Bruce Loose, the vocalist and bassist of the well-known San Francisco punk rock and hardcore band Flipper, has died at the age of 66.
The band’s drummer, Stephen DePace, confirmed the unfortunate news in an email to Pitchfork.
This comes after Loose suffered a stroke and was recovering from his home in Humboldt, California, where he possibly died from a heart attack on Friday.
Bruce Richard Calderwood was born in California to beatnik parents who would take him to local shows at times. He joined Flipper after the founders — Russell Wilkerson, widely known as Will Shatter, Ted Falconi and DePace — kicked out original singer Ricky Williams for missing shows.
Calderwood originally adopted the name Bruce Lose before eventually adding another “o” to his stage surname.
Shatter and Falconi formed Flipper in the late 1970s Bay Area at the dawn of the hardcore scene, a faster and more aggressive punk subgenre that had a strong influence in California. The group shared stages with Black Flag, Bad Brains, and the Dead Kennedys.
But the group’s strength lied in their ability to groove as well as thrash, and they had a thing for blistering, noisy heaviness that bordered the psychedelic.
One year after earning plaudits and notoriety for their smash 1981 hit “Sex Bomb,” the band released its debut LP, “Album – Generic Flipper,” via Subterranean.
The band’s body of work became a classic due to its influence of legion outre rock bands with its supernatural grumpy approach to life and conventional song forms.
“We’re just trying to show the absurdity of whatever it is we’re trying to show the absurdity of,” Calderwood once tried to explain.
The band went on to amass a large following that included Kurt Cobain, who wore a homemade Flipper T-shirt on “Saturday Night Live” and in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” music video.
Shatter’s death of a drug overdose in 1987 greatly affected the band and ended things. They then reformed in the ’90s to play multiple shows and released the 1992 album “American Grafishy” on Def American, but suffered a huge setback when Calderwood broke his back in a car accident in 1994.
He continued to perform at their occasional concerts — and on Flipper’s two 2009 albums “Love” and “Fight,” featuring Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic — until 2015, when the band announced that he could no longer tour and would be replaced by the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
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