By Will York

'I'VE COMMITTED SUICIDE twice so far," Bruce Loose joked over the telephone from his home in Mendocino County last spring. "But judging by the fact that I'm not dead – and judging by the way I tried to do it, I should be – then I'm not supposed to be dead."

photo courtesy of Will York

Loose lived hard for a long time and may have gotten out of the city – and the group – just in time. Forget about Paul Shaffer and company – in their heyday, Flipper were the world's most dangerous band, and they left a trail of wreckage to prove it. There were the drug-related deaths of three band members: legendary bassist-vocalist Will Shatter in 1987, early vocalist Ricky Williams in 1991, and Shatter's replacement, John Dougherty, in 1997. Then there was the hasty, fine-print contract they signed with Rick Rubin's Def American in the early '90s, giving up control of their catalog and burning their biggest supporter, Subterranean Records boss Steve Tupper, in the process. The ill-advised reunion album, American Grafishy (Warner Bros., 1993), and ensuing disastrous tour almost put the nail in Flipper's coffin – or at least should have.

Now the band's major recordings are out of print, while Loose and the other surviving members are still trying to figure out how to salvage what's left of the tarnished Flipper legacy. Who knows? Maybe all this fallout is the product of some sort of bad West Coast punk voodoo, the same stuff that caused Minuteman D. Boon's fatal car wreck, the Dead Kennedys' disgraceful legal battles, and SST's bankruptcy. More likely, it's just a side effect of Flipper's crazy, chaotic music, which mirrored the way the band lived their lives.

Formula none

Setting aside the gory details of their offstage lives, it's the awesome, inspiring music Flipper made onstage that people should remember. It was an unlikely formula: frontmen Loose and Shatter taking turns on vocals and bass, anchored by Steve DePace's steady, almost oblivious drumming and topped off by Ted Falconi's howling noise guitar. Vietnam vet Falconi played like he was tuning in to alien transmissions through a steel plate in his head. Loose and Shatter ground out repetitive, distortion-wrecked bass riffs that seemed to hit all the wrong notes on the scale – and this was the lead instrument. They were never in tune. On paper, it doesn't make much sense, but in Flipper's hands, it all came together in a magical sort of mess that transcended the sum of its parts.

"I don't want to rub it in, but if you missed Flipper, you really missed something good," said Joe Pop-O-Pie, whose band the Pop-O-Pies opened for Flipper several times between 1982 and 1984. His comment sums up the basic Bay Area underground-rock old-timer sentiment regarding Flipper: they were the San Francisco band during the early '80s. Not only that, but if you weren't there, you'll never get the full Flipper experience.

"You get a really one-dimensional representation [from the recordings], or maybe even two-dimensional," agreed Tupper, whose now dormant Subterranean label remains synonymous with Flipper. "But the whole thing? No. Because it fit into the whole social and cultural scene at the time, and without that kind of background, I think you're only going to get a very two-dimensional, at best, picture of what was going on."

Even so, Flipper's 1981 debut album, Generic (Subterranean/Def American), is one of the all-time classic American punk records, which has to count for something. It's a masterpiece of apparent haphazardness that reveals its streetwise intelligence the more you listen to it. Most critics single out the runaway seven-minute closer "Sex Bomb" – which contains a total of seven words sung over and over – as the album's definitive moment, but the album is full of amazing songs, including some of the most poetic rock lyrics since Bob Dylan's. "Ever wish the human race didn't exist / Then realize you're one too?" Loose sings on "Ever," only to answer his own question a couple of lines later: "I have / So what?"

Flipper's blend of fatalistic realism and sarcastic humor was unique. "It was like good-times music for people that were naturally just absolutely pessimistic," explained Gregg Turkington, a longtime Flipper fan who went on to work for Subterranean and become friends with Shatter. "It would give you some real hope and inspiration while still staying true to that sort of negative viewpoint about things."

Thorn in hardcore's side

Flipper acquired a rabid, dedicated following and inspired critical praise from well beyond the Bay Area, but also irritated plenty of others who either didn't get the joke or didn't realize how serious the band were about it. "Sometimes it seemed like they would go out of their way to try and annoy an audience," Tupper admitted. A necessary antidote to the increasingly dogmatic hardcore punk scene that was developing in the early '80s, they challenged this audience in every way possible – right down to the very existence of their unfashionably slow, sludgy music.

"Basically, people that were really the oddballs and that never really fit in would go for Flipper," said Turkington, explaining the band's contrarian appeal. "And the people that gravitated toward punk rock because they liked torn jeans and Mohawks – those are the people who would not like Flipper. I think Flipper was hip to this trend. That's why they were such a thorn in the side of this whole [hardcore punk] crowd."

Flipper weren't the only band challenging the onset of punk dogma in those days. Their peak years came during what has to be considered the golden age of independent rock music in the United States, a time when fellow visionaries like the Minutemen, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, and the Meat Puppets were exploding punk's boundaries in every direction. "There was a real sense of urgency!" Loose exclaimed, remembering the era. "We saw a society that was going to hell. And we were either going to drag it all the way to hell, or drag it up out of hell."

Sadly, it was the bands themselves who were ultimately dragged down, each of them meeting an end that was, at best, mildly tragic, and at worst – well, just look at what happened to Flipper. Setting aside conspiracy theories about cocaine money-laundering rock clubs, behind-the-scenes major-label schemes, and other attempted explanations for the dark times that struck in the late '80s, the sagelike Tupper tried to put things in perspective: "Here you're talking about basically culture and the way it ebbs and flows. If you look back through history, this kind of thing has happened about every 10 years. You had the punk thing in the late '70s, the hippies in the '60s, and before that you had the beats, you had the swing era. And you can just trace it all the way back, about every decade or so – music, art, and politics, all rolled up into one big explosion that happens every once in a while. And they don't last forever."

They sure don't. In true Flipper-esque fashion, though, Loose is remarkably realistic and unromantic about the past these days. Certainly, the self-confessed "loudmouth" has been humbled over the years, but he doesn't second-guess himself. As he once sang, "The game's got a price."

"Living a different kind of life, would my music have been the same?" he asked rhetorically. "No, of course not.... For me, it was pertinent to be on the edge. Otherwise, I didn't feel alive enough. It was a balancing game. It was a challenge to see how long you could live on the edge without dying. Actually, quite a few of us made it through. A lot of us didn't."

Pain and spirit

Luckily, he hasn't lost his sense of humor, either. He has some hilarious stories, and it's a joy to hear his voice perk up when he tells them. For example, there was the time he crawled under the stage at a Dead Kennedys show and yelled through a hidden, plugged-in microphone, "I might be 'too drunk to fuck,' but I can sure lick some pussy!" He also mentioned a scrapped plan to issue a still-unreleased studio album from the mid-'80s under the title Flipper's Greatest Misses, with artwork depicting a dartboard decorated by errantly thrown syringes instead of darts. "Will would have thought it was hilarious," he maintained.

He's not completely callous, though. "I miss Will, even though the last few years were kind of tough between us. We made a damn good team. There were so many times when Will and I would be on opposite ends of the city, and I know we were both in mental connection, in creative mode. We'd come into rehearsal that week, and he's got two bass lines and one set of lyrics, and I've got one bass line and two sets of lyrics, and they all fit together," he said, laughing. "It was magic."

He had fewer nice things to say about his other bandmates when we spoke again last summer, although he broke a long silence with them recently in hopes of sorting out some of the band's post-Rubin wreckage. (DePace and Falconi were contacted via e-mail for this article but had not responded as of press time.) The goals involve trying to regain some control over the albums they sold to Rubin in the early '90s, including an unreleased studio album, and moving forward with plans to put out some additional live material, with perhaps Turkington's help. There's other business too, like the recent string of tribute-album appearances DePace and Falconi made using the Flipper name, including – brace yourselves – A Tribute to NOFX and A Punk Tribute to Weezer (both on Cleopatra Records).

Happily, Loose and company recently have made diplomatic breakthroughs. Last week they met in person for the first time in years to discuss business, with the help of some intermediaries. In an e-mail sent Feb. 26, Loose reported, "So to my surprise the Flipper meet went very well. No fights, apologies where [sic] made by all parties, and we are back on the same page."

Otherwise, Loose is on sabbatical these days, living with family in Mendocino County and trying to recover from the debilitating lower back pain that's plagued him for the past decade. Although playing the bass is out of the question at this stage for medical reasons, he has gotten back into making music with a Flipper-like feel and instrumentation over the past few years, toying around with electronic music software on his computer and trying to get another live band ready to perform. He did a one-off show at 924 Gilman in 2002 with a band he dubbed Not Flipper and has gotten another Not lineup together with Mia Levin on bass and Rachel Thoele on drums – both formerly of Flipper contemporaries Frightwig – and Weasel Contingent's Bill Burgess on guitar. However, their plans got put on hold last fall when Loose's back pain suddenly worsened again.

Certainly, meeting him in person for the first time last August – with nothing to go on but 20-year-old photos and video footage – was a bit of a shock. The gray-haired Loose, who now wears glasses and walks with a cane, scarcely resembles the virile young man who was on top of the world in those old Flipper documents. He still sounds good, though, and as the band warmed up with some of his old songs at a rehearsal, it was clear he hasn't lost his old intensity, even if his voice is a little rougher.

Levin thinks Loose is doing the best he has in years. "I think he's in a lot of pain," she admitted, "but I think his spirit's in the right place, and I think his heart's in the right place. And Bruce still has the right idea, which is, 'Wake up and think for yourself! Don't swallow what they tell you.' It's funny, because in 1980 we thought, 'Oh man, this is fucked-up.' But comparatively, it's way more fucked-up now. And so I think it's really timely for Bruce to come out and say what he has to say."