Bruce Loose, 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 email to Pitchfork. Loose had previously suffered a stroke and was recovering at home in Humboldt, California, where he is believed to have died from a heart attack on September 5. He was 66 years old.
Bruce Richard Calderwood was born in California to beatnik parents who would sometimes take him to local shows. He joined Flipper after the founders—Russell Wilkerson, better known as Will Shatter, and Ted Falconi and DePace—kicked out original singer Ricky Williams for missing shows. At first, Calderwood adopted the name Bruce Lose before eventually adding another “o” to his stage surname.
Shatter and Falconi had formed Flipper in the late 1970s Bay Area at the dawn of hardcore, the tougher and sterner punk variant that had a stronghold in California. Their sensibility aligned with the scene’s—they shared stages with Black Flag, Bad Brains, and the Dead Kennedys—but Flipper liked to groove as well as thrash. They were a band of Grateful Dead enthusiasts who happened to have a penchant for blistering, noisy heaviness that bordered the psychedelic.
A year after earning plaudits and notoriety for the sludgy, saxophone-spangled, nearly-eight-minute single “Sex Bomb” in 1981, the band released its debut LP, Album – Generic Flipper, via Subterranean. It was a nihilistic, hardcore punk curio that became a classic, influencing legion outre rock bands with its preternaturally grumpy approach to life and conventional song forms. (“We’re just trying to show the absurdity of whatever it is we’re trying to show the absurdity of,” Calderwood once half-explained, in typically circular fashion.) He and Shatter traded vocals, both similarly life-sick, and the band amassed a devout following of the similarly pessimistic. One such devotee was Kurt Cobain, who wore a homemade Flipper T-shirt on Saturday Night Live and in Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” music video.
A 1984 album, Gone Fishin’, and some live records followed, but Shatter’s death of a drug overdose in 1987 cut the band short. They reformed in the 1990s to play a handful of shows and release the 1992 album American Grafishy on Def American (label head Rick Rubin had once been in a Flipper tribute band), but again ran into misfortune when Calderwood broke his back in a reported car accident in 1994. He continued to perform at their occasional concerts—and on the dual 2009 albums Love and Fight, featuring Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic—until 2015, when the band announced that he could no longer tour and would be replaced by the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
