POLL Pot! It's a Dead Kennedys "Give Me Convenience..." poll!

Really really tempted to vote "Night of the Living Rednecks" here.

Difficult to get beyond a choice between "California..." and "Holiday...", but the rest of the record is killer too, even (especially?) the live material.

"Life Sentence" still has power for me.

"Moon Over Marin" may actually be my favorite one in the end but it's not on here so...

I've had their I Fought The Law going round my head for the past couple of weeks, but it's hard to see past the twin giants of California Uber Alles and Holiday In Cambodia... Uughhh... California it is.

man this is hard - might have to throw a vote to man with the dogs just to make sure it gets one. or pull my strings.

oh but then theres too drunk to fuck.

goddamnit

Holiday in Cambodia just slightly over the equally obvious California Uber Alles

Yeah, this ^, Holiday just takes it for me but this is a tough choice. Pull My Strings also in serious contention - they only ever played this once right? At an awards ceremony? Top album from start to finish, and Night of the Living Rednecks still amuses me after all these years. Ray's guitar broke...

Cambodia, boringly. It's just the perfect Biafra vocal performance.

"Holiday in Cambodia". Unless I'm missing some context, "California Uber Alles" always seemed really self-defeating (if catchy), given Jello's politics.

There's a lot of context there, which he's discussed in various places. Basically, he hated the fatuous hippie capitalists who had overrun Boulder and he was convinced a demagogic politician was going to come along and exploit people, and Jerry Brown combined both obsessions. He quickly realised Brown was OK and that Reagan was the real problem, hence We've Got a Bigger Problem Now.

In Jello's words:

"Well Jerry Brown did say that people were looking for a man on a white horse and keep in mind that I had just escaped from Boulder, Colorado where every other person was searching for a guru to tell them what to do. Any wacky cult or new age movement can find very fertile ground in Boulder and I was really scared by this and thought it was dishonest and evil and so I thought, oh my god after all this rebellion I expected more out of the 70s than people wandering in the mental darkness looking for someone with all he answers to tell them what to do. And one powerful poltician alone seemed to be able to tap into that and thus Jerry Brown is the focus of California Uber Alles but when Reagan stormed in and I realised what was at stake with the religious right claiming they owned the country and people more extreme even than the supporters of Richard Nixon, I realised that was a much bigger threat, thus California Uber Alles evolving into We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now. "

Police Truck is one of the best ever DK songs. Insight is high on my list too.

Sure Holiday and California are great. But to me, those songs are great on Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables. I never spin them off this one.

Great record overall.

Really really tempted to vote "Night of the Living Rednecks" here.

I did. Wasn't really close.

Police Truck

"Moon Over Marin" may actually be my favorite one in the end but it's not on here so...

This. Well, this and 'Religious Vomit'.

Single version of California Uber Alles >>>>> Fresh Fruit version. Holiday in Cambodia, not so much, might prefer the album version of that one.

Really really tempted to vote "Night of the Living Rednecks" here.

― Sean Carruthers, Saturday, July 24, 2010 1:11 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

b/c basically most major historical conflicts can be reduced to "jocks vs. nerds" imo

Pull my strings or Too Drunk.

Wait - def Pull my Strings.

Remember Jello saying he was actually voting for Jerry Brown for president when Brown was running.

always wondered why "kill the poor" wasn't on this

I assumed it was the same version as on Fresh Fruit, whereas all the other songs were different versions or not on albums.

So I THREW the rock!

I voted in this poll last weekend: pretty sure it was for Insight, but I can't remember now.

Still can't decide :-(

Any wacky cult or new age movement can find very fertile ground in Boulder

Interesting- and is it wrong that Hunter S Thompson sprang to mind here? Although he's probably cut from the same cloth as Jello Biafra actually...

i will occasionally enthusiastically shout out "Fred Myers!" at random

xp: Thompson was Aspen, I thought.

tough one, version of "california uber alles" is really great on this, "police truck" is so good though.

my LP of fresh fruit for rotting vegetables had "police truck" right in the middle of side 1 so I always think of it as being a part of the album, get weirded out when I hear the regular version

xp correct, yes, my mistake.

holiday in cambodia = the best DKs track, but not this version. i'm torn btween police truck, 2 drunk 2 fuk, california uber alles, NotLR, and (for some reason) pull my strings. california FTW, but voted 2 drunk anyway, out of underdog pride.

we're not a punk rock band, we're a NEW WAVE band...

...still wanking in the men's room!

u bawl like the baby in eraserhead...

though the baby in eraserhead doesn't really bawl ...

ACCORDING TO JELLO tho...

i agree, it wheezes or somesuch. man that is a great movie. remind me not to have a offspring.

life-sized hot wheels car for some dumb rich kid

life-size hot wheels baby

Is he the ultimate sarcastic rock front man? I think MES runs him close, but he's often too oblique.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Police Truck

― _▂▅▇█▓▒░◕‿‿◕░▒▓█▇▅▂_ (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, July 27, 2010 9:46 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

^^^^ yep

The Dead Kennedys could groove for a punk rock band when they had it going. We used to have parties and mix in CDs over the stereo and their stuff always did well in those situations, better than most punk rock. I'm going to go with Police Truck as I freaked out dancing to it at a party and my friends from then on if they saw me dancing like that would call it the Police Truck dance.

"Insight" is a great, unheralded track. A camp counselor of mine suggested that the song is being sung by the tormented "kid in the back of the class" himself, basically spewing back the abuse he'd been taking every day. Made the song much more powerful.

man this is harder than it looks

seems like "police truck" has a pretty good voting block so I'm tempted to throw a bone to one of these:

"life sentence" - love this song, really raging, and for once jello is speaking directly without his usual satirical playacting, if only he didn't answer the musical question "are you really you you you"

"saturday night holocaust" - I always dug how the dk's could get all twisted and scary and perverted and dissonant on stuff like this, "ill in the head", "I kill children"

hm

None of the versions on here are as good as the Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables versions

"too drunk to fuck" is kind of a perfect punk rock single

u bawl like the baby in eraserhead...

going to confess here that for the past 25 years I thought the line was "you ball like the baby in eraserhead" which is a pretty disgusting/disturbing image

you mean the two songs that are on fresh fruit for rotting vegetables

xp

lol E3 - trying to envision how that is physically possible

I know this is a common picture, but I just want to ask - which one of these guys is really annoying?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/Pullmystrings.jpg

I like the version of california uber alles on give me convenience a lot, jello's vocal is not as good but east bay ray's gtr tone is awesomer and you can hear the echo of the room they're playing in, all kinds of mic bleed, gives it a sense of immediacy

let's not go there

xp to sarahel

I thought it was "ball" too tbh. I've never actually seen Eraserhead though so I never really knew what that meant.

for reference:

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/eraserhead6.jpg

so hott

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/eraserhead.jpg

if y'know you like gauze

i mean, maybe it could give a good blow job, i dunno ... but then you get to the line - "take out your fucking retainer put it in your purse"

it's a simile not an extended metaphor

lol @ wikipedia entry for "too drunk to fuck"

The song also illustrates the dangers of drinking alcohol in excess.

i know it's meant as a simile, but that doesn't mean that i can't imagine the eraserhead baby wearing a retainer with a purse by its bedside giving a drunk Jello Biafra a blow job

^new board description?

dreams are free

My heart belongs to "Police Truck"

Was that song making reference to specific incidents at the time?

I'm actually surprised by how well many of these tunes hold up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Not a single vote for I Fought The Law?? Huh.

Misheard Jello from Night of the Living Rednecks:

We'll play the theme from the Dinah Shore show.
Who wants to be Dinah Shore? Who's alter-ego is Dinah Shore?
Oh, it's Fiston Gillepso Quigley this time!

I just figured that Fiston Gillepso Quigley was some other tv personality I'd never heard of. Either that or a San Francisco political figure like Tibor Uskert.

hahahah Dinah Shore and the Dinah Shore show definitely faded into oblivion. Like, you don't have that nostalgic rediscovery of Dinah Shore as with other old tv. I do think of this song a lot, but never because I see something reminiscing about Dinah Shore.

usually the thing that brings to mind this song is either:

1. someone in Portland mentions something about Fred Myers, Burnside, or The Long Goodbye
2. I see a life-sized hot wheels car for some dumb rich kid IRL
3. some really stupid bureaucratic / judicial / law enforcement action that is essentially "they confiscated their club and my rock for further evidence"

Same on item 2.