The Dead Kennedys were at the forefront of the punk rock movement in the early eighties. After a long hiatus, they reformed in 2002 and are touring Australia in October. John Goodridge had a chat with bass player Klaus Flouride about his guitars and the craziness of those early days.
Hi Klaus, how did your European tour go?
It was great, it was fun, a blast. It was hot. No sorry, actually it was the east coast tour that was ridiculously hot. It was unseasonably cold. They had the tail end of a hurricane. So that’s a bit of climate change there, that at the end of summer a hurricane is coming through Scotland. Outside of that there were a couple of festivals that were pretty rainy. At the Belgian one it rained on the audience but they didn’t go into tents, which was nice. They could very well have said “Fuck this! It’s been raining all day, I’m soaking wet, this is a heavy metal festival and why am I watching this melodic band play punk rock”, you know, but they stood there and even dug it. The next festival it rained all day and Snoop Doggy Dogg was on a different stage and he got poured on the whole time but the skies cleared up. So people were wet but they watched us. The venues of course were 35 degrees inside and humid so it was mixed, but the audiences were all great.
Can you tell me about your guitars and the relationship you have with your bass guitars?
Well, you know what happened to the other one, right? Brazil lost it and it’s very probably in baggage claim someplace but the airline would much rather just pay us the fifty dollars that’s on the back of the ticket.
So how does it feel to lose something like that?
I’ve lost guitars before and I just have to let it go. I mean I tried to get it back and we did everything to try to get it back, and when I mentioned it on Facebook, I suddenly had 600 new friends from Brazil and about 40 of them had worked at this airline and they said there were about three or four big halls of lost luggage that never gets going through except to just put it there because they just don’t want to pay the person overtime. It could be there, but they wouldn’t be able to sell it without spray-painting it black or something. So then I had Schecter guitars send me one and it was a good jazz bass and I played it on the first tour after that, the England one, but before that we had a year off. Ray had carpal tunnel in his left hand so he had an operation, which seemed to be effective, so Ray can play again, which is great.
But a friend of mine from the eighties was going to get Tony Sherman to make a replica to surprise me, but Tony said that he needed more that just pictures to work off. I had a bunch of hi-res pictures then watched them make this thing and they wouldn’t let me pay them back or anything, and he put nicks and dents in it, but it’s not the same. But it’s the thought behind it, plus it plays like a bat out of hell. It’s got brand new pickups for one thing. I used to throw the other one down all the time and each time you do that it loses a bit of the volume. You take any magnet and whack it, it’s gonna lose a little force and pickups are electromagnets and I hadn’t changed the pickups since ’84, so here are these pickups that he made.
The thing is slightly heavier because he was working off of pictures and he didn’t have another jazz bass there, which he sort of beats himself up for. He says “I wanna do work on the body, I wanna make you another body.” I say, “Tony, no, it plays great!” In “Moon over Marin” where I have to hold that one note, it’s really hard to get most amplifiers to hold that harmonic, but that bass just resonated right there.. So it’s not the same bass but it represents the bass.
It was an honor to me that he made that for me and it’s really lucky that it plays really well. Ray got his guitar stolen too, but they were Schecters, so they replaced it too. So they’re a well-meaning company that makes affordable, good guitars. They’re halfway between Fenders and Squiers, but they have some good ideas and the guitars are getting better and better.
When the Dead Kennedys formed, the punk rock era was a reaction to the politics of the time. Were you ever afraid on stage that the crowd was getting out of control?
There are different sorts of afraid and it wasn’t just a reaction to the politics. There was an apathy that politics was going to do what ever it was going to do no matter what we do, so we might just as well do nothing. We were labeled a political band but at least two thirds of the songs would be labeled social commentary. “I Kill Children” isn’t directly a political song and that song got us into a lot of trouble way back with the PMRC, but if you take the time to go to the bridge of the song, it explains what’s going on inside the guy’s head and what happened to him as a child and stuff. A lot of it is getting inside what makes crazy people tick, what makes people stupid, why they choose to be stupid and it goes into politics also. Most of it doesn’t directly make a statement, like this needs to be done. One of the few ones we did like that is “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”. We’re fairy clearly saying that you guys are idiots, cut it out, we’re sick of it.
There was stuff, watching from the stage that was scary in England and Germany and in Southern California with a bunch of Jarheads who came in thinking it was like a football game where we can knock anybody down and there’s no rules and turned the mosh pit into what became known as slam dancing thing, which was a manufactured word by some press agent. We changed our names when we started the group, we all had a goofy name and everybody was doing that at the time, so we could still be in the phone book and not have to worry about people sending us mail bombs.
But on the fifteenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination we were playing an evening show and one of the local writers, who knew he was doing us a favor by writing about us, by the name of Herb Caen, wrote, “when you thought the Jonestown bad taste had reached it’s nadir, along comes a group called Dead Kennedys playing on the fifteenth anniversary”. He also mentioned Biafra and suggested he change his name to put in Bangladesh and stuff like that. But we knew that bad press is better than no press at all, so that was fun. But it got picked up by Associated Press and it went national and we got threatening calls from all over the country and people were being frisked as they came into the shows and they took guns off some of the people – I mean they let them come on in, they were business men, but not with guns. We didn’t know any of that had happened until after the show. God knows what would have happened if they hadn’t been frisking them. Some guy threw a shot glass at us during one of our songs and it smashed on the wall behind us, which scared the bejeesus out of the drummer.
So there’s been that sort of thing but there’s been the cops in Southern California and they specifically were fairly brutal to punk rockers. There have been a couple of riots but we only had shows stopped maybe three times during that era and it almost always caused by the cops. They’d look at a mosh-pit and say “this is violence” and pull out the batons. At one show they threw a canister of tear gas into the mosh so people were trying to leave the hall but they blocked the doors.
Then D.H. got in trouble in Brisbane for being black basically; the cops saw him from a distance and didn’t realize he’d been on ABC earlier in the day and they thought he was an aboriginal, even though he’s black his features are not like an aboriginal, but at that point the cop had gone past the point where he could say “oops, I made a mistake”. He just told him he had an open beer can and to get in the car, and Ray said if he gets in the car then I get in the car, and the cop was “no get out of my way, I’m arresting this man.” “If you put him in the car, I’m coming along because I don’t know what’s going to happen there.” So in the end they arrested him also for obstructing justice, and they took them down to the watch house. But then they realized that they were on TV and famous so they bought out a couple of belts with studs on them and stuff and they had us signing autographs and stuff and it was just like “okay, whatever.” But you can’t say “I don’t approve of what you just did to me” or you’ll be right back.
Wow that’s amazing. Well I look forward to seeing you in Adelaide.
Awesome. Make sure you tell people to stick around after the show because we love meeting the fans. We like to meet the people that we play for.
Dead Kennedys – Bedtime For Democracy Tour
Tuesday 30th September Fowlers Adelaide (ALL AGES!)
With special guests The Bennies
www.moshtix.com.au / www.venuetix.com.au
Wednesday 1st October 170 Russell Melbourne
With special guests The Bennies
www.170Russell.com.au
Friday 3rd October HiFi Brisbane
With special guests The Bennies
www.oztix.com.au
Saturday 4th October Coolangatta Hotel Coolangatta
With special guests The Bennies
www.oztix.com.au
Sunday 5th October HiFi Sydney *Public holiday eve*
With special guests The Bennies
www.oztix.com.au
Wednesday 8th October Mona Vale Hotel Mona Vale
www.dashtickets.com.au
Thursday 9th October The Entrance Leagues Club Entrance
www.dashtickets.com.au
Friday 10th October The Small Ballroom Newcastle
www.dashtickets.com.au
Saturday 11th October Capitol Perth
www.oztix.com.au
www.killrockstar.com.au | www.deadkennedys.com
