Jello Biafra for mayor: the Dead Kennedys’ bid for power
Former Dead Kennedys frontman and arch-provocateur Eric Boucher, better known as Jello Biafra, has been fascinated and immersed in politics since first witnessing JFK’s head-bursting assassination at the tender age of five. Such a world-shattering event proved pivotal: its queasy mix of TV news and the disorientating media climate, blood splattered with brains and conspiratorial violence would guide Biafra through the rest of his life, forging a healthy irreverence and cynicism for the business and political class through his activism as a punk frontman, label head, spoken word artist, and satirical prankster.
Back in 1979, before even Dead Kennedys’ torrid debut LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Biafra decided to run for San Francisco mayor as an independent. Requiring $1,500 or 1500 signatures, Biafra accrued $900 and gathered the remaining signatures at the last minute to become an official candidate.
In a recent interview with Classic Rock, Biafra recalled the genesis of his mayoral fancy: “It was kinda done on a dare. I was in the back of our drummer’s Volkswagen Beetle on our way to a Pere Ubu concert when he said: ‘Jello, you have such a big mouth you should run for Mayor.’ At the gig that night, I started mouthing off to everybody that I was going to run for Mayor. I even wrote my platform out on a napkin with a felt-tip pen while Pere Ubu was playing a metre from me.”
He chose a hell of a time for it. The city was a febrile powder keg of protest and societal anger. Following incumbent mayor George Moscone’s and city council member Harvey Milk’s (the first openly gay elected official in California and gay rights champion, long before the term LGBTQ+) assassination at the hands of disgruntled former Board of Supervisors representative Dan White and conviction of voluntary manslaughter over first-degree murder, the broiling sense of injustice among the people resulted in the ‘White Night’ riots that tore through the liberal city, gay advocacy groups and the organised left clashing with the SFPD in nightly turmoil. This certainly left an impression on Biafra, emblazoning the stark picture of an upturned cop car in flames across Dead Kennedys’ 1980 debut LP.
Challenging corporate democrat and future Californian senator Diane Feinstein (who assumed the SF mayoral office after Moscone’s death) and Republican-turned-independent Quentin Kopp, Biafra usurped the popular commercial tagline “there’s always room for Jell-O” and set to work on a manifesto filled with sardonic proposals. Some were wholly sensible: “Holding elections in which police would be voted into office by the neighbourhoods they patrolled” feels entirely prescient in an age where faith in the police force has never been lower. “Businessman to wear clown suits within city limits” pursues a more Yippie political theatre to his policy agenda, but its anti-establishment sentiment wouldn’t have been lost on the young SF electorate.
Never one to turn down a stunt if it supports his subversive japery, Biafra made his contempt toward Feinstein’s shallow leadership known in full spectacle, “It was my response to ‘Frankenfeinstein’ saying she was going to ‘clean up’ Market Street, by which she meant throwing the homeless out of all the vacant buildings. So, I went to her mansion in Pacific Heights on a mission to clean up her lawn. It was just an attention-grabbing stunt. It looked like I was wearing a toxic-materials suit, but it was actually a coverall for a milk delivery man. There was a big, locked gate at her mansion, so I didn’t get as far as her lawn.”
Biafra’s manifesto also targeted the widespread police corruption leeching off the independent venue community the punk scene depended on. Biafra elaborated: “Something else I had learned quickly when I first came to San Francisco was that the city was openly and brazenly corrupt. I realised, for example, that the reason why punk shows were getting attacked so much by the police was that none of us had the money to pay off the cops. In some cases, the promoters just refused on principle.”
He added: ”So realising how the whole thing worked, I thought, okay, let’s just bring it all out in the open. And I proposed an officially appointed Board Of Bribery to set fair and standard bribe rates for acquiring liquor licences, building code exemptions, protection from the police and other crooks and so on.”
Remarkably, Biafra came third out of ten candidates, forcing a secondary run-off between Feinstein and Kopp. With such an embarrassing result for the SF political elite, a bill was passed by the Board of Supervisors (with Kopp a member) a few years later forbidding anyone from running under an assumed name. Although ‘The Man’ would never admit it openly, the SFPD’s embrace of community policing shortly after does suggest that the Dead Kennedys frontman may have indeed helped shape city policy in his own irreverent way.
Biafra’s political ambitions didn’t end there. In the 2000 Green Party leadership contest, Biafra came second, joint with countercultural author Stephen Gaskin, with another characteristically bold programme, including a maximum wage, decriminalising all drugs, and again efforts to make police forces accountable to their community, this time on a national scale. Easy to dismiss as just a piece of punk theatre, Biafra was always armed with a sharp and progressive vision that bolstered his unorthodox proposals.
Speaking on a local news segment back in ’79, Biafra summed up his motivations succinctly: “For those of them who have seen my candidacy as a publicity stunt or a joke, they should keep in mind that it is no more of a joke, and no less of a joke, than anyone else they care to name.”
