What’s actually on the cover of Dead Kennedys’ ‘Frankenchrist’?
Amid the swirling punk explosion that seized the San Francisco arts and music world in the late 1970s, the kings of the scene were without question hardcore miscreants, Dead Kennedys.
Fronted by the animated provocateur Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys spat a nightmarish and scabrously cartoon reportage of political failure and imperial greed, spiking fierce lyrical attacks with surrealist sting and rancid blasts of discoloured satire. Dropping their 1980 debut as the country’s Reaganite lurch was rearing its ghoulish head, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables stood as a fireball classic of punk’s original wave, teeming with colourful affrontery as corroded as the burnt-out cop cars plastered over its eerie cover.
By 1985, Dead Kennedys were one of the leading faces of US hardcore, yet a need to flex creatively would shape their third LP, Frankenchrist. Excoriating cutthroat capitalism and tearing asunder the nation’s coagulating mythos, Dead Kennedys deploy a wide sonic arsenal to blast the ‘Stars and Stripes of Corruption’, from Mariachi trumpets on the seething ‘MTV-Get off the Air’, ‘A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch’s blistering psychedelia, and the gurgling synthesizer that scores the exploited worker on the dystopian ‘At My Job’.
Biafra made the album’s core thesis clear enough to SPIN in 1986, establishing a treatise of empowerment as much as a scathing critique of the neoliberal capture: “One of the main focal points of Frankenchrist is if we are going to rise above the need for cops and laws, we can quit using the old American work ethic of seeing how much you can get away with and how much you can scam and who cares whose back you stab or what you do to get it as long as you get it”.
As ever, Biafra always had a grab bag of sourced images and media clippings ready to be assembled by the Alternative Tentacles label art team. While Frankenchrist’s inserted poster ensured its long-standing infamy—a daybill-sized print out of HR Giger’s notorious Landscape #XX self-sodomising genitalia oil painting, so controversial that the band were brought to trial on obscenity charges—its compromised album cover was no less dripping in Biafra’s weird, journalistic bite.
It’s an image that becomes stranger the more one looks at it. Paraded down a crowded street are four shirt and tie white men in tiny miniature cars, sporting red fezzes and smothered in a faint glow of self-satisfaction. Who are these oddballs?
The red ties and Ottoman headgear are the uniform of the Shriners. Formed in 1872 and headquartered in Florida’s Tampa, the fraternal organisation is a part of the wider Masonic society and boasts alumni such as Mel Brooks, J Edgar Hoover and John Wayne, and nebulously seeks to attract “men of good character” and “foster self-improvement through leadership, education, the perpetuation of moral values and community involvement”. Initially called the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Middle-Eastern cosplaying became toned down in light of 9/11’s ensuing Islamophobic feeling, officially adopting the ‘Shriners’ moniker in 2010.
The original Shriners adorned on Frankenchrist’s cover weren’t best pleased. Snapped by Newsweek a decade previously in a Detroit parade, the Shriners decided to dump another legal headache on Alternative Tentacles’ plate, already swamped by the costly obscenity fight, and sued Dead Kennedys, Newsweek, and two independent retailers for a cumulative $45million. With the image already published and sourced legitimately, the Shriners had no grounds, and the lawsuit was abandoned.
However, legal woes and financial haemorrhaging accelerated Dead Kennedys’ demise, eking out one final album with 1986’s Bedtime for Democracy before disbanding soon after. Leaving a stunning hardcore punk legacy, Frankenchrist’s skewed cover perhaps captures Biafra’s worldview the most succinctly, a vignette of American culture that becomes more absurd the closer one pays attention.
