Gimme Something Better (17 page)

Ruth Schwartz:
Most of the people who were really in love with Flipper were pretty messed up. You had to be really messed up to be into it. People who didn’t do drugs didn’t like it, ’cause who wants to stand around for that?

Jello Biafra:
Flipper opening for PiL at the South of Market Cultural Center. My favorite show of all time. Visualize the PiL audience, 3,000 people crammed into a building way too small. I commend Johnny Rotten for refusing to play for Bill Graham. Which meant it was a poorly run Paul Rat show that was way oversold. One person there turned to me afterwards and said, “You know, Bill Graham should have done this show.” It was that badly run.

Tom Flynn:
The crowd hated them. A huge crowd, all in this big long narrow building. Flipper started, and I thought something was wrong with the P.A. system. I couldn’t hear a note the guitarist was playing. I was like, “Is this what they’re trying to sound like?”

Jello Biafra:
The sound was bad, the crowd was pissed, everybody was in a really edgy mood. There were all these jocks, and people even from Travis Air Force Base, there to see the freak show, ’cause Johnny Rotten was gonna come on.

And there was Flipper, playing their wonderful/horrible music, and people getting madder and madder, trying to boo them off the stage. Most bands would melt, and go off into the dressing room and cry. But Flipper was just laughing at ’em. Bruce said, “Okay, now we’re gonna torture you some more.” And then would come the next song. Eventually Falconi was playing his guitar, using a Bacardi bottle as a slide, that someone had thrown up there apparently.

The stage was about ten feet off the ground with a chain-link fence. People kept trying to climb up on the stage to pull Flipper off, and falling back on everybody else like the Potemkin movie. Bruce and Will were actually playing soccer, kicking all the cans that were thrown at them back at the crowd. And then finally Will hit his bass on an upstroke, his bass flew over his head, took him with it, he crashed into all of the equipment, and knocked it over. The whole thing was feeding back something fierce, all through the P.A. And Will just paced the stage, dragging his bass and his amp behind him, laughing. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving audience.

Fat Mike:
San Francisco punk in the ’80s did not have a sound. Out of tune and totally sloppy and fucked up was the San Francisco sound. Flipper, I mean seriously—worst band in America. They may be classic, but L.A.’s got Bad Religion, and the Circle Jerks, and Agent Orange, and Social Distortion. And you have Flipper? What the fuck is that?

Steve Tupper:
On a lot of the records, I did the artwork. The album
Generic Flipper
, the bar code, I took it off a can of dog food.

Ray Farrell:
I worked for Subterranean. They would come in eating cat food to get advance money, because they spent all their money.

I was at some Flipper gig in San Francisco. Before the bands started, I was standing in the beer line. I wasn’t paying any attention, but I kept getting hit in the back, by somebody not being able to keep their balance. I turned around and I saw it was the Flipper guys. Two of them were already drunk, and kind of smacking each other. One of them kept falling into me.

Instead of turning around and hitting him, I made my back very rigid. He got pissed off that I did this, and smacked me in the back of the head. I turned around, and smacked him in the face, and I got hit in the eye, and before I knew it, I was on the floor being held down by three of the guys.

Ted Falconi, it was a hair trigger with violence for him. He was a fucking Vietnam vet that was just like, I’m here to protect my guys. He didn’t know what the fight was about. But if the other two guys were gonna do it, then he was gonna join in. They got me on the floor, and a guy was sitting on my chest. Ted said, “Wait, it’s Ray!” And I said, “Yeah, I’m getting beaten up by a band that’s on the label that I work for. This is fucking ridiculous.” I ended up with a black eye.

Steve DePace:
I was kind of the straight guy surrounded amongst all these crazy fuckers. There was always some serious drama between Ted and Bruce. Over whatever. One show at the Hotel Utah, I think, Ted and Bruce started fighting onstage in the middle of the show, and ended up out in the audience pummeling each other.

Another night it happened at the Mabuhay, over a girl they were both dating. Before we even started. The place was packed, all these people were watching Bruce and Ted fight. And that was the show. The fight went offstage somewhere, and it was me sitting there in front of a full crowd. They came back up and we did one song. We had a 45-minute set. The first half hour was the fight, and the last 15 minutes was “Sex Bomb.”

Bruce Loose:
Steve, he’s a good embellisher. I don’t know if we were into direct fistfights. There may have been supposed things that looked like punches thrown, but there were never any punches that landed.

Gone Fishing: Flipper

Tom Flynn:
I saw Flipper with Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks. Flipper only played three songs. Then Dirk Dirksen came out onstage for some reason, and Will started punching him. It was a huge fight, and that was the end. A bunch of their sets ended in fights. I can remember someone saying to me once, “They gotta figure out another way to end their shows.”

Steve DePace:
We played 4th of July down at the Farm. Bruce had just had his kid. He collected up dozens of these dirty, shitty diapers, brought them to the show and started lobbing them into the audience. He decided that was the punk rock thing for that particular night. So these shitty diapers, what do you think happened to them? They started coming back onstage. Shit diapers.

Johnny Genocide:
Bruce is an amazing person. You have to peel back the layers to see the brilliance of his mind.

Steve DePace:
There was an episode in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oftentimes audience members came up onstage and would dance around, stage dive, whatever. This girl was up onstage, a bunch of people around her. This guy kinda literally bumped into this girl, thrashing around. The girl fell backwards and the guy fell on top of her, and it was right in front of my kick drum. And they just started fucking, right there. They’re like, well, here we are, let’s do it. One couple ran off after the show and went to Reno and got married. And are still married.

Steve Tupper:
After we’d done that one Flipper song on
S.F. Underground
, I was thinking, “Jeez, we need to do a live recording of Flipper because the studio stuff doesn’t capture it.” Bruce and Will both had this very dry, sarcastic humor thing going. We went through scads and scads of board tapes and picked out some of that outrageous in-between song patter and put it on the records.

They were doing quite well. They were getting a lot of national airplay by that time. People around here knew what to expect. But they would hit towns cold, and no one would know about them except by hearing their records on the radio. People would show up, and then just get all this total disdain, hurled at them from the stage. That alienated a few people.

Steve DePace:
The first national tour we did, we came through New Orleans and played in the French Quarter somewhere. The bar-tender was this hot chick who introduced us to kamikazes at three in the afternoon, while we were sound checking. We went off and had dinner, more kamikazes.

This particular night was just Kamikaze Drunken Mess Night, for us, onstage. We were so bad. Most of the audience left. There was probably ten people in front, they were the hardcore fans and we ended up just going, “You guys play.” We handed our instruments to them, they started jamming, and we went to the bar.

Bruce Loose:
When we were on tour with GWAR, we left them in New Orleans. On our way back, we stopped and drank a bunch of Hurricanes. It was a really hot day, and we started having a squirt gun fight on the street, which turned into having the police coming, an art gallery smeared with mayonnaise, a water pistol being pointed at the police, and then Ted being held with a gun on the top of his head, facedown on the ground. Over a water pistol.

Ted Falconi:
Only one time it was really bad, and that was in Jersey. Steve and I pretty much killed this quart bottle of tequila backstage. After about the third song I was making myself seasick. I started asking for somebody to play guitar. I had this line of kids. I was like puttin’ it on, they’d play for awhile. Take it off, put it on the next guy, they’d play for awhile. I was sitting on the side of the stage, in front of the drum riser. It was okay.

Steve DePace:
There were times when Will or Bruce either couldn’t do a tour or left in the middle of a tour. Bruce did that to us one time, he just up and left, and we had half a tour to go. Even Ted left us in the middle of a tour one time.

Krist Novoselic:
That was the thing with Flipper. They had a few shows scheduled in Seattle, but they were all canceled. Word was, they could never get it together to take it up that far north.

Steve Tupper:
Flipper started going on extended breaks in ’82. We were trying to record their second studio LP. It took about a year. They did like two LPs’ worth of basic tracks. And then Ted wanted to live in L.A. for awhile, and Bruce wanted to stay in New York for awhile. It was getting difficult to get people together. There were too many drugs around.

Steve DePace:
In San Francisco, people didn’t do cocaine. That was the rock star drug and we were all anti-rock star. So it was speed. It was cheap, it lasted longer. Heroin was cheap. Acid. Those were the big drugs of the day. And booze. Punks weren’t into weed because it was hippie.

Rozz Rezabek:
We were so down on that. Somebody would light up some pot, everybody would be like, “What the fuck you doin’, you fuckin’ hippie? Get that shit out of here!” It’s really funny because a lot of those guys are now practically Rastafarians. Kelly King: Definitely a lot of heroin in the city. A good friend of mine, Nina Crawford from the Vktms, a great singer, really great band, and she was a junkie. There was a lot of that going around.

Bruce Loose:
The drugs and the type of music that got influenced from those particular drugs killed the true heart of the San Francisco punk scene by 1981, ’82. Up to ’83, maybe. But then I’m thinking more of Flipper.

Jello Biafra:
I guess I made a decision early on. I could either do what Will and his buddies were doing and spend my money on speed—I just couldn’t handle it as well as those guys seemingly could—or I could spend it on records. Which one would make me more happy long-term? Records, of course.

Rozz Rezabek:
I can remember Will doing this. Back then, you could take these things called Vicks inhalers. Get about 20 of ’em, bust ’em open. They had this big chunk of ChapStick type stuff in there. You’d get some acetone down at the hardware store, pour it on that in a glass baking tray, and then set it in the window. It dries out, after about a week of sittin’ in the sun. And that’s all you really had to do.

Steve DePace:
I don’t know why or how, but I drew the line in the sand for myself as far as drug use went. Because I saw around me people going very rapidly from drug use for fun and yuks, to being really fucked up, to being desperate, and robbin’ and stealin’ and lookin’ like shit, to dying. That happens fast. And I guess I was smart enough to go, wow, man, if it can take you from having fun one night to being dead in a year, or six months, or three months, I better not fuck with that shit.

Kelly King:
They weren’t like a regular band. They were just wasted, so wasted. Bruce would always be doing heroin and the other ones were always wired.

Steve DePace:
I saw three guys in my band die. It affects your business, it affects your playing in the band. It affects everything. It goes from, you’re in a band, you’re making music, this is great, this is cool, we’re playing shows, to, so-and-so’s too fucked up to play, or to rehearse. Or he’s passed out on the chair over there. Or he’s been up for a week, and he’s crashed, there’s no waking him up. But we have rehearsal scheduled. Well, when you’re on drugs you don’t think about a schedule. It’s all one big day. There’s no time, there’s no day.

You’ve got a tour planned. Well, Dickhead doesn’t want to go on tour, he tells you the day before. And he makes up some excuse. But the real reason is, he doesn’t wanna leave his dealer down the street. And if he doesn’t feed his habit every day he gets sick. We would just threaten to go anyway, and he would go, “What do you mean? Oh no, you’re gonna leave without me, okay I’ll come.” Like you’re gracing us with your fucking presence.

Kelly King:
Ted was a total speed freak. Ted would stay up for days. They drove my van for a long time. We’d get back to the warehouse and they’d just disappear. I’d always have to load back in by myself. Too much drugs, man.