Moon Over Marin - Dead Kennedys
In a big cou- Wait.......
In my efforts to reach true punk status, it was a necessity to delve into the discography of the Dead Kennedys, one of the most celebrated hardcore punk acts in the genre’s storied history. While the enduring legacy of the band may be that of enigmatic frontman Jello Biafra and his largely publicized legal dispute with the rest of the group, the Dead Kennedys have one of the more tight and celebrated discographies of any punk band of the era.
While their debut, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, is surely my favorite of their 4 mainline studio recordings, it is the follow-up, Plastic Surgery Disasters, that is widely recognized as one of the great hardcore LPs of all time.
Joined for the first time on a full-length by the late powerhouse D. H. Peligro, who would maintain drumming duties for the rest of the band’s initial existence, the group hit their stride with the 1982 album. East Bay Ray’s flavorful surf-inspired guitar work and the mastery of secret weapon Klaus Flouride on bass helped Plastic Surgery Disasters thread the needle of edgy political satire and humor and raucous, mind-bending punk that the Kennedys did so well.
The album’s closer, however, sounds quite like nothing else the band had penned to that point. Forgoing breakneck thrashing for a more subdued, easygoing groove, “Moon Over Marin” stands as one of the defining moments of 80s hardcore, proving that you didn’t have to play until your fingers fell off to craft an enduring, triumphant piece of music.
East Bay Ray’s main guitar lines on the track harken back to the masters of the euphoric and melodic anthem, Scotland’s Big Country. Seriously, if you threw Stuart Adamson’s dramatic croon on top of this track in place of the characteristically zany Biafra, this would sound like a great lost cut from The Crossing, one of the more underrated works from the initial “big” music boom of the 1980s.
But, as can be gathered from my assessment of Biafra’s performance above, Jello makes this song the bombshell that it is through his distinct vocal musings. The song is a bitter portrayal of an environmental crisis exacerbated by an oil spill from the perspective of an aloof, self-centered fool.
The crowded future stings my eyes
I still find time to exercise
In a uniform with two white stripes
Unlock my section of the sand
It's fenced off to the water's edge
I clamp a gas mask on my head
Listen, it doesn’t matter if the world and all its creatures are dying, the man’s going to get his steps in.
The soaring heights of the guitar solo section gives the track and its parent album a sense of finality, as if the journey of everything the record warned about in its preceding 13 tracks has come to fruition, the world in utter decay, completely unbeknownst and evading the care of those that remain. No matter what, Biafra sings, there will always be a moon over Marin, as long as that moon isn’t zapped from the sky as a result of the interplanetary maneuvering of Earth’s fatal radiation poisoning.
The track is pretty easily my favorite from the Kennedys, though it may just be their least ferocious. If nothing else, it answers the question of what it would sound like if The Edge played with the Circle Jerks.