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The Flaming Lips Biography
SONG NOTES FROM THE SORCERER'S ORPHAN
Understanding At War With The Mystics
"THE YEAH YEAH YEAH SONG (WITH ALL YOUR POWER)"
Steven had been recording in a separate vocal booth on his computer and I walked by and heard the crazy grouped vocals doing the "yeah yeah yeah" part and I was immediately hooked. This is one of those songs that points the finger at the pettiness of those in power but also points the finger back at ourselves - what would YOU do? Power in the hands of the inexperienced (which is what we would be) is very dangerous...
"FREE RADICALS (A HALLUCINATION OF THE CHRISTMAS SKELETON PLEADING WITH A SUICIDE BOMBER)"
I had a dream in which Devendra Banhart (the weird singer/songwriter) is pleading with a suicide bomber (who is about to go blow up something or somebody) to change his mind. And once he changes the deranged zealot's point of view, he (Devendra) immediately sympathizes with the frustration (mostly aimed at George W. Bush) that could make someone long for such exaggerated revenge...(Keep in mind that this is just a funny dream - these suicide bombers are clearly brainwashed religious fanaticals that are insane with their own agenda...they are beyond any pleas of reason and are not worthy of any sympathy.)
"THE SOUND OF FAILURE"
We have some friends whose father was dying of cancer - I say "was" because it (the cancer and his death) dragged on agonizingly for over a year - and they (our friends) were becoming, understandably, weary of being forced to be upbeat...
And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to them, to have to hear this gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas, Destiny's Child, Ashlee Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the "Muzak" systems virtually everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was really only effective if you didn't actually have any real psychic stress...And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to try to understand their fears and their sadness - as opposed to pretending that it's "all good." And, you see, this is true insight... finally we know it's okay to have a troubled mind, it's okay to fail...
And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New York from Oklahoma while I drove and Steven played battery powered keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best friend has died, and everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier) she must endure the empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since it has arrived, what is despair, what is hope, what is failure...And what is in the darkness??
The line in the song, "so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen" is obviously a reference back to my friends and their Muzak incident...meaning, "Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani that their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove that they don't empathize with my sadness." I believe, in the song, that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl's less mature friends...and that she's not trying to go against them, she just doesn't want to pretend that she understands what she doesn't really understand - what death is...what despair is...what existential fear is... She doesn't know, but she's starting to find out...
"IT'S DARK... IS IT ALWAYS THIS DARK?"
A strange sort of afterword to the previous song. The voice and the strange blippy trail is actually my voice run through a computer plug-in effect called "Squirrel Parade"...Pretty cool... Anyway, it sounds like I'm saying "It's Dark", but I didn't say "It's Dark." I don't remember what it was exactly - just me talking before a song, but it gives the illusion of a young girl finding her way through a mystery...yes?
"MY COSMIC AUTUMN REBELLION (THE INNER LIFE AS BLAZING SHIELD OF DEFIANCE AND OPTIMISM AS CELESTIAL SPEAR OF ACTION)"
We had been using the musical elements of this song (it wasn't a song then) as an intro for our live shows, as I rolled around on top of the crowd in the now-famous "Space Bubble." The power of the chord structure and arrangement kept inspiring me and I eventually pieced together this manifesto of defiance and optimism. It is my response to the naysaying know-it-alls who see life leading only to death and see nature as a cruel prankster designed to defeat the human spirit. And the truth (which I get to proclaim as if standing on the top of a holy mountain shooting laser beams out of my hands - thanks to Steven's epic orchestration) is that no circumstance can ever defeat us unless we let it... Resilience in the face of failure is a manifestation of the mind...
"VEIN OF STARS"
I picked up a guitar that Steven had tuned to an odd open chord (F 6/9) and, without thinking, strummed it a couple of times and immediately sang (off the top of my head) the first line into the tape recorder, "Who knows, maybe there isn't a vein of stars calling out my name." My intention was to sing something cosmic about how humans have (as science reveals more and more about the nature of time and space) been abandoned by the stars...But I believe, once we finished it (the song and its production), it seemed to convey just the opposite...That almost despite science we are connected to the stars...Because we love to look at them, we hope maybe they love to look at us...
"THE WIZARD TURNS ON...THE GIANT SILVER FLASHLIGHT AND PUTS ON HIS WEREWOLF MOCCASINS"
A kind of space jam where the initial performance had Michael playing the CD player (in it was a CD with a recording of the drums), Steven playing the Rhodes and me playing electric bass. Mr. Fridmann ran the whole thing through a series of space echoes, flangers, filters and distortion boxes... The entire mix lays in the bed of a program called Metaphysical Function...Neat, huh?
"IT OVERTAKES ME"
I sometimes will do a silly songwriter's trick - I'll act like I'm writing a song for someone else and on this track I was imagining Gwen Stefani... I pictured her singing it and imagined what kind of production would happen. Initially I called the song, when it was intended for Ms. Stefani, "I Like to Masturbate and Think of Outer Space"...and I still think that if she was doing the song it's a great title....But to think of me, a 45 year old man with a graying beard, umm, masturbating....is... well...(I'm uncomfortable even typing this)...unpleasant...so anyway...The song ends up being more about my occasional bouts of panic when accidentally contemplating the "Cosmic Reality", that is....that we (the Earth) are floating perilously adrift in a vast and endless sea of black infinity (outer space) and it is, when analyzed, a mindfuck...and yes I feel horribly insignificant....So anyway, what we ended up with, I believe, still sounds like a mashing of "Hollaback Girl" and "1969" by The Stooges...take some drugs and turn it up real loud...
"THE STARS ARE SO BIG AND I AM SO SMALL...DO I STAND A CHANCE?"
This section of the song captures, I think, the vulnerability and awe of this same scenario (the Cosmic Reality) within a cathedralesque womb-cloud of angelic voices... but instead of panic it is solemn and comforting...
"MR. AMBULANCE DRIVER"
The entire song, its key and chord structure, is built around the ambulance siren sample. When we first did it there was an eerie death coloring (probably due to the siren and the lyric about the girl being dead) that was very satisfying... But we found, with repeated listening, that the siren, somehow, subliminally disappeared and, to our surprise, it revealed a kind of Eddie Rabbitt ('70s pop-country singer-songwriter) at the roller rink, easy listening teenager car crash ballad.
"HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE"
A friend of ours, Greg Kurstin (he played with us on the Beck tour and was nicknamed "Firefingers" by Steven due to his sublime playing of the keyboard) is an accomplished musician and has a great ear for pop sounds and structure...He's written songs with artists ranging from Enrique Iglesias to Karen O and he, upon my insistence, sent this unfinished track for us to build on. It was great fun and again (like the Gwen Stefani trick) it allowed us to create inside a different identity. The song is about a type of person that everybody knows and endures (we won't mention names). They blame everyone but themselves for all of their problems, which they seem to have in endless supply. If they suffer, you suffer more... You know what I'm talking about.
"THE W.A.N.D. (THE WILL ALWAYS NEGATES DEFEAT)"
I was playing electric guitar, Michael was on fuzzwah bass and Steven was on the drumkit and we stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath getting mashed up with Sly and the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a wonderful new direction. The idea of a magic wand and magic powers occurred to me while watching a homeless guy in Oklahoma City. He was, I believe, Vietnamese, and had a cool looking wizardly beard and mustache and he carried a long stick, which he used as a kind of cane-weapon. And one day I saw him fighting an "imagined" enemy and the long stick became (as best I could tell) a kind of magic wand that made his invisible foe retreat. I mean... it seemed to give him a confidence that allowed him to defeat his hallucinations...and at first I thought "how sad...he believes this old stick is saving him"... but the more I thought about it, the more I envied him in a way...for the evil manifestations of his mind he invented a sparkling sorcerer's baton to lead his psychic revolution...yes!!...
And so we delved into a kind of radical protest rock mentality...We sing, "We got the power now, motherfuckers, that's where it belongs," but I believe it's cosmically empowering - not actually empowering. In the song, we rail against the greedy, corrupt evil beings who are in control and trying to enslave us... But our rebellion is simply to fight back - we have no solutions.
"POMPEII AM GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG"
A galloping Godhead melody (reminiscent of the German National Anthem) telling a vague story of a young couple planning their suicide. They live in a place where there are volcanoes erupting and they are going to take the train up the mountain and jump into the flowing lava as a symbolic sacrifice of their restricted love. The triumphant quality of the arrangement suggests that, just before they obliterate themselves, they realize that to make such a decision, to destroy yourself, is really just a point of internal motivation leading to outward action. And, if they could do something as extreme as annihilating themselves, why couldn't they just try to change the circumstances that have limited them?....Action is all we have....Worth mentioning is that this is Steven's first lead vocal on a Flaming Lips track...
"GOIN' ON"
The core of the chorus melody has a melancholy resolution evoking, abstractly, sections of Mahler's 9th Symphony...We are, subconsciously I guess, drawn to "the answer"... maybe that is why people have the urge to pray or sing or create...We long for this thing called "closure," but I believe that "closure" is, maybe, an illusion. This song takes a long stare at coping and the secret healing powers of slipping through time and space...How suffering, somehow, is relieved by simple...acceptance...
Wayne
2006
Understanding At War With The Mystics
"THE YEAH YEAH YEAH SONG (WITH ALL YOUR POWER)"
Steven had been recording in a separate vocal booth on his computer and I walked by and heard the crazy grouped vocals doing the "yeah yeah yeah" part and I was immediately hooked. This is one of those songs that points the finger at the pettiness of those in power but also points the finger back at ourselves - what would YOU do? Power in the hands of the inexperienced (which is what we would be) is very dangerous...
"FREE RADICALS (A HALLUCINATION OF THE CHRISTMAS SKELETON PLEADING WITH A SUICIDE BOMBER)"
I had a dream in which Devendra Banhart (the weird singer/songwriter) is pleading with a suicide bomber (who is about to go blow up something or somebody) to change his mind. And once he changes the deranged zealot's point of view, he (Devendra) immediately sympathizes with the frustration (mostly aimed at George W. Bush) that could make someone long for such exaggerated revenge...(Keep in mind that this is just a funny dream - these suicide bombers are clearly brainwashed religious fanaticals that are insane with their own agenda...they are beyond any pleas of reason and are not worthy of any sympathy.)
"THE SOUND OF FAILURE"
We have some friends whose father was dying of cancer - I say "was" because it (the cancer and his death) dragged on agonizingly for over a year - and they (our friends) were becoming, understandably, weary of being forced to be upbeat...
And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to them, to have to hear this gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas, Destiny's Child, Ashlee Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the "Muzak" systems virtually everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was really only effective if you didn't actually have any real psychic stress...And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to try to understand their fears and their sadness - as opposed to pretending that it's "all good." And, you see, this is true insight... finally we know it's okay to have a troubled mind, it's okay to fail...
And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New York from Oklahoma while I drove and Steven played battery powered keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best friend has died, and everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier) she must endure the empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since it has arrived, what is despair, what is hope, what is failure...And what is in the darkness??
The line in the song, "so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen" is obviously a reference back to my friends and their Muzak incident...meaning, "Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani that their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove that they don't empathize with my sadness." I believe, in the song, that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl's less mature friends...and that she's not trying to go against them, she just doesn't want to pretend that she understands what she doesn't really understand - what death is...what despair is...what existential fear is... She doesn't know, but she's starting to find out...
"IT'S DARK... IS IT ALWAYS THIS DARK?"
A strange sort of afterword to the previous song. The voice and the strange blippy trail is actually my voice run through a computer plug-in effect called "Squirrel Parade"...Pretty cool... Anyway, it sounds like I'm saying "It's Dark", but I didn't say "It's Dark." I don't remember what it was exactly - just me talking before a song, but it gives the illusion of a young girl finding her way through a mystery...yes?
"MY COSMIC AUTUMN REBELLION (THE INNER LIFE AS BLAZING SHIELD OF DEFIANCE AND OPTIMISM AS CELESTIAL SPEAR OF ACTION)"
We had been using the musical elements of this song (it wasn't a song then) as an intro for our live shows, as I rolled around on top of the crowd in the now-famous "Space Bubble." The power of the chord structure and arrangement kept inspiring me and I eventually pieced together this manifesto of defiance and optimism. It is my response to the naysaying know-it-alls who see life leading only to death and see nature as a cruel prankster designed to defeat the human spirit. And the truth (which I get to proclaim as if standing on the top of a holy mountain shooting laser beams out of my hands - thanks to Steven's epic orchestration) is that no circumstance can ever defeat us unless we let it... Resilience in the face of failure is a manifestation of the mind...
"VEIN OF STARS"
I picked up a guitar that Steven had tuned to an odd open chord (F 6/9) and, without thinking, strummed it a couple of times and immediately sang (off the top of my head) the first line into the tape recorder, "Who knows, maybe there isn't a vein of stars calling out my name." My intention was to sing something cosmic about how humans have (as science reveals more and more about the nature of time and space) been abandoned by the stars...But I believe, once we finished it (the song and its production), it seemed to convey just the opposite...That almost despite science we are connected to the stars...Because we love to look at them, we hope maybe they love to look at us...
"THE WIZARD TURNS ON...THE GIANT SILVER FLASHLIGHT AND PUTS ON HIS WEREWOLF MOCCASINS"
A kind of space jam where the initial performance had Michael playing the CD player (in it was a CD with a recording of the drums), Steven playing the Rhodes and me playing electric bass. Mr. Fridmann ran the whole thing through a series of space echoes, flangers, filters and distortion boxes... The entire mix lays in the bed of a program called Metaphysical Function...Neat, huh?
"IT OVERTAKES ME"
I sometimes will do a silly songwriter's trick - I'll act like I'm writing a song for someone else and on this track I was imagining Gwen Stefani... I pictured her singing it and imagined what kind of production would happen. Initially I called the song, when it was intended for Ms. Stefani, "I Like to Masturbate and Think of Outer Space"...and I still think that if she was doing the song it's a great title....But to think of me, a 45 year old man with a graying beard, umm, masturbating....is... well...(I'm uncomfortable even typing this)...unpleasant...so anyway...The song ends up being more about my occasional bouts of panic when accidentally contemplating the "Cosmic Reality", that is....that we (the Earth) are floating perilously adrift in a vast and endless sea of black infinity (outer space) and it is, when analyzed, a mindfuck...and yes I feel horribly insignificant....So anyway, what we ended up with, I believe, still sounds like a mashing of "Hollaback Girl" and "1969" by The Stooges...take some drugs and turn it up real loud...
"THE STARS ARE SO BIG AND I AM SO SMALL...DO I STAND A CHANCE?"
This section of the song captures, I think, the vulnerability and awe of this same scenario (the Cosmic Reality) within a cathedralesque womb-cloud of angelic voices... but instead of panic it is solemn and comforting...
"MR. AMBULANCE DRIVER"
The entire song, its key and chord structure, is built around the ambulance siren sample. When we first did it there was an eerie death coloring (probably due to the siren and the lyric about the girl being dead) that was very satisfying... But we found, with repeated listening, that the siren, somehow, subliminally disappeared and, to our surprise, it revealed a kind of Eddie Rabbitt ('70s pop-country singer-songwriter) at the roller rink, easy listening teenager car crash ballad.
"HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE"
A friend of ours, Greg Kurstin (he played with us on the Beck tour and was nicknamed "Firefingers" by Steven due to his sublime playing of the keyboard) is an accomplished musician and has a great ear for pop sounds and structure...He's written songs with artists ranging from Enrique Iglesias to Karen O and he, upon my insistence, sent this unfinished track for us to build on. It was great fun and again (like the Gwen Stefani trick) it allowed us to create inside a different identity. The song is about a type of person that everybody knows and endures (we won't mention names). They blame everyone but themselves for all of their problems, which they seem to have in endless supply. If they suffer, you suffer more... You know what I'm talking about.
"THE W.A.N.D. (THE WILL ALWAYS NEGATES DEFEAT)"
I was playing electric guitar, Michael was on fuzzwah bass and Steven was on the drumkit and we stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath getting mashed up with Sly and the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a wonderful new direction. The idea of a magic wand and magic powers occurred to me while watching a homeless guy in Oklahoma City. He was, I believe, Vietnamese, and had a cool looking wizardly beard and mustache and he carried a long stick, which he used as a kind of cane-weapon. And one day I saw him fighting an "imagined" enemy and the long stick became (as best I could tell) a kind of magic wand that made his invisible foe retreat. I mean... it seemed to give him a confidence that allowed him to defeat his hallucinations...and at first I thought "how sad...he believes this old stick is saving him"... but the more I thought about it, the more I envied him in a way...for the evil manifestations of his mind he invented a sparkling sorcerer's baton to lead his psychic revolution...yes!!...
And so we delved into a kind of radical protest rock mentality...We sing, "We got the power now, motherfuckers, that's where it belongs," but I believe it's cosmically empowering - not actually empowering. In the song, we rail against the greedy, corrupt evil beings who are in control and trying to enslave us... But our rebellion is simply to fight back - we have no solutions.
"POMPEII AM GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG"
A galloping Godhead melody (reminiscent of the German National Anthem) telling a vague story of a young couple planning their suicide. They live in a place where there are volcanoes erupting and they are going to take the train up the mountain and jump into the flowing lava as a symbolic sacrifice of their restricted love. The triumphant quality of the arrangement suggests that, just before they obliterate themselves, they realize that to make such a decision, to destroy yourself, is really just a point of internal motivation leading to outward action. And, if they could do something as extreme as annihilating themselves, why couldn't they just try to change the circumstances that have limited them?....Action is all we have....Worth mentioning is that this is Steven's first lead vocal on a Flaming Lips track...
"GOIN' ON"
The core of the chorus melody has a melancholy resolution evoking, abstractly, sections of Mahler's 9th Symphony...We are, subconsciously I guess, drawn to "the answer"... maybe that is why people have the urge to pray or sing or create...We long for this thing called "closure," but I believe that "closure" is, maybe, an illusion. This song takes a long stare at coping and the secret healing powers of slipping through time and space...How suffering, somehow, is relieved by simple...acceptance...
Wayne
2006
The Flaming Lips All Music Guide Biography
Even within the eclectic world of alternative rock, few bands were so brave, so frequently brilliant, and so deliciously weird as the Flaming Lips. From their beginnings as Oklahoma weirdos to their pop culture breakthrough in the mid-'90s to their status as one of the most respected groups of the 2000s, the Lips have ridden one of the more surreal and haphazard career trajectories in pop music. An acid-bubblegum band with as much affinity for sweet melodies as blistering noise assaults, their off-kilter sound, uncommon emotional depth, and bizarre history (packed with tales of self-immolating fans and the like) firmly established them as true originals.
The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983, when founder and guitarist Wayne Coyne allegedly stole a collection of musical instruments from an area church hall and enlisted his vocalist brother Mark and bassist Michael Ivins to start a band. Giving themselves the nonsensical name the Flaming Lips (its origin variously attributed to a porn film, an obscure drug reference, or a dream in which a fiery Virgin Mary plants a kiss on Wayne in the backseat of his car), the band made its live debut at a local transvestite club. After progressing through an endless string of drummers, they recruited percussionist Richard English prior to recording their self-titled debut, issued on green vinyl on their own Lovely Sorts of Death label in 1985.
When Mark Coyne soon departed to get married, Wayne assumed full control of the group; in addition to remaining its lead guitarist, he also became the primary singer and songwriter. Continuing on as a trio, the Lips released 1986's Hear It Is, followed a year later by Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips. While touring in support of the Butthole Surfers, they played Buffalo, NY, where they were befriended by concert promoter Jonathan Donahue; after a jam session with Donahue's nascent band Mercury Rev, he and Coyne became close friends, and Donahue eventually signed on as the group's sound technician.
After recording 1988's difficult Telepathic Surgery, English exited, reducing the Lips to the core duo of Coyne and Ivins; after adding drummer Nathan Roberts, Donahue adopted the name Dingus and became a full-time member in time to cut 1990s stellar In a Priest Driven Ambulance while simultaneously recording the brilliant Mercury Rev debut, Yerself Is Steam. Following a series of hopeful phone calls to Warner Bros., the company signed the band in 1991, and in 1992 their oft-delayed major-label debut, Hit to Death in the Future Head, appeared to little commercial notice; Donahue soon exited to focus his full energies on Mercury Rev, followed by the departure of Roberts.
With new guitarist Ronald Jones and drummer Steven Drozd, they cut 1993's sublime Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, which they supported by playing the second stage at Lollapalooza and touring the nation in a Ryder truck. Initially, the album stiffed; however, nearly a year after its initial release, the single "She Don't Use Jelly" became a grassroots hit, and against all odds the Flaming Lips found themselves on the Top 40 charts. They took full advantage of their requisite 15 minutes of fame, appearing everywhere from MTV's annual Spring Break broadcast to an arena tour in support of Candlebox to a memorably surreal lip-synched performance on the teen soap opera Beverly Hills 90210, where supporting character Steve Sanders (portrayed by actor Ian Ziering) uttered the immortal words, "You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!"
After the 1994 release of a limited-edition sampler of odds-and-ends titled Providing Needles for Your Balloons, the Lips returned in 1995 with Clouds Taste Metallic, a strikingly mature and diverse collection highlighted by the singles "Bad Days" (also heard in the film Batman Forever), "This Here Giraffe," and "Brainville." Despite the inclusion of the remarkably melodic "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles," "Christmas at the Zoo" (rumored to be under consideration for inclusion on an upcoming John Tesh holiday record), and the epic "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World," the album nonetheless failed to live up to the commercial success of Transmissions, and the band was once again relegated to cult status.
In 1996, the Lips' world went haywire; first, Jones disappeared to undertake a spiritual odyssey from which he did not return, then Drozd's hand was almost needlessly amputated after he was bitten by a spider. At about the same time, Ivins was the victim of a bizarre hit-and-run accident after a wheel came off of another vehicle and slammed into his car, trapping him inside. Ironically, Coyne was having car problems of his own when rumors of his latest sonic foray -- conducting an orchestra of 40 automobiles, all with their tape decks playing specially composed music at the same time -- prompted fan discussion of his possible psychological collapse. "I would try to tell people what I was doing and found that I couldn't explain it very well," Coyne later remarked about the project, dubbed the Parking Lot Experiment. "Plus, I had a sore on the side of my tongue for a week and it made me talk kind of weird. I'm sure they thought I was retarded."
By the following year, the Flaming Lips (who continued as a trio, opting not to attempt to replace Jones) were back in the studio, recording an album that, according to Coyne, would be "so different and exciting it will either make us millionaires or break us" -- in short, 1997's Zaireeka, a breathtaking and wildly experimental set of four discs designed to be played simultaneously. A previously unreleased track, "Hot Day," also appeared earlier that year on the soundtrack to Richard Linklater's film SubUrbia. A Collection of Songs Representing an Enthusiasm for Recording...by Amateurs, a retrospective of their Restless label material, followed in 1998, and a year later the Lips returned with a breathtaking new studio effort, The Soft Bulletin. After a three-year absence from the shelves, 2002 brought several new releases, including the new record Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and a two-volume retrospective of the Restless years. Yoshimi won the group even more popular and critical acclaim than The Soft Bulletin, which the group maximized by spending half of 2002 appearing with Beck on his Sea Change tour as both his opening act and backing band. The Lips kept busy over the next two years by touring in support of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and working on their movie Christmas on Mars. They returned to the studio in 2004 and spent much of 2005 recording; that year, the Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks and VOID video collection were both released, whetting fans' appetites for the band's 2006 album, At War with the Mystics. In 2008, the band's long-awaited, seven years in the making film Christmas on Mars made its debut at that spring's Sasquatch Festival in George, WA; that fall, the movie and its soundtrack were released as a CD/DVD set. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983, when founder and guitarist Wayne Coyne allegedly stole a collection of musical instruments from an area church hall and enlisted his vocalist brother Mark and bassist Michael Ivins to start a band. Giving themselves the nonsensical name the Flaming Lips (its origin variously attributed to a porn film, an obscure drug reference, or a dream in which a fiery Virgin Mary plants a kiss on Wayne in the backseat of his car), the band made its live debut at a local transvestite club. After progressing through an endless string of drummers, they recruited percussionist Richard English prior to recording their self-titled debut, issued on green vinyl on their own Lovely Sorts of Death label in 1985.
When Mark Coyne soon departed to get married, Wayne assumed full control of the group; in addition to remaining its lead guitarist, he also became the primary singer and songwriter. Continuing on as a trio, the Lips released 1986's Hear It Is, followed a year later by Oh My Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips. While touring in support of the Butthole Surfers, they played Buffalo, NY, where they were befriended by concert promoter Jonathan Donahue; after a jam session with Donahue's nascent band Mercury Rev, he and Coyne became close friends, and Donahue eventually signed on as the group's sound technician.
After recording 1988's difficult Telepathic Surgery, English exited, reducing the Lips to the core duo of Coyne and Ivins; after adding drummer Nathan Roberts, Donahue adopted the name Dingus and became a full-time member in time to cut 1990s stellar In a Priest Driven Ambulance while simultaneously recording the brilliant Mercury Rev debut, Yerself Is Steam. Following a series of hopeful phone calls to Warner Bros., the company signed the band in 1991, and in 1992 their oft-delayed major-label debut, Hit to Death in the Future Head, appeared to little commercial notice; Donahue soon exited to focus his full energies on Mercury Rev, followed by the departure of Roberts.
With new guitarist Ronald Jones and drummer Steven Drozd, they cut 1993's sublime Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, which they supported by playing the second stage at Lollapalooza and touring the nation in a Ryder truck. Initially, the album stiffed; however, nearly a year after its initial release, the single "She Don't Use Jelly" became a grassroots hit, and against all odds the Flaming Lips found themselves on the Top 40 charts. They took full advantage of their requisite 15 minutes of fame, appearing everywhere from MTV's annual Spring Break broadcast to an arena tour in support of Candlebox to a memorably surreal lip-synched performance on the teen soap opera Beverly Hills 90210, where supporting character Steve Sanders (portrayed by actor Ian Ziering) uttered the immortal words, "You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!"
After the 1994 release of a limited-edition sampler of odds-and-ends titled Providing Needles for Your Balloons, the Lips returned in 1995 with Clouds Taste Metallic, a strikingly mature and diverse collection highlighted by the singles "Bad Days" (also heard in the film Batman Forever), "This Here Giraffe," and "Brainville." Despite the inclusion of the remarkably melodic "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles," "Christmas at the Zoo" (rumored to be under consideration for inclusion on an upcoming John Tesh holiday record), and the epic "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World," the album nonetheless failed to live up to the commercial success of Transmissions, and the band was once again relegated to cult status.
In 1996, the Lips' world went haywire; first, Jones disappeared to undertake a spiritual odyssey from which he did not return, then Drozd's hand was almost needlessly amputated after he was bitten by a spider. At about the same time, Ivins was the victim of a bizarre hit-and-run accident after a wheel came off of another vehicle and slammed into his car, trapping him inside. Ironically, Coyne was having car problems of his own when rumors of his latest sonic foray -- conducting an orchestra of 40 automobiles, all with their tape decks playing specially composed music at the same time -- prompted fan discussion of his possible psychological collapse. "I would try to tell people what I was doing and found that I couldn't explain it very well," Coyne later remarked about the project, dubbed the Parking Lot Experiment. "Plus, I had a sore on the side of my tongue for a week and it made me talk kind of weird. I'm sure they thought I was retarded."
By the following year, the Flaming Lips (who continued as a trio, opting not to attempt to replace Jones) were back in the studio, recording an album that, according to Coyne, would be "so different and exciting it will either make us millionaires or break us" -- in short, 1997's Zaireeka, a breathtaking and wildly experimental set of four discs designed to be played simultaneously. A previously unreleased track, "Hot Day," also appeared earlier that year on the soundtrack to Richard Linklater's film SubUrbia. A Collection of Songs Representing an Enthusiasm for Recording...by Amateurs, a retrospective of their Restless label material, followed in 1998, and a year later the Lips returned with a breathtaking new studio effort, The Soft Bulletin. After a three-year absence from the shelves, 2002 brought several new releases, including the new record Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and a two-volume retrospective of the Restless years. Yoshimi won the group even more popular and critical acclaim than The Soft Bulletin, which the group maximized by spending half of 2002 appearing with Beck on his Sea Change tour as both his opening act and backing band. The Lips kept busy over the next two years by touring in support of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and working on their movie Christmas on Mars. They returned to the studio in 2004 and spent much of 2005 recording; that year, the Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks and VOID video collection were both released, whetting fans' appetites for the band's 2006 album, At War with the Mystics. In 2008, the band's long-awaited, seven years in the making film Christmas on Mars made its debut at that spring's Sasquatch Festival in George, WA; that fall, the movie and its soundtrack were released as a CD/DVD set. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
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