So the urban legend is that a young Jello Biafra took one look at the cover to the Crap Detectors' Victims of the Media LP (1978) and was struck with the inspiration to name his record label Alternative Tentacles. I had no idea whether or not it's true, but it gives Lincoln a hell of a place in the history of punk music. Unfortunately, Jello Biafra, founder of Alternative Tentacles and former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, refuted it.
"Sorry, but no. The first Alternative Tentacles release, California Uber Alles, had already been out a month or two when I saw that album," Biafra said in an email. "Alternative Tentacles, like so many of my other 'haha, great ideas,' just popped into my head."
Sorry, kids, we don't get to be that footnote.
But god, what punk it was! Angry, aggressive, sarcastic, socially aware in that way all young punks are. It was largely the work of Jim Jacobi, who's veered between Nebraska, Washington and Texas in his 30-plus strange and storied years playing music.
Jacobi himself refers to the punk band as neither punk nor a band. But the first part — the punk — is indisputible in the face of such a nakedly aggressive single. The latter is less in dispute — an ad hocracy run by Jacobi whereever he happened to be and featuring whoever would play with him at that very moment. The first album was just he and a drummer. But for two guys — what a sound.