Let Them Eat Jellybeans

Lessons from the 80s Punk Underground, Where Everybody Hated Ronald Reagan.

There aren’t many records in my life like Let Them Eat Jellybeans - records that truly rewired my musician brain forever. I can’t remember how I first heard about this 1981 U.S. punk compilation, one of the first releases on Dead Kennedys’ San Francisco-based Alternative Tenacles label. It must have been 1982 by the time it reached my ears, based on the March 1981 cover photo, it would have come out later in 1981 and slowly made its way to cooler Midwestern stores. I think I bought it at Duroc Records in downtown Bloomington because it had some of the bands I’d heard and read about but hadn’t yet actually heard their music. Once I got my hands on it, everyone had a cassette copy. If you remember those days congratulations, you’re old.

Mind you, I didn’t (and don’t) love the entire album. It’s roughly divided between hardcore side one and experimental art rock side two. Side one isn’t perfect (more on that later), and I found much of side 2 to be unlistenable noise, because it is supposed to be unlistenable noise. But the first 6 tracks on side one are a perfect introduction to first wave hardcore, full stop. Listen to the YouTube link, it isn’t on DSPs. The versions of some of the songs on Spotify playlists are different. The YouTube link is the actual album.

Ha Ha Ha

Side one opens with Flipper’s Ha Ha Ha. Flipper isn’t a hardcore band, per se. Their music could fit on the art rock side as easily as hardcore, but Ha Ha Ha is a total jam from these San Francisco experimental punk pioneers. Stooges sleaze, lyrics dripping with sarcasm; this song, along with Black Flag’s version of Louie Louie, became a standard among bands on my local all-ages scene. I never saw Flipper live, but famously it was at a Flipper show where the high school aged Lemonheads decided they needed to start a band.

The Prisoner

Next is The Prisoner, but Vancouver hardcore Founding Fathers D.O.A. Here’s where the hardcore tempo picks up. 160 bpm, same tempo as your heartbeat in the pit. Remember I was a drummer, and this is the first time I heard the great Chuck Biscuits. There’s this wild, screechy slide guitar solo followed by two glorious bars of drums. A lot of my drum practice for months that followed involved playing along with these songs cranked as loud as it would go on my friend Harry’s compact stereo. We took turns playing along with that break until we could play it perfectly. That’s how I learned how to play hardcore drums, and that is why I had the opportunity to play with The Lemonheads 5 years later. Thanks, Chuck!

That’s a good wind-up for the next 4, which absolutely made my head explode.

Police Story

I remember being a little disappointed when I first got my hands on Black Flag’s debut album Damaged later that year. To me, this version of this song, featuring pre-Rollins vocalist Dez Cadena, is the definitive Black Flag track. It’s raw power and barely-controlled chaos - everything I hoped punk rock would be. The lyrics get right to the point:

This f****** city is run by pigs
They take the rights away from all the kids
Understand it, we’re fighting a war we can’t win
They hate us, we hate them, we can’t win. No Way!

A couple years after forming, these Sabbath and Stooges-obsessed nerdy surf kids from the South Bay couldn’t play a gig without attracting police violence - in part due to the audiences they attracted, and in part due to aggressive police who perceived the culture of punk as a threat. This primal scream of a punk song is an expression of real frustration - raising a middle finger to their adversaries in the LAPD - all but guaranteed escalations of violence. As a midwestern kid, I found this fascinating.

Black Flag wasn’t a political act per se, but this brutal anti-authoritarian message resonated with a kind of politics. Even if my friends and I didn’t run out and flip off a cop, it spoke to us.

Pay to Cum

Most of you already know that Bad Brains were a band consisting of four African-American guys from D.C., trained in jazz fusion and obsessed with Rastafarianism. I’ll be honest, I’ve never known the words to Pay to Cum. There are a few versions of this track, their first single, in circulation. Most of you also know Bad Brains were primary source material for Minor Threat, and one of the most influential acts in punk, full stop. What I noticed at the time is that it’s an unbelievably fast, tight, and powerful song with musicianship that held up against anything out there. Coming off our Classic Rock hangover, my friends and I had learned to value musicianship, which is not in evidence on every track on this comp. But nobody could deny that this is absolutely top shelf playing. If you want to play bass in a hardcore band, learn this song and you’ll be ready to start your own band.

Bad Brains showed us that punk had no boundaries, even if it was mostly suburban white kids. As long as you accepted the culture and politics of the scene, you were welcome.

Nazi Punks F*ck Off!

I think about this song often. The lyrics pop into my head from time to time for no reason, especially the opening lines:

Punk ain’t no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You think you’re hardcore cuz you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head

It probably pops into my head because it’s so deepy engrained in my musical DNA. I listened to Dead Kennedys constantly. I painted their logo on the back of my army jacket.

Nazi Punks is a message to the band’s audience. If you come to the shows, you’re not there to fight. While Police Story simply reports on Black Flag’s experience, Nazi Punks is an effort to discourage violence. Dead Kennedys are one of the most political bands of the era; they widen the lens in a song about scene politics to be about the perceived Fascist takeover of the Reagan administration, a persistent theme in Dead Kennedys’ songs.

You still think swastikas look cool
When the real Nazis run your schools
They’re coaches businessmen and cops
In a real Fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go
You’ll be the first to go….unless you think

In contrast with their SoCal king-of-the-scene counterparts Black Flag, pretty much everything DKs did was (far Left) political. Kill The Poor (about the neutron bomb), California Uber Alles (California as a Fascist state under Governor Jerry Brown and his “Suede/Denim Secret Police” - followed by “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now,” about - you guessed it - Reagan)…you get the point. Even when the songs weren’t overtly political, they tended to evolve to politics, as in Nazi Punks. Sometimes I think about how visionary singer Jello Biafra’s writing was in light of Maga. “Real Nazis run our schools” - I heard this at the time as hyperbole, now it could be reality.

Paid Vacation

This is one of the best songs by one of the best bands at the time, Circle Jerks, featuring Keith Morris, Black Flag’s original lead vocalist. This is one of the most topical songs of the time, essentially a protest song against U.S. involvement in the Soviet aggression again Afghanistan beginning in the late 70s.

It’s not Vietnam
It’s another oil company scam
Salute that flag to Uncle Sam
Get your money out, place your bets
It’s Afghanistan!

If only we’d taken Keith’s advice and kept out, right? I think this lyric is really smart - we all grew up knowing the Vietnam War was a scam, based on a false premise. None of the proxy wars against the Soviet Union during the Cold War really made sense, and everyone my age grew up with intense anxiety about a war breaking out in our efforts to stop the growth of Soviet Communism. Hardcore was fueled largely by a wide division between our pre-Boomer parents who embraced the cultural wave of Reagan, and our own generational anxiety about having to go to war to fight for something we didn’t believe in. We all felt it. We knew Vietnam was a scam and a failure. To borrow a phrase from today’s political pop culture, we weren’t going back.

Didn’t Everyone Hate Reagan?

I grew up in a bubble. My parents are Left Wing academics, Humanties professors. I grew up a few blocks from the Indiana University campus populated almost exclusively at the time with families of other Humanties professors. I had several Jewish friends, but I only knew one family that went to church. The only Republicans I met before my 30s were my grandparents and distant relatives, plus a few jocks in high school who liked to beat me and my friends up.

Everyone I knew hated Reagan and everything he represented in the culture. Look at the cover image of Jellybeans: That’s Reagan taking a bullet from John Hinkley, Jr.’s handgun in early 1981, the same year the compilation came out. Those sorts of images were everywhere with early hardcore. Ever heard of the Arizona hardcore band JFA? Bands with initial names were ubiquitous, the initials usually stood for something serious, like “Society System Decontrol” or “Millions of Dead Cops” or “True Sounds of Liberty.” JFA were on the somewhat less-serious side of the genre; the acronym stood for “Jodie Foster’s Army.” Why Jodie Foster? Because lunatic John Hinkley was obsessed with Foster and political assassination because of the movie Taxi Driver. Hardcore kids thought that shit was hilarious.

I clicked immediately with the Lemonheads guys when I first met them because we had hardcore in common. We had a lot more than hardcore in common, of course. But hardcore was the glue, and all those hours in the basement playing along with Let Them Eat Jellybeans and 1,000 other punk records sharpened my skills so I could join their gang for real. That was literally the dream during all those hours in the basement: “Some day I’ll get a chance to try out for a real band and I’ll be ready.” I could have landed in any major city in the country and found my tribe, because that culture, which traveled by album, fanzine, and touring band, was united. We didn’t need The Internet to show us how to be punk. We were united through music, and around a shared disdain for Reagan and his culture of greed.

I wasn’t able to vote in the 1984 election that reelected Reagan, one of the biggest landslides of all time. I didn’t vote because I was only 17. I remember we were all completely devastated. We didn’t see it coming, because everybody we knew hated Reagan! How could a president everybody hated win 49 states? Imagine that: Democrats won Minnesota, the home state of its candidate. That’s it. We were shocked he won at all. That’s a bubble for ya.

The first election I cast my vote in was 1988, when Bush Sr. beat Masshole Michael Dukakis. I remember where I was, rather we were: Atlanta, Georgia, at the White Dot. Believe it or not, Blake Babies played the same bill as Alec MacKaye’s post-hardcore band Ignition. We closed the night as most of the sparse audience remained glued to the television as election returns appeared. At the moment the network called the election for Bush Sr., all three of our stage tuners’ batteries died. I remember this freaked us out - and that we were all equally bummed, us and everyone in the room. Because we were all the children of hardcore, and we still hated Reagan and everything in his wake.

These Kids Today

Hardcore Punk is a Gen X cultural movement. I can safely say without bothering to gather evidence that many of the hardcore kids have stopped hating Reagan. Trump’s base is disproportionately Gen X, and I know a few former hardcore kids who are on that train. I’m also aware that there are many young people in America who feel about Trump exactly how we used to feel about Reagan, that gives me comfort. The iconography of Gen Z is different, however…but maybe not all that different. Our tribe expressed our political views in songs, on album covers, and in the pages of fanzines. I see parallels with meme culture. In a way, Reagan images in hardcore iconography are like an early version of memes. If we’d had the capability of spreading our culture at the scale of social media, we’d have been all over it. Do you know what a pain in the ass it was to make a fanzine? Kids will never know, unless they decide it was the better way to share information.

I grew up in a bubble, and I live in a different kind of bubble today. I keep a low profile about my politics because I’m surrounded by Trump flags on all sides. My politics have evolved, but my values were mostly set by age 16. For example, track 8 on side one of Let Them Eat Jellybeans is “Jesus Entering from the Rear” by The Feederz from Arizona. I couldn’t deal with it then, and I can’t deal with it now. I have my limits. I mean, it’s a dog shit song compared to the genius that precedes it on side one. I doubt I’d let the side play out without the lyrics. But the lyrics…The lyrics are an abomination. Punk ain’t no religious cult, punk means thinking for yourself. I did that, and I decided that song was over the line. I didn’t have to embrace everything in the culture to adopt the identity of a punk. I didn’t really care for the assassination jokes, either. I could pick and choose on the politics, but the main threads were music and the community. That’s pretty much where I am today.

I hope kids really get on board with national politics like they seem to be doing lately. The threat is real. I want their heart and their horror to register in the interest of democracy. I hope music shows them the way. I want them to find connection like our tribe did, because that has stayed with me. Our tribe found connection and community through music, through feeling like outcasts, and through hating Ronald Reagan.