For Jello Biafra, it's "California Über Alles" all over again—and again, and again

JB: He actually convinced me. I had the idea ahead of time, and since Shepard is a friend who has done another one of my album covers—for The No WTO Combo's Live From The Battle In Seattle—I figured I owed him the courtesy of calling him and telling him that I wanted to make fun of his picture. He immediately jumped and said, "Wait, I wanna do the picture myself." So, I had the honor of working with him again.

AVC: The record title, The Audacity Of Hype, is a play on the title of Barack Obama's autobiography. What made you choose that?

JB: Well, let's connect it up with the last song on the album, "I Won't Give Up," which is dealing with the aftermath of people realizing, you know, when they get that feeling like what Johnny Rotten said at the last Sex Pistols show, "Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Keep in mind the Obama campaign won all kinds of advertising awards for marketing hope and change and for that "O" logo. It's the most brilliant piece of propaganda art I've seen since the swastika. It's got it all: the fields of grain, the flag, the setting sun—oh yeah. That's a brilliant triumph of propaganda art, I can't deny it. So, it's basically to make fun of that and to make people question it more. And, now that people are questioning it more, the "I Won't Give Up" song asks, "Well, okay, we're getting our hearts broken again, what do we do now? Do we give up?" My feeling is no, we should be fighting harder. It's not so much Obama's fault as it is the so-called "Obama Nation" not bothering to back up the better ideas from the campaign—or at least the hopes they invested in the administration. So far, it's just like when Bill Clinton got in and people were so relieved that Bush wasn't in the White House. They were just like, "Ding dong, the Bush is dead. We can rest easy." And people just went to sleep.

AVC: What would you like to see people do, then?

JB: If anything, we need more insurrection and more protests in the streets to drive people in the right direction. So far, all we've got is a handful of Tea Party bozos being handed airtime by corporate media when there really should be a Million Uninsured March on Washington. A better example would be something Amy Goodman wrote when Obama first got in, pointing out that when Franklin Roosevelt first got elected, a previously scorned labor leader handed FDR a list of demands. Supposedly he took a look at them and said, "Oh, this is all great, now make me do it." That's exactly what he meant by that, drum up popular support from the ground up, march in the streets if you have to, but make sure this gets pushed in the right direction. Light a fire under the ass of some of those coin-operated legislators who need to get the bill through. All the people who voted for Obama assume that their job is done and they can go back to texting and playing video games all day. Well, the job is not done, it's only started. There needs to be a blowtorch up the ass of that whole administration the whole time they are in power.

AVC: Your band was initially called Axis Of Merry Evil Doers. Why the name change?

JB: Well, initially—when the band couldn't agree on the name—I thought, "Let's just make it like the Butthole Surfers originally did when they had a different name every time they played." Eventually the Gitmo School Of Med stuck. Part of the reason I pushed for it is because of my feelings on torturing war criminals. We can't let this be forgotten no matter how much the powers that be and corporate McNews would like us to think that it's not nearly as important to our daily lives as Tiger Woods' penis.

AVC: Your post-Dead Kennedys musical projects have been short-lived. Is this band going to stick around for a while?

JB: A lot of them were intentionally hit-and-run projects. I'd just find myself in a room making noise with Al from Ministry or with the guys from Nomeansno. Long-term, I always wanted my own band again, but good and bad adventures kept derailing the whole thing. This is something that will hopefully go on for a while—more live shows, more recordings, more sabotage and mayhem. It also means putting spoken word on ice for the foreseeable future. Plus, I want to see how the dust settles around the Obama era before I take up spoken word again.

AVC: What's your worst-case scenario with the Obama administration?

JB: We're really close to it right now. I had a feeling they might squander their congressional majority within two years and that's looking more and more likely. How much have we really lost when the Supermajority included wingnuts like Lieberman? Then there's that Senator Nelson from Nebraska who's barely done anything during his whole career except wear the worst toupee in the entire Senate.

AVC: You once remarked that the remaining Dead Kennedys touring without you was akin to them touring as a "Dead Kennedys cover band." Did they ever respond to that?

JB: I get threat letters from their lawyer every once in a while about one thing or another. It's still a very ugly situation and the whole Dead Kennedys catalog and legacy is slowly but surely going down the drain thanks to the way they've run things. It saddens me to see that. They're apparently trying to get yet another farewell tour in Europe off the ground for August and they hired a manager whose other main client is a Christian folk act. And yet, his own family values were perfectly cool with putting a cover of "Too Drunk To Fuck"—which none of those other guys wrote a note of—as the background music to a really brutal, graphic rape scene in one of the Grindhouse movies. It's all money über alles—and, in the long run, it's hurting everything. These are the same guys who have been running around Hollywood trying to get people to pony up money for a Metallica-type documentary movie about the band and they can't understand why I don't want to be in it.

AVC: How has all of that affected the way you feel about your time with the band?

JB: Don't get me wrong, it's not like I hate Dead Kennedys. I'm really proud of the music and the legacy—and for crying out loud, I wrote most of the music for that band, too. What really makes me mad is that when the shows are advertised, the photo is an old picture of the band with me in it. It's just out-and-out fraud. They claim it's the promoter's fault each and every time, and yet it keeps happening. I've also heard that they don't introduce the scab singers by name, so all the mall kids who found out about the Dead Kennedys at Hot Topic go to the shows thinking its me. They could at least do it with some class, just list two or three names and say that they will be playing the music of The Dead Kennedys—which is something the people from The Germs should be doing too. Or, they would have a lot more class if they did what Bauhaus did. Peter Murphy is out of the band so you launch a new band, a new name, to some degree, a new sound, and presto, you have your own identity. Then again, if they tried that, they'd need somebody to write the songs.