Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables - Release Variations

Release Variations

• The original back cover featured a found photograph of an old lounge band called the Sounds of Sunshine, with the Dead Kennedys' logo pasted onto the drum kit and skulls and crossbones spliced onto their instruments. The original photograph, as found by Biafra at a garage sale, had no identifying remarks on it whatsoever, and was used because the band thought it was "hilarious". Somehow Warner Wilder, the former vocalist of the defunct lounge band learned of the photo and threatened to sue the Dead Kennedys. The back cover was reprinted with the heads of the band members cut off, but this solution was found to be unsatisfactory to the Sounds of Sunshine, forcing an entirely different photo of four old ladies in a living room (with the Alternative Tentacles bat mascot pasted over a picture frame). When Cleopatra Records reissued Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables in 2002, the original unbeheaded lounge band picture reappeared. The 25th Anniversary "Deluxe Reissue" co-released by Cherry Red Records and Manifesto Records in 2005 used the old ladies photograph, but with the Dead Kennedys logo substituted for the Alternative Tentacles Bat
• Early IRS pressings featured the cover tinted orange with black lettering. This cover variation was not authorized by the band. According to a late-80s interview with Goldmine magazine, IRS told the band they wanted to make the domestic version different from the Cherry Red import, to which Biafra claimed to have told IRS, "Yeah, inferior to the original — change it back!" During a 1981 performance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., Biafra mentions, "Some of you stooped so low as to buy our wonderful album, even with the shitty Disneyland orange cover which was not our idea."
• Post-IRS, pre-Alternative Tentacles pressings on IRS's Faulty Products subsidiary added "Police Truck" to the middle of the Side A sequence, between "Let's Lynch the Landlord" and "Drug Me".
• Some Cherry Red vinyl pressings added "Too Drunk to Fuck" to the end of Side A.
• Pirate pressings of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (as well as the next two Dead Kennedys releases, In God We Trust Inc. and Plastic Surgery Disasters) were manufactured in Italy, Spain and Portugal. According to Biafra, these pressings were manufactured by someone who retained the master parts from defunct Italian licensees and put out what Biafra described as "Clorox bottle-quality pressings". These pressings were sold by a cut-out distributor to record stores that were, in Biafra's words, "too snooty" to deal with the independent distributors that Alternative Tentacles dealt with.
• The run-out groove of the early Alternative Tentacles pressings as well as early Cherry Red pressings includes the text "Well?? Who ARE the Brain Police???" - a reference to the song "Who Are the Brain Police?" by The Mothers of Invention.