(This is a paper that I originally wrote in 2008 for freshman year writing, I have made revisions based on the notes given to me from the professor after receiving my grade, as well as other miscellaneous changes such as grammatical corrections, and the addition of pictures. You can find
the This American Life episode here, and the track Tales From the Trial from
The High Priest of Harmful Matter is available on Spotify. There are no sources provided, because we were supposed to use 'signal phrases'. )
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| Poster of Penis Landscape, Original by H. R. Giger |
The
story here I am about to share is about a musician who the government tried to
censor. In the eighties when the PMRC and Tipper Gore tried to repress the American
music industry, many small independent artists who would have trouble defending
and representing themselves in a court of law were particularly targeted. This is a specific
case of a punk rock musician who was singled out.
In 1986 the Los Angeles police
department raided the home of Jello Biafra. Biafra, whose real name was Eric
Bouher, better known as the lead singer for The Dead Kennedys, was asleep when
the raid took place. He tells of the whole incident himself in the spoken word
album “The High Priest of Harmful Matter”. The nine police officers that showed
up with a search warrant told Biafra that he
was under suspicion of distributing harmful matter. The officers didn’t find
drugs or guns, they found records; which is exactly what they were looking for.
What would follow in a year and a half would be a three week long court case
that eventually would be thrown out by the judge.
The
specific record the police were looking for was Frankenchrist
by the Dead Kennedys. Every Frankenchrist album
comes with an insert poster done by H.R. Geiger entitled “Penis Landscape”.
While many people might not know him, Geiger won an Academy Award for set
design on the movie Alien, as well as the Oscar for best effects. When the
deputy chief of Los Angeles
County, Michael Guarino saw the
insert, he knew right away he had an open-shut obscenity case.
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Dead Kennedy's 1985 Frankenchrist
LP, complete with warning sticker. |
When the police
left Biafra’s home they had three copies of the
Frankenchrist album, three
copies of the Geiger poster, and Biafra’s private mail as well as business
paper work; not only from his home, but also from
Alternative records, the record company that Biafra owns. Biafra
was one of four people charged with distributing harmful matter, including a wholesaler,
a guy who worked at Alternative Tentacles, and a 67 year old man who owned the
factory that pressed the albums. Each could expect maximum of a year in jail
and a two thousand dollar fine for what the Dead Kenndys had to say with an
album. On top of that the Dead Kennedys would be blackballed from any music distributor;
otherwise that distributor or retailer would be subject to similar fines for
carrying “harmful matter”. The only reason the record store where the album was purchased was not prosecuted, was because they had already taken all Dead Kennedys albums off their shelves.
The
next day the district attorney said that prosecuting the Alternative Tentacles
label was “a cost effective way to prosecute”. By singling out an independent
label it was easier to enforce the censorship the Parents Music Resource Center
headed by Tipper Gore had in mind, rather than go after a multimillion dollar
record company such as Time Warner, Sony or Universal, and their musicians such
as Prince or Madonna. Rather than pay the fine, Biafra
fought the case which ended up costing him over eighty thousand dollars. Fortunately, not only
was the No More Censorship Defense fund put into action where fans from all
over the world sent in money, but a California criminal justice lawyer toke
Biafra’s case for free, the ACLU sent a lawyer as well.
The
trial itself dragged on for three weeks in L.A. Testimony was given by a young
girl who said that the album was purchased for her little brother as a
Christmas present by her mother, and that the album had been opened by someone
before Christmas. This is allegedly when the mother then seen the Geiger painting. The mother
then sent the artwork to the Los Angeles
district attorney’s office. The reason why this story seems so bizarre is
because it’s not true. Years later Guarino alleges that he had found and
listened to the Frankenchrist album himself and thought it would be an easy
case to take on. After three weeks, the media had turned the case into a joke
and the jury was hung, in favor of acquittal. When Guarino wanted to retry the
case, the judge threw it out.
In 1995 on the
Chicago Public Radio show This American
Life, Guarino and Biafra talked on the
phone. Guarino had in his own words “changed his ways”, apologized to Biafra and said that at the time he thought he was doing
the right thing and thought he had the moral high ground in the case. The funny
thing was, Biafra thought he himself had the
moral high ground as well. After a while the reporter that did the story, David Segal, said “the two started talking like old war buddies” and
“it was hard to get a word in edgewise”. In the background a recording on their
phone conversation can be heard where the two discussed everything from
politics to going out and getting dinner with Guarino’s son, who incidentally
ended up being a huge Dead Kennedy’s fan.
So
in the end Biafra and company got off, and in
the process won a civil liberties battle on free speech. Had they lost, all
Dead Kennedys material would have been deemed “harmful” in the state of California, if not the
country, and anyone charged with distributing it would have been fined and
possibly jailed. Guarino would have then gone on a harmful matter slash
censorship triad and gone after other artists, and though it took three weeks, Biafra stopped him dead in his tracks. Jello Biafra fought the law, and Jello won.
