Flipper

Flip­per was founded in 1979 by Ted Fal­coni, Will Shat­ter, Steve DePace, and Ricky Williams. All were from early San Fran­cisco punk bands, Rad Com­mand, Neg­a­tive Trend, and Sleep­ers, respectively.

Ricky Williams, though a great singer, was too messed up, and was fired after about 6 months. He was replaced by Bruce Loose, who we con­sider to be an orig­i­nal mem­ber. Bruce was on the very first record­ing released by Flip­per, which was a song enti­tled "Earth­worm" on the SF Under­ground / Sub­ter­ranean EP.

The most notable live show with Ricky Williams, or Ricky Sleeper, as he was known, was the show in which we were the sup­port for X on their very first trip to San Fran­cisco. It was at this show that Ricky scored a KO on Will Shat­ter while swing­ing a mic stand. End of show for Flipper.

Ricky left us with some good mem­o­ries and the name Flip­per. It was his idea to call the band Flip­per, as he had named all of his many pets, Flip­per, so too would he need for the band to have the same name, for no other rea­son than it was a name he could remember.

The band lineup was Bruce, Ted, Will, and Steve from 1979 until Will Shatter's untimely death in Dec. 1987. Dur­ing this time the band released 3 sin­gles and 5 albums. We picked back up again in Jan. 1990 with John Dougherty on bass gui­tar and released one sin­gle before being signed by Rick Rubin to Def Amer­i­can and releas­ing "Amer­i­can Grafishy".

John Dougherty met the same untimely death, and we found our­selves fly­ing the miss­ing man for­ma­tion, once again. There was quite a long break this time. It would be more than 10 years before Flip­per would reform.

It would take a call from CBGBs to get the band back together. Hilly needed our help to play a cou­ple of ben­e­fit shows. We answered the call in Aug. 2005, with an old stand by bass player friend, Bruno DeS­mar­tass of Bad Pos­ture fame. We played the 2 CBGBs shows, the final show at the famed Olympic Audi­to­rium in LA, a sold out his­tory mak­ing event at The Fill­more in San Fran­cisco, and a suc­ces­sion of other shows. These included a per­for­mance at The Toronto Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val, a Paper Mag­a­zine Party in NYC, in which Moby joined us on stage for an epic ren­di­tion of Sex Bomb, and an Edward Cul­ver punk photo book release party, as well as club dates on both coasts.

Our friend Bruno left the band, on his feet and still breath­ing, in Sept. 2006. We had an oppor­tu­nity to play the "All tomor­rows Par­ties" fes­ti­val in Eng­land which was being curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, in Dec. 2006. With­out a bass player we had to find someone.

There was one name at the top of the list that just had to be. Krist Novoselic.

We invited Krist to join us for the fes­ti­val and a tour of Eng­land and Ire­land with old friends The Melvins. Krist accepted the invi­ta­tion to our great plea­sure and we com­pleted the UK tour of 2006 with the Melvins.

2007 and 2008 were cre­ative years for Flip­per. Along with Krist, we wrote new songs and recorded new stu­dio tracks as well as a few dif­fer­ent live shows.

After com­plet­ing a brand new stu­dio album and a live album set for release on May 19th 2009, Flip­per is plan­ning to hit the road. Unfor­tu­nately not with Krist. He has decided that the tour grind is no longer some­thing he wants to do.