Nothing is something: Bruce Loose, 1959-2025

The word still bugs the shit out of me: poptimism. The concept is fine and good, the idea that rock critics’ prejudices to the white and the male and the guitar need to be countermanded, but that portmanteau doesn’t say that, it says be happy about what’s given to you. The pop is one thing, it’s the optimism that really pisses me off. Ever look at a flower and hate it?

Bruce Calderwood originally called himself Bruce Lose on Flipper’s first albums, he ultimately changed his moniker to Bruce Loose as a way to try and by more positive. It would be hard to be more negative than a song like “Life Is Cheap,” which Loose wrote and sang on Flipper’s first record: “Life is pretty cheap, it’s sold a decade at a time / Life is pretty cheap it’s so easy to find / Life is pretty cheap there’s really nothing new / Life is pretty cheap except for the cold delirious few.” Or the above-quoted “Ever,” which concludes “Ever wish the human race didn’t exist, and then realize you’re one too?” Or “One By One,” where Loose shouts “Cease to exist!” over and over again. And now Loose is gone from existence, dying last week at the age of 66.

Loose sang and played bass in Flipper, along with fellow singer/bassist Will Shatter, guitarist Ted Falconi and drummer Steve DePace; he also wrote about 42 percent of their songs, per his own estimate. Shatter had a deeper drawl that could go to truly depressing places, Loose had a more punkish snarl to his tone that could be ironic or pissy or completely, viciously straight. These vocal tones rode atop the sludgiest music ever made, bludgeoning basslines and bashing drums mired in Falconi’s inimitable squalling guitar. It’s hardcore sunk in a tar pit, in its bass-led melodies and textural strings and pessimistic outlook it is the superior American version of Joy Division. In an interview following a 1983 local TV performance, Ruth Schwartz futilely tries to get the band to elaborate on their song “Sacrifice,” which is led by one of Loose’s bitterest vocal deliveries. “You just wrote an anti-war song and an anti-government song,” Schwartz says before Loose cuts her off: “We wrote an anti-song.”

Much of Flipper’s reputation rests on their debut album, Generic, which leads off with “Ever” and its clatter is almost cheerful — there are handclaps! — behind Loose’s words. The record is morbid and ugly and relentless, a few actual hardcore tunes make an appearance but otherwise the songs grind away and apparently ground down quite a few audiences looking for a more conventional punk sound. It is a great album but I am also a huge fan of their follow-up, Gone Fishin’, which occasionally gets a little too highfalutin with its production choices but also has “Sacrifice” and “Cease” and the wonderful “In My Life My Friends,” a song with a dentist drill bassline and lyrics that adapt a weird work of Christian fantasy and un-ironize an ironic message from the Devil. The band released multiple seven-inches and compilation tracks as well and a lot of that material appears in even cruder form in the essential Public Flipper Limited, a live double album culled from a half decade of debauched shows across the country (one tune opens with them refusing to play until someone buys them more beer). 

During that 1983 interview, Loose talks about wanting to play the Oakland Coliseum, with “Journey’s sound system” and Bill Graham promoting, tickets a cool $20 — and only 20 people showing up. It makes me think of how every fantasy of Bart Simpson’s ends in failure, to his delight. Loose refuses to be pinned down and Schwartz is clearly getting sick of his shit, and to be fair to her he’s not exactly convincing in his glib denials of meaning. But he also says “Jokes are meant to be taken seriously” and I think that is true. There’s truth in wanting to fail on a big stage and a smaller truth in wanting to be on that big stage to begin with. There’s serious mockery in “Ha Ha Ha” and its contempt for blindly conformist — dare we say optimistic? — life. There is the hilarious and clearly drawn-from-experience board game that comes with Public Flipper Limited, with spaces like “Underage show but they give band a case of Bud anyhow, plus 10 points” and “Wake up in pretty girl’s bed and she says she has herpes, minus 10 points” (and it’s minus 20 points if the rest of the band finds out). There’s the incredible piss-take of Loose extending “LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE” past all reason and rhythmic standard during the chorus of “Love Canal,” a savage laugh in a song about poisoned children that is 100 percent true and completely serious.  

And yet there is also serious joy in Flipper songs, something that is not the belief in something good but the power and pleasure of manifesting it right then and there. It’s in “Sex Bomb,” the band’s masterpiece of a a ridiculous vocal (“SEX BOMB MY BABY YEAH”) and a one-string riff transcendently descending over and over into noise, ecstatically stomping the song into the dirt. It’s in “The Wheel,” another riff that became an excuse and a dare, a marathon of up to a half hour while people from the audience came up on stage and blared their own nonsense into the microphone. During one performance at a 1980 show, an inebriated gentleman starts repeating Shatter’s name over and over before, not without some logic, segueing into the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered,” and the band just rolls on. If the band would use this relentlessness and fidelity to their own perverse nature to antagonize audiences, here the video catches people in the audience dancing and swaying, almost like a Grateful Dead show, having a ball. It’s a joke that for an endless moment, everyone is in on, tuned into the same weird and wrecked frequency. In the 1980s Loose fervently denied having a message, in a 2009 interview he had a different tune:

“Flipper has always been a means and a device for getting a message to people, and if it’s time to fuckin’ chill down the anger, it’s time to chill down the anger. There’s definitely hope in this world, I mean we may not make it through this bullshit of trying to go green and all this crap – you can’t just build a green society out of nowhere, you gotta go green from the get-go. Whether we all make it through this or not, it doesn’t matter. The time is now and that’s what you fuckin’ do, is what you enjoy.”

The time doesn’t last. Shatter died of a heroin overdose in 1987 and Loose broke his back in 1994; he was able to make music with the band again by the time of that 2009 interview but further back injuries a few years later put a stop to that. Falconi and DePace have continued to tour with Rachel Thoele on bass and frequently David Yow of The Jesus Lizard on vocals; Yow is one of the few vocalists alive who can live up to this music and make it live in all its joking ugly seriousness. But Loose helped bring it into being in the first place. 

I watched those videos above and others like them a lot five years ago, during lockdown and the pandemic, when getting out to an actual show seemed like it would never happen again. The time was endless and making it through was unclear; YouTube was a godsend of music from lots of bands but I came back to Flipper a lot. I’ve been listening to a lot of Flipper now. The weight of the music and its buzz that fills your skull; Shatter’s wail and Loose’s bitter sneer. Optimism isn’t always on the table and definitely isn’t worth always aiming for. I think Loose and his bandmates understood that in their bones, despite their deflections, and could find both truth and joy in the darkness.

One of my favorite recordings the band did is a ridiculous goof on “The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly,” the nursery rhyme/shaggy dog story that is perfect for a band who loved to beat a song and a joke into the ground. Loose is on vocals and you can hear him crack himself up as the old lady swallows the minister (who was there to get the goat, of course): “Isn’t it sinister to swallow a minister!” The time is now and it’s full of lights and sound and rhythm and noise, and if it’s building to an end that everyone knows, the band can still have a hell of a time getting there while looking it square in the eye. And even finding time for one more serious joke at the last minute, when that old lady finally swallows the horse and Loose forgoes the expected punchline for a last punch of his own: “She croaked!”