Punk rock band going to trial over musical rights, royalties

Tuesday, April 18, 2000 | 12:43 p.m.

Biafra, the group's singer-songwriter, claims his former band mates took his record label, Alternative Tentacles, after he refused to sell the Dead Kennedys song "Holiday in Cambodia" to Levi's for a TV ad.

"The whole thing has pretty much wasted two years of my life," Biafra said Monday, before speaking against the World Trade Organization at a demonstration.

"They basically want to force me into corporate prostitution, so they can put music that I wrote into TV commercials for corporations I'm here protesting today," Biafra said.

The three other members, guitarist East Bay Ray, bassist Klaus Fluoride and drummer D.H. Peligro, deny the allegations and have sued Biafra. They claim he has been using profits from the band's records to support his new career as a spoken-word artist. They want about $75,000 in Dead Kennedys' royalties.

"We think Biafra's acting like a capitalist in the worst sense of the word," Ray said. "He may not be a corporation, but he certainly knows how to act like one."

The Dead Kennedys, the Bay Area's most notorious anti-establishment punk-rock band from 1979 to 1986, put out five studio albums under the San Francisco-based Alternative Tentacles label.