I had a smile on my face when I spotted Kurt Cobain sporting a Flipper T-shirt on their Saturday Night Live appearance in January of 1992. It conveyed that imprimatur of underground cool to millions, even if most people watching had not a clue as to who Flipper was or maybe thought of an old TV sitcom. And, oh yeah, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic became a Flipper bassist from 2006-2009.
Flipper was — and technically still is — a hardcore-punk band, more or less, but they flipped the script. Loud but s-l-o-w. Aggro to the max, but also deadpan funny, humor itself being anathema to the hardcore horde. Flipper — co-led by two bassist-singers Will Shatter and Bruce Loose with Ted Falconi on guitar and Steve DePace on drums — bashed out a minimalistic, heavy low-end mess that could coalesce into this throbbing gristle of rhythm. Think “Sex Bomb” — where you’re pretty sure she’s his sex bomb baby, yeah or “Life” — where you’re pretty certain it’s the only thing worth living for — or “Ha Ha Ha — where you’re damn sure suburbia and shopping isn’t where it’s at. And “If I Can’t Be Drunk,” where the follow-up line is “I don’t wanna be alive!” It was sung somewhere between a plaint and a snarl. An alcoholic’s lament or boast?
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I latched on to Flipper pretty early, and spent some quite a bit of time with them as a critic and interviewer over the years, right up to the days when the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow took over the lead vocalist role and raised his own kind of holy hell onstage. No matter who was onstage, the possibility of audience confrontation was quite possibly in the mix. Yow was a little more in your face than Shatter or Loose had been. I’d call it organized chaos, but I’m not quite sure about the “organized” modifier.
And if fans taunted Flipper, Flipper struck back. If fans just wanted to mosh and bang each other around, that was OK, too.
Why is there a Flipper chapter in Backstage & Beyond Complete: 45 Years of Rock Chats & Rants?
Well, they certainly dinged both bells in the “chats” and “rants” categories. But mostly because they’re a band I like (that not everybody does, so it goes); I had good access to them over the years; and they’re an important slice of the hardcore punk-and-beyond world. The genre’s heyday, if you want to call it that, was brief, but Flipper endured. Not always in an active way, mind you. I mean, they were absent for chunks of time, but their influence was there from the start — aside from Nirvana, count Mudhoney, the Melvins, and Jane’s Addiction — and every now and then they popped up to entertain us, to remind us.
And remember, those were different times. Concerts not so controlled. Excess permitted or, at least, tolerated. Sure, Flipper was a good time, but they didn’t make it easy for anyone.
—Jim Sullivan
“I can remember that first tour in ’80-’81,” says Steve DePace, drummer for the San Francisco band Flipper. “We’d released three singles and garnered a lot of attention before the first album in ’82. What happened was the Dead Kennedys exploded — it was more of a slow cook for us — and they did a national tour. Jello Biafra loved Flipper and when he spoke to the press, he talked up Flipper. We did a national tour right behind them and our name was fresh on everybody’s minds, and we had those singles out. Our very first tour, every show was packed with rabid fans. We were young, in our early 20s, and we were partying pretty hard and having a really good time. There was definitely a feel of being part of something bigger than just being a band on the road. We discovered there were scenes going on in every little town and city.
“We didn’t make a lot of money: enough to maintain the tour vehicle. In the ’80s, I don’t remember staying in a hotel. Every city we went to we stayed at somebody’s house, and we didn’t even have that pre-planned. We would roll into a town, play a show and invite ourselves to stay with somebody. Sometimes, we would announce off the stage we needed a place to stay. There was a punk scene everywhere we went and you got to know the bands from that scene, all across America. A brother- and sisterhood.”
Life on the road for an indie punk rock band…
In 1993 I was in a bar with former Replacements singer-guitarist Paul Westerberg who — now sober — was sipping a cola at a Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. He was in Boston to promote his first solo album. Flipper came into the conversation, as the band was on a comeback tour and playing a local club, the Middle East Downstairs, that night.
“We thought we were a punk band until we met Flipper,” Westerberg mused, recalling a bill they shared some time ago. His tone was somewhere between admiration and disgust. “They were mean. They were the scariest group we ever saw. They stole our high hat [cymbal] and we didn’t have the nerve to ask for it back. They were some rough customers. A couple of them died, didn’t they?”
I didn’t know it at the time, but Westerberg was right. Bassist Will Shatter (real name: Russell Wilkinson) overdosed on heroin and died in 1987. But original singer Ricky Williams, who’d been fired from the band before they made any recordings, also checked out in 1992, a fact I didn’t learn until much later.
After Shatter’s death, Flipper’s surviving members — guitarist Ted Falconi, DePace and singer-guitarist Bruce Loose — went underground, hibernating (with incoming bassist John Dougherty; he died of an OD in 1997) until they were re-animated by producer Rick Rubin, who turned most everything he touched — from hip-hop to metal to (later) country — gold. He signed them to his Def American label and produced American Grafishy. He didn’t quite turn Flipper gold (they were still Flipper after all), but he got them back in the game.
They got another boost the previous year when Kurt Cobain wore a Flipper T-shirt on Saturday Night Live, showing the world that Flipper was (a) cool and (b) one of the places where Nirvana’s roots were buried. There was some truth to both.
Later that night at the Middle East, Bruce Loose started the show with a rambling admonition: “There will be no riot … I will not be hit by anyone … We will not have bottles thrown at us anymore.” They lurched into a rendition of the desperate, dirge-y anthem “Fucked Up Once Again,” and Loose let loose with an explainer: “It’s not about drugs, it’s not about drunkenness — it’s about the slow grind.”
To me, it seemed like all of the above, but, then again, the song does have a twist and a kicker at the end about being fucked up — “Never again!” Who’s to tell? Flipper’s métier is mess, and they were knee-deep in it, vacillating between the gleeful and the grotesque, but truthfully, they did not seem as willfully demented as they once did. The mosh pit people didn’t even knock each other senseless, though they did coalesce for a good bash during the closer, “Ha Ha Ha.”
When it first hit in 1976 and 1977, punk rock was a poke in the eye and a kick in the nuts to mainstream rock. Punk rock waned as the ’80s approached; less radical new wave bands took over center stage. But a different, more virulent strain of punk rock evolved, an even faster and thrashier form dubbed hardcore. On the surface at least, its musicians seem more alienated from, and angrier at, the state of the world. It was Reagan Time. And, yet, of course, they were out there to have fun, too, to bring some blurry catharsis into our miserable little lives.
On the edge of this movement lived Flipper. At its best, hardcore punk can cut like a razor; Flipper’s blade is purposefully rusty. Their music is messy and aggressive, strewn with odd melodic hooks that are as abrasive as they are catchy. Flipper’s approach has its roots in proto-metal bands such as Blue Cheer and the Stooges: Thick slabs of bass, drums and rhythm guitar, often topped with screeching, distorted lead guitar.
From the outset, Flipper rode the antagonistic/welcoming line as well as the sarcastic/we-mean-it-maaan line. There was a massive, low-end roar and a certain sneer but also black comedy. They weren’t slow-core, that offshoot genre whose bands, like Codeine, Low, American Music Club and Galaxie 500, lived on the sadder, softer side.
Not Flipper. Their music had the same ferocity as hardcore but moved at a glacial pace, which somehow upped the aggro factor even more. In the hardcore world that valued short songs and breakneck speed over everything else, Flipper played slow, sludge-rock punk. Some of the hardcore kids hated them; others dug the Flipper piss take.
The first time I ever heard them play “If I Can’t Be Drunk” was in concert, before it made it to record; hence, it was a first-time rollout in my world. Seven minutes or more of roiling thunder whose only lyrics are the title plus the rejoinder, “I don’t wanna be alive!” You could read that two ways: As dead-on truth, an alcoholic’s desperate, demanding plea that life without booze is not worth living, or (subtext maybe, or after-the-fact analyzing) a denunciation of that mindset and lifestyle because it was so obviously pathetic and reductive.
Let’s go back. It’s 1982 and I’m in a long defunct Boston club called Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The show begins with three of the four Flippers onstage, hammering out the chords and big beat of “Ha Ha Ha,” their, uh, hit. Well, their best-known song. It’s a caustic number about the folly of living in suburbia, followed by an observance of cheap squishy motel sex, with the band (and audience) laughing at everyone. But there’s no one to sing it. Shatter notices this and calls out, “Who wants to sing?” A kid who has nothing to do with the band takes the stage, does a creditable job on the chorus and wings it on the verses. About five minutes later — the song still pounding away — Loose joins his mates, takes the mic and begins the caustic first verse, declaring life’s a blast, like living in the past.
After the set, I asked Shatter about its shambolic beginning. “We didn’t know where Bruce was, and we wanted to start,” he explained, reasoning Loose would hear the noise from wherever he was and join the party.
Shatter and Loose, the band’s songwriters, swap guitar and bass throughout the night. “The Way of the World,” “Sacrifice” and “Sex Bomb” boom from the stage, building from a bass riff, with lead guitarist and Vietnam vet Ted Falconi adding piercing layers of noise, his back turned away from the mosh-mad punks.
The following year, Springtime at the Channel club in Boston…
Flipper had another new bassist, Bruno DeSmartass (né Steve DeMartis), but the sound remained the same. The songs move along at lumbering mid-tempo paces. The tempo may seem leaden, but don’t be deceived. The mixture is volatile. Rock and roll doesn’t boil over much more than this; the noise reached numerous points of glorious abandon and seething raw power; it nearly ended in a full- fledged fight between the band and several audience members. Loose and Falconi challenged their antagonists in the crowd to come up on stage and fight. Fisticuffs were avoided, it seemed, only because the crowd stayed put.
Swilling and spilling beer on stage, Flipper had been pelted by plastic cups, beer, spit, firecrackers and ice cubes all night. At one point, Loose struck up a chorus of “Let’s get three-year-old, three-year-old” to the tune of Olivia Newton- John’s “Physical.” (It should be noted that, in this context, a barrage of debris can be an affectionate gesture, a bond that implies everyone is in the same mess together. Band members being hit by this shit, however, sometimes differ.) After Loose received one particular nasty wad of spit near the end of the show, he leapt wild-eyed into the crowd, toting his bass, looking for the culprit.
Aside from that discomforting bit, Flipper succeeded with their excess. The wild spirit of primal rock and roll thrived. And when they launched into “Life,” indeed a most life-affirming song, it carried real import, where it’s forcefully declared that life is the only thing worth living for. Yes, it’s a joke on the level of Spinal Tap (“Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”) but it’s the obvious truth, too. I mean, what else ya got but life? Amidst all the chaos, it’s a takeaway worth, uh, taking away.
Fall of 2019 …
Flipper is at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge again. The gig began in blood and ended in chaos. I suppose that’s no surprise, though when I talked with DePace after the shambolic set, he said what went down at the end was not exactly what was planned for.
They opened with “The Light, the Sound, the Rhythm and the Noise,” which was a pretty good indicator of where the band was headed. Next, Flipper played a truncated version of its sneering throbber “Ha Ha Ha.” The song collapsed when singer-yowler David Yow, out surfing upon the hands and among the bodies of those packed at the club’s front, had suffered a gash over the right eye and was bleeding. An occupational hazard, same as old-school pro wrestling. DePace, Falconi and new bassist Rachel Thoele huddled. Yow was attended to and it was decided, of course, that the show must go on. Bloody, but unbowed.
Yow, who took over the vocals that once belonged to the long-dead Shatter and the irreparably damaged/sidelined Loose, always plays his part with reckless abandon, going back to his Scratch Acid and Jesus Lizard days. On this night, he was either drunk or played drunk really well. (One of the guys working the show who met him pre-set said it was the former; Yow was drunk when he got there.)
Neither Yow nor anyone else in Flipper are Trump fans. One of Yow’s shout-outs was a subtle “Fuck you Trump, fuck you asshole for fucking up our world.” That closed “That’s the Way of the World.” The feral Yow crawled the floor like Iggy and surely would have cut his chest with broken glass had he gotten the opportunity. He introduced Steve DePace saying “he looks like Jabba the Hut but kicks ass like John Bonham.” I believe that was a compliment. DePace, at least, smiled.
That the final song was “Sex Bomb” and Yow had left the stage by that point. The song began as Yow and Tibbie-X, the singer from the preceding band Reagan Youth took the mic and began to wail She was joined on stage by a long-haired topless trans woman. Yow came back at the end declare something about the Butthole Surfers being really good, but Flipper was this “art force.”
I asked DePace about Loose’s condition. He had severe back problems and had been using a cane on stage for years. The back problems forced him out of the band, but DePace said he was even worse now. Aside from his bad back, DePace said, “he’s fucked up in the head. He’s toast.”
Flipper in 2024?
Still exists, sort of. They’d gotten bassist Mike Watt — he of the Minutemen, fiREHOSE and (the briefly reconstituted) Iggy and the Stooges — to join in 2019 and again in 2022-’23. Falconi says on their last U.S. tour, he blew out tendons in his knee and they were going to scrap part of that tour. But Yow and Thoele came back on board to finish it. Then “Rachel got Covid in Florida,” Falconi says, “and our driver Neil Peterson filled in for her. All was good, then Yow left to do a video project in Austin, so for the Oklahoma shows we had Niccolo Birkitt fill in on vocals. For the last two shows in Los Angeles, Yow did one and Brandon Cruz [from Dr. Know] did the second show. Nathan Calhoun [from WE Are the Asteroids] was on bass.”
For their next-to-last show, they had Wyatt and Fletcher Shears from the Garden. The final gig was May 29th at the Caterwaul Festival in Minneapolis, with bassist Tony Ash from Conan Neutron & the Secret Friends and Shannon Selberg from the Cows on vocals.
Falconi does the math. “So, in the last ten shows we played with eight different people. We have been trying to get the back catalog out again, but Steve has been sitting on his ass, getting fat and feeling bad. I hope we can get the catalog out. Also, trying to get the John Peel session on vinyl along with a not yet released epic version of ‘Kali.’ I think the Peel session is one of the best recordings we did, with John Dougherty on bass and Bruce on vocals.”
Does Flipper still exist as a live entity?
Maybe at festivals. “It comes down to a matter of money to afford those kinds of shows,” says Falconi. “Fly in, get a hotel, rehearse and play. Fly home. Right now, Flipper is Steve and I. Watt is doing his own band again, and Yow is mostly doing his band and whatever movie he can do. I have been going through some medical issues, emphysema and fibrosis. I am still trying to stay active, biking and gardening, and the last MRI showed no new growth of the fibrosis. But I still get winded faster than when I was young. I’m ready to travel for a few more shows and we have an option on bass players but singers, that is the question. Oh well.”
With that, Falconi was off to go biking.
Backstage & Beyond Complete: 45 Years Of Rock Chats & Rants is out July 1 via Trouser Press Books.
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