Bruce Free, the vocalist and bassist of the influential San Francisco punk rock and hardcore band Flipper, has died, the band’s drummer Stephen DePace confirmed in an e-mail to Pitchfork. Free had beforehand suffered a stroke and was recovering at house in Humboldt, California, the place he’s believed to have died from a coronary heart assault on September 5. He was 66 years outdated.
Bruce Richard Calderwood was born in California to beatnik dad and mom who would typically take him to native exhibits. He joined Flipper after the founders—Russell Wilkerson, higher often known as Will Shatter, and Ted Falconi and DePace—kicked out unique singer Ricky Williams for lacking exhibits. At first, Calderwood adopted the title Bruce Lose earlier than finally including one other “o” to his stage surname.
Shatter and Falconi had fashioned Flipper within the late Seventies Bay Space on the daybreak of hardcore, the more durable and sterner punk variant that had a stronghold in California. Their sensibility aligned with the scene’s—they shared phases with Black Flag, Dangerous Brains, and the Lifeless Kennedys—however Flipper favored to groove in addition to thrash. They have been a band of Grateful Lifeless fanatics who occurred to have a penchant for blistering, noisy heaviness that bordered the psychedelic.
A yr after incomes plaudits and notoriety for the sludgy, saxophone-spangled, nearly-eight-minute single “Intercourse Bomb” in 1981, the band launched its debut LP, Album – Generic Flipper, by way of Subterranean. It was a nihilistic, hardcore punk curio that turned a traditional, influencing legion outre rock bands with its preternaturally grumpy way of living and standard tune varieties. (“We’re simply attempting to point out the absurdity of no matter it’s we’re attempting to point out the absurdity of,” Calderwood as soon as half-explained, in usually round style.) He and Shatter traded vocals, each equally life-sick, and the band amassed a religious following of the equally pessimistic. One such devotee was Kurt Cobain, who wore a selfmade Flipper T-shirt on Saturday Evening Stay and in Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” music video.
A 1984 album, Gone Fishin’, and a few reside information adopted, however Shatter’s dying of a drug overdose in 1987 lower the band brief. They reformed within the Nineties to play a handful of exhibits and launch the 1992 album American Grafishy on Def American (label head Rick Rubin had as soon as been in a Flipper tribute band), however once more bumped into misfortune when Calderwood broke his again in a reported automobile accident in 1994. He continued to carry out at their occasional live shows—and on the twin 2009 albums Love and Struggle, that includes Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic—till 2015, when the band introduced that he might now not tour and would get replaced by the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
