Looking at rock writing from the early ‘90s journalists would have you believe that after 1980 or so, punk disappeared only to resurface with Nirvana and its cohort. And while there’s some argument to be made regarding the Seattle group’s importance in underground music’s culture, Cobain and company wouldn’t have existed if there wasn’t a constant slew of low run records and weirdo bands traversing the States.
That being said, one of the bands that hasn’t necessarily aged too well in the eyes of those that work behind the scenes in those aforementioned music rags is an Arizona come San Fran group headed by Frank Discussion called the Feederz.
During its earliest incarnation in the late ‘70s, Discussion surrounded himself with local folks from his hometown. But by the beginning of the ‘80s the singer and songwriter had made his way to NorCal as Discussion’s music already bore a striking resemblance to what Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys were up to. The fact that Biafra ran Alternative Tentacles, an independent record label, and had released the Let Them Eat Jellybeans! compilation, which included a Feederz track, didn’t hurt matters much.
When Discussion arrived, he quickly moved to form a new core Feederz line-up and appropriate various Kennedys at different times. But on the Feederz first long player he was accompanied by D.H. Peligro, Biafra’s drummer. Entitled Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?, which included a piece of grip tape (kinda like sandpaper) on the cover in order to damage any adjacent albums, the disc was made up of various screeds against normalcy and some songs to just confound the normals – “Dead Bodies” being one of them.
It became clear from just that one long player that the Feederz were capable of more than just a few catchy punk and hardcore tracks. The album opener, “Have You Never Been Mellow,” even finds Discussion singing as opposed to screaming out all those antisocial lyrics.
It was also immediately apparent that the group, even as it occasionally approximated the Kennedys’ sound, was more musically adept than most of its cohort. By the group’s second disc, released in 1986 and called Teachers in Space, the band took on an occasionally post-punk angle to its hardcore and straight punk stuffs. The ensemble went so far as to quote “My Favorite Things” in the middle of its track “New Crime.”
There’s no proper reason as to why there would only be one more Feederz album. And while Discussion continues to record occasionally, his group’s first few discs need to rightfully be considered achievements of mid ‘80s punk even if the band began during the previous decade.