Sparking mad

For a chosen few, success happens almost overnight. An approving word-of-mouth whispering campaign in the press, a mild record-company push and a killer one-riff single can often be enough to do the trick, catapulting unsuspecting bands into the stratosphere before they have even the faintest idea what’s hit them.
Others, however, have to work at it somewhat longer. And then there’s The Flaming Lips, whose path to glory has been so long and convoluted it’s quite literally a miracle that they stayed the course.
Many hotpress readers hadn’t yet seen the light of day when the Lips played their debut gig. It happened in February 1983, in (of all places) a transvestite club in Oklahoma City – a mind-boggling concept, given the singularly warped character of the vision the band and their lead singer Wayne Coyne were beginning to fashion. While it’s undergone a process of evolution all its own in the interim, the Lips’ music has retained a spiritual connection to the promising noise that poured forth at that first unveiling: a description-defying, wildly eccentric collision of post-punk death-rock and psychedelic anti-structure, as indebted to Beefheart or Sun Ra as to the Velvets or the Jesus & Mary Chain.
Promising the noise may have been, but for a long time there were few takers. From the outset the Lips’ records were always critically lauded, but in sales terms – apart from a freak Top 40 hit in 1994 with the single ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ – they could hardly get arrested for over 15 years of touring and recording, during which they seemed to inhabit (just about) the outermost reaches of the cosmic consciousness. 1999’s The Soft Bulletin – a record which seemed at the time, as hotpress’ Niall Crumlish put it, ‘to have worked out the meaning of life’ – changed all that. A work so sprawling and unruly as to make Sergeant Pepper or The White Album seem streamlined, it marked a breakthrough for the band, its at times astonishing imaginative zest winning over the indie audience that had until then stolidly resisted their charms. A latter-day psychedelic masterpiece, it is widely quoted nowadays among people’s favourite record of all time.
The follow-up, 2002’s Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, was even stranger, but it sold over a million copies notwithstanding, and completely dominated most critics’ Album of the Year polls. After years in the wilderness, there was no disputing that The Flaming Lips were now a serious proposition.
As for their new release, At War With The Mystics, it looks as if it may be the one with which The Flaming Lips go mainstream – in commercial terms, that is. With the hit single ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ as a potent trailer, it debuted at No.6 in the charts in both Ireland and the UK. And in the US, it immediately became their biggest hit yet, shooting in at No.11. Everyone is still struggling to decipher what it’s about – but there is a widespread feeling among the rock faithful who’ve newly taken the band to their collective heart, that the journey will be its own reward, a gift that never stops giving...
To say that it might never have gotten this good is to vastly understate the precariousness of the often fragile hold on things The Flaming Lips have had to live with over the years. One gets accustomed to tales of Bacchanalian debauchery on this particular circuit, but even by the skewed standards of their profession, The Flaming Lips have outdone themselves. As drummer Michael Ivins puts it, laconically: “Rock’n’roll excess? We’ve all had our moments.”
There were times when it got worse than bad. Indeed, the continuing physical existence of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd is itself a marvel: Drozd lost about 10 years to a severe heroin habit. Footage from the band’s Fearless Freaks DVD graphically shows Drozd shooting up while talking about his addiction, in a manner that seems to hint that he’s perfectly at peace with the imminence of the Reaper.
As for the main man Wayne Coyne, he’s now in the curious position of suddenly having become one of the planet’s biggest pop sensations – at the age of 45. A self-confessed acid casualty (‘I’ve had one too many bad trips, and couldn’t ever do it again if you held a gun to my head’), Coyne’s friendly countenance does have something of a back-from-Planet-Zog unruliness about it, and he’s earned every one of those grey hairs. The eyes, however, are those of a person 40 years his junior – twinkling, mischievous, gentle and constantly lighting up with wonder.
Encountering your correspondent the day after US Vice-President Dick Cheney has shot his 78-year-old mate, Coyne is still cackling with laughter at the event.
“In a sick, vicious kind of way, I can see a great deal of humour in the whole thing,” he says. “I can’t rustle up a whole lot of sympathy for the guy who was shot. If that’s the kind of thing he’s into, then it’s an occupational hazard and he shouldn’t have exposed himself to that kind of risk anyway. And bearing in mind the kind of company he keeps, I would doubt whether he’s a particularly wonderful person. They say it’s embarrassing for Cheney, but he seems to be beyond embarrassment. Or any other sort of emotion. It’s just a fucking pity he hasn’t managed to shoot Bush in the head. Or maybe he already has. It would be difficult to tell.”
Perhaps it was done in morbid tribute to William S. Burroughs?
“Maybe so. Hard to picture, though, Cheney curling up at night with a Burroughs tome in his hand. In fact, I don’t want to even think about what he curls up with at night. Actually, I met Burroughs and found him an absolute gentleman. Slightly bats, but then everybody is, and surrounded by cats which he adored. His big thing was guns, so I took the opportunity to go firing with him, which is an experience I’ll never forget.”
The old man appears to have had excellent taste in the younger acolytes he chose to sink a Scotch with: in addition to Coyne, there was Tom Waits and – I mention – Jeffrey Lee Pierce…
“I have to stop you there, man. Dying doesn’t make you a better person, and as cruel as it might sound, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a fucking drunken asshole. I’ve spoken to Nick Cave about him, they were fairly close at one stage, and I think he’d tell you the same thing. Drugs are exciting, they’re interesting, they can be a pleasure and they certainly have the power to make you see the world in a totally different light. They don’t necessarily make you any less of a person – Steven (Drozd) remained a very sweet individual the whole time he was on smack. I knew Nick while he was still on it (until 1998, despite his much-publicised late ‘80s ‘clean-up’- CF) and never found it made him obnoxious in any way. Pierce, though, I always felt crossed that line, though there’s guys out there who say he was a gem if you really knew him. There comes a point where the really cool, brave thing to do is to fight the fucking thing.”
As Coyne alludes, bandmate Drozd has provided just-about-living testimony to the extremities of utopiate peril. At the time the Lips were recording Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, very few people would have laid bets on Drozd surviving to see much of the next decade. But he’s still here.
Coyne concedes that, for a long time, he wasn’t unduly alarmed at Drozd’s choice of drug (“When Steven started doing it, it didn’t unnerve me. Fuck, we’re a rock’n’roll band looking for more intensity. Drugs are going to be part of the equation.”) The situation reached a frightening point, however, during the Yoshimi recordings when “it was starting to fuck with the band, big time. Steven looked like he could die any day, he’d turn up later and later at the studio, and it really didn’t seem to matter to him.”
What transpired may well have altered the course of the Western world’s musical history. “We were due to drive 18 hours to New York to record,” Coyne testifies. “Steven turned up five hours late. I punched him in the head a few times. I’m not saying it was right, but it was either that or throw him out of the band. I was trying to communicate that he was fucking with everybody by that point, not just himself. And he got clean right after that. I think I did the right thing, at the right time.”
As for Wayne himself, the singer has taken far fewer drugs than people might assume, going by his song titles. The way he tells it, a couple of bouts with acid in the mid-80s pretty much cured him for life.
Flashback (if you’ll forgive the segue) to September 1999, when the band were in town to play the Olympia Theatre as part of the Soft Bulletin tour. Hot Press’ Peter Murphy met Coyne for a pow-wow in the band’s dressing room and enquired of the singer if he thought that LSD aggravates subliminal fears and phobias. Coyne didn’t mince his words in response.
“I think acid exaggerates it to the point where you’re just flat wrong. I mean, if you could keep your knowledge of the situation intact, I think you could easily say, ‘Oh, that’s just the acid and I’m not really losing my mind’. I think now I could separate the two and clearly say, ‘Oh, obviously this is some hallucination… even my emotions could be an hallucination because I’ve taken this drug’.
“But I guess that’s one of the big fears, losing control over the only thing you have control over, your thoughts. But honestly, even from doing Zaireeka [the Lip’s 1997 concept album, which spreads the music across four CDs, to be played simultaneously], I don’t fear it as much anymore. I guess I used to fear it because I thought: The Bad Insanity! Y’know, where you shit yourself and you kill people. Now I don’t think that’s the only way you can be insane, it could actually be quite pleasant: ‘Oh, everything’s great!’ I think there’s probably a million different ways a person could go insane.”
Has he ever had any kind of psychotic episode?
“I had a slight run-in with what I would consider more of a nervous breakdown, where there’s a lot of things happening in your life, as if you’re juggling plates, and you get to the point where you have about seven or eight of them going and you really can’t get one more in there, and then one more comes and it kinda falls apart.
“There was a time, in late 1996, my father was dying of cancer, it was a long, long descent until his death into the worst part of winter. And I was doing a lot of these experimental shows (The Parking Lot/Boombox Experiments), and it took a lot of my concentration because it wasn’t as though I had a lot of people believing in what I was doing. Like, with touring you have so many people helping you, record companies, even people like you who are interested in what we do – it gives you more belief that what you’re doing is alright. But when I was doing those Parking Lot Experiments at the very beginning, I couldn’t really let anybody in on what I was trying to do, and I was juggling all this stuff in my head.
“So I had all these things going on within my life and family and everything, and I did have a couple of days where I felt that I must be close to what madness is. But I realised it wasn’t actually madness, it was probably just being tired and not having things sorted in my own head.”
Sounds pretty scary all the same. What did it feel like?
“It felt to me that I couldn’t understand my own thoughts. It started when I was watching TV and people were talking and I knew what they were saying sounded right, but I couldn’t understand it. And it was a kind of shocking couple of moments where I sat there like, ‘That can’t be good’… but I couldn’t even think that. But when (normality) returned, I felt, ‘Boy, isn’t it nice to be able to feel your own thoughts?!!’ You take so much for granted, that you can understand when your own mind is talking to itself. And to not have that for even just a couple of seconds was like, ‘Wooah!’”
Hence songs like ‘The Spark That Bled’ off The Soft Bulletin, containing a split-second epiphany, which opens out into a full-blown panoramic/paranoiac fantasy sequence.
“It’s that whole realm of an idea in a split second,” Coyne says. “A realisation, even if it’s just a millisecond of thought. I did an experiment on myself once, almost by accident. I always wondered, you know sometimes you can fall asleep and have these dreams that seem to last a year. You’re placed in this thing where there’s characters and a plot and everything, and you wake up and realise, ‘Gosh, I was only asleep for a couple of minutes’.
“But one time I fell asleep in the back of the van, and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was just beginning (sings instrumental intro). And it goes through just that one time before John Lennon starts to sing. I timed it, it’s a little over six seconds, not quite seven. And in that time I had one of these expansive Stanley Kubrick type dreams, the whole thing started and ended, and I woke up and John Lennon was just starting to sing. And it let me know that sparks happen in your head that, under the microscope of your mind, can become years and years of something visual. It’s just crazy how much can be compacted into so little time.”
Crazy indeed.
The same principle might apply to the Flaming Lips’ career, a marathon by some standards, until you realise how far they’ve come and how many uncompromising and frequently astonishing records they’ve made, evolving from a scuzzy little death rock band from Oklahoma to a musical take on The Wizard Of Oz as envisioned by the aforementioned Stanley.
“Some of that early stuff, I think it shows enthusiasm over all obstacles,” Coyne says. “We just thought, ‘If we have enough enthusiasm, we’ll make it through’. We’ve always felt totally insecure. If we played with bands like The Butthole Surfers or The Jesus Lizard, we would feel like novices compared to them. But little by little I sort of felt like they froze in time and after a while I got kind of bored with it. And somehow I think that was the only bonus to not being particularly good at one thing: we had to keep moving on.”
As already stated, The Soft Bulletin was a quantum sonic leap from earlier (but also inspired) records like Hit To Death In The Future Head, Transmissions From the Satellite Heart and Clouds Taste Metallic.
“The first time I heard that album I was absolutely floored,” recalls David Katznelson, the A&R man who convinced Warner Music to take a chance on the Lips in the early ‘90s (not long after he had tried, unsuccessfully, to talk his bosses into signing a pre-Nevermind Nirvana). “I had always known Wayne was working towards something, there had always been an element of progress in his songwriting. You could see that even with Zaireeka, which we only approved because the band promised it would come out of the same budget as The Soft Bulletin. But this brought his songwriting to a whole new level.”
A dreamy meditation on life and death, The Soft Bulletin was gestating while Coyne’s father was dying, Katznelson recalls. “My sister-in-law was also very ill at that time and subsequently died. I remember Wayne and I having lots of very deep conversations about the meaning of existence. There are some songs on that album – to this day when I hear them I just sort of seize up.”
The record kicked off with the one of the Lips’ best loved tunes, the monumental ‘Race For The Prize’ an uplifting hymn of praise to, of all things, scientists, physicists, doctors and all manner of men in long white coats.
“I mean to heighten the drama somewhat in that song, so that by the time I say, ‘With wives and children’ I crush you, you know what I mean?” Coyne chuckles. “You can do that with songs and movies and stories, you can compact a lot of stuff into a real short amount of time and it can move you. But I try to remind people that creativity is everywhere you look. Especially in a town like Dublin, when you look around and see the architecture. This all starts with big ideas… your sewer systems, y’know, that’s creativity. I think because being a scientist or a teacher or someone like that doesn’t have a lot of drama, no one wants to pay attention to it because it’s not sexy, and they don’t wear weird clothes or whatever. But people who think about the mechanisms of how the imagination works see it in everything.
“I say this a lot, but I do think that people overexaggerate the extraordinary life that they don’t have. They think, ‘It must be just celebrities and people who are dropped out of UFOs who have these extraordinary lives’, and I try and tell them, ‘Everyday life, just by waking up and looking around and being alive, you’re already living an extraordinary life. All you have to do is sit around for a couple of minutes and it starts to happen’. And the drama will happen to everyone eventually, your own life becomes the most dramatic thing that will happen because it’s happening to you. The tragedies, the drama, the boredom, all those things will come to you and you’ll live this life that you read about or see in movies and stuff… only it lasts longer!
“And so that’s what I put into our songs a lot of times, just saturating everyday life, analysing it as if it was a novel: ‘Oh, these moments, what are they really made of?’ In songs you can do that. Something it would take me a year to explain to you with just conversation, when the music’s playing and the mood is there, you feel as though you understand it. Now, maybe when the music stops, you don’t understand it again! But sometimes, as long as the parts are hovering in your mind, you go, ‘Oh yeah, I get it’. And I think sometimes that’s the power of music.
“I’ve been lucky that some of the things I’ve latched onto, like love and death and trying to understand the universe and stuff like that, are things you can spend years and years thinkin’ about without feeling you’re running up against a wall. And I do see now how it’s all so temporary. I mean, even your state of mind is a temporary thing.”
Speaking of temporal-spatial relationships, Coyne’s former bandmate and Mercury Rev leader Jonathan Donahue gave an interview to HP last year in which he ruminated almost exclusively on quantum physics, a past preoccupation of both Coyne and Lips producer David Fridmann (see panel). When Wayne is pushed to ponder whether he’d side with Einstein’s theories of past, present and future co-existing in four-dimensional space-time, or the Quantum Physics school of chronological time as a river, he arrives upon the unlikely analogy of Lou Reed.
“I was talking to someone about Lou Reed,” he says, “and how what Lou Reed used to stand for and what he stands for now are different things. Meaning itself is temporary. The Lou Reed that stands in front of you today doesn’t mean what that old Lou Reed in the Velvets did. That guy doesn’t actually exist anymore. He’s still Lou Reed, but he doesn’t mean what he used to, and it is weird how if something goes on too long, it sort of loses its meaning.
“Y’know, it’s only in art that you can be in competition with your own ideas. I mean, it’s fucked up. With some bands, like The Rolling Stones for example, I think they just surrender to it, they don’t seem like they even want to beat their old stuff. But it’s probably not a horrible existence. I guess it’s better for people to have at least at one time understood you.”

So now, replete with a new cleaned-up Drozd, the Flaming Lips continue to soar skywards on their own, extremely singular, wavelength. At War With The Mystics is a feast for the aurals. Terminal nitpickers might argue that the ‘yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah (repeat ad infinitum)’ backing vocals to the appositely-titled opener ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ are misjudged at best and infuriating at worst, but there’s so much going on elsewhere that we can afford them forgiveness.
They are, after all, on the side of the angels. Last January, Coyne delivered At War With The Mystics’ mission statement when he told MTV: “There’s a line on (‘The Sound Of Failure/It’s Dark…Is It Always This Dark?’) that goes, ‘So go tell Britney and go tell Gwen’. What I’m railing against is this preternaturally happy music sung by kids and written by 40-year-old Swedish men. And in between them there’s this void. I guess the worst offender is like the Black Eyed Peas or Destiny’s Child, where they’re going, ‘I’m a survivor, I’m gonna make it’, and I’m like, ‘Well, you’re 20, what are you going to survive? Getting a bikini wax this weekend?’”
The album is discreetly political (read between the lines and you will find a great deal that is anti-Bush). This, says David Katznelson, reflects Coyne’s growing acceptance that, somewhere along the way to 2006, he became a public figure.
“He’ll deny it if you ask him straight out, but Wayne has always been a very political, very philosophical. He’s been on this religious trip. As he has acquired a higher profile, I think he has recognised that this brings with it a responsibility, that there are subjects on which he should comment.”
Having studiously been ignored by the mainstream media for 20 years, Coyne’s stock is now sufficiently high that Playboy are ringing him up to ask him how he lost his virginity, and what him and the missus get up to between the sheets.
Regarding the former, Hugh Hefner’s minion was given the low-down: “I think I was 16. I’d gotten this job working as a cook at Long John Silver’s. This woman I knew from high school, who I ended up going out with and living with for four years, came by one night during the summer with a couple of her friends. They were drunk, and it happened about five hours later at her house. Steely Dan played in the background, and I did the best I could.
“The act itself is great, but it’s the waiting for it, and the getting ready, and the foreplay that really excites me,” he said, addressing the latter part of the query. “I suppose I fall into Sting’s tantric sex category. I like a show. I like high heels and all that sort of junk. Dark hose. New places, like the kitchen, the living room, a hotel room, the car. For me, it’s all about the new, the unexpected. If you do it the same way all the time it gets boring.”
A philosophy that applies equally to his band’s music.
Rough, ragged and more conventionally ‘rock’-y than either of its immediate precursors, At War With The Mystics will hopefully lay rest to perceptions of The Flaming Lips as any sort of happy-dippy, tree-hugging hippies. As Coyne knows all too well: “The world is a vicious, unfeeling, uncaring place. It eats people alive. We’re not like Bill Withers waking up and thinking, ‘What a lovely day’. But we do aspire to see the beauty and wonder in the world, and maybe even reflect some of it.”