- Wonderfully offensive band name – check!
- Brilliantly arrogant LP title – check!
- Withering disdain for left and right politicos – check!
- Mutant surf rock stylings – check!
- Picture of burning cop cars – check!
- Still sounds sharp 42 years later – check!
- Best US punk LP – check!
Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, I just don’t have the words. They do though:
Efficiency and progress is ours once more Now that we have the neutron bomb It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done Away with excess enemy But no less value to property No sense in war but perfect sense at home
Paranoid? gleefully so, but who are you asking for?
I love Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables. Stumbling across it in a bunch of LPs that my dad was looking after for a friend who was emigrating was a seismic moment for me back in 1991. I liked punk, which for me at the time meant the Sex Pistols nihilistic rock flash and Ramones mean Beach Boys schtick, plus a handful of compilations I’d heard. Dead Kennedys* made me rethink what punk was to an extent, they were genuinely off-the-rails but with real intent, they skewered their targets, politically and personally.
One of my all-time favourite songs ever is here, ‘Holiday In Cambodia’. Real menace, real bite, realpolitik. If you’ve never encountered a certain type of rich kid slumming it, going wild, dabbling, trying to find a soul to call their own before going home to work in daddy’s firm (never mummy’s) and make a mint, then good fucks to you my friend, unfortunately I have. This song just sounds like too many people I met on my English course.
So you've been to school for a year or two And you know you've seen it all In daddy's car thinking you'll go far Back east your type don't crawl Playing ethnicky jazz To parade your snazz On your five-grand stereo Braggin' that you know how the niggers feel cold And the slum's got so much soul**
I could write 1000 words just on this track, easy. I think the band really hit a musical height here too, conjuring tension terror and dread. East Bay Ray was a git player and a half, Ted and Klaus Flouride^ really hit their straps here too.
The other massive hitter here is the equally funny/feral/ferocious ‘California Über Alles’. Even if the band had just come up with the title, that would have been enough, that they then tagged it onto a masterpiece of cynical, sneering discontent with a brilliant buccaneering tune of absolute heaviness, is almost too much to bear. Dead Kennedys = not very keen on conformity; who knew?
Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables^* is too much of a sacred text for me to dissect it tune by tune, just experience the sucker for yourselves. Playing it today I am struck by just what a fabulous collection of tunes it has, that wild mutant surf rock is a gift that just keeps on giving and Jello serves up his wonderful lyrics, crooning, yowling, whooping BUT always completely intelligible. This album is just a great listen.
The hits just come slamming in time after time, ‘Kill The Poor’, ‘Let’s Lynch The Landlord’, ‘Stealing People’s Mail’, ‘Drug Me’ … the titles alone are almost enough. It all culminates in a derranged, speed snorting, spittle flecked cover of ‘Viva Las Vegas’, featuring a lyric change or two that Pomus and Schuman would not have approved of.
Dead Kennedys had a sound that was totally their own, still nobody sounds remotely like them. They were not in thrall to ’77 punk, they eschewed any of the creeping macho behaviour that infiltrated US hardcore and frankly they were so much cleverer and individual than their peers it hurt.
Dead Kennedys targeted bigotry, economic inequality, blind patriotism, hypocrisy and warmongering – good job those problems have all receded in the last 42 years, eh readers?
A big part of Dead Kennedys was their whole aesthetic. Right from the beginning the artist Winston Smith was on board. The large pull-out lyric/collage that comes with Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables is one of his very best. My copy is an original one on Cherry Red Records which has the doctored back cover found photo of a lounge band on it – this was censored/altered/removed from later copies.
We're gonna steal your mail On a Friday night We're gonna steal your mail By the pale moonlight We better not get caught We'll be dumped in institutions Where we'll be drugged and shocked Till we come out born-again Christians
A cautionary tale indeed.
1137 Down.
PS: Because I love you:
*my mum’s favourite band name ever, ‘it’s so brilliantly offensive’ she gushed.
**considered taking the n-word out, but left it as Jello uses it to emphasise how vile the song’s subject is.
^my fave Dead Kennedys name. Have a go at inventing your own – I came up with Vlad Kissinger.
^*I snigger at its arrogance every time I type it.