Punk rock band Flipper, currently composed of Bruce Loose (vocals/bass), Ted Falconi (guitar), Steve DePace (drums) and Rachel Thoele (bass), recently concluded a tour that touched several cities of the U.S. and Europe.

Formed in 1979, Flipper is a seminal band of the San Francisco punk scene, and it has been a huge influence for many bands pertaining to different musical styles, including bands such as Nirvana and The Melvins. Flipper took a break of ten years from the mid-90s to 2005, when they came back to the scene. The band’s latest release is a twin album; the first record, “Love,” contains studio material, recorded with Krist Novoselic (ex-Nirvana) who was the bass player at the time, while the second album, “Fight,” is a live album.

For the joy of fans, the band is now working on new songs, together with the new bass player Rachel Thoele (ex- Frightwig, Mudwimin, and Van Gough’s Daughter). The material is only at the first stage of creation though, not going beyond initial jams. Drummer Steve DePace told Toonari Post that the band will not head to the studio for recording a new album at least until the second half of the year, with the new record being released next year at the earliest.

However, another exciting release is coming soon for the band. According to DePace, Flipper intends to release this year a complete album recorded back in 1983, previously unreleased. The tracks are outtakes from “Gone Fishin’,” the band’s second studio album released in 1984. The new album will contain the original recordings of 1983.

Toonari Post had also the chance to attend one of the band’s concert during their latest tour. The performance took place in Vienna, Austria, on April 20. With the occasion, Flipper gave an intense performance, creating a raw and powerful atmosphere for about one hour.

The band showed to be completely united in the flow of the performance. Rachel Thoele fitted perfectly and elegantly with the rest of the band, Bruce Loose kept the stage in an intriguing way, with his strong personality enriching the musical performance. Steve DePace elevated the whole sound with an intense drumming performance and Ted Falconi did not miss the chance to show his extraordinary musical capabilities.

The peak of the show was probably reached during the encore, which saw Rachel Thoele asking the crowd to join the band on stage to perform “Sex Bomb,” the song contained in “Generic Flipper,” the first album released by the band in 1982. A fan got on stage to accompany Rachel Thoele in singing the song, while Bruce Loose got the bass, as in the early times of the band, when he was the bass player together with Will Shatter.

Another fan got on stage dancing to the song; the whole performance created an atmosphere that installed in the concert attendees the feeling of being out of time, recreating the environment that used to be the core of rock concerts, but that seems to have been lost by many.

Flipper showed to be in perfect shape and to maintain the feeling that has always lain behind the band’s concept. With this energy and music experience, we look forward to the new releases, and to have the chance to see them touring again soon.

Image Courtesy of   Kevin Warnock
Photo Credit : Kevin Warnock

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Here is the second part of the interview with San Francisco punk band Flipper, which Toonari Post met in Vienna, Austria, during their recent tour.

Toonari Post (TP): As we said, you have served as a great influence for a wide number of different bands. What is the band or musician that you, instead, consider as a core influence for you sound? The central one. Have you gained new sources of inspiration during the 10 years of break that you had?

Ted Falconi (TF): Every time we get a new bass player is like a whole new set of inspiration. We’re different because we’ve grown out of what we were. There was a break and then we came back together; it’s a different edge of what we do and that’s happened to us three or four times. So it allows us to involve ourselves along with the influence of another bass player.

TP: So you’re actually your own influence…

Bruce Loose (BL): Yes, right to that. The only other thing, the only music that I ever really catch on to, is that really good pop hit that happens every 5 years, that’s just from growing up as a kid, listening to popular music on the radio, what was the good pop hit. There were a lot more then, not so many now. There’s a lot of stuff out there and not all of that stuff is great.

Rachel Thoele (RT): I really like some kinds of Metal. I’m really impressed with the music that you get on the radio stations on the web, I can hear all the stuff I’ve never heard before; I think that’s really interesting. You can just stream all the stuff and get it. ‘Cause I used to listen to the same old CDs for years and years and years… It’s pretty great to have access to random stuff based on kind of what you like.

BL: And then you get a Stream capture program…[laughs]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A63ObJkQ78s&feature=related

TP: What is the main difference, in terms of attitude, between ‘Generic Flipper,’ your first album and ‘Love,’ your last studio album?

BL: it once again goes to a different bass player, it changes the whole thing. With Generic there was the influence of Will in there, and in Love there was the influence of Novoselic. It changes what it changes; it changes what I’m doing lyrically.

I think with Generic we were just learning about using a studio and working in that capacity and learning what recording was about, how we functioned in recording. I recall when we were doing the stuff with Generic, we were just like “ok, that little thing, it didn’t sound right, but we’ll use it, instead of putting a band-aid over, let that wound show, and put something around it”…. A different fashion.

With ‘Love’ and also over the years of going through our career, the approach in which I develop a song now is listening to what is going on and first I play with the rhythm, with just sounds, you know, just noises, I don’t even start putting words together, until I can start figuring how it is gonna to fit in rhythmically; I would come up with a raw set of lyrics and then some flash of an idea would happen and all totally changes but, I’d still be using that meter that I’ve been working with, the rhythmic dynamic.

That’s a very different approach than what we were doing with Generic, and how we were writing songs back then. So for me there’s a very big difference in how the material is created. We started doing the same with the little bit of stuff we started working with Rachel, it’s the same. Having to work with a raw rhythmic dynamic of the vocals first, before putting some words together, whereas before I had some set of words and I would force them into the situation, so on that part, it is very different for me.

RT: To my mind Flipper is truly a jam band. The songs are written from jams and the repetition makes it easy to jam to them on stage, so they’re not really played the same twice.

Steve DePace (SD): Back then I do remember that Generic was actually recorded over the course of about a year, now we’d go and record it all in one time. We were recording two songs here, three songs there, until we had a collection of songs, to put an album together, whereas with ‘Love,’ we actually went in with the idea of “let’s write these songs and record an album,” so it’s a very different approach.

We worked with different engineers obviously, they were very different people, but both great and there were so many years in between, we kind of learned a lot in between that time.

TP: Where do you see Flipper in 5 years?

BL: Oh, I have no idea. On some stage, somewhere…you’ll be there, we’ll be there, answering to your questions.

SD: I have no idea.

TP: Rachel, do you see yourself in Flipper in 5 years?

RT: I have no idea.

Image Courtesy of   http://www.flipperrules.com
Photo Credit: Kevin Warnock

The article Meet One of Punk’s Pearls: Flipper in Interview (part 2/2) appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Toonari Post recently had the chance to interview the historical punk rock band Flipper, currently composed of Bruce Loose (vocals/bass), Ted Falconi (guitar), Steve DePace (drums) and Rachel Thoele (bass), during the latest band’s tour.

The band gave some fascinating insight about their vision of music and their approach to the scene. Here is the first part of the interview.

Toonari Post (TP): You’ve been on the scene since 1979, with a long break from the mid-90s to 2005. How have you seen the punk scene, as well as the music scene in general, change during this time? Assuming they have changed at all in your opinion.

Stephen DePace (SD): Everybody else made money and we didn’t [laughs].

Bruce Loose (BL): That’s a very valid answer. I’ll go with that one. I didn’t see anything, because I wasn’t around.

SD: Green Day made all the money, and they didn’t leave any for Flipper [laughs].

TP: What about touring? Do you see any difference between now and then? Do you find a difference in the approach that fans have to your shows?

BL: We’re being hit by a whole new group of people, it seems like, people that haven’t even seen us before, so, I don’t even know that they are fans, but people are coming up to say “I grew up listening to this” or “I’ve been waiting 30 years to see this.”

Ted Falconi (TF): We have people, though, that have come to more than one show, that’s been pretty cool. There are a few real ‘Die-Hards’ still out there.

TP: You have changed bass player quite often, for several reasons. Do you think that this fact has influenced your sound?

SD: Yes, each time we get a new bass player it changes a little bit.

BL: They add their own personality to the mix, and that always changes things.

TP: What about you Rachel? Was it hard for you to fit in the band, as you joined only recently?

Rachel Thoele (RT): I was a really big fan of theirs when I was super young; I think they’re all excellent musicians, and it’s really great to be able to play with all of them. It makes me really happy to play with what probably influenced my own bass playing as a young person.

BL: Rachel has been around as long as we have, in the same scene; it just seemed a very natural fit to have her come in, because she had the best grasp of what we were doing then, and all through all of it.

TP: Your musical style has inspired bands that then took different musical paths: grunge bands, punk bands, and bands such as ‘The Melvins.’ What was the key that made this happen in your opinion?

SD: All I can say is that I think it’s pretty cool that we influenced all these different people, in all these different bands, in all these different styles. I don’t know what else to say, other than it’s cool that that happened, and it’s cool that they give us credit.

TP: Speaking of credit, how do you feel about music downloading? What’s your position in this regard?

BL: Well, we see something from the download, but it’s pennies. It’s not anything like what royalties used to be, or collections would be, or something like that; like if it was just regular distribution of CDs and vinyl through proper distribution channels, because you have a lot of people doing bootleg downloads. Unless you have a team of people working 24 hours per day, seven days a week, monitoring computer use, constantly sending out cease-and-desist letters, it’s almost impossible to keep on top of it.

TP: Do you think there should be some sort of regulation, on the shape of SOPA or ACTA, to control this?

BL: As long as we’re gonna be in this computer age, they’re gonna monitoring us, or follow us, and follow our consumer patterns, and design their adds after what our preferences are on Facebook and stuff like that, hell yeah, monitor us off!

SD: My concern is that you have to be careful with what governments are doing and what corporations are doing, because it might be worth it to let our stuff be bootlegged and downloaded for free and all that other stuff, as long as we are able to maintain a free flow of information and communication around the world. Because if they use that as an excuse to shut down our abilities to communicate from the U.S. to Italy, for example, to talk about what’s going on in our countries, and so on and so forth, Because I know that’s what they wanna do…

BL: Yeah, they wanna prevent another “Arab Spring.”

SD: The occupy movement got shut down by the police, and next thing they’re gonna do is come after that free flow of information and communication, and they’re gonna come after saying, they wanna protect art, trade-mark, but what they really wanna do is keep us from talking to each other.

BL: Shut down the freedom of speech.

SD: Yeah, exactly. So the bottom line is that if it costs us free downloads of our music to maintain freedom of speech, well, so be it.

TP: What do you think about streaming? Do you consider it a positive tool, an incentive for musicians, to improve music quality? Streaming an album before it is released makes the consumer decide if buying it or not, hence, it could push the artists to make an entire good album, and not only a couple of good singles.

BL: With stream capturing programs streaming is soon not gonna be that preview of something, people are starting using them for streaming and catching that stuff.

SD: That’s why a lot of bands will give you a short sample of the songs, 30 seconds or so; then they can’t steal the whole song.

TF: Another thing is giving you an mp3, that’s really low quality; so people who like the song will go to get the better quality.

RT: you can hear stuff of bands that not many people know; using a streaming device you can have a push on bands.

SD: if you see the potential to promote your music, you can build a fan base and sometimes it really works hugely. There’s a band out of Los Angeles, that recently put out a record, and it’s huge, I can’t remember the name of the band. What happened it was this young kid, he put the song together by himself, he recorded it and he put it out on the internet and the song was so catchy that it took off like wildfire.

He had 50,000 hits, 50,000 downloads, all of a sudden and that got him a record deal and then he got his buddies together, they got a band together and they made this great record and they’re these young, twenty something year-old guys and they’re good, they’re really good. So putting your stuff out on the internet can work for you like that, so it is a good tool.

Image Courtesy of   rokkosadventures.at/Klaus Pichler

The article Meet One of Punk’s Pearls: Flipper in Interview (part 1/2) appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

San Francisco punk rock band Flipper has come back to the touring scene, feeding the excitement of enthusiastic and nostalgic punk fans. The band has just started playing some US shows and will begin its European tour in April. The band is currently composed of Bruce Loose (vocals/bass), Ted Falconi (guitar), Steve DePace (drums), and Rachel Thoele (bass).

With its raw style, characterized by heavy distortions that enrich a bass-driven noisy sound, Flipper has been highly influential since the beginning of its story in 1979. It has been recognized as a source of inspiration, not only for several punk rock and noise rock bands, but also for sludge metal bands, like the Melvins, and grunge bands, like Nirvana. They have often cited Flipper as a milestone for their sound development. The self-made Flipper t-shirt, often worn by Kurt Cobain, late Nirvana frontman, has become legendary.

Flipper’s line-up changed several times throughout the years. The loss of many members was due to a variety of reasons, including heroin overdose, as in the case of founder member Will Shatter, who died in 1987, and bassist John Dougherty, who died in 1992.

After the death of John Dougherty, the band took a break for over 10 years. They returned to the scene in 2005, however, for two live shows in support of CBGB. At the time, the band featured Bruno DeSmartass as bassist, and the same line-up went on performing live shows for the first part of 2006. At the end of that same year, Krist Novoselic of Nirvana became the new bass player for the band. With him, the band recorded new studio material and released a new album in May 2009.

The new release consisted of a ‘twin album’. The first album, ‘Love’, contained the new studio material recorded with Novoselic, while the second, ‘Fight’, contained the live versions of old and new songs. Krist Novoselic then decided that touring was no longer a part of his life, and Rachel Thoele, former Frightwig, joined the band.

Here are the upcoming dates of Flipper’s International Tour:

March 29, 2012, Lion’s Lair — Denver, CO, USA
March 30, 2012, Lion’s Lair — Denver, CO, USA
April 5, 2012, The Croft — Bristol, UK
April 6, 2012, Rescue Rooms — Nottingham, UK
April 7, 2012, The Duchess — York, UK
April 8, 2012, Stereo — Glasgow, UK
April 10, 2012, XOYO — London, UK
April 12, 2012, De Klinker Club — Aarschot, Belgium
April 13, 2012, Sonic Protest Festival — Paris, France
April 14, 2012, L’Epicerie Moderne — Lyon, France
April 16, 2012, Nachtleben — Frankfurt, Germany
April 17, 2012, Knust — Hamburg, Germany
April 18, 2012, Stengade — Copenhagen, Denmark
April 20, 2012, Arena — Vienna, Austria
April 21, 2012, Latte Più Live — Brescia, Italy
April 22, 2012, Rössli — Bern, Switzerland
April 24, 2012, Wild at Heart — Berlin, Germany
April 25, 2012, Club Vaudeville — Lindau, Germany
April 26, 2012, LVC — Leiden, The Netherlands

Image Courtesy of    http://www.flipperrules.com

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