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| PAST MUSIC REVIEWS | MORE REVIEWS |
Of Parking Lots, Boom Boxes, And True
Genius
A sporadic history of the Flaming Lips
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"To see a World in a Grain of Sand |
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— Mr. Blake |
SEEDS OF GENIUS (bubble machines, laser lights)
When I was in college, I was cool. I was the front man for a cool and ridiculous speed metal band. I owned all sorts of cool and obscure Sonic Youth EP's. Heck, I even had live bootleg tapes of the Smiths and the Velvet Underground! I was so cool my college gave me $14,000 a year to hire bands to come play on campus. We got Tad, Camper Van Beethoven, and a bunch of other cool obscure bands that were so cool and obscure you wouldn't know them so don't even think that you might. But the coolest of the cool bands ever to play my remote college was the Flaming Lips.
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They showed up at the appointed venue (a fraternity house) four hours before the gig, having driven straight from their home in Norman, Oklahoma. After the show, they packed up their van and immediately drove fourteen straight hours back through Oklahoma to a show in California the next night. It was obvious that the Flaming Lips were not messing around. As they began unloading their over-packed Econoline, we watched in awe as the props rolled in: smoke machine, bubble machine, laser lights, flood lights, disco globes, swirling psychedelic lights, and homemade pyrotechnics. The bass player controlled the entire light show with his left foot via a fourteen-switch control pedal he had built himself. The show was loud, indistinct, and non-stop. Even though I knew all the songs, the band would be a good three or four minutes into a new song before I'd recognize that they had emerged from their inter-song sound swirl and were now actually playing organized music.
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My speed metal band opened for the Flaming Lips that night (hey, I got to hire all the bands, remember). We pulled out all our best stops: flowered tights, the oversized painting of Peter Frampton, the papier-mâché bull's head, and a 20-minute version of Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song". Then the Flaming Lips got up and just blew us away. We weren't even close. That was back in 1989, before "She Don't Use Jelly" (the Vaseline song) was even a concept in guitarist Wayne Coyne's mind. Even then, we knew that this strange trio from Oklahoma was bound for greatness, well beyond a mere MTV hit and a cameo appearance on 90215 or whatever the name of that TV show is.
ROOTS OF GENIUS (parking lots, boom boxes)
Fast forward to 1996. The Flaming Lips have been together for 13 years. They are on Warner Bros. Records. They've had a radio hit. They've sold lots of albums. They've been noisy. They've been weird. They've been silly. They've been bubblegum. So what's left to do but begin experimenting with multiple sound sources, listener participation, and new dimensions of sound? What lofty musicians like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Brian Eno had been theorizing for years, Flaming Lips guitarist/singer Wayne Coyne would bring to pass in an Oklahoma City parking lot.
