Feederz
Jesus

In '82 Jello Biafra was not having his best moment. The Dead Kennedys had already given all they could give; he had married Theresa and for a gift, he had received a BMW left in the backyard, under a tarp, hidden by his reputation as "tough and pure". Towards the end of '83 Frank Discussion, the biggest madman of Phoenix, bald with crazy eyes, was on the run from the feds for having sent all schools a letter addressed to the Arizona board of education offering scholarships to the winners of an essay titled "Why school is just a big waste of time". After a year spent hiding at Biafra's house, he ran away with Theresa and his friend's money.

Phoenix, a city besieged by the sun, had in the Meat Puppets and Frank Discussion's Feederz - the same madman who live would tie dead cats to the guitar neck and shoot blanks at the audience with an M-16 - its artistic peaks of the local Hardcore scene.

The Feederz, like Phoenix's other major band, had almost nothing to do with Hardcore except for the fact that they were dedicated to music that rejected any possible aesthetic sublimation. Few chords; solitary notes played so crookedly that they didn't even form a riff; no distortion. To the average fundamentalist "kids" the Feederz were disgusting, and that fool Frank liked it that way.

"Jesus", a 7-inch released in 1980, composed of four songs for nine minutes of music, is the first testament to their passage in this world. If the Wire of "Pink Flag" were cats, soaking wet, closed in a sack and beaten with clubs, once they came out alive and free from the torture, they would have sounded like the Feederz. Faster, more annoying, sharper, and more elemental. In one word: sicker.

In 1980 there were those who had already gone beyond Hardcore. Beyond even today, although time has passed.