Free speech is always under attack, declares the new play Porn Rock: The Obscenity Trial of Jello Biafra that premiered at the Eastwood Performing Arts Center in Hollywood this February, and will run through March.
Written by Larry Meyers, veteran TV and theatre writer, and directed by Jeremy Kagan, an Emmy award winning film and TV director, the play deals with the monumental 1987 Los Angeles obscenity trial of Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. And according to Meyers, “it offers an incisive exploration of the tension between free speech and artistic responsibility.” That’s a mouthful, and, more importantly, that’s a mindful.
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Each night, the audience is asked to participate in jury selection and to render the verdict, potentially precipitating a different ending to the play for every performance, although, in fact, every night has concluded with unanimous acquittal.
It’s worth noting the context for this play. It, of course, all started with female masturbation…
Followed by a First Amendment clash of powers. Forty years ago, the “Tipper Gore-Frank Zappa hearing,” or the “rock-porn hearing” was unfolding as then Senator Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, was not thrilled by the Prince record she purchased for her daughter. Specifically the lyrics: “I met her in a hotel lobby/Masturbating with a magazine” (“Darling Nikki”, 1984).
She famously decided to make it a, quite literally, federal case. This triggered a Senate hearing, with Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver gloriously running rings around the pompous Senators and the so-called Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC, which, not inappropriately, sounds like a South American fascist militia.
The PMRC had compiled a list of fifteen songs in popular music that they found the most objectionable, known (and forever lampooned, by the way) as the “Filthy Fifteen,” It included, presumably much to her delight, Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” (more female masturbation!), Madonna’s “Dress You Up” (straightforward sex, God forbid), Mötley Crüe’s “Bastard” (violence) and Def Leppard’s “High ‘n’ Dry (Saturday Night)” (drugs/alcohol). To Hell in a handbasket for America’s fragile kiddies, clearly!
But this Holy mission wasn’t just ridiculous, it was legally serious — and inspired the pursuit of obscenity convictions, which can result in jail sentences, and were a repulsive end run around the First Amendment. 2 Live Crew were famously tried for it (and acquitted).
Which brings us to 1987 when the City of Los Angeles charged punk rock icon Jello Biafra with “Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors” after he included a sexually explicit poster (a surreal landscape of sexual penetration by Swiss artist H.R. Gigero of Alien-design fame) inside the band’s 1985 LP, Frankenchrist. The trial and its fallout (even though the charges were eventually dismissed after a hung jury) nearly ruined him. He had his home raided, the band went kaput, and he was virtually bankrupted. All for standing up for his artistic freedom of expression.
“With Jello’s case we all played by the rules. We thought it was important. We had a Supreme Court that felt the same,” shares Philip A. Schnayerson, Biafra’s Criminal Defense Attorney at the time. “But now things are just different. At least two of Supreme Court Justices think they are above the law. Plus, at least when Nixon was President he obeyed the law, I can’t say that about Trump. He is anti-democratic.”
Biafra was punk rock. He was a disruptor, a trickster and challenged people with lyrics and his art. And because art is reflective of culture, it also leads culture.
We shouldn’t ban hate speech, because I want to know who the bigots are.
Larry Meyers
“For most people, the debate over rock and rap lyrics was theoretical,” shares then SPIN Editor-in-Chief Bob Guccione, Jr. “We raged against the creeping suppression, but, at the end of the day, we went home. For Jello Biafra, it wasn’t theoretical, it was very real — he’s the true, unsung hero of the culture wars, the artist indicted for his art. He fought the real battle, and prevailed.”
Guccione appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Jello and debated Gore. “In the beginning the crowd were all for Tipper, but by the end of the show they were cheering and applauding Jello and I, and afterwards Tipper came up to me and said, ‘I don’t know why we’re arguing, I’m against nuclear weapons!’ I said ‘I’m against blowing up the world too, but if you’re against censorship, as you say you are, then be a friend of the court for Jello at his trial. That way you can prove you’re not for censorship.’ She didn’t do that, of course.”
One of the reasons that Larry Meyers was so fascinated by Biafra’s work was his rufescent alarm for free speech. “Think of it as a rubber band you stretch; for societies to move forward we need to challenge these norms,” says Meyers. “The Greeks did it, the Romans came and did it, the Jews, the Christians, everybody contributed.”
Baifra, now 66, did the work so many people just don’t feel like doing, whether it’s raging against government or corporations, he was (and is) summoning up the freedoms that a Handmaid Tale Commander is so ready to pluck away from us.
The Hon. Susan E. Isacoff (Ret.) who served as a judge for the Los Angeles County Superior Court and presided over this case, says to me: “The revisiting of the trial reminds me that the temper of those years of attempted censorship is now being repeated. And yes certain segments of society are worried about sullying the minds of their progeny.
“Must you be worried when writing for SPIN? Not yet. I would fear more about certain politicians who punish AP and are now threatening NPR and PBS. Everyone should be worried about truth and freedom of speech.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.