Low Pants, No Chance

Is it a coincidence that Flipper and Guns n Roses both took 16 years to release new albums?   

If you were around during the Reagan Years and bought Generic, Flipper's 1982 debut album, one of two things probably happened: 

 A: You threw this curiously yellow LP on your turntable and then spent a half hour switching back and forth between 33 and 45 rpm, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with your stereo speakers and why this music sounded so goddamned slow, after which you promptly returned it to your favorite punk rock record store and exchanged it for, say, the new Exploited album. 

Or B: Beneath the feedback and over-driven bass sludge you had an epiphany of sorts, your ears slowly attuning to the strange life-affirming sense of catharsis lurking beneath the cacophony of wrong notes that immediately elevated this record above the by-the-numbers fuck the world nihilism of the average punk band. It resonated with you perfectly, even though you had never heard anything that sounded even remotely like it before. It may have changed your life, possibly even for the better. 

That may be overstating Flipper's impact a bit, but just barely. Generic was indeed that important; a droning, feedback-laden slap in the face to the hardcore scene's harder-faster-louder aesthetic, and it was genuinely one of those polarizing albums that you either "got" or you didn't.  It cemented their reputation as the genuine article and influenced countless musicians, but the band never lived up to it's promise. Their sophomore album, Gone Fishin', was decidedly more experimental than their sloppy debut and critically underrated, then the band ground to a sudden halt after the death of co-vocalist/bass player Will Shatter in 1987.  The surviving members reunited briefly in the early-nineties, then seemed to disappear again overnight amid vague rumors of mismanagement, bad blood, and drug addiction. Until this year, their entire catalog (including Generic) was out of print, and if you heard their name it was usually in the context of someone they influenced. If there was ever a more unlikely contender for a comeback, it was Flipper.  

Well, Flipper is back after 16 years with not one but two new albums, one recorded live and one in the studio. Love, the studio disc, is a fine offering from this legendary group of reprobates and delinquents. You're not going to find anything as anthemic as "Way of the World" or "Life" here, but the new songs more than hold their own against the band's considerable history. All the elements that defined Flipper and made them stand out like a sore thumb are present and accounted for: the monolithic bass rumble (played here by Krist Novoselic, filling in for the late Will Shatter), Ted Falconi's ambient wash of guitar noise, Steve DePace's cavernous drums, and Bruce Loose's venomous vocal attack. Co-produced by the band and Jack Endino (Nirvana, Mudhoney, et al.), Love sounds more like a throwback to the mid-nineties Sub Pop Singles Club era than the group's original work on the Subterranean label in the eighties. While unmistakably Flipper, songs such as "Triple Mass" and "Love Fight" would not sound out of place on Bleach or Incesticide. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it makes sense that in a band where the bass guitar is the lead instrument, the bass player would have a certain amount of influence on the songs. They just happened to record this album with the former bass player from Nirvana, so I suppose you would have to expect some cross-pollination. 

Love really succeeds when it sticks to what Flipper does best: slowing the pace down to a crawl and dragging you through the dirt with them. "Why Can't You See" sounds like "Dazed and Confused" without all the dick-fucking around with the violin bow and "Old Graves," the album's closing track, may contain Flipper's most genuinely horrifying lyrics; over one of the band's trademark bass dirges, Bruce Loose paints a simple story filled with images of childhood innocence that slowly builds to a violent climax. While not on the level as "Shine" or "The Lights, The Sound," this is what you listen to Flipper for, and no one can wring more emotion out of three notes than Flipper. 

You seem like the kind of asshole that would write poetry, Dan said, typically, trying to antagonize me

All my male relationships seemed rooted in aggression and cruelty

You were always self-absorbed and clueless, he went on

You might be right, I said, using a conversational gambit my sponsor taught me to avoid confrontation

Whatever happened to Eddie?

Probably dead, I mumbled

What?

Seeing people from the past brings me back to that time, I continued, more to myself than to him

It’s something I try to avoid

That’s sounds like some more pseudo-intellectual bullshit

Was another year of suffocating confusion

It helped to be drunk

The free-fall had begun years before

But I was just figuring out

Things were not going to right themselves

In some eleventh-hour reprieve

I was going to have to run out the clock

Go into sudden death overtime

This is not poetry

Real poetry has always eluded me

People occasionally said

I had a way with words

It was all bullshit, though

I could never compete

Scholastically or physically

But words were one game

I could successfully fake

I was adept at mimicry

I was proficient

In your vernacular

You can call it articulate

I call it intuitive guesswork

I’m not a sociopath

I just test well

I can pass for human

At least for a while

By the time you figure out

I have nothing original to say

I’ll have burned that bridge

And written you a poem

1000 steps to the shore

the coastline has changed

the sands have shifted

topography eroded by time

memory is no match for entropy

the coordinates are the same

but the landscape is littered with ghosts

The ringing in my ears

is 8897 Hz

the dubious gift of a decade

standing in front of amplifiers

in empty clubs

living in a dream

impressing no one

killing time

like most things I wanted

it turned out to be meaningless

another lesson that taught me

who I am

and who I am not

now the noise keeps me up at night

a low grade background hum

like radio static from some distant event

I am now fifty years old

I have no illusions about what this means

I feel no sense of accomplishment at having reached this age

Fifty just means I managed to survive for a handful of decades in spite of myself

I guess that’s what happens

When your grandiose self-destructive fantasies don’t pan out

Now when I see young people

With their funny haircuts and obvious clothes

I understand no one is going to mistake me for one of them anymore

 I'm okay with this

I don’t miss being young

I didn’t really enjoy those years all that much

Youth looks painful from this distance

I remember it as the age of insecurity

The age of clamoring for approval and acceptance

I do much better in the age of Fuck It

Things are much easier now

(undated)

Sometimes it feels like I’m getting things together and making some kind of progress, however incrementally. Then my subconscious lets me know how wrong I am. I’ll have dreams abut people and certain times, and it fucks me up for a while. It forces me to realize there are certain things I’m not going to be able to outrun.

I had a dream about ________. It was clear that she had moved on from me, and she made a point of letting me know this in a very casual yet pointed way. I told her that it didn’t feel like she valued my feelings very much. She just looked at me incredulously and said, “So it’s going to be like that?”

At one point in the dream she changed her top in front of me, casually removing her bra and absently massaging her breasts before putting something else on. Sometime in the middle of the next day I realized that this had actually happened. It was with a different person, but the same message: You have become invisible to me.

In another part of the dream I was in a small tourist town, staying at a rustic motel. I climbed to the top of a rock ledge overlooking the town to take a picture for a friend. The ledge seemed much higher when viewed from the top, and I was having difficulty getting back down. I ended up jumping from rock to rock, half running down the steep incline and dodging jagged shards of broken Budweiser bottles strewn along the path.

The symbolism seems almost insultingly obvious, like something I should share at an AA meeting. 

February 29. Had a dream about ______.  I was at her parent’s house with some friends – people I haven’t seen or spoken to in 20 years – which I suppose would mean the dream was set 20 years ago, although nothing about it seemed dated or to be taking place in the past tense. I was telling ______’s mother about a film I had seen in 6th grade, a film they showed us in school called Boys Aware.  It was an educational film warning boys to watch out for predatory homosexuals.  The Inglewood Police Department (who are thanked for their cooperation in the credits) and the school district apparently felt this was a significant problem. Like the anti-drug films we were forced to watch, it was the same kind of Dragnet-style melodrama that already seemed hopelessly out of touch, even to a bunch of 10 year olds in 1977.  I remember we had to have our parents sign a permission slip to watch it.  In the dream I told ______’s mom that I had a copy of the movie at home, and that I would arrange to borrow a projector from someone at work and bring it over to watch later.

______ didn’t figure much in the actual dream, but her presence had the exact same effect on me as it did when I knew her. It was the same longing and anxiety that I felt any time I was near her, a kind of awestruck paralysis that was so overwhelming it was like being physically stricken. Strangely, in the one letter ______ sent me when I knew her, she mentions a dream she had about me; she was climbing a mountain range in Europe, and when she reached the summit I was the first human face she saw. She sent this letter to me after we had not spoken for a period of time, and it turned out to be one of the only tangible objects I have that proves any of this even happened.         

Some of the best times I’ve had were playing music.  I was lucky enough to have some like-minded friends to make noise with, people that were committed enough to put together a set of songs and play out when we could get a gig, but who didn’t take the whole business so seriously as to suck the fun out of it.  There was no money in what we were doing, and it certainly wasn’t a viable career move, so why try to make it anything other than what it was?  Even the ritual of band practice, just wasting time, knocking back a few too many beers while fumbling through shitty covers instead of working on our own songs, felt good.  In those moments, being in a band seemed to justify the aimless trajectory of my life at that time.  

Being on stage was a different story. I never considered myself a musician or felt completely comfortable playing in front of people. It was like I was afraid someone was going to discover I had no idea what I was doing, or that I had been faking it the whole time (I still consider this an apt summary of my musical “career”).  There were a few times that stand out, nights when we were all in synch and the playing was so tight that I would forget where I was and space out for just a few seconds, lost somewhere inside the song.  It was like falling into an amazing eight bar fugue state.  I’ve never forgotten that feeling.  Usually, though, I was drunk and playing out of tune, and I always felt like an idiot the next day.  But like any good drug, you ignore the diminishing returns and keep telling yourself it will be different next time.

In the span of a few years I went from needing to have someone physically point out the frets that I had to play, to feeling competent enough to contribute my own compositions.  The first time I wrote something that sounded like a “real song” was a revelation.  I brought it to the next practice and played it for everyone. One of my friends that I was already on the outs with said it sounded like “commercial Pearl Jam shit,” which offended me greatly.  For that and a few other real or imagined slights, I convinced the others in the band that we needed to get rid of him.  Being total cowards, we dispatched the singer to do the dirty work.  I’ve never regretted that, although now I wish I had had the balls to kick him out myself.  We played the offending song – jokingly titled “Road Song” because it felt like one of those shitty Bon Jovi power ballads about how tough it is to be a rich traveling musician – the one time we played the Whiskey.  It got a good response, which was somewhat vindicating.  The rest of the show was anticlimactic.

Somewhere along the way things went from punk to “alternative.”  Words like “demographic” started to creep into our vocabulary, even though we were still playing the same shitty bars to 10 people.  There were some questionable fashion choices (what can I say, you watch enough Replacements videos and you’ll end up in a dress at some point). No one got rich or picked up by a major.  Or no one I knew, at any rate.  Most of us drifted off into the straight world of families and day jobs. A few of us stayed in the garage, dutifully plugging away at the dream.  I saw the end coming so I hung it up and waited for the Next Big Thing to come along and burn the memories of those years from my mind.