JELLO BIAFRA

The long-lost interview.

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Yup. Jello Biafra. I know, I know. It's pretty crazy, right? Right.

We had a chat back in November of 2021(?!) and then life really got in the way and majorly delayed this thing. And then it got lost. And life got even more weird. Seriously, though, life was a real shitbutt for a minute, but things are seemingly back on track, which is why this is finally happening... again... now.

Oh, and it's probably a little bit weirder than you'd expect. Or maybe not. I don't know. Whatever.

So, here goes.

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Intro: The Cat Who Opens Doors

Hüsker Foöd: Hello, yes, Jello?

Jello Biafra: That's me.

Hüsker Foöd: Yessir. How're you?

Jello Biafra: Okay, sorry about this. [talking to cat] What are you doing? This cat has learned how to open doors. Now she's gonna open the sliding closet door, then she's gonna climb up the middle of it and get on something above the door, and then figure out what to do and hopefully not knock a million things over jumping off. Not every cat has been such a climber, but this one really is. I just hope she never masters doorknobs — she can open everything else now.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, wow.

Jello Biafra: Yeah.

Hüsker Foöd: That's equal parts impressive and scary, I think.

Jello Biafra: And puts records in danger. Nothing like pulling your body across the tops of 45s in a tight space and putting your claw in the groove of a record to get yourself there and breaking one every once in a while.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah. That would be bad.

Jello Biafra: Alright. Are we recording?

Hüsker Foöd: Yes. Yes, I was going to ask if that was okay for transcribing...

Jello Biafra: Well, obviously I wouldn't do it otherwise.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: So, are you sure it's recording?

Hüsker Foöd: Yes, it's definitely recording.

Jello Biafra: I mean, we can always play it back to find out if you want, because I'm only going to do this once — but if you really think we're good, then on we go.

Hüsker Foöd: Yes, we are good. First off, thank you for doing this. I have like 17 readers, so it's not like you're really reaching a wide audience here.

Jello Biafra: Oh my god...

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: No. I'm jo... It's a few more than that, thankfully.

Jello Biafra: I would hope so. I can only do so many interviews. So I do try not to do everything — like high school term papers and all that. Be it another book about anarchy, or a doc about a band, I'm the last person you interview. Because some of those people never get 'em done anyway, and that weeds them out.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah. So, I'm here to actually ask about — how did you ever find out about Heino and "Komm in meinen Wigwam?"

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: The part I love about that song, specifically, is his pronunciation of "Sioux City Sue" — which is "SEE-uhks City Sue."

Jello Biafra: Oh, I hadn't caught that one. You can only listen to Heino so much in any given millennium.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Thanks to you, I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube and somehow found that song, and then a buddy of mine actually had a copy of his greatest hits. And I was like, "Wow! This is now one of my prized possessions!"

Jello Biafra: Yeah, well, somehow you knew that I knew about Heino. Basically, I'd wondered who on earth he was ever since I saw one of those albums with this über-Aryan blonde dude with those shades on on the cover, mixed in the import bin with all the European prog and Krautrock albums. I wondered what on earth this could be.

On Heino

Jello Biafra: It certainly isn't what I was looking for. Years later — I can't remember if it was my long-gone ex-wife or some other circumstance — his Super Hits album came into the house around, I don't know, '82, maybe '83.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh wow.

Jello Biafra: And I was like, "Oh, this guy. Let's see what on earth he actually is."

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah.

Jello Biafra: And immediately it was some of the schmaltziest music I had ever heard. But I noticed the production was full-blown — the whole kitchen sink, like you'd get on an ABBA record — everything was used.

Hüsker Foöd: Exactly.

Jello Biafra: Naturally, there were choirs, saw noises, hula guitar. A song about Hawaii. And maybe the one about what he called the "Navajo" that I heard later, I don't know. But I realized, my God, this is just about the most quintessentially hideous artist I've ever heard, and I was fascinated by his world.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Exactly. Yeah.

Jello Biafra: So his albums got regular play in the house — especially after we discovered that this icky girlfriend who'd moved in with another roommate fled the house whenever Heino came on, and didn't come back for the rest of the day.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh wow.

Jello Biafra: The only other thing we could play to drive her out was Venom.

Hüsker Foöd: Right. That's amazing.

Jello Biafra: And so I accumulated more and more Heino albums, and got versed in Germany about more and more of the phenomenon itself.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah.

Jello Biafra: I also realized that even back then, with the smaller but really intense hardcore audiences, if you played certain cards, punk could be its own version of classic rock — or even middle of the road — for the people in the room. Such as always playing Ramones, Pistols, Clash, or maybe Generation X at the venue before the next band comes on. Over and over and over again. So I thought: wouldn't it be more in the spirit of punk and provoking people if we forced them to listen to Heino for at least thirty minutes before every single one of our shows? And I think that went on for as long as four or five years, up until we broke up.

Jello Biafra: Not everyone was happy about that. Randy Ellis, the legendary promoter of a place called City Gardens in New Jersey — right in the middle of Trenton, more Trans-Ams in the parking lot than I'd ever seen anywhere in my life — got so mad he yanked the cassette out of the tape player without even pressing stop, threw it on the floor in disgust, and then popped in the Cockney Rejects.

Hüsker Foöd: Wow. Nice.

Jello Biafra: Then there was playing Heino in Germany itself. I was aware by then that not everybody in Germany was very fond of him — people who'd grown up with their parents listening to him incessantly, plus his right-wing political leanings. He was much more popular in places like Bavaria, which has been described to me as kind of like the German Texas in terms of rabid conservatism.

Jello Biafra: In a northern place like Hamburg, he was not such a popular man. The Hausfrauen were less likely to show up in droves and throw their underwear at him, Tom Jones-style — which apparently was a thing there for a while.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, wow.

Jello Biafra: So that first night of the '82 tour in Hamburg, after Slime played, on comes Heino — and for one song, all the Mohawk punks and others began dancing in a line, doing German folk dancing, laughing away. Then when the second song came on, they scrounged up and threw every last projectile they could get their hands on up into the balcony where the mixing board and our sound man were.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, Jesus. Wow.

Jello Biafra: In Berlin, it went off after about thirty seconds. I walked back to the sound booth. "Chris, what did you do? You took Heino off." And he just smiled, rolled his eyes, and pointed to his feet and ankles, which were no longer visible because they were that deep in beer cans in less than a minute.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Wow. That's amazing.

Jello Biafra: A very powerful irritant when employed in the right place.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, wow. That's amazing.

Jello Biafra: I didn't realize until later that he had these TV shows and was such a huge star — as he is to this day. His profile had kind of faded. But then in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Communists fell, and he quickly jumped on it and got the first German reunification song onto the charts. Suddenly he had a huge career again. He always was an über-nationalist — to the point where the Stasi in East Germany frowned on him so heavily that relatives and friends in West Germany would send Heino music boxes piece by piece, so that when authorities realized what it was and it was assembled over there, you could hear your favorite Prussian supremacy songs from the 19th century.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, wow.

Jello Biafra: He was a cult figure. A rebel figure. And then once the Wall was down, he had all these new fans, was back at number one, and sure enough, another TV show. That's the one I saw that had to be seen to be believed. Heino and his wife Hannelore would walk out — she in a floor-length Tyrolean dress, he in whatever Heino duds he had on that night — and the set was a whole German beer garden made up mostly of senior citizens, plus the occasional annoyed-looking teenager who'd been forced to come by their parents.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: And his guests had to be seen to be believed as well, including a big German-language country band that called themselves Truck Stop.

Hüsker Foöd: Of course. Yes.

Jello Biafra: We'd known about them because it seemed we were following them — or they were following us — on our last German tour in '82, and there were ads for Truck Stop everywhere we went. But I think the most surreal moment was Heino and Hannelore with paper headbands and feathers on, dancing around a cardboard cactus, and their song about the Navajo. "Komm in meinen Wigwam." The visions that would erupt — can you imagine riding across the range in the old west, tired, cold, lonely, and you see a tepee in the distance with a little smoke coming out, and you go to the tepee, and discover it's Heino. Oh, I can't.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah. Oh wow. That's amazing.

Jello Biafra: There were also all the Latin lover songs they had — perhaps for another audience that had fled after World War II and was now well established in Brazil and Argentina.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah, exactly.

Jello Biafra: Then here's what gets even weirder. His profile kind of faded again, but ever the calculating cash register, he released what he called a heavy metal album. The cover was a skull with a Heino wig on it. On the back, there he is with his cap and that canary grin, with a Fender Stratocaster around his neck. What you get on the record are covers of a gigantic German pop-punk band called Die Toten Hosen — who publicly disavowed it and opposed it — and even Rammstein, all done in the Heino style. And not the other way around. Apparently that album was number one on the pop charts for three months or more.

Hüsker Foöd: Jesus Christ.

Jello Biafra: So then what happens but suddenly, at a giant soccer-stadium Rammstein show, out comes Heino as a special guest. I even thought, when I first heard Rammstein — who are from the former East Germany, I might add — that regimented marching kind of vibe to the music, singing in that low-register grunting German... I remarked to friends from Sweden who were playing it for me in their car as we drove to a festival: "My God. The heavy metal Heino." And then lo and behold, there he really was, starting to do guest spots on tour with Rammstein.

Jello Biafra: Then out comes another Heino heavy metal album, which I've never been able to get my hands on. Only this time, there he is on the cover in a spiked black leather trench coat with an even bigger shit-eating grin, and this time it's Rammstein-sounding riffs with the lyrics from his old hits dropped on top.

Hüsker Foöd: He's a genius.

Jello Biafra: Then he goes on another tour — apparently soccer stadiums, the biggest venues they had in Germany, completely sold out six months in advance. And that was only maybe three or four years ago.

Hüsker Foöd: That's insane. Wow. I don't know how I move on from Heino. It's kind of hard to top that.

Songs He Wishes He'd Written

Hüsker Foöd: Joey Reed asked: have you ever heard a song and immediately wished you had written it? If so, what was the song and artist?

Jello Biafra: Oh, there are so many of those I can't even count them. Me and some of my old friends I've known since high school were talking about various pop songs from back in the day — most of which I couldn't stand — but I brought up "Five O'Clock World" by The Vogues. A lot of people know that song even if they don't know the group; it's also the theme song for some ghastly sitcom from the late nineties or early two-thousands, it might even be Mad About You. Anyway, I heard it again in the early '80s, bought the 45 on the spot, and went, "My God, this is a magic pop song." There are always a few out there that I totally love, and I would love to be able to write something like that — but never have.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah.

Jello Biafra: Or another totally unique one that still amazes me every time I hear it: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" — the first record out of the gate by Bauhaus. You knew you were dealing with some serious shit there. The follow-up was "Dark Entries," which is also just an amazing song.

Jello Biafra: I saw them in London the week that their debut album In the Flat Field came out, and boy, were they deadly. They weren't overkill — they were the masters of underkill. Mostly in the dark the entire set. It opened with "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in complete darkness, except for the little lights on the amps. Then right before it was time for Peter Murphy to sing, one light — sticking straight out from the floor, set up by their own dedicated light guy — comes on, and there's nothing but Murphy's face, lingering there.

Hüsker Foöd: Wow!

Jello Biafra: It only got lit slightly more when "The Flat Field" came on after that. What a great show. By far my favorite Bauhaus album too.

Seeing the Ramones: A Lightning Bolt

Hüsker Foöd: You said somewhere that seeing the Ramones live was one of those 'aha' moments — like, 'I want to do that someday.'

Jello Biafra: Oh yeah, that happened to people all over the world when they saw the Ramones, and the Ramones were very aware of it. It just never occurred to me, in the days of arena rock in the 1970s, that you could go backstage and talk to a rock star. But one of these same people — Joseph Pope, who came out here with his brother and started that SST label band called Angst — well, he's a little more outgoing and gregarious than I was. He comes and says, "Hey, I was just backstage talking to the Ramones!" "What?" And then he brought the rest of us back, and we spent a lot of time with the Ramones.

Jello Biafra: One of our other friends, who not only clerked at the record store and had traded records in Boulder, but had a radio show on the local independent public station — the late, great KRNW — found out from talking to them that they had a night off the next night. They were opening for a failed radio rock band called Nite City at a venue called Ebbets Field. Especially fun watching all the cocaine-cowboy major-label people who threw their weight around, because that venue was one of the ground zeroes for testing out who was gonna be the next Eagles, and who was gonna be the next Firefall. And they all couldn't leave, they had to put up with the Ramones.

Jello Biafra: These forty degenerate-looking dudes with leather jackets came out — although Tommy just carried his jacket and propped it behind his drum set — and they were way louder than any of us had braced for. As we got used to it and realized how good they were, looking back at all those cocaine-cowboy people behind us, you could tell by the looks on their faces: we were thinking "Yes, yes, yes!" and they were thinking "No, no, no!"

Jello Biafra: And I also realized: this is so awesome, but it's so simple. I want to do this. Even I could do this. I should do this.

Hüsker Foöd: Sounds great.

Jello Biafra: So out of that one show came Angst, came the Kennedys, came the Nails — who had that song "88 Lines About 44 Women" — and were originally Colorado's first punk band, called the Ravers. When our friend Rick from KRNW talked to the Ramones and realized they had a night off, he got Ebbets Field to let the Ramones headline the next night. The Ravers got the support slot, so suddenly they needed so-called roadies. Me, Joe, and our friend Sam all became the Ravers' roadies. That spring and the rest of the summer before we moved to San Francisco, I felt ten feet tall. "All you people at school, my family — I'm a roadie for the Ravers, goddammit!"

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: Don Fleming, who later started the Velvet Monkeys and then Gumball, was at that show — stationed at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver. I hadn't realized that Air Force dude was Don Fleming until thirty years later when he re-contacted me. He works at the Lomax Archives in New York now and actually gave me a little tour. And then Al Jourgensen claims he was at that show too. He was living in Colorado at that time. You never know, but nobody knew him.

Jello Biafra: Jim Nash and Danny Fletcher, who owned the killer record store in town called Wax Trax — which the Ramones went to the next day and may have even proclaimed the best record store they'd ever seen — later sold the Denver Wax Trax and moved to Chicago and opened another one. And it wasn't long before they had the Wax Trax record label. That came out of that Ramones show in Denver too.

Hüsker Foöd: That's amazing.

On Wesley Willis

Hüsker Foöd: Will Armstrong asked: what was it like working with Wesley Willis? And do you think he'd still have the same impact today if he were around?

Jello Biafra: Well, I'm hoping we're going to get the albums back out on vinyl soon. We still have the CDs, but there's an entire generation — if not two or three — who have never experienced Wesley live. And part of the beauty of Wesley is watching people's reactions when they hear him for the first time, having no idea what's about to happen to them. Same as when I got a really early, rough DIY video demo of Gwar and people could not believe what they were seeing on the screen.

Jello Biafra: I think he was the greatest singer-songwriter in American history. In large part because labeling him "outsider music" doesn't even begin to describe just how outside of virtually every aspect of life Wesley was. He was the most completely differently-wired person I've ever known. You meet him, he doesn't shake your hand — he head-butts you.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jello Biafra: And I'd watch him download entire albums out of his head — writing one lyric after another, page after page in a notebook — and then he was ready to go. Later on, he actually mastered computers a lot earlier than I did, so he'd go to Kinko's and get on a computer, and again, he would download entire albums out of his head.

Jello Biafra: He was also, of course, a master illustrator who is being taken very seriously in art critic circles now, and for good reason. His so-called double perspective is very rare. And because in addition to schizophrenia, there was serious autism going on with him — at least I think so, in a Rain Man kind of way — every single one of those buses in his drawings that went by at fifty to seventy miles an hour on the Dan Ryan Expressway while he was sitting up above: those are all real buses. Specific ones. The license number, the ad art, the number on top — all correct. All from memory.

Hüsker Foöd: Wow. I didn't know that.

Jello Biafra: He had reports of doing drawings of downtown from memory too, getting all the buildings right. If he got your phone number, he'd never forget it. And unfortunately I didn't know until later that he had 1,500 pop songs memorized off the radio. Occasionally, according to one of his roommates, when he was in a certain kind of mood, you'd get an a cappella Wesley concert of pop songs.

Hüsker Foöd: Wow.

Jello Biafra: I first heard him when a friend in Chicago named Tammy Smith met up with me near St. Louis when he got out of rehab, and she said, "Hey, I have this tape of somebody I think you might want to hear." The first song was "Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's." Then more, then even more, then some tracks from the Wesley Willis Fiasco — the band he had going simultaneously — and I was like, oh my God. I had just finished this super long interview for the Incredibly Strange Music book. And this guy is the incredibly strangest of all.

Hüsker Foöd: Exactly. Yeah.

Jello Biafra: So if there's anybody like this we should put out, it's him. Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is largely Tammy's tape in the same order, including a song about her that I thought I should put on there as a thank-you.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: You didn't meet Wesley so much as you experienced him. He was a handful — although whether he was on a so-called joyride or a hell-ride, when the voices in his head were yelling at him and he was just distraught at everything — the minute he left town, you missed him. No matter how physically exhausted you were from being his minder for a day or two or three.

On Frontmen, the Schizophonics, and Hank III

Hüsker Foöd: You've said that J.D. Wilkes of the Legendary Shack Shakers is probably one of the better frontmen of the past however many years — is that still true? Is there anyone else on your radar currently?

Jello Biafra: Well, sadly I'm missing one of the best ones tonight. I'm just not ready to come out of my COVID cave and risk any kind of problem from going to shows. The band is called the Schizophonics, out of San Diego. Their singer and guitar player is another one of those front people unlike and beyond anything I've ever seen in my life. His songs are really good too. He's got all kinds of moves you might have seen someone like Prince do, but there's more than that going on. Plus he doesn't play his guitar with a pick — sometimes he picks with the fingers on both hands at once, kind of like the jazz master Stanley Guitar, only in this case Pat Beers — B-E-E-R-S — really fucking rocks.

Hüsker Foöd: That's awesome.

Jello Biafra: His wife Leti — L-E-T-I — is the drummer. They have two or three albums out and a bunch of seven-inches too. There's a long interview with them in Razorcake a few issues back. Fair warning though: there's another band called the Schizophonics, so if you Google them, they're both gonna pop up.

Hüsker Foöd: I've heard that you once told Hank III to stick to country — the roots-type music. Is that true?

Jello Biafra: Not in the least. That's complete bullshit.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: I hadn't even heard him do country until he came out with his original stuff, what's now called the Hellbilly material. At that point his rock was all over the map and amazingly good. I don't know whether the album he recorded when Duane Denison was still in the band ever got released. If not, it's at this point the greatest unreleased rock album I know of. All the classics are on there. I have a CDR of it, but there may be several different versions. I've kind of lost contact with Shelton right when everybody else did. I just hope he's okay. He's a very dear friend and I care about him very much.

On that Crate Digger series on Fuse where people talk about their record collections, he pulled out Plastic Surgery Disasters by Dead Kennedys and called it one of the most important albums of his life. I was so honored by that. That's the album that took forever and nearly killed me to make, but it's the one that was Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers' favorite album — and a key album for people like the God Bullies. The really warped and important music people.

I'm very proud that no two albums of mine have ever sounded alike, to this day. And the Dead Kennedys stuff is still strong enough that people argue over which one is the best. There are the Fresh Fruit people, the Plastic Surgery Disasters people, the Frankenchrist people, even a few Bedtime for Democracy people — a disproportionate number of whom seem to hail from Japanese bands.

Food: Candy, Cooking, and Pandemic Boredom

Hüsker Foöd: Alright, since this is a zine about music and food, I had to ask a few questions about food. What did you end up making before the interview? Are you a cook yourself?

Jello Biafra: Not a very good one, so I keep it simple. In this case it was a couple of eggs and salsa, and then I made some juice on my little juice machine. That'll keep me for now.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah. I'm still not sure if it's actually worth cleaning those things, but...

Jello Biafra: Well, there's kind of an extra zap in my step if I've got that stuff in my veins, that's for sure.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: Chad Fulton from Columbus, Ohio asked: what is the best candy bar, and brownies — inside or out?

Jello Biafra: Well, unlike me, my mom — still going strong at age 92 — is an incredible cook. Not just main dishes, but her cookies, cakes, and brownies are to die for. Better even than the best of Mrs. Fields in its prime. No one has ever topped her muffins. So I'm partial to her brownies. I kind of like both the crispy outside and the inside. And her blondies are even better — sometimes with mint chocolate chips inside.

Hüsker Foöd: Oh, wow. That does sound good.

Jello Biafra: And Christmas was always fun. We'd be making big old gingerbread men, and I'd be constantly swatting my hand or sneaking pieces of dough to eat. I realized early on: why make the same old gingerbread men? So when I was maybe sixteen, one Christmas I made Watergate criminal gingerbread men. Another time: Iranian hostage crisis gingerbread men. Another time I made a Ross Perot — just by pulling the pointed head off the top and giving them two giant ears — and it was obvious who it was. And then, to my mother's chagrin, I discovered that if you pulled off a leg or an arm or even a head and put the red hots right where you'd pulled it off, they'd melt in. Bloody gingerbread. My mom was less than pleased.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: That's amazing. And what's your favorite candy bar?

Jello Biafra: Boy. I can't handle sugar that well these days. I haven't been able to for a long time — maybe because I ate too much of it when I was a pizza delivery guy for a year and a half after I got out of high school. I was still a hippie weed head then, sometimes being tipped with joints. So I'd get the pot munchies, go to the supermarket, and get the biggest Nestlé Crunch bar I could find, only to discover I'd eaten all of it. It would get so out of hand I'd make an entire bowl of sugar-cookie dough at home and eat all of that. That may have tipped my sugar tolerance a good ways toward oblivion.

So I rarely eat a whole candy bar anymore. But over the years I've loved the Three Musketeers, the Hip bars...

Unfortunately, Brach's doesn't seem to exist anymore. They had way better mints than the York ones — although those aren't bad either. And every Easter they had these speckled chocolate malted milk ball Easter eggs with an extra sugar speckle coating on top. Those were right up there with Cap'n Crunch as the best American junk food ever made.

But American candy bars don't even touch some of the ones from overseas. The British Cadbury bars, before some other company bought them out and made them crap a few years ago — oh my fucking God. The regular chocolate: to die for. The Caramel bars as they call them over there: to die for, way better than the American ones. There's one called the Crunchie Bar — C-R-U-N-C-H-I-E — with all this baked honeycomb stuff inside that's maybe even better than the others.

Their cookies are to die for too. The McVitie's digestive biscuits with no chocolate on top — there's nothing like them over here. And the German Leibniz cookies — I think the company is Bahlsen, B-A-H-L-S-E-N. Little butter cookie crackers with a nice layer of milk chocolate on top. Those are amazing. You can have one of those in my current state and feel satisfied. And the German chocolate generally is so amazing.

Hüsker Foöd: Sarah asked: what stupid thing did you do during the pandemic to entertain yourself? Some people learned to bake bread, some people learned to knit...

Jello Biafra: No. I've been frustratingly unproductive. Here's Mr. Out-of-Control Al Jourgensen, who on the way to finishing not one but two Ministry albums during COVID. The first one just came out and it's pretty damn good too. No matter what he does to his mind and body, he still makes great stuff.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah, I managed to get diabetes over the pandemic. That was cool.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: No, it's not, actually. I'm sorry to hear that.

History, Politics, and the Current Moment

Hüsker Foöd: Is there any hope for us at this point?

Jello Biafra: Well, I was a big news hound at a very young age too. My favorite cartoon characters early on were Bullwinkle and Senator Everett Dirksen. I saw the Berlin Wall go up. I saw a lot of the civil rights movement. The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. Saw Oswald get shot live in our living room — not knowing what had happened, and then watching it again and again on the instant replays.

I think it's good to stay interested, and I'm really grateful that my parents — who I didn't always get along with very well — chose not to shield me from that. Most parents changed the channel and made sure their kids didn't watch the news. But back when the networks hadn't yet been swallowed up by corporations who took over editorial control, you saw the really bloody footage of our soldiers in Vietnam. You saw assassinations. I still remember African Americans being attacked with hoses and dogs on our own black-and-white TV. My mother piped up: "I just don't understand why anybody would attack somebody else because of the color of their skin." And I was militantly anti-racist from first grade onward, even though Boulder was an almost entirely white town.

And then my dad blundered into a rock and roll station on the radio when he was trying to get me to go to sleep one night. Then when I was seven — fall of '65, Beatlemania still in full swing — a local garage band played on the air, and I made him leave it there. So early on, being the passionate character I am, I experienced all the political upheaval and the birth of the environmental movement and all the music at the same time. And they cross-pollinated to affect me that much more deeply.

The best reality show in the history of television was the Watergate hearings with Senator Sam Ervin. Nixon was going down. The last time our justice system actually worked, although then President Gerald Ford pardoned him. In contrast, Oliver North should still be in prison to this day. Reagan and Daddy Bush, who was even more deeply involved, skated on it. And that was way worse than fucking Watergate. Government dope dealing, including sparking the crack epidemic. Sponsoring our own terrorists in Nicaragua. Running arms to our supposed arch-enemy Iran at the same time to pay for it. That was treason times a hundred.

When people were saying after Trump stole the 2016 election, "Oh, he'll be impeached and bounced so fast" — I said, "That's a nice thought, but I remember Contragate. I remember how this really works." Each time it's scarier than before, because now, thanks to the Internet, you do have those bikers taking over towns, and reports of the Oath Keepers — which is mostly soldiers, retired and current military, and cops — and that's 40,000 members.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah, in fact — I don't know if you heard about this — just last year, a bunch of pro-Trump bikers took over a town about ten minutes from where I live called Bethel, Ohio. The rumor was that busloads of antifa were coming in from Columbus. It turned out to be five local teacher-led BLM demonstrators holding signs saying Black Lives Matter. And upwards of 800 pro-Trump bikers came, took over the town, attacked the demonstrators, and held the town for three days. The local cops did nothing. So when January 6th happened, I wasn't exactly surprised. It was like they did a dry run right here in Clermont County.

Jello Biafra: I never heard about this at all. Full but concise links are welcomed.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah... did a writeup. I'll send them your way.

Jello Biafra: So basically, to finish answering your original question: when Contragate went down, I had hope that justice would somewhat prevail. Instead the opposite happened, and that tore my insides out. That broke my heart. So I try to keep some light flickering. Václav Havel once said, after serving as president of Czechoslovakia: "Are you optimistic?" And his answer was, "I am not optimistic, but I always have hope."

Jello Biafra: My thinking — especially from the spoken word shows — is that I operate on two tracks at once: what I think should be done, and what I think is realistically possible. And when people send Twitter-size attention spans and first-grade-level ideas, I think: this is a fine product of the tax-gutted American school systems. People aren't just dumb because they're greedy. The reason they manipulate the anti-tax movement to gut the schools is they want dumber graduates who are more obedient to the corporate agenda. Don't question why you're getting lied to and screwed. Spend more time on Facebook, play video games, listen to awful pop music with auto-tune singers that sound like fake aliens, and call it life.

On Grief and Closure

Hüsker Foöd: I just wanted to thank you... ten years ago, my wife and I lost twin boys. And I found a quote by you — I think it was in a video, in reference to your sister who passed. You said: "Ladies and gentlemen, let's get real. There ain't no such thing as closure. The loss, the longing, that hollow feeling in my gut will never completely go away, nor should it. You deal with it and keep moving on. Closure doesn't exist. So don't ever let anybody try to sell it to you when you're hurting." Everyone kept coming to us and dropping the C-word — closure. And that quote actually helped me quite a bit.

Jello Biafra: Well, that's what it's for. I even had to say that at a memorial for William Burroughs in San Francisco, and it meant a lot to all kinds of different people — even older Beats who were there. How phony the old concept of closure is. It's mainly a pop-culture thing that's used to sell religion, psych meds, and the death penalty, basically.

And the part you didn't quote that I also think is important — especially with losing my sister Julie, and her husband Clyde from Scotland, who I love like a brother — is that that grief is always gonna be there. Some people pull typical California stuff: "Oh, you'll get over her." Like, I'm not gonna get over this. I have no intention of ever getting over Julie. She was my fucking sister. The only sibling I ever had, and for the most part we were pretty damn close. She'd grown into a really cool person and I was just so proud of her.

I have no intention of getting over Julie or Clyde. And even now, every once in a while it all comes back to me. You know that feeling too. And I just have to let it rocket through me. I may break down, I may cry really badly — but then I get up and keep walking.

That's what you've gotta do. When Wesley Willis died, I had to really promise myself that I was not going to let my grief at missing him take away all the enjoyment I've gotten from his music. And all those stories, many of which I witnessed, that crack me up every time I think of them to this day.

I think the most rewarding of all the albums we've put out on Alternative Tentacles — in our forty-year history — has been Wesley Willis. Some people might know him only from "Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's," which once heard is never forgotten, and which is in the Super Size Me movie. But as for other people reacting to Wesley, it'll be the same thing as always: either you flee from the room, or you're hooked. Several different people said, after one song after another: "Wow. This is addicting, isn't it?"

Hüsker Foöd: It is. Yes.

Jello Biafra: Yes. It is.

Truckers, Trucks, and Tunes

Hüsker Foöd: I was a truck driver for fifteen years, so of course I love that you covered some of those trucker songs with Mojo Nixon on Prairie Home Invasion. Was it hard choosing which song to do?

Jello Biafra: It was a real toss-up, and it was amazing to even consider putting a truck driver classic on the album — but we finally wound up doing "Convoy in the Sky."

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: And especially as a trucker, you have not lived until you've heard "Start a Label Compound." I actually got that from a compact truck drive compilation.

My great regret, though, is not knowing earlier about "Gear Jammin' Buddy" by Jimmie Logsdon — L-O-G-S-D-O-N. He was on King Records. "I'm a gear-jammin' buddy, I live on short-order dinner... I like my rows straight and long and my women with curves. People tell me I'm nothing but nerves." He picks up a woman hitchhiking who then hijacks and robs him, he gets pulled over, she lies about it in court. One of the great trucker story songs.

And Wesley never did a truck driver song, but he did do a song that might belong on one of his greatest hits, about a Ford Windstar: "To see that river going in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I was driving 600 miles an hour. A policeman pulled me over but he let me go. Ford Windstar. Ford Windstar."

Hüsker Foöd: That's amazing.

Jello Biafra: He was unquestionably one hell of a survivor. The parts of his mind that were really there — he was no idiot. He was very, very bright. And had an incredible imagination.

Thanksgiving, Pilgrims, and Cheetos

Hüsker Foöd: Last question: any favorite Thanksgiving foods?

Jello Biafra: Cheetos.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: Yeah. Those turned up at my grandparents' place in Colorado Springs one time. There was the big dinner in the middle of the afternoon — most of which was stuff I've never really liked much to this day — and then the Republican cousins from Pueblo would show up, which I always dreaded a bit. And then we'd all sit in the living room watching football and munching Cheetos. That was Thanksgiving.

It got even weirder for me when I did an eighth-grade history class report on crime and punishment in the Puritan colony. That's when I realized how insane the Pilgrims really were. "Oh my God — this is the American Taliban." That wasn't the word I used then, because the Taliban didn't exist, but you know what I'm saying. And yes, it was their descendants who gave us the Salem witch trials. So no, I'm not jumping with glee that my mother found out we have an ancestor off the Mayflower. She's pleased as punch to be a Mayflower baby, while I was embarrassed as hell.

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: Now I've even asked her genealogy friend in Oklahoma to see if that same ancestor's descendants were somehow involved in the Salem witch trials.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: I don't know how to thank you enough.

Jello Biafra: I even buttered her up by saying that after all these years I was finally a fan of the University of Oklahoma — because they had a quarterback named Spencer Rattler. From Arizona. His name is fucking Rattler. You can't make this stuff up.

[laughter]

Hüsker Foöd: I just Googled him. Yeah. Wow.

Jello Biafra: And I mean that's the best quarterback name since Sonny Sixkiller — the Native American quarterback of the University of Washington.

Hüsker Foöd: Well, thank you so much. This has been incredible.

Jello Biafra: And you can't not have Bob Mould — Moldy Bob — in Hüsker Foöd magazine. When you're ready, send me something and I'll forward it to Bob without giving out his email. And how could Greg not do something like this when he has a restaurant?

Hüsker Foöd: I know. I've tried! I've even chatted with his wife.

Jello Biafra: When I was at their band hotel, Greg became Magnum Swab, Bob became Moldy Bob, and Grant became Grant Hard Pants — or I couldn't make up my mind whether to just call him Golf Goat, because it made absolutely no sense, but it fit. And D. Boon was even their crew guy once, so I named him Senator Furniture. That was the last time I ever saw him. Speaking of grief, and wondering what he'd be up to right about now.

Hüsker Foöd: Yeah.

Jello Biafra: Even my dad said, as far as grief went: his best friend growing up was a guy named Jimmy Wager, a couple years older than him, who went into World War II and never came back. He said: even now — and he was maybe forty-five, fifty by then — "I just think to myself: Jimmy's missing all this."

Jello Biafra: And it was like that with Wesley too. I remember all those scenes in the air when Obama won in 2008 — even I had some actual hope. And he and Michelle came out in that park in Chicago, and everybody's going crazy, and even Jesse Jackson had a tear coming down his face. And then I thought: oh my God. Just imagine what Dr. King would feel right now. Oh my God. Just imagine how Wesley would feel right now. Even if he was in the back row of those hundred thousand people, you would hear him loud and clear. That powerful voice of his. "Barack Obama is my friend, in Jesus' name. Barack Obama is my friend, he's a world-class whuppin' Saddam Hussein's ass to Russia."

[laughter]

Jello Biafra: I can see it now. He would have been so happy. Who knows — there might have been an entire album of nothing but songs about Obama.

Hüsker Foöd: That would have been something. Well, thank you so very much, Jello.

Jello Biafra: Yeah. Take care, and good luck.

Hüsker Foöd: All right. Thank you so much. Have a good night.

Jello Biafra: Bye-bye.

— Hüsker Foöd Zine —