BIAFRA SLAPS RECORD BIZ ‘APATHY’

Less than five hours after misdemeanor pornography charges against him were dropped, Jello Biafra sat in a Fairfax-area restaurant with a few friends celebrating the punk-rock performer’s court “victory.”

But Biafra, 29, wasn’t totally jubilant.

While ecstatic over the court decision, he was highly critical of the pop Establishment’s reaction to the case, labeling major record companies and most rock performers as “deliberately and consciously apathetic.”

The singer-songwriter and Michael Bonanno, 27, general manager of Biafra’s tiny Alternative Tentacles Records label, faced maximum one-year jail terms and $2,000 in fines for including an allegedly pornographic poster in the 1985 album “Frankenchrist” by his band, the Dead Kennedys.

The poster was a reproduction of a surrealistic painting titled “Penis Landscape” by Swiss artist H. R. Giger, who received an Academy Award for best visual effects for the film “Alien.”

But the charges--distributing harmful material to minors--were dismissed by Municipal Court Judge Susan E. Isacoff on Thursday after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked, 7 to 5, in favor of acquittal.

Having traded the three-piece suit he wore during the trial for a more typical sport shirt and slacks, Biafra--an intense man who speaks with the colorful, provocative edge found in many of his songs--said, “There was all sorts of frustration . . . being singled out in what seems like a sick joke. . . . not being able to play music. . . .

“But the most frustration I had was the snide, condescending people in the music industry--both bands, the media and record companies--who decided to pooh-pooh this whole issue because we weren’t a major-label recording artist.

“If we had been on, say, Columbia (Records), we would have gotten all the legal help and media backup that money could buy. I could count on one hand the people who expressed support. . . . Frank Zappa, Steve Van Zandt, (publicist) Howard Bloom.”

Indeed, the celebration setting itself seemed to underscore Biafra’s point.

If a best-selling artist had been on trial, the evening celebration would have been a gala affair with TV cameras, record company executives and flowing champagne. As it was, Biafra was joined by half a dozen friends and associates in a quiet corner of the restaurant--no cameras or public relations machines roaring.

Harvey Kubernik, a member of the Los Angeles branch of the “No More Censorship Defense Fund,” echoed the singer-songwriter’s criticism of the formal record industry.

“I am embarrassed by the way the industry failed to respond,” said Kubernik, who is head of Freeway Records and is working with Biafra on a spoken-word album to be released on the singer’s label in late October.

“But it’s not just the record industry. Where was Hollywood? This was an Oscar winner (Giger) involved in this case. Where was the art community? A few people started taking the case seriously near the end, but the apathy was appalling.”

Kubernik, who is also booking some college spoken-word performances and lectures by Biafra, warned that a conviction could have led to similar prosecutions around the country. He said that he has already detected a “chill factor” growing out of the publicity surrounding the trial.

“The phone is not ringing off the hook with global or stateside bookings the way it might have run in the ‘60s for an Abbie Hoffman or a Jerry Rubin,” he continued. “In fact, some bookers who had initiated the idea of (Biafra) coming to campus have begun coming up with requests for tapes or advance transcripts of his projected show. We don’t play ball that way.”

Despite Biafra’s suspicion that the reason he received so little industry support was that he is a small potato, commercially speaking, many record executives and fans no doubt found it hard to take the charges against Biafra seriously.

The idea of sending a rock musician to jail in this day and age for including in his album a reproduction of a painting by an Oscar-winning artist seemed so ludicrous that the whole thing struck many rock fans at first as some sort of huge prank.

When Biafra, an exceptionally forceful speaker, then began making the rounds of TV-radio talk shows and decimating conservative rivals on censorship panels, the whole incident seemed like some perverse coup by Biafra. Formerly known only in punk-rock circles, Biafra suddenly had a national presence.

Even Biafra’s father, Stan Boucher, 59, a poet and psychiatric social worker from Boulder, Colo., wasn’t concerned when he heard his son was arrested. “My reaction was, ‘This will never reach court. These things don’t happen now.’ I thought that was something that was part of the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s.”

The elder Biafra, who was at the restaurant celebration, said that he didn’t begin taking the trial seriously until he entered the courtroom here. “Even then, the whole thing seemed out of place,” he said. “I kept thinking the attorneys should have been Spencer Tracy or someone else from a 1930s movie. How could this be happening in 1987?”

As the gathering Thursday night came to a quiet end, the younger Biafra said he believed at the beginning of the case that he could have probably gotten off with just a “little slap on the wrist” if he had pleaded guilty, but that he sensed there “was something more at stake.”

“My fear now is people will say, ‘Oh well, it all blew over; now we can all go home.’ Given the climate of the country, I think artists are still in danger, but I do believe we have helped make it politically unpopular to do a stunt like this again in Los Angeles.”

Biafra, whose Dead Kennedys group broke up during the course of the case, said that he plans to concentrate the rest of the year on spoken-word appearances and speeches about censorship, possibly not returning full-time to music until late 1988.

“I work very slowly (on my music) and it is going to take time just to put all the pieces back together,” he said. “I probably won’t begin putting a band together for a year or so.”