Dead Kennedys: Plastic Surgery Disasters
1982
Alternative Tentacles Records
Format I Own it on: Vinyl
Track Listing: 1. Government Flu 2. Terminal Preppie 3. Trust Your Mechanic 4. Well Paid Scientist 5. Buzzbomb 6. Forest Fire 7. Halloween 8. Winnebago Warrior 9. Riot 10. Bleed for Me 11. I Am the Owl 12. Dead End 13. Moon Over Marin
"Plastic Surgery Disasters" is a 1982 concept album about Joan Rivers...
Oh yea, I meant to talk about this in the last post...The inserts in these Dead Kennedys albums are always amazing...
They really go all-out in these things...Usually resembling a newspaper packed full of hilarious and/or horrifying photos and headlines...Wait, that's exactly like a newspaper, come to think of it...
The interesting thing about the "Plastic Surgery Disasters" insert is that there's about twenty four 12 X 12 pages but all the lyrics are crammed onto one page and are written so small that I can barely read 'em...But that's probably because I'm a super old man now...I can recall reading these clearly on the dang CD booklet (which must have been microscopic!!!) and having no problem...
Thinking back to those days, I remember this album not quite clicking with me at first...I had only heard (and obsessed over) "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death," "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables" and "In God We Trust, Inc" and when I first put on "Plastic Surgery Disasters" it seemed much darker, murkier and text-heavy than any of those albums...It didn't quite hit the pop pleasure center that the other albums (believe it or not) hit for me...Not to mention the cover just confused the shit out of me (imagine my surprise when years later I discovered that tiny. dried, leathery hand belonged to a human being! It always registered as a grotesque doll hand or something...).
But over time this has grown on me immensely and has become one of my favorites...It's so much more dense and detailed than their previous stuff...Instead of the generalized societal finger-pointing, Jello delves more into the specific characters that make up Dumb America, like the "Terminal Preppie"and the "Winnebago Warrior"...And "Forest Fire" and "Riot" are so riveting and finely detailed that they function as satiric short stories...Particularly "Riot" which follows the empty-headed riot fantasies, normally associated with punk records, to their logical conclusions...Where you wind up homeless the next day from burning down your city and you eventually run into the well-armed wall of police who get to riot all they please...Such great stuff...
The music is also more detailed...All the various influences are more integrated...It's still hardcore punk, but hardcore punk with psychedelia and Ennio Morricone woven throughout...And check out the band's flawless grasp of pop on "Moon Over Marin." Jello is actually the weak link on this song, his vocal line nowhere near grasping the greatness of that guitar melody... It shows that the band could have been pumping out new-wave pop hits if they really wanted to, but instead chose to focus on pissing everybody off with abrasive punk..It's unexpectedness makes it one of my all-time favorite DK songs, along with "Bleed for Me," which also appears on this album..."Bleed For Me" is just a classic punk blast, with a great chorus...Plus the line, "When cowboy Ronnie comes to town, forks out his tongue at human rights," always cracks me up for some reason...I know it's just a figure of speech, but here's how I imagine it looking...
LOLOLOL!!!!
The specificity of the politics on these DK albums don't date them too badly (the unfortunate thing about politics, is that there's always another name you can insert that does the job just as well...) and it actually makes the albums more interesting than the bland, generalized sloganeering that you got from post-80's punk...So if you're a DK fan, don't miss it, if you're one of those folks that hate politicized music, you're probably not a Dead Kennedys fan in the first place...
Here's "Moon Over Marin" by Dead Kennedys...Enjoy...
It's my DK favourite LP (maybe because it's the first one, when I was a kid...). But my copie don't have the lyrics, neither the poster. Do you have the insert with them (in good quality for the zoom...jajajaja)?
ReplyDeleteYea, my copy has the insert and lyrics. Endlessly entertaining stuff. I would scan them but my scanner is a 100 year old piece of junk. I should probably upgrade someday.... I can't imagine starting with this one! Must have been mind-blowing. I feel like I was more eased-in by some of their other stuff. Plastic Surgery Disasters and Frankenchrist have been the ones that I seem to revisit the most these days ...
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