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.

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: