E-Mail This Article to a Friend Unholy marriage Punk prankster Jello Biafra throws down with heavyweight champs the Melvins BY JAMES PARKER
	Related Links   Mike Miliard Jello Biafra's spoken-word albums. The Melvins' official Web site Colin Fleming reviews The Melvins' Mangled Demos From 1983.

You could argue that in the late ’70s and early ’80s the gnawing, undeceived, sacrilegious voice of Jello Biafra had an effect on listeners similar to that of Bob Dylan in the mid ’60s. Not a nice noise, by any means, but you couldn’t tune it out: it announced and embodied a future where things would be made to reveal themselves, a merciless future, a future scoured of bullshit. "It’s time to taste what you most fear/Right Guard will not help you here/Brace yourself, my dear!" That future failed to materialize — the current bullshit-to-reality ratio may be the worst yet — but Jello’s still with us, still scuffling and sniping, kept on edge both by a continuing decline in public standards and by the legal battles that have dogged him since the days of Frankenchrist (1985), when Biafra, his Alternative Tentacles label, and his fellow Dead Kennedys were dragged into court charged with "distribution of harmful matter to minors." The DKs won that one, but lately they’ve been at war with themselves: in a years-long case that began in 1998, guitarist East Bay Ray, bassist Klaus Fluoride, and drummer DH Peligro sued Biafra, who runs Alternative Tentacles, for non-payment of royalties — a suit that Biafra claimed was triggered by his refusal to allow the Dead Kennedys’ "Holiday in Cambodia" to be excerpted for use in a Levi’s commercial. (The three other DKs deny that they ever accepted the offer from Levi’s.)

When I reach him by phone in San Francisco, it takes about three seconds for Biafra to start talking about all of this. "Y’know, sometimes I’m called paranoid for the views I have on certain things, but is paranoid the right word when someone’s worst nightmares keep coming true? Never in a million years did I expect Klaus and Peligro to join up with East Bay Ray and sue the shit out of me for failure to treat them like major-label rock stars and let ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ be in a Levi’s commercial. I never expected that to happen, but it did." He’s crowing with contempt here, and the flavor of his rant is pure Richard III — a crooked king soliloquizing to his crooked shadow.

Litigation is the world’s ritual revenge on the satirist; his words are obscured and dragged down by other, humorless words, heavy legal words, and he’s forced — for the benefit of the court — to wear a straight face. Lenny Bruce was crushed by litigation. Biafra, who describes his legal spat with his former mates as "vastly" worse than the Frankenchrist trial, grows — momentarily — somber on this theme. "It can be very difficult at times. Those guys damn near drove me to suicide." But then he’s back in savage-jest mode. "Who knows, they’re probably already counting the extra money they’d make if they could sell my face on collector plates after I was dead!"

Enter the Melvins, who teamed up with Biafra for 2004’s Never Breathe What You Can’t See and are touring with him in support of the new Sieg Howdy! (both on Alternative Tentacles); the group, who record as "Jello Biafra with the Melvins," play the Middle East downstairs this Friday. The great antagonist was by no means a charity case: he’s been releasing spoken-word albums from his Alternative Tentacles home base for more than a decade, and the label continues to sign new artists. But one gets the sense that the Melvins got Biafra out of a hole. "We really did wanna help him out," says drummer Dale Crover, "because we all thought that what happened to him was really tragic — everything that he and the Dead Kennedys stood for got shattered right in front of him. And as we worked with him, he kept saying that he wished he’d got a band together sooner — I think it was something that had been missing from his life." Biafra, for his part, is grumpily grateful: "Those guys certainly offered me a lot more friendship and genuine human concern than any of the Dead Kennedys ever did."

Collaborating with Biafra, who’s recorded with everyone from the punk bands NoMeansNo and D.O.A. to country huckster Mojo Nixon, might seem a typically cranky move for the Melvins. Or perhaps another example of the stone-faced perversity that has produced — along with some of the heaviest hard rock of the past 20 years — albums like 2001’s useless Colossus of Destiny, an hour-long "noise experiment" that sounds like a schizophrenic hairdryer. On paper it’s certainly a weird marriage: Biafra’s shrill and wordy polemics with the Melvins’ crawling, pre-verbal low end. The DKs were quick, trebly, stinging: the Melvins’ rhythm section rolls like an underground bone mill. But it works, as weird marriages will. "The Dead Kennedys’ guitar player and ours have two totally different sounds, obviously," says Crover, "but we tried to accommodate Jello whenever possible. We kind of adapted to each other." The massive alteration in tempo was apparently not a problem. "When the Melvins first started, we always played as fast as we possibly could." The result is pretty nifty, riff-demented punk rock that occasionally (as during an extended version of the new "The Lighter Side of Global Terrorism") rises to the drug-spangled pummeling of vintage Hawkwind, what Biafra calls "hypnotic punk."

At issue in the litigation was the authorship of the Dead Kennedys’ back catalogue. Biafra claimed exclusive credit for some songs, but the California Court of Appeal concluded that "the evidence showed that the band worked collectively on the creation of its musical compositions." Crover sees things a little differently. "Working with Jello, it became apparent that he wrote the majority of the Dead Kennedys songs. He’ll hum parts to you and come up with songs like that. Guitar solos too. Style-wise, it was all there. I think the court saw him as someone who couldn’t play an instrument and therefore wasn’t capable of songwriting, but to us it was very clear."

The lyrics on Sieg Howdy! are striated with the bile produced by the case. "We’ll sue the guy who wrote the songs/So we can sell them into commercials/Steal the name and hit the road/Trashing all our band stood for," Biafra gurgles on "Those Dumb Punk Kids (Will Buy Anything)," his wit for once failing him completely. The man is bitter. "These were my friends! But they didn’t care if everyone at Alternative Tentacles lost their jobs, if all the bands got screwed — they just didn’t care. Pure raw greed in its ugliest form. Mentality-wise, they’d fit far better in a room with Dick Cheney than they would in a room with our peers."

Going out on the road with the Melvins at least gives him the chance to make an æsthetic correction. "This isn’t gonna be your laid-back punk retro revue or anything. The world has had enough of that."

Jello Biafra with the Melvins | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Oct 21 | 617.864.EAST