Hippies vs. Punks: Generic Flipper

After work I have to pick up a packet for a race I'm running Sunday morning. It involves a trip up to the Green Lake neighborhood. I don't know what time I will get home. So I am posting the weekly installment of Hippies vs. Punks this morning instead of tonight.

I mentioned in a Monday post on the SST Tour that my Hardcore bonafides boiled down to a love of the Minutemen. To add to that I would be remiss if I did not mention Album – Generic Flipper.

In the 1980s entertaining in the university city of Berkeley usually involved having friends over for beers, sometimes a meal, and then out into the night to go to a bar or a party. Sometimes we would stay all night in the apartment I shared with my girlfriend (who became my wife, and then my ex-wife) and just drink, talk and listen to music. At a certain point in the evening, after all the records had been played, usually sometime around midnight, one album would be placed on the turntable, an album irrefutable and dense, inky black, dark and deep, an album that said, "It is over." That album was Generic Flipper.

Listening to a song like "Life is Cheap" before trundling off to bed to sleep off the alcohol reminded one that the world is ruled by brute force wielded by alien forces -- an important lesson to imbibe along with one's liberal education.

Flipper was formed out of the wreckage of Negative Trend. It combined Negative Trend bassist Will Shatter and drummer Steve DePace with vocalist/bassist Bruce Loose and guitarist Ted Falconi. (A college buddy of mine lived next door to Ted.) The band was controversial in that their slow, bass-driven droning sound went against the speedy grain that dominated California Hardcore.

Generic Flipper -- recorded in 1980 and 1981, released in 1982 -- overlaps with and provides perfect sonic documentation of the "Reagan Recession." 

Nineteen-eighty-two was the first time I was living on my own as an adult. Nationwide unemployment hit 10.8% in November and December, higher than any time -- including the Great Recession of 2008 -- since the Great Depression. Attempting to cut inflation Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker took a meat ax to the economy, the prime interest rate hitting 21.5% in June of '82.

Though I was safely ensconced in the protective arms of the university, I remember the vibe of that time of high unemployment. I remember it was a cold fall and winter. Living in an urban environment for the first time I became aware of the shit and piss and broken beer bottle alleyways and the hatred, vomit, rage, junk, dread, squalor, hopelessness of life that Generic Flipper so accurately records.

Reaganism was definitely the end of the line for any Hippies who were still holding out in the early 1980s. Flower Power had been rendered juiceless. The Punks, who first appeared in the avant-garde at the same time as the stagflation of the 1970s, painted a picture of a future we are presently living.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #40

One of the nice things about the about the old location of the local where I work is that it was a convenient walking distance to the Douglass Truth Library. I would often go there during my lunch break and sit in the comfortable chairs and read the New York Times and maybe doze off for a few minutes. I would also browse the music compact discs. One album I discovered was II by The Psychic Paramount. It sounded distinctly different. On the band's Wikipedia page the genres listed are experimental rock, noise rock and psychedelic rock. There's definitely a No Wave/Glenn Branca vibe to it, but it also has a Hardcore/Flipper-like edge.

This morning I heard the last track off II, "N5 Coda," as I suffered up the last hill on my second eight-mile run in as many days (I'm trying to get ready for a 10K next Sunday), and I was reminded how good The Psychic Paramount is.

My cohort at the university all went on to be doctors and lawyers and journalists and professors and IT professionals. I am the odd man out in that I am a secretary, a.k.a., office worker or support staff personnel. This letter, number 40, like last week's, is addressed to my friend Niall; it is devoted to my friendship with his older brother who had just made his mark professionally as a reporter. Though written while drunk, as all these letters were when I first arrived in New York City in my early twenties, it nonetheless contains an honest assessment of aspiration and achievement. The last paragraph is a young man's farewell to friendship.

Spring 1989 

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, which means go up to a mountain, on top of a mountain, and say what it is that you want to say. I heard about Colum's successes tonight from Terri, how he's got stuff printed in the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK and the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and man I'll tell you, I feel so happy about it, about the deservedness of Colum's successes, so clean and unthreatened and peaceful and devoted, that I almost feel bad about it: one, because I really haven't written to him and provided him with moral support; and two, because it rnakes me realize how unenergetic and unrisky and scared my life really is. Colum had something to do, and he did it, which is what it's all about, isn't it? But he did it alone, and I feel like I kinda stopped being his friend. I never wrote and he never wrote and I never called and he never called, and on and on, dribbling into laziness and unappreciation. The last time I talked to Colum was in January at your place. I remember getting stoned all of us together the first night you were back from LA when Mark and Gail were there; I remember the football game in the parking lot; I remember driving him in my VW bus over the Bay Bridge while he snuggled in the back with Terri wrapped in a sleeping bag; and I remember just me and him alone in the Oak Street apartment -- you had gone over to sleep at Eve's house; Terri and Mark had left to go to a few clubs -- listening to Bob Dylan. That night it was like this: the two old men together, too old to go out and rock with the kiddies, old and forlorn and fundamentally lonely, alone. We chatted for a bit, talked about I don't know what, and then decided to turn in. We walked into your room, shut off the lights, got into bed, put our heads on the pillows, and fell asleep. -- Two old pals alone together and going to bed, no girlfriends to go over and sleep with, no bars to hop, nothing to do but say good night and go to bed. I felt like my dead granddad -- vulnerable and pure and teetering and tired. But none of it bad, not in the least; in fact, very  good, totally honest and at home, a kinda of feeling I don't even feel with my own family, except for maybe my father. Oh, well. I can remember more if I tried, but that's not the point. The point is that I feel shitty about not taking more care for Colum. 

I think what happened in the last two or three years is that Colum figured out what it is that he wanted to do, and if not wanted to do, what he should do, and should do in the sense of really doing it. We're still wafting around in early twenties uncertainty and fear. He had no time for such shit. And he's right. Hopefully we'll find the energy a few years from now to make the kind of choices he did. 

It's not all my fault and it's not all your fault and it's not all Colum's fault. It has something to do with the fact that the earth is the dirt of sadness and that time fades away. -- There will be no more games of One Hand on the porch at night as the black-and-white television blabbers on the kitchen chair; there will be no more hash browns cooked in olive oil on electric stoves in 1985; there will be no more Socrates discussed over coffee and beer and hot dogs as Leslie complains about too much noise; there will be no more pisses in toilets in nooks in apartments on Dana Street. And no matter how much I'm accused of goldbricking, and no matter how much I'm chastised for backward looking and lauding the past, there is one thing I will always be when it comes to things like this, and that is right.

Hippies vs. Punks: Negative Trend

Negative Trend, a precursor band of Flipper, was on the bill of the famous January 14, 1978 Winterland show that spelled the end of first wave Punk and the Sex Pistols. Negative Trend was supposed to appear after the Sex Pistols, but they never made it on stage. The plan hatched by Malcolm McLaren was for Negative Trend to go on, perform using the Sex Pistols' equipment and then destroy everything -- the stage, guitars, amps, drums -- in a blaze of crowd-pleasing, media-tantalizing glory. The band was blocked from the stage by bikers employed by Bill Graham. The story is recounted by guitarist Craig Gray in a KALX interview from 2009:

Negative Trend had three different lead vocalists in the late 1970s -- Rozz Rezabek, Mikal Waters and Rik L. Rik. The Posh Boy Music November 1978 recording that I downloaded from Amazon and have been listening to all week features F-Word co-founder Rik L. Rik. He is the end of the line. While Rik is excellent, Mikal Waters, who appears on the Negative Trend EP (1978), I prefer; he has more of a Lee Ving vibe. The original singer, Rozz Rezabek, has a solo record titled Rozz and Negative Trend: The Pop Sessions (1978) which is quite good but apparently not accurate in its co-crediting of Negative Trend:

I think the name "Negative Trend" is the perfect name for a first wave Punk band. It says it all without irony and ostentation. 

This is what Punks represented after the Hippies vacated the cultural vanguard and the Age of Aquarius evaporated -- a negative trend. 

The Zeitgeist has grown progressively more negative ever since, to the point where we are at now, The End: culturally, suffocated by technology; politically, smothered by an extremely powerful plutocracy; ecologically, headed for -- if not already suffering from -- a planetary crisis.

The music of Negative Trend is an aural bridge between first wave UK Punk and what would become the dominant form of American Punk -- California Hardcore of the early and middle 1980s. One can also hear a proto-Goth sound in a song like "Black and Red":

It's good stuff. I particularly like "Mercenaries":

It takes me back to the late '70s when colonial Africa was collapsing and images of black national liberation wars were shown on the nightly network news through a white supremacist lens. The U.S. had just "cut and run" in Vietnam and here we were right back in a proxy war, this time in Angola. But the Hippies were no longer on the scene with their Magical Mystery Tour (1967). No, the Punks of 1977-1978 were about as far away from "All You Need is Love" as one can imagine.

To see the new face of the avant-garde and its celebration of drunken adolescent cynicism take a look at these videos from a Mabuhay Gardens show in early 1978, a couple of months after Negative Trend failed to make it to the stage of the Winterland Ballroom. The lead singer is Rozz Rezabek. The bass player is Will Shatter, who will go on to form Flipper with the second Negative Trend drummer, Steve DePace:

After three decades Negative Trend reformed  in 2009, performing also in 2010 when they disbanded. This is the group (the only original member is Craig Gray) doing "Meathouse" at a San Francisco show in February of 2009: