Dead Kennedys: Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

Dead Kennedys: Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

1987

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. Police Truck  2. Too Drunk to Fuck  3. California Über Alles (single version)  4. The Man with the Dogs  5. Insight  6. Life Sentence  7. A Child and His Lawnmower  8. Holiday in Cambodia (single version)  9. I Fought the Law  10. Saturday Night Holocaust  11. Pull My Strings  12. Short Songs  13. Straight A's  14. Kinky Sex Makes the World Go 'Round  15. The Prey  16. Night of the Living Rednecks  17. Buzzbomb from Pasadena (alternate version)




This is it! This is what got me into the band...It was one in a pile of CD's I picked up for my birthday as a teenager when I was first exploring the world of punk (I believe I went over all this before in the Circle Jerks "Group Sex" post) and this shit really sealed the deal...I must have listened to this a few thousand times. To this day I can still recite all the lyrics for the entire album off the top of my head (even the spoken-word track!!). I don't have the CD anymore, but I have an old vinyl copy which is pretty interesting because the final two songs are on a separate flexi-disc...

 Y'know, those floppy, paper-thin, plastic-film discs, like the kind they'd give away at McDonald's that would have a jingle or something on it...

If you're only going to pick up one Dead Kennedys album, pick up the McDonald's one...The part about the pickles always gives me goosebumps...Wait, what am I saying? Pick up "Give Me Convenience or Give me Death"! It's a compilation of non-album singles, B-Sides, live tracks (of songs that didn't appear on the albums) and an odd alternate take of "Buzzbomb," that Jello sings in an old lady voice that ends up sounding like the Crucifucks...

 Somehow this posthumous collection of odds and ends up capturing the spirit of the band better than any greatest hits ever could...This is where you find all the prime stuff..."Police Truck," "Too Drunk to Fuck," "Insight" are all punk classics..."Holiday in Cambodia" and "California Über Alles" appear here too, but in their original single versions, which sound pretty similar to the versions on "Fresh Fruit", except they're maybe a little less trebly and not quite as intense. This version of "Holiday in Cambodia" doesn't have the whole "Pol Pot" section, either...

But the real highlight is "Pull My Strings" which is one of the best live recordings ever...The band was invited to play at a music awards show and took the stage in white dress shirts (like the Knack (or some other nice band that you'd take home to Mom) would wear), turned around their hidden skinny ties to form dollar signs and proceeded to eviscerate the music establishment...

 It's hard to single out the greatest moment in the song, but here's a few:

• Jello's announcement that the band are no longer a punk rock band, they're now a new wave band... 
•  Turning "My Sharona" into "My Payola."
•  The mock Bob Dylan backing vocals during the breakdown. 
• The Line: "And when I'm rich and meet Bob Hope, we'll shoot some golf and shoot some dope..." 

Things do drop off a bit at the end, with "The Prey," which is a stalker narrative set to boring lounge jazz, and "Kinky Sex Makes the World Go Around" which has always creeped me out...It's essentially a political spoken word piece (I mean, I can kind of make out a static-y version of "Bleed For Me" in the background, I think...), but the sound of the Iron Lady orgasming about a war turns my iron stomach...

Yuck!!

It's weird that there's no tracks dating later than the 1982 "Halloween single" on here...



I can't recall the band releasing any singles from the "Frankenchrist" or "Bedtime for Democracy" albums, so there's no B-Sides that I know of...Does anybody know if there were any outtakes from those two albums? Hmmm, that's got me thinking, which is always a dangerous proposition...

Anyway, a little birdie told me it's Friday, so it's time to sit down in the fluffy chair, flame up the herb, woof down the beer and listen to some music...Let's do "Pull My Strings" by the Dead Kennedys...Have a great weekend everyone!