Still Kicking

“For one thing the music stands up because [guitarist East Bay] Ray and I had been musicians for a while,” reflects bassist Klaus Flouride, “and Bruce [Slesirger – drums] – who was Ted on [1980 debut] Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables – he’d also played a little bit in bands, and Biafra had played in a band called The Healers or something in Colorado when he was there, but we were all record collectors and we all brought all sorts of different music to the band. Two things really were important to us: a sense of humour and some melodic sensibility of some sort. Most people knew Sex Pistols and the Ramones at the time, and we really didn’t want to be one of those bands so we created our own little template that involved humour, melody and a lot of politics. We were known as a political band by a lot of people, but I think it was mostly social politics – we peek into things that make people act like they do.

“Back then we were looking at things like [child murderer narrative] I Kill Children, which got us into a mess of trouble, and the first album got us into trouble later. The people who got so offended didn’t read the lyrics, and if they had they would have seen that the bridge for instance explains that we’re looking inside the minds of people and why they act this way. I think most of our songs, at least ones like Terminal Preppie, Forest Fire and Well Paid Scientist [from 1982 album Plastic Surgery Disasters] – all that stuff still applies, including unfortunately a lot of the political stuff. We weren’t telling you what to think – and we still aren’t – rather than saying, ‘Here’s some seeds for you to think about’ and just getting them to think. 

“We weren’t just complaining about how fucked up people are we were exploring it, like, ‘Why? What causes this?’ Unfortunately the short answer is always greed and avarice and stuff like that. We were aware that things were fucked up, but we weren’t just saying, ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ – which is wonderful stuff, but it’s not what we were about.”