Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine released their debut album “The Audacity of Hype” October 20th, 2009.  This Q&A was conducted in the Fall of 2009 by Jesse Luscious on the cusp of our Thirtieth Anniversary shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

Q: So what can you tell us about the origins of this band? How did Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine actually happen?

BIAFRA: I never stopped thinking of myself as a songwriter, singer, or musician. There kept being different adventures, some good, some bad, and the ultimate wide-eyed geeky fan chance: "Oh my God, I get to make a record Al and Paul Barker. Oh my God, I get to make something with NoMeansNo. How could I not do this?"  Finally, I hid for a few years trying to write the songs I really wanted to do, and then I came out of my cave and a lot of the people I wanted to do them with were gone. Either the bands they were in had gotten really, really big and they could do their own things or there had been drug problems or they had just gotten sick of music entirely. Or the band had gotten big, signed with a major record label, and then the drug problems and discouragement began and then they didn't play music anymore.
And so there were some hit and miss ideas including trying something with Ralph (Spight) and Jon (Weiss) years ago, but then he decided he wanted to concentrate full-time on the Hellworms. Ironically the jamming on those songs, "New Feudalism" and "Electronic Plantation," was the cassette that made it up to Krist (Novoselic) and Kim (Thayil) in Seattle to do those with No WTO Combo. An early interested person was Christian from Triclops! but then he wanted to concentrate on Triclops!  And Ralph had been calling, so instead of having both of them I just started with Ralph and went from there. I guess what finally spurred me on after all this time - finally, I had a deadline. I had to do it by a certain time or just throw up my hands because I had seen The Stooges on Iggy Pop's 60th birthday and had a great time, it was great show.  I swore I would never ever see them if they reformed because it'd be too corny, but that was well worth seeing.  At least unlike the fake Dead Kennedys they actually really brought it as far as the music goes, especially Ig and Mark Watt. So I thought, “You know, I'm 50 years old next year and I better do something. And if it's a tenth as good as The Stooges, I'll declare victory.” So, I had a lot of spoken word touring dates to finish cause I had been doing the In The Grip Of Official Treason show for about two years at that point. It was such a good show I kept wanting to present it to people, but at some point I had to pull the plug. After England I didn't take it to the European continent and the building the band began. Sure enough we did have a band in time for the “Biafra Five O” shows for my fiftieth. At that point we were gonna have a new name every gig and that one was Axis of Merry Evildoers, and then Ralph named us The Dick Army, of all things, for a show at Annie's. Finally we needed one for the album to settle on, so Guantanamo School of Medicine it is. The Gitmo School of Meds.  The big GSM.  Start drawing those logos, people.  So we played those shows and then the band scattered for awhile as Billy Gould went back over to Europe where he lives for a good part of each year and there were a couple of physical injuries in the band, specifically me and John. And then we pulled it back together at the first of this year, at least when I got back from Colorado and worked on the album in earnest, and there you have it.

Q: So you went to Europe already before the record came out, how was that?

BIAFRA: It went pretty well actually. We all got along, much better than Dead Kennedy's ever did on tour. And I held up pretty well - I could do my thing and not just stand there and still do a show so that was still good. I ain't no Henry Rollins or Iggy Pop - I'm a mortal.  The idea of a theatrical front person is almost lost at this point, so again I began realizing that people don't see demented people on stage so much anymore and you gotta try to do more of it and do it better and what not. But it came out pretty well and even in Germany people seemed pretty happy that we were doing almost all new material instead of doing nothing but old material.  Even the ones that began yelling for "Too Drunk To Fuck" after one song...as soon as I laid down the law and said "Hey look we're here to play some new songs," they went "Yeeehaah." Or “Jaaaaa.”

Q: But you do play things from your long musical history.

BIAFRA: Yeah, I don't know how much we're going to be able to work in.   I made a list of songs that it would be cool to play some day and there were so many of them.  I had some from Tumor Circus and even the album with Mojo Nixon as well as Lard, Jelvins, and obviously some Dead Kennedy's and thought – “Shit, we're never going to be able to play all these unless we play a set as long as the Grateful Dead.”  So far there's a few Dead Kennedys songs that will pop up, mostly new stuff and we'll rotate them around.  Although people who live in the Bay Area are more likely to hear more variety because we'll have to rotate them each show.  Our sets will be different each night.  Not completely, obviously.  That was an old Dead Kennedys tradition...we never played the same set twice.

Q: Some of the songs are about now and others are timeless.  You even have kind of a song that bridges the George W. Bush presidency to the Obama one - "Terror of Tinytown."

BIAFRA:  Yeah, I guess you're thinking it's kind of a requiem for the Bush era but then asking, "Hey wait a minute, we're just pretending that he isn't here anymore."  We're still in Afghanistan   and we still haven't closed Guantanamo Bay, thus the name of my band.  One of many serious disappointments that I've had with Obama - even though I didn't vote for him I want him to succeed - there's a little audacity to hope, but that hope is being dashed pretty quick when they keep slamming the door on even lifting a finger to prosecute the members of the Bush administration for war crimes, let along corruption, stealing two elections, and all the things they should be doing long prison sentences for if they were true believers in the law and order they try to force on everyone else.  The problem with not going after them is...well lets look at Contragate which was even worse then Watergate, when we had government dope dealing, we were sponsoring terrorists known as the Contras, sponsoring assassinations, selling arms to Iran of all people which they still have and would use on us gladly if we decide to attack them in any way, and these guys all just got let off the hook.  A handful of them got slaps on the wrist and then they were pardoned for that by Clown Prince W's father.  Daddy Bush, or “Poppy,” as they call him.  Ironic name considering that's what you make heroin from and he was director of the CIA for a while, many of us have strong suspicions about their role in the drug trade.  By not throwing the book at them, they have a way of coming back and gaining even more power later.  Robert Gates who Obama had the audacity to hope wouldn't screw him by keeping him as Defense Secretary, that guy was number two to William Casey during Contragate and Casey and his cowboys were running the whole thing.  That's inexcusable.  In contrast with Watergate, at least those people went down and a lot of the main ones went to jail so you didn't end of with FBI director G. Gordon Liddy or something like that.  That's what we would have wound up with.  We would have wound up with Oliver North if he hadn't turned out to be such a flakey blowhard a la Sarah Palin and went for the money first.

“Terror of Tinytown” is also a track on one of my spoken word albums.  It’s off of the last one, In The Grip of Official Treason, and it basically compares Bush and his whole demeanor and dimwit attitude to a 1930's film called The Terror of Tinytown, which I recommend everyone see as an educational tool.  It's a western where the entire cast is midgets and the villain in the black hat is so much like Bush, but he was immolated at the end when he tries to blow up a building and ends up inside it instead.  If that sounds familiar?  It was just too close not to compare the black hat villain "I'm going to wind up owning all the ranches," and the sheriff saying "But…but…but."  Just like the United Nations when Bush went into Iraq.  It was just so close that I couldn't leave it alone.  That image along with Bush as the cowboy Cornholio like Beavis and Butthead...those are the two that will never leave me, I don't think.  So in a way “The Terror of Tinytown” sums up the last two or three of the spoken word albums in song form, with a warning for the future that we better not let this crap go unchallenged, unpunished for that matter.

“Electronic Plantation” is kind of a hypnotic space punk song if you will and I'm always a sucker for that kind of stuff.  Be it Hawkwind, Helios Creed, Psychoplasma, Wipers, or others, but not that many people do that kind of stuff.  So that was another reason it was high time to get back to rock because not too many people, if any, do quite what I do.

Q:  How would you describe your sound...obviously you've done stuff with Lard, Jello and the Melvins, I get this psych feel to it but its still really heavy and fast, and there's the surf leads...

BIAFRA:  My sound usually springs from punk, it's just trying to add new and different things to punk that other people don't or can't, and trying to punkify some things that could use a little squirt of energy or something.  The one with the Melvins, Never Breathe What You Can't See, “Islamic Bomb” might even be considered a world beat song, although it was more directly inspired by Sandy Nelson and the Hollywood Persuaders.  I just try to see what hasn't been done.  But rather being that analytical about it, I'll admit a lot of it is just whatever pops in my head that I think is cool is what gets used.  It's finding the missing pieces and the words to use that can take years sometimes.  Some of the songs on this album have been around for a while, I just never got to record them.  They were written well before the evil Dead Kennedys lawsuit or any of that derailed my life yet again.  Then I redid the lyrics for now...at least "Terror of Tinytown" lyrically is brand new and some of the others like "I Won't Give Up" and "Dot Com Monte Carlo" which isn't on the album...we recorded it and it will come out later.  It's about the gentrification of San Francisco.

Q:  There seems to be some timeless songs

BIAFRA:  Well they are all designed to be.  I learned that the hard way with "California Uber Alles."  Here I have this great conspiracy theory about Jerry Brown and I came up with it by myself...but it wasn't quite right.  Then Reagan gets in instead and I realized these people were vastly worse so "We've Got A Bigger Problem Now" was made and it became a piece of American folklore, a heavy electric folk song. All kinds of other people have done “California Uber Alles”: Atilla the Stockbroker doing “Boadicea Uber Alles” about Thatcher and Michael Franti did it about Pete Wilson. With the Melvins I did it about Schwarzenegger and that version is still in the live set of Guantanamo School of Medicine.

Q: Your record veers between a dystopian vision with the "Pets Eat Their Masters" song and then the "hope" thing, "I Won't Give Up"...I think it's a really good closer because you have all these crazy down beat songs...

BIAFRA:  I think "Pets Eat Their Masters" is a really upbeat song.  When I wrote it I couldn't stop laughing.  I know I got something good when I'm laughing the whole time.  "I Won't Give Up" I guess is my opening shot across the bow of the Obama era, addressing the disappointment that many of us are already beginning to feel but saying does this mean we should get ready to give up or does this mean we should even follow the BarackStar’s own advice and that any change we hope for and want will have to come from the ground up?. Within insurrection in the streets, the voting booth, how we spend our money and who we give it to, things like that.  Whether in an organized fashion or secretly at night and telling no one and just causing trouble.  That's how we stopped the Vietnam War.  My father grew up during the Depression and he didn't think that Franklin Roosevelt would have lifted a finger to do anything about the situation, except he sensed more than a lot of his wealthy brethren that there were so many people that were so angry that their whole system was in danger of going down in less they did something.  Whether people are that active or not right now we're right on not just one precipice but name how many there are.  We have a collapsed economy with less and less jobs where people are getting poorer and poorer while other people are swiping the money.  We have the explosion of the Chinese economy inhaling of what's left of natural resources, if they want to live like we do they are going to need several more earth's worth of resources.  What do we do about that?  We can't just take everything forever.  Neither can they and at the same time I have to run the wipers on my wind shield every couple days to wipe off this brown film and my car is kept in a garage.  What is that brown film? Chinese factory dust.  Apparently it's a lot worse in Seattle and way worse in Tokyo.  But all kinds of things like that, let's not forget Global Warming itself, regardless of what Sarah Palin and crew may think is really going on. "Clean As A Thistle" is kind of about good, upstanding, conservative, patriotic, Born Again, Family Values, penises, and all the weird adventures they get into.  A song that will never be dated because there will always be another one.  Governor Sanford of South Carolina is only a latest example, one of my favorite comedians for that matter.  What's funny to me is that it's not just that he ran off with a floozy in Argentina for a week and didn't tell anybody when he was supposed to be Governor...I bet Bush sure envied him.  There's another Mark Sanford story that's even better, typical Right Wing grandstanding for Fox News, he walked into the legislature with baby pig in each arm decrying over spending and pork barrel projects and they both shat all over him.  Ruined a good rug too apparently. Boy I'd wish I'd seen that.  I'd just love to see that happen to Schwarzenegger, wouldn't you?  Also with that one I sort of had a rough envision at no point in this song should guitars sound like normal songs. It's a pile driver kind of a Detroit punk song, lets completely wreck that whole thing so you get bits of Man Or Astroman on a bender one minute and then you get Heads wah wah another and you know there's a lot of playing around with that to try and get it to work and then it finally did.

Another example of that it's not that hard to make punk different if you decide you wanna do that and the audiences overseas really appreciated that too that it wasn't just more of the same old stuff. Although a lot of them compared the music to Dead Kennedys, maybe a Dead Kennedys with more fire power cause it's a double guitar line up and a heavier sound, which I guess I could except that. I don't wanna go “Is that all you're getting out of it?” but at the same time I wrote most of the music for the Dead Kennedys too so my stuff just comes out sounding a certain way.

“New Feudalism” is basically another term for globalization, it's not really capitalism except for people on the bottom get dog-eat-dog capitalism. Otherwise it's more like the old barons and lords in high castles and everybody else is the peasants on the other side of the moat. Whole army of knights to put you down if you get a little uppity and don't pay enough tribute to the A.I.G., excuse me, the King. And so that's what that song was about and that's why we played it at the Seattle protest too.

“Panicland” is what a lot of our corporate lords and corporate media where would like us to live in and we're so afraid of everything we don't challenge our situation. And survey after survey, study after study, show that people are far more afraid of crime than they were five, ten, fifteen years ago even though the crime rates have steadily been going down. It's all a matter of perception and it kind of breeds the revival of racism and re-segregating schools work place and living patterns.

Q:  “Electronic Plantation”, that's from No WTO Combo?

BIAFRA: Yeah, there's a couple of songs that I did on the No WTO Combo live album that I thought deserved better more cohesive studio versions. After all when me and Krist Novoselic and Kim Thayil and Gina Mainwal tried to throw our band together for the Seattle protest we had, what, two practices, maybe three at the most with all this mayhem raging in the meantime. Looking back, I'm just blown away that the musicians were able to get as much together as we did. And I think it's a great compliment to them that it came together that quickly.
I always liked those songs anyway, so I'm glad to have them in the live set at last. And “Electronic Plantation” is basically about digital sweatshops. In San Francisco that racket’s been going on as long as I've lived here I think. Where a lot of the jobs in town were always temp jobs. You go to a temp agency who takes, what a third of your pay or more as a commission and then you may be working as some drone for Bank of America or even for the temp agency itself for years but since you're a temp there's no guarantee you're gonna work the next week, so why give you health care or anything like that. Quite the scam.

The song “Three Strikes” kind of horrified a lot of people overseas because they had no idea that the whole reason we have so many people in prison is in large part because so many prisons are run for profit and those very companies, some of which are CIA connected like Wackenhut, the way they make money is to get more and more people put in prison for longer and longer periods. Thus our insane War on Drugs and things like that. “Strength Through Shopping” is your good-old-fashioned satire with my usual sharp pitchfork, self explanatory. “Pets Eat Their Masters” is more abstract but another one of those nice dancing-on-the-edge of the end-of-the-world kind of songs.

Q:  What are your goals with the new band? You're touring, new releases, you've recorded some songs that aren't out yet...

BIAFRA:  There are some other songs such as "The Cells That Will Not Die", "Dot Com Monte Carlo," and "Victory Stinks" about how the support-our-troops crowd ignores the soldiers after they come home, and another one called "Miracle Penis Highway".  They'll all come out in some form. Plus we have a weird Krautrock side to us so there may be some official bootlegs along the way cause we were also invited to do a song for a tribute CD about two bands that meant a lot to me growing up called The Pink Fairies and The Deviants. The Deviants sort of morphed into the Pink Fairies-- closest thing Britain had to The Stooges and there was a lot of white panther stuff with The Deviants. Speaking of pranks, they would just get themselves on a flatbed truck, pull up and block the entrance to a big commercial rock festival and play for free.
We didn't have enough time to learn one of the rockers from The Pink Fairies or whatever so I just said, "Ok, let's do one of The Deviants improvisations." The biography is out but the CD didn't get done. So now they're even talking to me about whether we're gonna put it out in some form, although I'd kinda rather do vinyl on it, and hear the whole completed beast first and go from there.
Some people who don't know these bands might know the writing of Mick Farren, the singer for The Deviants and who was in very early Pink Fairies but he's not on the albums. He's known in the science fiction world as well as the journalism [world]. He lives in LA now and I don't know if that CityBeat paper is still going, but I've heard that it's not down there. Hopefully it is cause then you get to read Mick Farren every week and his tongue is as sharp as ever.

Q: You've mentioned Krautrock and psych and all these different influences in the current band, and obviously a lot of it, musically, comes from you but how did the crazy group of people you're in this band with influence it?

BIAFRA: Well, it was just sort of what they decided to put into the songs and how I steered the boat. Some of the songs were originally intended to be on a collaborative album between me and The Heads, the gold standard of the British stoner psych world or worldwide. They're more of a space rock band, but anyway, that never quite happened. The only way that Ralph, who I started the band with first before Billy and then Jon and Kimo (Ball) came aboard, had to learn the songs was listening to some practice room ones of versions with The Heads. And so, lo and behold, he started putting in some of the rip your head, off wah-wah fuzz effects that were a Heads trademark but not really a Victims Family or Freak Accident trademark.  So, I figured okay, if that's way we're gonna go, we'll go with that as part of the sound.

As I get to know them better, I know more what to maybe suggest for each person. I mean, Billy Gould isn't in the band anymore. He stayed just long enough to record the album, thankfully because by that time he was back in Faith No More as well as rehearsing for their big overseas tour, and so for the European tour we borrowed Jon Weiss', our drummer, brother Andrew Weiss, who some people may know from Rollins Band and Ween and Helios Creed and brief stint in the Butthole Surfers for Electriclarryland.  And then we had to get a local guy, of course, so now we have Ron Nichols. His original band was Grinch, and then he has been in Fracas and Hammers of Misfortune and several more since.

And then Kimo Ball, the other guitarist, was brought in by Ralph. We auditioned a lot of people, including Mykill Ziggy from Turn Me On Dead Man, and Kimo seemed to be the wildest of the wild cards. He plays bass with Ralph in Freak Accident and has done many other things on his own. Way back, he was in Mol Triffid...