Bay Area punk rock legend Jello Biafra hospitalized after suffering stroke
Published in Entertainment News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Bay Area punk rock icon Jello Biafra was hospitalized over the weekend after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke.
The former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys — by far, the greatest Bay Area punk rock band of all time — suffered the stroke on March 7 according to a Facebook post from Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles Records label. The stroke was reportedly caused by high blood pressure.
The stroke caused the left side of Biafra’s body to go numb — at least temporarily.
”I hopped out of my bed because I needed to pee, and my left leg just collapsed under me and I fell to the floor,” Biafra is quoted as saying in the Facebook post. “I couldn’t even break the fall with my left arm because it wasn’t working either. I tried to hop back up again, and I couldn’t. I realized I had ‘fallen and I can’t get up!’ It was this point I thought, ‘Oh (expletive), I’m having a stroke!’”
Biafra was in stable condition and remained hospitalized as of Monday morning, which was when the Facebook post was made.
The 67-year-old punk rock singer, who went on to record solo spoken word albums and other projects after departing from the Dead Kennedys in the late 1980s, sounds committed to doing what it takes to regain his health and get back to work.
“I still have a lot of great stuff in me, but right now I gotta lotta rehabbing to do,” Biafra wrote in the Facebook post.
Despite his long-running solo career, Biafra remains best-known for his trailblazing recordings with the Dead Kennedys, including the 1980 debut “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables” — which might just be the greatest punk rock album ever made.
Yet, Biafra was most recently in the news with something that had nothing do with making music — as he attempted to auction off his 1989 Toyota Celica GT Convertible.
Biafra had owned this vehicle since 1995 and boasted that it has “impeccable punk rock credentials,” according to the post about the auction of the car on Hemmings.com.
“As Jello’s daily driver for decades, this T160-generation shows over 212,000 miles on its odometer,” the post read. “‘Displaying its battle scars proudly, the sporty convertible ‘runs, rides, starts and stops top notch,’” according to a friend assisting Jello with the auction listing. Additionally, the friend notes that the Celica passes the notorious California smog test with ‘flying colors.’”
The kicker to the auction deal was that Biafra would deliver the car himself to the winning bidder.
“As a special extra to the auction of this unique droptop, the winning bidder will have the option of taking delivery of their new piece of punk rock history in the San Francisco Bay Area where Jello will take them for a cruise around some of his favorite historic sites,” the post read.
That appears to have been a mighty incentive, since the car was eventually sold via the auction for a whopping $33,600 (or, roughly, about $33,000 more than it would’ve been worth if it didn’t have such an esteemed punk rock pedigree).
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