“Your mommy told you this
And your daddy told you that
Always think like this
And never do that
You learned so many feelings
But what is there to that
Which are really yours
Or are you just a copycat”
From “Your Emotions” by Dead Kennedys
No matter how human and wonderful our parents may be, they often are first and foremost one thing – authority figures. They are the first ones with whom we experience ourselves as subordinate. They are the first ones to punish us if we do wrong or otherwise step out of line. And yet, we love our parents in part because we recognize that they love us and they provide us with a roof over our heads, food on the table, heat in the home and protection. And ideally, they show us a path towards achieving a good life – building a career, forming friendships, finding a romantic partner, pursuing interests — and the opportunity to build an independent life of our own.
What complicates things is that this hierarchical relationship is with someone who can be eerily similar to us – often exhibiting the same strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, if we met our parents under different circumstances as peers, those similarities would lead us to be good friends. But in the context of a parent-child relationship, those similarities often cause us to butt heads with our parents in a way that undermines rather than enhances the relationship.
Which is why I was so grateful to Eric Reed Boucher – otherwise known as Jello Biafra – for talking with me for The Hardcore Humanism Podcast about his relationship with his father, the late Stanley Boucher. As we spoke, I began to learn a great deal about what an accomplished and fascinating man Boucher was and how Biafra navigated the difficult and complicated terrain of parental relationships. And I came away with a sense that in the end Biafra was a chip off the old block.
First some context – Biafra is perhaps best known as the front man for Dead Kennedys, considered one of the greatest punk rock bands of all time. The Dead Kennedys album Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables has been named one of the greatest punk rock records of all time by Rolling Stone and Revolver. Biafra never stopped making music, including with his current band, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, and their upcoming album Tea Party Revenge Porn. And as bands like Dead Kennedys toured the country, they spawned new hardcore punk scenes that then had the opportunity to develop and connect in with a growing hardcore culture.
Biafra further helped develop hardcore punk rock culture by starting his own independent record label Alternative Tentacles. In his book American Hardcore, author Steven Blush wrote, “Dead Kennedys were the SF ensemble most responsible for making Hardcore happen nationwide … DKs singer Jello Biafra – HC’s biggest star – was a powerful presence whose political insurgence and rabid fandom made him the father figure of a burgeoning subculture …”
To this day, many people stand in awe of Biafra, similar to how Biafra speaks of his father. As Biafra describes it, his father, Stanley Boucher – a psychiatric social worker – dedicated his life to helping bring affordable mental health care to people who would otherwise not have access. “I sort of like realize what a pipsqueak I am compared to all the things he accomplished and still managed to raise kids and everything else and have time for the family too,” Biafra told me.
And just as hardcore punk was a movement of passion and community and not intended to make its participants wealthy, Boucher chose to put his efforts towards a cause in which he strongly believed – mental health care. “He got his master’s at UC Berkeley and did some practicing and treating people with a clinic somewhere in San Francisco and got offered quite the cushy job,” Biafra recalled. “Declined it for a couple reasons … He felt he should be treating more than just people who had money.” After years of working as a mental health advocate for the state of Colorado, Boucher began working for the Western Interstate Commission For Higher Education (WICHE). It was here that Boucher most actively worked on setting up mental health facilities that provided continuing education across the western United States focusing on underserved populations and impoverished areas.
Further, Boucher displayed the same Do-It-Yourself (DIY) spirit that was the foundation of hardcore punk. Biafra explained how his father and his father’s climbing partner approached their passion for rock climbing. “Taught themselves how to rock climb, because people weren’t doing that either. And so, they mail ordered a book from England on how to rock climb,” Biafra explained.” And as he put it, you know, ‘we didn’t know if we were going to die’ … And then later claimed he climbed Pikes Peak over 50 different ways.”
Biafra’s parents did not try to shield him from learning about the troubling and violent events of the 60’s and 70’s. He was encouraged to watch the news so he could learn about events happening in the world. “I’d watch a cartoon show or two towards the end of the afternoon. And then the news would come on at six and I watched that with equal fascination … even if we were sitting down to dinner at the time, and super bloody Vietnam War footage like they would never show on TV now came on, or those horrible scenes like from Selma and other places …They didn’t change the channel,” Biafra recalled. “They discussed the whole thing… and that made an impression. And so… I had very strong opinions about racism, civil rights, environmentalism, Vietnam, and others from a very early age. And I was really engaged with it.”
Similarly, Biafra’s parents allowed him to listen to rock radio and watch rock shows like Hullabaloo. This resulted in Biafra connecting music and politics through songs that protested the Vietnam War by artists such as Steppenwolf, Edwin Starr and Country Joe McDonald. “And then I went to the Woodstock movie with my dad … And so I connected with a culture … I experienced it at such a deep personal level,” he said. “It’s all, you know, very deep part of my fire my soul what some recovering addicts might call a higher power.”
So we have two DIY visionary outside-the-box thinkers who dedicated their lives to building a culture about which they were passionate and thought could help the world. In theory, two such like-minded people would have connected right away. And yet, Biafra described his father as very different at home as compared to how he was with the rest of the world. “We fought a lot,” Biafra explained. “I mean, you’re politically this way, dad, but at home, you’re like Nixon … As a parent, he was kind of a fascist.”
Perhaps the area where Biafra and his father butted heads most was around Biafra’s decision to seriously pursue developing Dead Kennedys. Rather than viewing him as a kindred spirit building something new and exciting as Boucher himself had done in the mental health world, he tried to dissuade him, suggesting that Biafra pursue music as a hobby not a career. At times it felt to Biafra like his father was downright dismissive. “I show my dad some pictures of the band. I’m so excited. He looks at it. ‘The lighting could have been better in this one’ … That was all he said,” Biafra explained. “Another time he said, ‘Well, you’ve accomplished some great things here. Now, in some ways, finding your own place to live in the big cities is a bigger education than four years of college. But you’ve never read Shakespeare.’ It’s like in that way I was a huge disappointment to him.”
So how did things change for Biafra? To start, Biafra felt that things changed a bit when he left home. “We did better as soon as I moved away,” Biafra said. Often, no longer living under our parents’ roof signals the shift away from a more authority-based relationship into a more peer-based connection.
And ultimately, Biafra made a simple conscious decision to change how he viewed his parents in general. “I was married at one point, went to see my wife’s sister in New York,” he explained. “It seemed like every third or fourth thing out of her mouth was how much she hated their mother and how angry she was. I thought, you know, this could be me, but it doesn’t have to be me. And I’m going to make sure from this point onward, that it’s not me.”
Photo credit: David Kluver
