Interview with the Flaming Lips

Quote  “If we could put music into a soda bottle and you poured it into your ear to listen to it, I would do that.” - Wayne Coyne

By Linda Laban

The summer festival season is here and there’s no doubting who is the ultimate summer festival band -- yep, the Flaming Lips. The Oklahoma fearless freaks know how to throw a party and have always been very creative with their live shows.  Confetti guns: check. Dressing road crew and lucky audience members in furry animal costumes: check. Front man Wayne Coyne walking on the crowd in a giant bubble: check. This summer sees the band mixing regular shows with whole album performances of their ‘90s classic “The Soft Bulletin” and their idiosyncratic cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

This year saw the band getting equally creative with their record releases, too. Around Valentines, they initiated a little brotherly love-in by transferring the idea behind ‘90s “Zaireeka” boom box experiment to cell phone. In spring, they offered music-laden flash drives embedded in a skull made of the stuff Gummy Bears are made from. Then there’s the various 12inch EPS in colored vinyl hand-chosen by Coyne, who actually went to the record plant to mix it himself.

Coyne takes time out to talk to KOvideo about what makes him tick and to warn us against eating too many Gummy Bears.

The Flaming Lips are always doing lots of wild, weird, wonderful things. It’s partly because that’s who you are and partly your work, and it’s wholly art. But what is amazing is this continuance; you guys just don’t seem to stop.

I know. I think that’s my greatest attribute that I actually want to do it. I LIKE to do it. I get great satisfaction and joy in just doing something. That doesn’t mean there isn’t the pain, hassle, and the work, But my attitude is bring it on, I want to do that. That’s the thing I have. It doesn’t always have to get results, but the willingness to try and not be worried about whether it’s going to be the greatest thing ever is probably the only way you’re going to get to accidentally stumble on some very great things. I’m willing to try.

Are you a fidget?

No, no. I think I’m obsessed. I can understand that it might seem like it, but it’s not that I’m a fidget. I fall into a lower rung in that I just get obsessed with shit.

The cell phone music download you did earlier this year, it follows on from the "Zaireeka" boombox experiment as a sonic social experience and it takes advantage of the social media phenomenon of this past decade.

That’s a great way to put it. That’s exactly right. It requires that you have friends and they like doing things with you and you have some phones. You have the ability to hang out with people and have experiences. There’s a lot of things that we do with music, but this requires that you are engaged and not just listening to it. That’s the experience I’m offering. Some people love music; they want to make music or art. But some people are looking for a colorful experience to do together.

Now, giant gummy skulls with flash drive brains, what is that about?

When you put it bluntly that way it really sounds cool. I thought it would be great to release music once a month in a different way. I didn’t know how we’d do it, but I wanted to do it via some other vehicle other than putting it on iTunes or YouTube and saying, ‘Look, here it is folks’. So I thought it should be in these objects. Not knowing what these objects were going to be, I went to the first thing I always start with: the psychedelic medium of color, death, and all that stuff. So, we started off with the idea of skulls. I think in the beginning we were into making rubber skulls that smelled like bubblegum. Then I thought why don’t we make bubblegum skulls and you eat your way in to retrieve this flash drive with the music.  The bubble gum people were very difficult and didn’t want to do anything different. But there is a gummy bear company out of North Carolina who were already doing weird thing like giant Gummy Bears. We thought of doing a Gummy Bear with a flash drive in its brain.

A gummy bear with a brain, that’s quite something.

[Laughs.] The Gummy Bear plant owner was already a Lips fan, so he was into it. That always helps when you can find like-minded weirdoes who own a giant candy factory already. 

How do you find these people, or do they find you?

We found the Gummy Bear factory online and he was into it. He just happened to be a fan of the band. It’s experimental on the same level that we make the music sometimes. You know, we wanted to make a movie and it took us a long time to make the one we made. People make movies all the time…

But not in their back yard, like you did with “Christmas on Mars.”

Yeah, but I don’t really want to go to Hollywood. I want to make it with my friends, my way. It would probably never be anything like anything anyone else would make. To me, that’s important, that’s where I’m coming from. We’ve talked about all the different ways to deliver music. If we could put music into a soda bottle and you poured it into your ear to listen to it, I would do that.

One problem, you have to eat your way to the flash drive to get it.

It took 20 minutes to get to it. But we wanted to see if the flash drive would survive. It did. We are going to suggest that you eat it with a lot of other people. That’s a lot of Gummy Bear getting into your lower intestine. It’s not good; I’ve eaten that much before.

What occasion prompted you to eat that many Gummy Bears?

About ten years ago we used to buy gummy bears in five pounds bags and you sit around watching movies with your friends and you eat them two or three at a time. Do that for eight hours in a row and before you know it, you’ve eaten five pounds of them! It’s like, ‘Oh, my god!’ You end up with this unmovable blockage. Once that happens you never forget it.

The mind boggles… It all sounds very expensive, this innovation, though.

It would be if you didn’t have a market for it, but we’re doing it knowing that we have a certain volume of stuff that’ll sell. And we already have lots of people who help us do things, so that makes it faster and cheaper.

There’s so much chaos and violence in the world, how do you manage to stay so positive and lighthearted?

This is a very Lips type quagmire. We accept who we are and we don’t know whether we’re good or bad. There’s part of us that we think, I don’t want to be like that. There are parts of us that we change and we grow. But how much of it do we try to change? That’s the existential struggle.

It seems to be an evolutionary struggle. Will it be all right in the end, though?

It probably will be all right in the end if we understand that the end means the unavoidable and the end means that in five thousand years from now people live in peace. I don’t know. I question it all. It all seems so connected. But I really don’t know.

The Flaming Lips summer tour dates are as follows:

• 6/11 Santa Rosa, CA Harmony Festival
• 6/14 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Special performance of “The Soft Bulletin”)
• 6/15 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Special performance of “Dark Side of the Moon”)
• 6/17 Las Vegas, NV The Cosmopolitan
• 6/24 Atlantic City, NJ
• 6/30 St Austell, Cornwall, UK Eden Project
• 7/1 London, UK Alexandra Palace, ATP (Special performance of “The Soft Bulletin”)
• 7/2 Cheshire, UK Jodrell Bank
• 7/5 Ottawa, ON Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest
• 7/7 & 7/8 Chicago, IL Aragon Ballroom (Special performances of “The Soft Bulletin”)
• 7/9 Milwaukee, WI Summerfest
• 7/10 Chicago, IL (Special performance of “Dark Side of the Moon”)
• 7/27 Boston, MA Bank of America Pavilion
• 7/28 Holmdel, NJ PNC Bank Arts Center
• 7/29 Wantagh, NY Nikon at Jones Beach Theater
• 7/31 Montreal, QC Osheaga Festival (Special performance of “The Soft Bulletin”)
• 8/3 Morrison, CO Red Rocks Amphitheatre (Special performance of “Dark Side of the Moon”)
• 8/4 Council Bluffs, IA Harrah's Council Bluffs
• 8/5 Kansas City, KS Kansrocksas Festival
• 8/6 Tulsa, OK Brady District Block Party
• 8/20 Somerset, WI Sound Town Festival, Somerset Amphitheater
• 9/10 Raleigh, NC Hopscotch Festival
• 9/16 Telluride, CO Telluride Blues & Brews Festival