Jello Biafra says Jerry Brown's not so bad

March 30, 2010 | Lance Williams, California Watch

It’s 2010, and Jerry Brown is running for governor of California.

If he wins, will the Dead Kennedys play the inaugural ball?

Absolutely not.

Flickr photo by Tyko2000Jello Biafra

Still, Brown’s emergence as a candidate for the office he left 28 years ago has also given a career boost to Jello Biafra, the former frontman for the long-defunct San Francisco punk band.

Their 1980 underground hit “California Über Alles” began with the lines:

“I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns.”

“California Über Alles” wasn’t a campaign anthem. Brown is portrayed as a “Zen fascist” who wants to be “Fuhrer.” The title evokes the first line of "Das Deutschlandliedt," the German hymn that was appropriated by Hitler. There also is is a reference to a death camp with “organic poison gas.”

As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once wrote, “Just when you think tastelessness has reached its nadir, along comes a punk rock group called the Dead Kennedys."

Today Biafra is a solo artist, and he says he may have been wrong about Brown back in the day. “I realized I was off base with Brown when the Reaganoids stormed in in 1980,” he tells the online A.V. Club in an interview. He added a caveat:

It will be interesting to see what happens because Brown was a budget hawk the first time around—when there was way more money in the budget to slash from essential services. Even Brown doesn't seem to want to stand up to the rich people and the land owners who don't think they should have to pay taxes for the public good.

Of Brown as governor, Biafra also says, “I guess that would be better than selling the whole state off on eBay.” (For the politically inactive, that's a dig at GOP front-runner Meg Whitman, eBay's former chief.)

California politicians and Adolf Hitler just seemed to inspire hardcore punk.

Do you remember the Reagan Youth? I caught them in Dallas in the summer of 1984, playing their hit “Anarchy in the Fatherland” at an outdoor gig in 100-degree heat.

The bandstand was in what Dallas police called “the playpen” – the fenced-off protest area set up outside the convention center where the Republican Party was nominating President Ronald Reagan for a second term. The Reagan Youth were very loud, and drenched in sweat. Most of the audience were police officers. I think the officers preferred country music.