Those who’ve had the reissue of Flipper’s Generic Flipper — the debut LP from the legendary San Francisco punks — in heavy rotation since it was made available for the first time in a decade last month, via San Francisco label Superior Viaduct, will be excited to know that there are a lot more reissues on the way. “We’re reissuing all of our back catalogue. There are 10 or 12 albums that are gonna be coming out over the next couple of years,” Flipper drummer and founding member Stephen DePace tells me during a recent phone chat, explaining that Superior Viaduct has a five-album, five-year deal to release all of the band’s material from Subterranean Records (also a San Francisco subcultural institution), including an album of unreleased material from the outtakes of 1984 sophomore LP Gone Fishin’. And DePace says that’s just the start of it.
“That’s gonna be awesome, but then there’s another five albums, like the Love album that we did with Jack Endino and Krist Novoselic in 2009… We have a couple of live albums from CBGB’s, like a show recorded on Thanksgiving 1983 called Blow’n Chunks, which was released on ROIR Records, who put out the first release from Bad Brains. All of their releases were live and they were all on cassette only… There’s another live release from CBGB’s from around that time, so two different live records… We recorded a couple shows with David Yow in 2019 [on Flipper’s 40th anniversary tour], one in Chicago and one in LA, that I think we’re going to make into one live record… Then American Grafishy, which was recorded under contract with Rick Rubin, and all the rights defer back to us in like two years, so we’ll put that out… There are 11 altogether that we’re gonna be putting out over the next three years or so.”
According to DePace, the idea for the reissues had been floating around for a while: “It came about a few years ago. A bunch of record companies had been coming at me, wanting to do reissues, and I’m the one guy in the band that does all of the work, nobody else in my band had that kind of energy to put into it,” he jokes, before explaining that it was the recent retirement of founding guitarist Ted Falconi that gave him the final push: “Ted was the last of the original members to retire, and I was kind of down in the dumps, so I decided it was time to reach out to Serious Viaduct, who were one of the record companies, and tell them I was ready to do it.” He tells me that the decision to go with Serious Viaduct was partly because of the SF connection between themselves, Flipper, and Subterranean, but also because a lot of people had been singing their praises, including some unlikely ones: “I’ve heard from around that they’re one of the best. When you hear from their competitors, ‘You gotta go with them! They’re great!’ it really means something!”
Late April and early May saw Stephen DePace celebrating the reissue of Generic Flipper with a string of West Coast dates that had him joined by a number of musical friends playing the band’s earliest material: “I’ve been referring to it as Flipper and Friends, with Ted retiring… I’ve been working with various people, because it’s kind of difficult to find a set group of people to do anything for an extended period of time.” The dates featured Jon Kelly — who Stephen first met when Jon sent him a Flipper cover he’d done on an album by his duo The Flood — on guitar and Sean Shimmer of Los Angeles trio shimmer bed on bass, who played half a dozen shows throughout California, along with one stop in Reno, Nevada, which DePace admits was a surprising highlight.
“Reno was a standout. I’ve never known Reno, Nevada to have a great punk scene, but it was all ages and there were all these young people there. It was at Holland Project, which has an art gallery attached and a live music venue run by people in their twenties. All these kids showed up, and they were super enthusiastic and knew all of our songs to sing and dance along to… And then in Santa Cruz we played this festival called CruzaPalooza, which was at The Catalyst, this legendary venue which is apparently on the verge of closing, and there’s a big movement in Santa Cruz to try to buy the venue and save it. FEAR was the headliner and Flipper played right before them, but then there were a bunch of younger bands, and Mentors played… of course without El Duce. And then they had a wrestling ring set up and all of these wrestlers doing their thing.”
Flipper and Friends are gearing up for a four-date East Coast run that will wrap next Sunday, May 31st, at our very own Johnny Brenda’s, which kicks off this Thursday, May 28th, with an exceptionally intimate gig in Highstown, New Jersey: “We’re playing the first show at a record store, Randy Now’s Man Cave, which is run by Randy Ellis, who ran the infamous City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey, where everyone played, all the punk bands… We’re doing this kind of in-store performance, but he has shows there all the time. It’s kind of like a mini venue that caps out at like 60 people.” The following night will find them at Baltimore institution Holy Frijoles — a Tex-Mex bar/restaurant that doubles as an indie rock venue — before they play Total Bummer Fest at Knockdown Center in Queens alongside the likes of Dinosaur Jr., Blonde Redhead, and Meat Puppets on Saturday.
Considering the variations in setting and size of venues Flipper’s played in recent years (2019 saw them sell out The Church, while 2022 had them at Kung Fu Necktie before providing direct support for The Garden at Union Transfer later that year.), I’m curious if DePace has a favorite type of space, but he admits that that doesn’t tend to play a huge factor. “I gotta say, the most important thing, and it’s important that the sound is good, but the number one most important thing is the audience that shows up. If they’re super enthusiastic and love what we’re doing, we feed off the energy coming from the audience, and the surroundings almost don’t matter,” he explains before going on to recount a particularly memorable show in the ‘90s: “We were on tour with Gwar and when we got to the venue there was no power or something, so the show was cancelled, but these punk kids came looking for Flipper — they didn’t even care about Gwar [laughs] — and they found us in a parking lot, and they were like ‘We’re putting a party together and we want you to play!’ So, a few hours later, they picked us up and drove us back to their home for this amazing show, and Dave Brockie from Gwar came!”
When I ask if he has a favorite Philadelphia memory, DePace says that Flipper’s October 2019 show at The Church for the band’s 40th anniversary tour — which had David Yow providing lead vocals — was an exceptionally cool experience, in part because of a very special guest whose work in Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke, and Pigface I’m hoping PHILTHY’s readers are familiar with: “Martin Atkins did a thing with us… It was David Yow who introduced us… We played Chicago and David called up Martin and told him to come down to the show and we he did a thing with us with two drummers… He was in Philadelphia when we were, so we did it again!” “We’re good pals. I communicate with him all the time now. He’s gonna be doing a new Pigface thing later this year or next year, and I think Flipper might do something with them,” DePace tells me, before going on to say that was already a longtime fan of Martin’s work: “I remember the very first time Public Image Ltd came through San Francisco, Flipper was their opening act. It was probably 1980 and we had made a little name for ourselves at that point, but we were just starting out. I solicited the promoter endlessly and harassed him to get us on the bill [laughs].”
Although the details of a potential Flipper and Pigface collaboration are still in the works, for their upcoming East Coast dates, Flipper have enlisted another, more recent, legend, Pissed Jeans’ Matt Korvette, who Stephen tells me has been on his radar for quite some time now: “Flipper played with Pissed Jeans 20 years ago exactly in Brooklyn and, man, we were all really impressed with them at the moment, and they’d just started in 2005. I even brought home a poster they had made for the show, which I still have… They stood out to me, and Matt popped into my head when I was thinking about vocalists; I’d been kind of following him and I thought he’d be a great match.” He also tells me that fans can expect more Flipper and Friends live jaunts throughout Flipper’s time dropping reissues, and at least one of those lineups is likely to feature vocalist Chris Spencer, whose Unsane covered early Flipper single “Ha Ha Ha” on their 2012 album, Wreck.
The majority of Flipper’s most historically famous fandom comes from artists of the golden era of alternative, the early-mid ‘90s, with Kurt Cobain regularly seen in a homemade Flipper shirt (prior to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic officially joining the band in the mid-aughts), in addition to Buzz Osborne of Melvins (who’ve both covered and collaborated with the band) and Donita Sparks of L7 citing Generic Flipper as a favorite album. However, DePace notes that Flipper had some pretty major endorsements from pretty early on: “Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys was an early fan of Flipper, from day one. And they got out and did their first national tour a little before us, and everywhere he went he was telling everybody Flipper was his favorite band, so by the time we got out there all of our shows were sold-out, based on the early singles and what Jello said, so we had a pretty successful career going into it!” However, DePace tells me the very earliest years of Flipper were a bit more labor-intensive, literally…
“We formed in late 1979. I answered an ad about a legendary studio in San Francisco that was known as Wally Heider Studios, and now it’s Hyde Street Studios. They put out an ad looking for musicians who would help fix the place up in return for studio time, so we got paid in studio time and we’d go in to record whenever we’d accumulated enough time to do an eight-hour session. We’d do these midnight to eight-in-the-morning sessions because they were the cheapest… We released three different singles over the first few years, and we were lucky enough to be contacted by a record company, Subterranean Records, and it call came together from there… We recorded Generic Flipper starting on Halloween of 1980, and it was 10 months of recording from here to there, whenever we had enough time, and we eventually had enough material for an album.”
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