JACKSON HOLE, WYO – The Flaming Lips have produced music to match their name since 1983. Be it strange, intense, beautiful, mind-altering, whimsical, or psychedelic—it concocts an emotional super glue that pairs Wayne Coyne’s high, crack-able voice with kaleidoscopic musical accompaniment. Oklahoma’s three-time Grammy winners take stage at the Center Theater this Thursday.
What The Flaming Lips continue to push the boundaries of is concert performance with an art project approach. Video projections, lasers, inflatable figures, balloons, fake blood (they really like blood), outrageous consumes, giant balls of glitter underneath inventive stage lighting—adding up to an indulgent visual experience that acts as a complimentary palette for sonic textures and eccentric musical moments. The band’s upward trajectory was setup by 1993 MTV hit “She Don’t Use Jelly,” followed by the 1999 release of The Soft Bulletin, and then solidified with 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
The Flaming Lips are a little further out of the box than most bands that come to mind that have performed at the Center for the Arts in the last decade. And for The Lips, finding common ground with any audience means a willingness to be wooed (the audience), and five guys that are ready to woo.
“You may not know our music but we’re glad to be standing here in front of you, and if you stand there for a moment, we’ll blow your minds,” Coyne said from his home in Oklahoma City [a full audio stream of the interview is above, or click here]. “And I think that’s been our challenge. When we were first invited to play festivals you go from this isolated little world where you’re playing to your fans and they love it and you can veer off and it can go a lot of ways. But the fans know every second of everything you’re done and they’re all crammed into a little place. Then you’re thrust in front of a hundred thousand people at four in the afternoon and they can be indifferent or excited. We thought, ‘lets see how we can make this better of an experience.’
Aside from his frontman/songwriting role, Coyne has created enduring album cover art, drawn comic books, released music on flash drives embedded inside Gummy skulls, directed a science fiction Christmas film, and opened a funhouse-style arts venue (The Womb) in his hometown of Oklahoma City.
After a twenty-five minute conversation with Coyne, one gets the feeling that the Lips don’t take themselves too seriously, though are thoughtful in their pursuit of acute angles when it comes to being a band that you won’t soon forget. The perfect example is a story Coyne shared about a huge festival in Scotland in which The White Stripes were billed as the headliner, and The Flaming Lips were scheduled for the preceding slot.
“We got word that The White Stripes had to cancel because Jack White has been in an auto accident and had broken his finger or something,” Coyne explained. “The promoter asked us to headline and it was a turning point. We went out and got white trousers and put on red shirts and the very first song that we played…The White Stripes are friends of ours…we played their big hit ‘Seven Nation Army’ like it was our f***ing song! The audience went ape shit…I think doing those sorts of things endears you to that night and those people right there.”
The Flaming Lips will be releasing Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 on Friday and the Jackson stop marks the first of the band’s lengthy summer tour. For a band with fourteen studio albums plus odds and ends, curating a collection of songs is a labor of love.
“Luckily, our manager Scott Booker has kind of been obsessed with this curating this Greatest Hits stuff for probably at least ten years now,” Coyne said. “He’s the biggest fan of The Flaming Lips. Some of the songs on the Greatest Hits are absolutely impossible to find, so it was hit desire to pull those out of obscurity and get them in front of people. ‘Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear, Pt. 2’ was that way. I actually thought it was a different song and don’t have a memory of its inception.”
This is a special show for Jackson and the first time The Flaming Lips will play Wyoming. As the anticipation builds for Thursday’s show, here’s one of the most poignant lyric stanzas in the last twenty years from one of the most memorable albums of a generation, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
“Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face
Do you realize we’re floating in space,
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die
Instead of saying all of your goodbyes
Let them know you realize that life goes fast
Time to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round” ~from “Do You Realize??”
Opening the show is ambient DJ B|_ank, the project of William “Passionfruit” Hicks.
The Flaming Lips perform with B|_ank at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Center Theater. Tickets are $112-$132, and a few were still available at the time of this writing. JHCenterForTheArts.org.
