In Middle school my best friends were James Roberts and Steve Thacker.
Steve had moved to Chillicothe from Columbus for our 7th grade year.
He and James lived on the east end and while I was a country boy it
seemed like I was always over on Hern or Scioto street, sleeping over
or getting up to something, running the alleys or shoplifting from the
Speedy Mart. At school we tried to coordinate lunches and recesses to
hang out. Steve and I ended up with the same lunch period and while
there wasn't what you'd call a real recess with a playground, there was
the football field and the track, and if it was warm me and Steve would
go walk around the track and smoke. He had this shitty walkman with some
broken headphones that we'd share as we walked. Metallica's kill'em all
was still getting good milage and we must've listened to that cassette
until the tape broke. One evening Steve was walking down the alley
towards home and stumbled across a cassette laying there sans case and
j-card. He brought it to school the next day, excited to play it for me.

"Dude, check out what I found in the alley last night." You could barely
make out the artist's name since the printing on the tape was almost
completely worn off. "I think it says Jello Biafro", he said. I squinted to
try to read it. "What's it sound like?" , I asked. "Here". He popped the tape
into the player and handed me my 'phone. "It's kinda like thrash with a weird singer"
he stated and hit play. He was right.

Unbeknownst to me at the time what I was hearing was Hardcore Punk. We walked around the track and shared a Marlboro. Our young ears couldn't compare this to anything. It didn't really register as punk to us because it didn't sound like The Ramones or Sex Pistols and with that vocalist it was barely metal, so we had to call it Thrash. "Jello Biafro" was cracking me up with his ridiculous name and singing. I had no reference for this.The tape lasted as long as our lunch period and it was time to go back inside. I remember wanting to hear it again for the rest of the day and when school ended I got on the bus and Steve walked home. We did listen to that tape again. And again and soon I was obsessed with finding out who the fuck 'Jello Biafro' was exactly. Like most things the answer came to me by accident. I was thumbing through an encylopedia when I happened across the entry for Biafra, the little nation that tried to secede from Nigeria in the late 60's. "This is it!" I thought, I knew the word Biafro was too ridiculous to be true. Jello Biafra! But that still didn't make any sense and even then I wasn't sure if it was the name of a person or the band itself. I resolved to find someone who knew what I desperately needed to know. I didn't even know who Dead Kennedys were at this point and didn't know anybody who was into punk or would know anything about this, since all the punks in my paper mill hometown were older dudes in their early 20's. It remained a mystery for a solid two years until my legendary 9th grade year, when I made my first punk friends. They knew all the older dudes too and turned me onto "Give me convinence or give me death", the DK's "greatest hits" album. In the liner notes the singer was credited as 'Jello Biafra' I was right! but this wasn't the tape I had listened to with Steve on the track at Mt. Logan Middle School(it was actually loads better). I had a vague memeory at the time of walking past a car parked in the lot outside Blind Dog Music on Main St. It had a DK's sticker on the passenger side window, a design I've never seen since with a suicide king playing card and the old english logo blazen at the top. How could I not have made this connection before? I managed to fit jello in with DK's but I still had no idea what the hell that tape was back in 7th grade. After making the magical transformation from nerdy metal head kid to nerdy punk kid (with admittedly embarassing tendencies toward industrial and goth...you should have seen the make-up)and spending a couple years skating and smoking dope with the punks I realized that Jello had collaborated with a couple bands post DKs. One such collaboration was with the Canadians, D.O.A. The resultant album was "Last scream of the missing neighbors". Released in 1990, it features the epic nearly 14 minute "full metal jack-off" in which Jello rants about just about every political evil that had gone down at the time. When I listen to this now, it reminds me not only of things like the crack epidemic, Ollie North and the Contras but also of growing into what I would eventually become, of changing tastes in music, identity and even people. The beginning of that decade, the 90's, was the beginning of my adolescence, of my teenage years. The beginning of life-long friendships and the end of others.