Flop — Whenever You're Ready

Revisiting one of the great overlooked alt-rock records of the 1990s

It was September 1993, less than a month after I’d moved back to LA, and right around the time I first saw Arthur Lee in concert. I was browsing the bins at Rhino Records’ Santa Monica location, just up the street from the Third Street Promenade, when a small, handwritten sign on a nearby shelf caught my eye.

“Like Buzzcocks meets Cheap Trick,” it said. Up above the sign was a CD with brightly colored cover art immediately recognizable to me as the work of Ed Fotheringham, who’d previously designed covers for Seattle bands Love Battery and Mudhoney. The album was Whenever You’re Ready, by a Seattle band I’d never heard of called Flop. Maybe there were listening stations at Rhino where you could check out new releases, or maybe not; I forget now. But either way, the mere mention of Buzzcocks and Cheap Trick got my attention, and the CD went home with me.

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Whichever Rhino employee had written that small bit of hype had good ears. The music was indeed full of roaring twin guitars and well-enunciated, slightly fey vocals a la Pete Shelley’s Buzzcocks work — legendary Buzzcocks/Stranglers/Human League producer Martin Rushent produced this album as well — and melodic yet weirdly constructed post-glam stompers a la the first Cheap Trick album. But the album’s lyrics were what really got me — fractured, piquantly poetic observations covering everything from alienation and breakups to prehistoric evolution and the Unified Field Theory. “A. Wylie,” the album’s hard charging opener, was basically a five-line breakdown of George Bernard Shaw’s An Unsocial Socialist set to ringing power chords.

Sidney Trefusis has ceased to live today
Agatha Wylie said she'd throw it all away
I heard it a long time ago
The things she said to me
You're a lucky one

Though they were new to me, Flop had released another album a year earlier — Flop & The Fall Of The Mopsqueezer — and were led by Rusty Willoughby, previously of Pure Joy and Fastbacks. The songs and lyrics were all Willoughby’s, and I deeply admired his ability (nay, compulsion?) to stretch insanely catchy hooks and melodies around lyrics and subject matter that absolutely defied anyone to sing along. The chorus of “Julie Francavilla,” a song named after a Seattle news anchor, consisted of the following lines:

You'll survive a vegetable
The meat's diseased and she said so
I won't try to persuade you anymore

But my absolute favorite was the roaring two-minute blast of “The Great Valediction,” which was almost Robyn Hitchcock-esque in its consideration of sauropods, jellyfish and the randomness of existence, while also invoking one of the greatest live albums of all time:

Bold flashing dagger teeth
Powerful and tree-like limbs of allosaurs go by
Oh a hundred million years ago
There wasn't need of lumbering sauropods
For man would soon give birth to god and breed

But you were made into a jellyfish discovering the flow of time
And never hearing "The Who Live At Leeds"

I wrote a rave review of Whenever You’re Ready for the LA Reader, where I’d just started freelancing, and about a month later caught Flop at the Hollywood Palace, where they were opening for Redd Kross. While they didn’t exactly blow the headliners off the stage (who could in those days?), they held their own and sounded great, and so I raved about Flop once again in my Reader review of that show. And when it came time to submit my Top Albums of 1993 list to the paper, I put Whenever You’re Ready at Number One, ahead of such brilliant releases as Redd Kross’s Phaseshifter, Teenage Fanclub’s Thirteen, and The Boo Radleys’ Giant Steps.

Not that anyone cared what I thought, least of all the rep at Epic, whose subsidiary 550 Music had jointly released the album with L.A. indie label Frontier. When I told her over the phone — while trying to cadge press tickets to Flop’s January 1994 concert at the Hollywood Auditorium, a show which would ultimately be pre-empted by the Northridge Quake — that Whenever You’re Ready had been my “album of the year,” she sounded about as enthused as if I’d informed her that I’d recently stepped in a particularly fragrant pile of dog shit. Despite the presence on the album of a couple of songs with legit alt-rock chart potential, such as the Nirvana-esque lope of “Regrets,” Flop had clearly lived up (or down) to their name, and the label had already moved on to more pressing commercial concerns.

Even more depressing to me was that everyone I knew who should have dug the record had written it off as a “major-label sellout,” pooh-poohing Rushent’s production as “too commercial”. Personally, I thought Rushent brought out the sparkle in Willoughby’s melodies without sapping the band of its power — and frankly, neither Mopsqueezer or 1995’s World of Today (the latter recorded after Flop were dropped from Epic) ever clicked with me like Whenever You’re Ready did — but no one else seemed to agree. I put “The Great Valediction” and “Night of the Hunter” on countless mix cassettes for friends over the next few years, and not a single recipient ever came back to me on the latter with, “Hey, it’s pretty cool that Flop wrote a song about the only film ever directed by Charles Laughton!” Maybe I just expect too much from people sometimes…

Solvents glue and heroin she said
I don't want to do that at all
I took her to see Robert Mitchum in
Night of the Hunter

Shelley Winters has a vision of
Righteousness from up above
She trades her children for the love
Of a preacher with a soul decay

Flash forward to the summer of 2009. I was hanging out with a couple of friends at a street fair in Seattle, waiting for Mudhoney to go on, when I recognized Rusty Willoughby standing by himself just a few feet from me. I really wanted to go over and tell him how much I loved Whenever You’re Ready, but got shy about it; maybe such enthusiasm would have made his night, but I worried that a mention of the album might just bring up bad memories of his brief time in major label land, along with any bitterness that might have still been lingering from the album’s lack of acceptance.

A year or two ago, I learned while rooting around on Discogs that Whenever You’re Ready — though released at a time when major labels were phasing out vinyl releases — was actually also issued by Epic as a limited-edition vinyl picture disc. I’d been keeping my eye out for an affordable copy ever since, and finally scored one a couple of weekends back via Get Hip Records’ April Fools sale. I don’t think I’d listened to the whole album in years, but it brought back all kinds of great memories this week while spinning on my turntable, and renewed my conviction that this was truly one of the great overlooked/underrated albums of “the grunge era,” and the maybe 1990s alt-rock in general. And it’s still out there on Bandcamp, Spotify and lotsa other music sites, waiting for you to give it the love it deserves… whenever you’re ready.

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