this is not pitchfork

It was 1983. I was working in a record store, which just happened to be one of the busiest record stores in New York, in one of the busiest malls in New York, at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

So, here we were on the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination and one of my co-workers remarked that, unlike most days of remembrance in the U.S., no one had yet declared Kennedy Assassination Day to be a holiday of sorts; the kind where you see store-wide sales and clearance items going for bargain prices! I mean, how would one advertise such a thing? Come to the JFK Clearance Sale, where you’ll get more bang for your bucks!

And then we came up with a brilliant idea. We could combine the death of JFK with the start of the Christmas shopping season – a way to commemorate Kennedy but bring the customers in as well.

So we put up a Dead Kennedys display on the carousel in front of the store. We grabbed all the copies of Fresh Fruit we had in the store, plus a few copies of Plastic Surgery Disasters and put them on the carousel, which was just a few feet from the wide front door of the store, which people traveling through the mall passed by all day long.

Needless to say, the display was down within twenty minutes and we were reprimanded, with big, inky, black spots splattered on our permanent records.

Oh yea, despite the fact that Jello’s voice sometimes grates on me, and despite the fact that Jello himself always grates on me, I do love this album.

Favorite song: California Über Alles (sentimental pick)
Official Site