Dead Kennedys ─ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: the Early Years

Despite releasing records only on independent labels and receiving virtually no radio play, Dead Kennedys routinely top both critic and fan polls as the greatest punk band of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their sound was inventive and tetchy, and front man Jello Biafra’s lyrics were incisive and often scathing. This chronicle—the first in-depth book written about Dead Kennedys—uses dozens of firsthand interviews, photos, and original artwork to offer a new perspective on a group that was mired in controversy almost from its inception. It examines and applauds the band’s key role in transforming punk rhetoric, both polemical and musical, into something genuinely threatening and enormously funny. Author Alex Ogg puts the local and global trajectory of punk into context and, while not flinching from the wildly differing takes the individual band members have on the evolution of the band, attempts to be celebratory—if not uncritical.

Alex Ogg is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Guardian and the Times. He is the author of several music titles, including The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap and No More Heroes: A Complete History of UK Punk from 1976 to 1980, and the coauthor of The Art of Punk, which was named a 2012 book of the year by the Independent. Ruby Ray is a former staff photographer for Search & Destroy magazine, for which she photographed acts such as Dead Kennedys, Devo, Flipper, the Sex Pistols, and X. Her work has been collected in From the Edge of the World: California Punk, 1977–1981. She lives in San Francisco. Winston Smith is an artist known for his use of “hand-carved” collage. He first came to prominence through his collaborations with Dead Kennedys, for which he created numerous album covers, inserts, and flyers. He lives in San Francisco.