Now many of our label peers are down to one or two employees or pulling the plug altogether. "I've used my own money to keep the label afloat. Eight years on, Biafra urges people not to buy DK albums, repackaged on another label minus their deliciously offensive Winston Smith artwork.īiafra described losing the Kennedys from Alternative Tentacles as "like getting some of your limbs blown off". A judge eventually ruled the band's music was no longer the property of Alternative Tentacles. But from 1998 to 2001, Biafra spent most of the time battling his embittered former Dead Kennedys. Undaunted by punk reactionaries, AT continued to harvest esoteric and extreme crops of fresh artists. I want my work to be available in remote small towns and cultural ghettos.
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For me, using a major distributor is more like the martial arts principle of using the enemy's strength against them. "It was one crab trying to pull another crab back in the bucket. "Of course, it was easy to label me as a sell-out because I was part of the neighbourhood," says Biafra of the MRR row. A gang of punks chanting "rich rock star" severely beat up Biafra at a local gig in 1994. It went on to ban AT ads and reviews, and provoked a backlash against Biafra. The punk zine Maximum Rock'n'Roll, based in the Bay Area but covering the scene worldwide, took AT to task for working with EMI-owned distributor Caroline.
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But by the mid-90s Biafra found himself at war with the scene he helped create. There were also three brilliant post-Kennedys sonic assaults with Biafra fronting DOA, NoMeansNo and his Lard project with Ministry's Al Jourgensen. The Beatnigs and Victims Family joining the fold.
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The late 80s formed AT's purple period – with Alice Donut, NoMeansNo, To date, he has released eight full-length spoken-word albums and recently took on Noam Chomsky. Post-Kennedys, Biafra discovered his oratory worked well without music and found himself shaking up the university lecture circuit. The DKs won but the lengthy court case split the band and left Biafra as sole label proprietor.Īs the pro-censorship brigade sharpened their muskets, AT unleashed the Butthole Surfers on the world with their mini-album Brown Reason to Live, and baited the rightwing majority further with the Crucifucks and the Dicks.
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HR Giger's genitalia-filled Landscape XX, inserted in the DK's fourth album Frankenchrist, led to a trial for obscenity. It was a poster by a world-renowned Swiss artist that killed the Kennedys in 1986. The following year, DOA, TSOL and 7 Seconds all had their own releases through the label. Otherwise we might have disintegrated within a few months."Īlternative Tentacles was founded by DKs to release their music, and by 1981 it had assembled most of the players in the emerging North American hardcore punk scene for a compilation, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, aimed at British and European audiences.
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"I've always been very grateful to him and Jim Fouratt, the New York promoter who played Bob the record. "It was just a stroke of dumb luck that Bob Last of Fast Product flipped over the record and wanted to release it," Biafra says. Initially, it failed to make headway in their backyard but in the UK the band became an overnight success, thanks to an influential Edinburgh indie label. "Anything I can do to jar people's brain sediment, I'll do," says the tireless agitator.įrom UK anarcho-punk to lysergic Texan country, Biafra's madly eclectic taste in music is the common denominator behind every release and he's committed to ensuring his idiosyncratic tentacles continue to reach out for strange new things.īiafra began blowing minds in San Francisco when he joined Dead Kennedys and self-released California Über Alles in July 1979, which brutally satirised the green, liberal and anti-war state governor Jerry Brown – a little unfairly – as a "zen fascist". And for the past 30 years his label Alternative Tentacles has flung musical Molotov cocktails at the masses. E ric Reed Boucher renamed himself Jello Biafra in 1978 because he "liked the way the images collide in people's minds".