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 electronic mail to Pitchfork. Free had beforehand suffered a stroke and was recovering at residence in Humboldt, California, the place he’s believed to have died from a coronary heart assault on September 5. He was 66 years previous.
Bruce Richard Calderwood was born in California to beatnik dad and mom who would typically take him to native reveals. He joined Flipper after the founders—Russell Wilkerson, higher generally known as Will Shatter, and Ted Falconi and DePace—kicked out unique singer Ricky Williams for lacking reveals. At first, Calderwood adopted the identify Bruce Lose earlier than finally including one other “o” to his stage surname.
Shatter and Falconi had shaped Flipper within the late Seventies Bay Space on the daybreak of hardcore, the harder and sterner punk variant that had a stronghold in California. Their sensibility aligned with the scene’s—they shared phases with Black Flag, Unhealthy Brains, and the Useless Kennedys—however Flipper appreciated to groove in addition to thrash. They have been a band of Grateful Useless fanatics who occurred to have a penchant for blistering, noisy heaviness that bordered the psychedelic.
A 12 months 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, through Subterranean. It was a nihilistic, hardcore punk curio that grew to become a traditional, influencing legion outre rock bands with its preternaturally grumpy lifestyle and standard music kinds. (“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 sometimes round trend.) 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 home made Flipper T-shirt on Saturday Evening Dwell and in Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” music video.
A 1984 album, Gone Fishin’, and a few stay data adopted, however Shatter’s loss of life of a drug overdose in 1987 minimize the band quick. They reformed within the Nineties to play a handful of reveals 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 automotive accident in 1994. He continued to carry out at their occasional concert events—and on the twin 2009 albums Love and Struggle, that includes Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic—till 2015, when the band introduced that he may not tour and would get replaced by the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
