Pioneering punk rocker Jello Biafra was hospitalized this past weekend after suffering a stroke.
Biafra, the former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, announced Monday on Facebook that he had a hemorrhagic stroke caused by high blood pressure over the weekend.
“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,” the singer said in the 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!’”
Biafra said it was at this point he realized, “Oh shit, I’m having a stroke!” but added, “I still have a lot of great stuff in me, but right now I gotta lotta of rehabbing to do.”
The post notes that Biafra was hospitalized as of Monday and is in stable condition and getting the care he needs.
Biafra, 67, co-founded the Dead Kennedys in San Francisco in 1978, and was the lead singer until leaving the band in 1986.
The band’s best known songs include “Holiday In Cambodia,” “Too Drunk To Fuck,” and “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” which Biafra reworked into “Nazi Trumps Fuck Off” for a March 2025 concert.
After leaving the band, Biafra worked as a solo artist, played electropunk music in the Witch Trials, and started the band Lard with members of industrial metal band Ministry, according to Pitchfork.
Although the Dead Kennedys reformed in 2001, Biafra declined to join. Three years earlier, other band members sued him for allegedly withholding royalties, and he was forced to pay outstanding payments and punitive damages. He also had to turn over most of the Dead Kennedys’ back catalog.
His relationship with the band doesn’t seem to have gotten better.
Last month, he criticized his former bandmates for signing on to Punk In The Park, a multi-city music festival series.
After it was revealed the festival’s organizer, Cameron Collins of Brew Ha Ha Productions, supported Donald Trump in 2024, the surviving Dead Kennedys pulled out of some, but not all, gigs, inspiring Biafra to go scorched-earth on his former bandmates.
“They’re taking the money $$$, and THEN pulling out?” he said in a statement to Stereogum. “The real Dead Kennedys would never have let this happen in the first place. One more sordid reason I don’t ever want to play with them again.”
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