Famous for rebelling against anything that smacked of hypocrisy, The Dead Kennedys took on everyone from religious fundamentalists to right-wing politicians and a music industry that, by the early 80s, had done a lot to kill real rock 'n' roll. And how they did was often pretty funny.

Their eagerness to get under the skin of people in the music business got the best of them at the 1980 Bay Area Music Awards. Perhaps the most notorious show the Kennedys ever did, the event provided a stage for the punk class clowns to turn the whole glitzy showcase upside down.

Longtime Dead Kennedys bassist Klaus Flouride, who left the band earlier this year, fondly remembers the prank. They were supposed to play "California Uber Alles," but 15 seconds into the song, they launched into to the music-industry bashing number "Pull My Strings."

Here's how Flouride recalls it all going down:

"You have to look at where BAM magazine came from for one thing at the beginning as Rolling Stone had left San Francisco and gone to New York basically and Los Angeles. And so, BAM was a magazine that came in to fill the void for people like Carlos Santana and Jefferson Starship or the Starship or whatever it was at that point, and basically lob softballs at 'em and say how wonderful they are and Journey and groups like that, and they could never sell the damn magazine. It was always given away and supported by advertising and how they got to the level of having an awards show was above and beyond any logic that we could figure out as a band. But apparently, it had a lot of readership, and in order to keep current, by, I think it was 1980... yeah it was 1980, they wanted to start including some New Wave music as they put it. And they asked us and The Mutants to do some songs, and they, of course, wanted us to do "California Uber Alles." And we decided we didn't want to do "California Uber Alles." And Ted, the original drummer, came up with the concept of the lyrics for that song or a good portion of them, and we decided to throw in little snippets like the 'My Sharona' thing and [frontman Jello] Biafra knew the Pearl Harbour & the Explosions' song 'Shut Up and Dance'... everybody knew who was going to do what before it happened, so we got to throw that in, you know, right after the choruses and stuff. When we first tried it, we had to show it to them at dress rehearsal, where we started off with "California Uber Alles." And then, it was a day before the show, and then we went into the song, but when we played it for the dress rehearsal, instead of 'Is my c**k big enough?/Is my brain small enough,' we sang, "Is my smile big enough? Are my teeth white enough for you to make me a star?" or something along those lines. I can't even remember what it was, but it was something along those lines. And you know, Santana was there, Boz Scaggs was there, and they were, 'Ah, ha ha ha ha. They're having fun. They're taking a little poke at us. Isn't that cute, you know? These naive little punkers.' But we knew full well what we were going to do next night, and it was being broadcast live on what would be the equivalent of a Clear Channel station now, called KAML. And when we came out to do it, we did the actual lyrics. We had come up with the shirts with the $ signs. At first, the idea was to come out dressed like The Knack, you know. We had our jackets all buttoned up, and then, we opened the jackets, flipped out the ties and there's dollar signs on them. And then we went into the song, and when we came to the chorus, the guy from KAML was standing side stage listening; you could see the blood draining from his face like, 'Oh my god, this is going out over the air. Oh my god, I'm going to die.' Pacific Stereo was running ads every five minutes, and they don't even exist anymore, but ... and then the guy thought, 'Well, of course, the guys out in the sound truck are just going to, as soon as they hear something, are just going to go to commercial. This isn't any problem. Why worry about it.'

"Well, it turned out the guys in the sound truck are probably doing a doobie or something like that and going, 'Oooh, we need more kick drums here,' but they're not listening to the lyrics, you know, of any of these bands (laughs). So, it went out on the air, and they recorded it on 24-track also at the same time; it was being simultaneously recorded for posterity on 24-track, which was really handy later, because all we had was the cassette from the broadcast we had our roomates doing at home off the radio. And so, we got offstage and people were totally... I mean, during the song, Scaggs and Carlos Santana were sitting in the front row, [they] got up and walked out, and they went to the thing with everybody singing the chorus with us, and [everyone] actually started to sing because they were like trained seals. They were singing along, and you can hear... they start singing along, of course, and then they suddenly realized, 'Well, wait a second. What am I singing?' And the chorus sort of fades off with the people singing along at first, so it was fun."

Needless to say, not everyone was pleased with the Kennedys.

"Um, we got really negative reactions in the downstairs area dressing room, you know, behind the stage area after it was over," says Flouride. "People didn't like us very much, but we were happy with that. And there were all sorts of interactions with everybody from Peter Bogdonovich to Jerry Garcia was there. Then, years later, when we did the Give Me Convenience CD, we wanted to include it, and we found out that the tape existed. I think it was at a record plant in Sausalito, or something. And because I was considered the diplomat of the group as it were, it was my job to call up BAM magazine and ask them if they would give us permission to use that performance. And I went through a bunch of people, and they hemmed and hawed, you know, and like they said, 'Okay, let me get back to you in half an hour.' And... while we're sitting in the studio, trying to figure out if we could run off a mix of it, and he says, 'Okay, under one condition." And we're thinking... I say, 'Don't worry. We're not going to mention anything about BAM magazine.' He says, "No, that's the condition: You have to mention is that it was at the BAMIES,' because by that point, we had, you know, become somebody that people listened to, instead of just this New Wave band that they wanted to have. So, it was kind of funny that they insisted, after being so pissed at us the night of the performance, that when it came out, they insisted that we put credit for it being from the BAMIES. Yeah, that's the long and short story of that... so yeah, that's the long story behind that one. When the book comes out, everybody will know that part."

To find out more about what's happening with Klaus, visit www.klausflouride.com. Catch up on all things Dead Kennedys related by going to www.deadkennedys.com.