Gimme Something Better (16 page)

Penelope Houston:
It was kind of amazing. I think they were dancing to the vibrations. The deaf people were amused that all these punks wanted to come in and rent their room and have these shows.

Robert Hanrahan:
The social aspect of being able to participate and be accepted was big for the deaf people. They enjoyed being exposed to a different subculture like their own. It was very convivial, no fights or hassles.

Winston Smith:
They put their hands on the table and they could hear the music. It was music they could appreciate because it was so loud.

Johnnie Walker:
I was in my little corner with my mobile disco rig. We transformed the place, had it packed full of punks going crazy, bands coming up from Los Angeles, stage diving into the audience, the floor was bouncing up and down. You had mayhem at one end of the club, and all these deaf people at the other drinking beer and signing to each other, grinning all over their faces, because they absolutely adored it. They had all the atmosphere, but they didn’t have to hear the music.

Ray Farrell:
Any other club at the time, people would be snotty because it was either trendy, or because they just didn’t give a fuck. What was very unique about the Deaf Club is that the people who ran it were the friendliest people imaginable. I think I saw the Butthole Surfers there on their first time playing in San Francisco.

Robert Hanrahan:
In the early days, the commander of the Mission precinct sent a patrol officer to the Deaf Club. He told me that we had their cooperation, as the “punks were changing the face of the neighborhood and appeared to be bringing the crime rate down.” But he said if I fucked up he would unleash a shitstorm and close it down. “Understood?” was his next word. And with that I was escorted out to the street by the patrol officer and walked back. Sometimes younger cops would drop in to ask about learning to pogo with the real intention of meeting those “loose and wild” punk women.

Jennifer Blowdryer:
It was on Valencia. I remember Russell got queer-bashed pretty badly near there, and someone else got stabbed. When there’s a new area it seems like some blood gets shed, initially.

Robert Hanrahan:
There was one invasion by cholos near the end of the club’s life. The attackers were beaten back down the stairs and out onto the street by the audience. There was also the murder of a transient who apparently was flung out through one of the fire escape doors in the upper floors of the hotel and sailed over the heads of
Thrasher
magazine’s Enrico Chandoha and Matty Todd from Pink Section. Matty went into the club and asked me to come outside to talk with the cops, who arrived with paramedics, who waited patiently for the guy to die. While the cop and I were talking, this couple walked over into the street and the guy began to sift his hands through the blood from the transient’s head, that was pooling up on the street.

Good Vibrations: Deaf Club flyer

Jennifer Blowdryer:
I had this thick Rhode Island accent and I was mean as a snake. I didn’t like the fact that I’d been a reject all my life. I would always be tanked. I used to carry a bottle of Sea-grams 7. And then people were kissing my ass ’cause I was in a band. I remember Sally Mutant was backstage, and Timmy said I said, “You’ve got two short little legs, why don’t you walk away on ’em?” People would come up to me years later and be like, “You really upset my friend at the Deaf Club.”

Rozz Rezabek:
Everybody would end up drinking Bud, because it was the only thing you could order with the deaf people. You’d try and do sign language. But then if you mouthed the word “BUD” they’d understand. That’s all anybody ever drank, was Budweiser.

Larry Livermore:
The building was old and a little bit shaky. The whole place would move with the drums and the sound of the music, and people stumbling around and jumping around.

Rozz Rezabek:
This couple named Joel and Mimi lived next door. The window from their fire escape faced the backstage room. When bands were there, Joel and Mimi would just charge people a buck to come through. People would be crawling through the window into the dressing room. In and out, all night long.

Jennifer Blowdryer:
Now you think of people who are so-called handicapped, there’s supposed to be this liberalization of using language as if no one’s different, but they’re actually more protected and segregated now. It wasn’t like the deaf people must be separate or something. They were just down and drinking and having as good a time as anybody. They were drinkers, those deaf people. Oh yeah.

Sammytown:
They closed it down ’cause pogoing was big, and they were afraid the floor would collapse.

Robert Hanrahan:
The deaf community supported the club to the end. Bruce Conner had the last unofficial show there, a private affair that was paid for with an award he received.

Dennis Kernohan:
The deaf people there with balloons, holding them up and feeling the vibrations of the balloons to the Germs, all these fuckin’ great bands, and using these balloons and dancing around. For a tough old punk, it just made your heart—it gave you that beautiful feeling. They loved the music, and we were making money for them.

Steve DePace:
I remember being approached by Ted Falconi at a party in a warehouse somewhere. I was jamming around with some different people. He had seen me in Negative Trend, we had done shows together. He was in a band called Rad Command. He said, “Hey, man, I really like the way you play drums, blah blah blah. I got a thing going with Will Shatter. We want you to come and play drums with us.”

Ted came from a band that had broken up. Myself and Will, from a band that had broken up. The original singer, Ricky Williams, was fired from the Sleepers.

Flipper started in ’79. There was no talk of how we were gonna style this band, or how we were gonna style the music, or anything. We literally got together in a room, plugged in, and started playing. And what came out, came out.

Ted Falconi:
We did a show right outside the Aquarium in Golden Gate Park. And, as all these kids were running out, you know, “Flipper—I wanna go back and see Flipper!” Talking about the aquarium. And Ricky Williams had all these animals called Flipper. So Will was like, “That’s the name of the band—Flipper. Ricky will remember it, and it signifies fun.”

Steve DePace:
Ted was the art school guy. He came up with a logo that anybody could do. It was one continuous motion to do the whole thing. You just had to take your pen off the page to do the fins. That thing was all over the world.

Joe Rees:
Ted and I were friends in art school. I never in my life ever thought Ted Falconi would play a musical instrument and perform onstage. Oh sure, he was a frontline, open-minded anti-war guy with long hair. You just never expected any interest in the music scene.

Steve DePace:
Ricky Williams was fantastic. What a great presence, he was a great punk rock star onstage. But he was all fucked up on drugs. He lasted maybe six months. We actually kicked him out of the band. He was showing up to rehearsals unconscious. He had these two girls that were his handlers, and they would drag him from place to place. How do you have an unconscious singer?

Bruce Loose:
The only reason I’m in Flipper is because I was a friend of Will’s.

Rozz Rezabek:
The early Flipper shows were really good, when they were kind of like the Grateful Dead of punk. They would do these long pounding dirges, long, horrible anti-groove things.

Joe Rees:
Ted’s guitar was irritating as hell. But you could always have a good time when you went to a show. You never had to think a lot about Flipper. It was basically a crazy, mad happening.

Ruth Schwartz:
Flipper were the first rave band, as far as I’m concerned. Will was a poet. So he was doing poetry over this grunge thing. And it worked for a lot of people. I go back to that stuff now and it’s unlistenable. There’s a lot of things you go back and listen to now and you go, “They really were good.” And then other things you go back and listen to: “Wow, what were we ever thinking?” Flipper’s one of them.

Steve Tupper:
I first saw them in either late August or early September of ’79 at the Deaf Club. Mike from the Tools and I were both total Negative Trend fans. We cornered Ted in the back room and said, “Hey, would you like to be on this record that we’re putting out?” And Ted was totally grinning from ear to ear. I don’t think they’d even done a demo at that point.

Jello Biafra:
Flipper was a very controversial, maybe even dangerous band that still had the attitude of Negative Trend running through it. Where the reason to play music is not to be liked, it’s to fuck with everybody. There was no middle ground. People either loved them or absolutely hated them. It got to the point where one way of heckling crappy out-of-town poseur bands, or British record company bands, was to yell “Flipper!” out in the crowd. I yelled that at the Keystone in Berkeley, and somebody punched me in the back of the head as hard as they could. Just mentioning Flipper offended people that bad.

Dave Chavez:
I was a big fan of theirs because they were so noisy. You never knew if somebody was gonna be too high, or if they were just gonna play one song, or maybe a couple, or ten. You didn’t know. And if they did play one song or two songs, they made it fit the whole set. The scene was so new, it was really like the beginning of the hardcore scene. It sounds funny to say that, but early Flipper shows were some of the most hardcore shows I’ve gone to.

Krist Novoselic:
I met Buzz Osbourne, who was in the Melvins, in Aberdeen, Washington. I heard some of the old-school punks from the ’70s, but I hadn’t really heard any American hardcore music. I was 18. Buzz was a punk rock evangelist, so he lent me a bunch of records, and one of the records was
Generic Flipper
. I put it on and listened to it, and I said, “God, this is really weird.” Just the production value. Is this live? I listened to it again, and then the third time, I rolled over and it just floored me. Oh, this is really art and expression, and ethereal. It actually was an epiphany.

Dean Washington:
Flipper’s music is filthy and slow to me. I don’t wanna nod out, I wanna be, like, teeth grinding. But they were good.

Johnny Genocide:
They are the one band I never got tired of. There are layers to their sound that are fascinating to listen to, especially with headphones.

Steve Tupper:
The Tools, the Vktms, Flipper and another band that was pretty popular at that time, No Alternative, were all on
S.F. Underground
. The idea was to do this series of 7-inch compilations. Pick one song from four different bands and put them on a 7-inch. By the time the first Flipper LP came out in the spring of ’82, Subterranean was pretty much plugged into the whole U.S. indie distribution network. Flipper got this full-page spread in
NME
. We got their
Generic
LP released in the U.K., but it didn’t sell worth shit there. I don’t know why.

Larry Crane:
I lived in Nevada City through high school. My friends used to tape the
Maximum RocknRoll
show. We’d be riding in my car, and one of those shows, my friend said, “You’re gonna hate this.” And “Earthworm” by Flipper came on. I was like, “Wow, that’s really cool!” It was just so textural.

Steve DePace:
Will Shatter and Bruce Loose. Those guys were the real deal. They didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t about, oh, let’s play a great show and we’ll sell a lot of records. It was about torturing the audience to fucking death. To them, if you walked out, then they did their job right.

Mabuhay Flyer: Flipper, The Lewd, and Crucifix

Gary Floyd:
When we first moved here, I didn’t know those guys. The Dicks were playing at the Mab and Will Shatter jumped onstage and grabbed the microphone and started singing along. I ran over and grabbed him and kicked his fucking ass offstage and said, “Start your own fucking band!” Later on a friend said, “That was the guy in Flipper. He fucking loves you guys, and you told him to start his own fucking band. He
has
a band—bigger than your band.” But I had to pull it in, you know. Like, “Well, I didn’t like it.”