estranged4life
09-15-2006, 11:32 AM
Flaming Lips plan a spectacular arrival for tonight's city concert
Sept.15,2006 Daily Oklahoman
By Gene Triplett
Entertainment Editor
No one makes a big entrance better than The Flaming Lips. And barring any last-minute mechanical failures or blown fuses, their arrival tonight on the Zoo Amphitheatre stage should be nothing less than out of this world. Master psych-pop showman Wayne Coyne will have topped even himself, and the awestricken hometown fans will no doubt welcome back their loony local heroes with a wildly appreciative standing ovation.
Too bad customs officials at the U.S.-Canadian border weren't as happy to have them back, when the Oklahoma-bred lads were returning from a Sept. 3 gig in Montreal.
"I'll tell you something, getting back into the States is inevitably a lot worse than leaving the states," Coyne complained by cell phone while waiting his turn outside a customs station last week. "I gotta tell ya, in the early days when we would come up here in like 1985 and 1986, I mean, these customs guys, man, they would make us wait in there sometimes seven or eight hours."
Ah, but things have changed since those scuffling days when the young, unknown, ragtag garage band from Oklahoma City was clattering around the country, playing dates that barely paid for gasoline and a couple of candy bars. The unabashedly experimental, theatrically outrageous psychedelic rockers rose through the indie ranks on sheer nerve as much as talent, landing a major-label contract when one of them had the brass to make a blind phone call to Warner Bros. Records.
Their noisy underground weirdness evolved into lush, ambitious, neo-psychedelic weirdness, echoing the studio magic of The Beatles and The Beach Boys in their prime, and their lives shows — complete with volunteer dancers in furry animal costumes, hand-puppets, mirror balls, confetti cannons, fake blood and Coyne crowd-surfing in a giant space bubble — have become legend, increasingly outrageous and elaborate each time out, a surreal Disneyworld of the rock 'n' roll stage.
And now, touring behind the Lips' latest, most pointedly political album, "At War With the Mystics," Coyne is unveiling his most ambitious concert production gimmick to date, and he saved it for his friends back home.
"We've been calling it ‘the unveiling of the Mother Ship in the Mother Land,'" Coyne said, getting his mind off the Customs hassles. "People often ask, ‘Why don't you play Oklahoma City more often?' I try to tell people we play Oklahoma City when we're playing everyplace else. Not to make it less significant, but we just sort of use it as another stop on our tour.
"But at least this time I sort of feel like we're really making a bigger effort in some ways for Oklahoma City just because it can be the unveiling of this new phase of our Flaming Lips production. And so, in that way, I think it's going to work out perfect."
Coyne has been hard at work with bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins and other friends and family filming a science-fiction flick called "Christmas on Mars" in his own Oklahoma City back yard since the turn of the 21st century. Now, using some of the do-it-yourself know-how he's gained from that ongoing project, he has created the "UFO Light Show," a spectacle similar to one concocted by Parliament Funkadelic in the early '70s. "But our UFO light show sort of thing will be at the top of the (Zoo Amphitheatre) venue," Coyne said. "And if everything goes right, it'll sort of slowly descend down to the stage, and Michael and Steven and (drummer) Kliph (Scurlock) will get out of the bottom of it, and they'll go to their waiting instruments. And then I'll sort of magically appear out of the top of it in my space bubble and — if it all goes as planned — the UFO sort of tips, the front of it tips into the very front of the audience."
In this manner, Coyne will roll onto the upraised hands of the audience and go surfing along in his giant hamster ball. Then, as the band begins to play, the light-encrusted, circular "vehicle," 30 feet in diameter, rears back "kind of like a giant Ferris wheel, or a giant tarantula or something ... and then shoots all this new, sort of computer-driven freak-out of a light show that we are having strapped to the bottom of this thing.
"So it should be pretty fun," Coyne said. "I mean, it's about a quarter-million-dollars' worth of lights that we're putting on the bottom of this thing, so it should be pretty outrageous."
Certainly it will earn the Lips a warmer welcome than they received from those Customs guys at the border, who had no clue what these Okie rock weirdos were all about. All of a sudden it was like nothing had changed since 1985. Coyne had to ring off when the band was called in for baggage inspection, but he called back, as promised, a few minutes later.
"We made it through," he said. "I swear, I mean, you think they would be a little more cautious or sort of hide their hatred sometimes. They asked us, ‘You guys don't listen to that rap music, do ya?' Of course we lie and we say no, and they say, ‘You don't play any songs by the Dixie Chicks, do ya?' They really do. And you just have to answer them with a smile on your face. ‘Of course not, sir.' But they let us go, and our truck has made it through, as well. That's the worst of it."
It's the kind of mind-set the Lips rail against on such songs from the new album as the rowdy "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)" and "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)."
"I think we'd be fools to think that anybody in George Bush's administration, or anybody in the Taliban or Osama Bin Laden is going to be changed by what The Flaming Lips' view of the world is," Coyne said. "I think a lot of times when we're singing about these things, we're simply singing things that we are all thinking about, and whether that's ‘how did the universe get here, and does God exist and what is love,' I think it's as easy to ask those questions as it is to ask, ‘Is George Bush insane?' And, ‘How do we deal with this idea of giving people power who don't deserve it?'"
When he's reminded that a much warmer reception awaits him at the Zoo Amphitheatre, Coyne's mood brightens again.
"You should tell people that we're recording this Oklahoma City show as part of our live DVD, so they should come dressed in whatever they feel like ..." he said. "Tell them to dress up as their favorite comic book hero or whatever, and come to the show and let's make it one of the great shows of our career. ... Let's get a bunch of freaks out there and make a go of it, yeah."
And be sure to get there in time for the big entrance. It's bound to be a love-fest that will erase all memory of that Canadian border incident.
--------------------------
And to think, most people on both coasts think all there is to Oklahoma music is all country-Sorry, But the Flaming Lips & All-American Rejects prove otherwise.
Tickets were $20, talk about a bargain. The openings acts are Deerhoof, Stardeath and White Dwarfs.
Sept.15,2006 Daily Oklahoman
By Gene Triplett
Entertainment Editor
No one makes a big entrance better than The Flaming Lips. And barring any last-minute mechanical failures or blown fuses, their arrival tonight on the Zoo Amphitheatre stage should be nothing less than out of this world. Master psych-pop showman Wayne Coyne will have topped even himself, and the awestricken hometown fans will no doubt welcome back their loony local heroes with a wildly appreciative standing ovation.
Too bad customs officials at the U.S.-Canadian border weren't as happy to have them back, when the Oklahoma-bred lads were returning from a Sept. 3 gig in Montreal.
"I'll tell you something, getting back into the States is inevitably a lot worse than leaving the states," Coyne complained by cell phone while waiting his turn outside a customs station last week. "I gotta tell ya, in the early days when we would come up here in like 1985 and 1986, I mean, these customs guys, man, they would make us wait in there sometimes seven or eight hours."
Ah, but things have changed since those scuffling days when the young, unknown, ragtag garage band from Oklahoma City was clattering around the country, playing dates that barely paid for gasoline and a couple of candy bars. The unabashedly experimental, theatrically outrageous psychedelic rockers rose through the indie ranks on sheer nerve as much as talent, landing a major-label contract when one of them had the brass to make a blind phone call to Warner Bros. Records.
Their noisy underground weirdness evolved into lush, ambitious, neo-psychedelic weirdness, echoing the studio magic of The Beatles and The Beach Boys in their prime, and their lives shows — complete with volunteer dancers in furry animal costumes, hand-puppets, mirror balls, confetti cannons, fake blood and Coyne crowd-surfing in a giant space bubble — have become legend, increasingly outrageous and elaborate each time out, a surreal Disneyworld of the rock 'n' roll stage.
And now, touring behind the Lips' latest, most pointedly political album, "At War With the Mystics," Coyne is unveiling his most ambitious concert production gimmick to date, and he saved it for his friends back home.
"We've been calling it ‘the unveiling of the Mother Ship in the Mother Land,'" Coyne said, getting his mind off the Customs hassles. "People often ask, ‘Why don't you play Oklahoma City more often?' I try to tell people we play Oklahoma City when we're playing everyplace else. Not to make it less significant, but we just sort of use it as another stop on our tour.
"But at least this time I sort of feel like we're really making a bigger effort in some ways for Oklahoma City just because it can be the unveiling of this new phase of our Flaming Lips production. And so, in that way, I think it's going to work out perfect."
Coyne has been hard at work with bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins and other friends and family filming a science-fiction flick called "Christmas on Mars" in his own Oklahoma City back yard since the turn of the 21st century. Now, using some of the do-it-yourself know-how he's gained from that ongoing project, he has created the "UFO Light Show," a spectacle similar to one concocted by Parliament Funkadelic in the early '70s. "But our UFO light show sort of thing will be at the top of the (Zoo Amphitheatre) venue," Coyne said. "And if everything goes right, it'll sort of slowly descend down to the stage, and Michael and Steven and (drummer) Kliph (Scurlock) will get out of the bottom of it, and they'll go to their waiting instruments. And then I'll sort of magically appear out of the top of it in my space bubble and — if it all goes as planned — the UFO sort of tips, the front of it tips into the very front of the audience."
In this manner, Coyne will roll onto the upraised hands of the audience and go surfing along in his giant hamster ball. Then, as the band begins to play, the light-encrusted, circular "vehicle," 30 feet in diameter, rears back "kind of like a giant Ferris wheel, or a giant tarantula or something ... and then shoots all this new, sort of computer-driven freak-out of a light show that we are having strapped to the bottom of this thing.
"So it should be pretty fun," Coyne said. "I mean, it's about a quarter-million-dollars' worth of lights that we're putting on the bottom of this thing, so it should be pretty outrageous."
Certainly it will earn the Lips a warmer welcome than they received from those Customs guys at the border, who had no clue what these Okie rock weirdos were all about. All of a sudden it was like nothing had changed since 1985. Coyne had to ring off when the band was called in for baggage inspection, but he called back, as promised, a few minutes later.
"We made it through," he said. "I swear, I mean, you think they would be a little more cautious or sort of hide their hatred sometimes. They asked us, ‘You guys don't listen to that rap music, do ya?' Of course we lie and we say no, and they say, ‘You don't play any songs by the Dixie Chicks, do ya?' They really do. And you just have to answer them with a smile on your face. ‘Of course not, sir.' But they let us go, and our truck has made it through, as well. That's the worst of it."
It's the kind of mind-set the Lips rail against on such songs from the new album as the rowdy "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)" and "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)."
"I think we'd be fools to think that anybody in George Bush's administration, or anybody in the Taliban or Osama Bin Laden is going to be changed by what The Flaming Lips' view of the world is," Coyne said. "I think a lot of times when we're singing about these things, we're simply singing things that we are all thinking about, and whether that's ‘how did the universe get here, and does God exist and what is love,' I think it's as easy to ask those questions as it is to ask, ‘Is George Bush insane?' And, ‘How do we deal with this idea of giving people power who don't deserve it?'"
When he's reminded that a much warmer reception awaits him at the Zoo Amphitheatre, Coyne's mood brightens again.
"You should tell people that we're recording this Oklahoma City show as part of our live DVD, so they should come dressed in whatever they feel like ..." he said. "Tell them to dress up as their favorite comic book hero or whatever, and come to the show and let's make it one of the great shows of our career. ... Let's get a bunch of freaks out there and make a go of it, yeah."
And be sure to get there in time for the big entrance. It's bound to be a love-fest that will erase all memory of that Canadian border incident.
--------------------------
And to think, most people on both coasts think all there is to Oklahoma music is all country-Sorry, But the Flaming Lips & All-American Rejects prove otherwise.
Tickets were $20, talk about a bargain. The openings acts are Deerhoof, Stardeath and White Dwarfs.