In Life My Friends

Flipper released “In Life My Friends,” written by guitarist Ted Falconi, as the third track on Gone Fishin’, the band’s second studio album, on August 29, 1984, via Subterranean Records. Formed in San Francisco in 1979, Flipper slowed punk down to a crawl while the rest of the scene sped up, a choice that became the band’s defining trait.

Falconi built the song around a guitar part that drones more than it riffs, while Bruce Loose handles the vocals and Will Shatter holds down the bass. Steve DePace’s drums anchor the track at just over four minutes, brief by Flipper’s usual standards. The band recorded the album at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco with engineer Garry Creiman.

Will Shatter, who co-founded the band and played bass on the track, died in 1987 of a heroin overdose, just three years after “In Life My Friends” came out. Later pressings of the album included a printed tribute to him, which gives the song’s title a weight the band could not have intended at the time it was written.

Flipper never had a hit, and that was never really the point. The dirge tempos and crushing distortion on Gone Fishin’ are now cited as part of the genesis of sludge metal, years before the genre had a name. The Melvins carried that lineage forward, covering three Flipper songs across their catalog, and the same bottom-heavy blueprint runs through The Jesus Lizard and Unsane. Four decades on, the song still sounds like a band working entirely on its own terms.