“The Quietus”:
Looking at fliers for your gigs you seemed to play several times with The Dead Kennedys. How did you get on with the punks and their audiences?
SR: With that question you make it seem like it was a “them vs us” situation… which just wasn’t the case. We ALL went to each other’s shows back then. Most times the audiences weren’t any larger than 300 people or so… and they were all in bands. We even jammed with a lot with people from other bands… dare I say, even with guitar players. And band members would transfer from band to band like it was a game of musical chairs.
At that time in SF the term new wave hadn’t been invented yet and punk had not been rigidly defined. Punk wasn’t relegated to a guitar, black leather jacket, tight pants and safety pins uniform (although I wore those things sometimes).
When the Dead Kennedys started, people in the scene didn’t just like them because they were a “guitar band”. People liked them because they were very creative and original and funny, from their “anti-fashion” down to their lyrics. Not only was Jello very political, he also had the ability to break down preconceived notions of the frontman formula and the audience/performer relationship. We could share a bill with them at that time because people weren’t looking for “punk uniforms”… people in the scene were looking for craziness and business-as-UNusual.
Read and comment. From thequietus.com.
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