause shit, reeling around on stage and giving the finger, and Biafra told the crew to get him out. Second time, clearly having not been ejected from the premises as per Biafra’s request, buddy gets up front and grabs the cord out of the mike. Exasperated, Biafra solves the problem by leaping off the stage mid-lyric and fist first, landing in he middle of the pit, and punching the guy straight to the back and out the front door. Back on stage, he apologizes for the interruption and resumes, mid-lyric, right where he left off.
“Have you ever seen anybody do that?” I scream to my friend.
“Yeah, but not since the ’80s” he screams back.
“Have you ever seen anybody who’s 51 do anything like that?” I scream.
The point of Biafra is just that: He isn’t cooler than anybody, but he’s cooler than everybody, a paunchy middle-aged tattooless guy dressed like an Oregon bricklayer. And that white-dad look is effective as hell when he takes on the personas of the scary neo-cons he impersonates in new songs as well as a revamped California Uber Alles. When he fronted DK back in he ’80s what I loved so much was that it was as much a one-man play as a punk record, with Biafra inhabiting ever more frightening characters from the American pastoral, but from the inside out: somewhere inside Jello’s skin is a Governor Jerry Brown (his aura smiles and never frowns) quavering to burst out, like an alien from Sigourney Weaver’s solar plexus, raining down blood and alternative tentacles on us all.
Rants followed about for-profit incarceration in California (a blight) and gentrification in San Francisco (a bigger blight) and a lovely rendition of Holiday in Cambodia, that resonated much the same as it did in 1987, with the crowd chanting the Pol Pot chorus as if half of us didn’t actually take a holiday in Cambodia ourselves just last year.
For the encores, renditions of the rousing Holiday in Cambodia b-side Police Truck and Nazi Punks Fuck Off! sewed up the night nicely.
*but now I have Wikipedia. Finding out just now that Holiday in Cambodia is as much about Dr. Seuss as Pol Pot takes my Biafraphilia to a whole new level.
by the allmighty Melora Koepke / pictures by the equally allmighty Susan Moss
