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LIP SERVICE

By Steffie Corcoran

November/December 2005

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Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of Oklahoma City’s Flaming Lips, where dancing furries, intergalactic battles, and state pride find expression in the psychedelic wonderland of Oklahoma’s—some might say the world’s—greatest rock band.

 

This is an Oklahoma rock-and-roll story. Unlike an Oklahoma country music story, this one won’t have honky-tonks, two-steppin’, or songs about loving this or that bar. It will have more references to outer space than you can count on a Martian’s hand, a herd of animal costumes, a lead singer who worked eleven years as a fry cook at Long John Silver’s, and really, really weird song titles.

 

The songs themselves are likely to be about the defining human preoccupations: love and loss, life and death, a Japanese civil servant adept in the martial arts fighting soulless pink machines determined to destroy humanity.

 

If the last example comes as a surprise, you’re not a Flaming Lips fan—at least not yet. Their music may be as ever-evolving, unpredictable, and fanciful as the members of this Oklahoma City-based trio themselves, but the Flaming Lips saga is pure Oklahoma, grounded in work ethic, individuality, and that particular brand of good-natured affability and genuine kindness Oklahomans are known for the world over.

 

The Flaming Lips consist of leader/frontman Wayne Coyne, forty-four; bassist/soundman Michael Ivins, forty-two; and guitarist/drummer/keyboardist Steven Drozd, thirty-six. The graying hair (Wayne and Steven), shiny pate (Michael), and faint crow’s-feet (all three) hint that these are no spring chickens, especially in the beautiful people-filled world of the top-tier music industry. But the Flaming Lips are a far cry from geezer rock, longtime critical darlings peaking when most rock bands are gearing up for their first reunion tour.

 

It’s important to note that the Lips are darlings a couple of blips under the radar screen of massively popular, heavy-MTV-rotation, multiplatinum-selling artists like Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. The band’s followers are nevertheless cultlike in their devotion and loyalty to the Lips, whose every move they anticipate and embrace. Nor are those fans limited to the States; they stretch to Canada, Europe, and Japan.

 

The sometimes fickle, difficult-to-please music community has been drooling over the Lips since the 1990 release of In a Priest Driven Ambulance, their last album on the indie Restless label prior to being signed by Warner Bros. Records. That acclaim has picked up steam over the years, as the Lips’ body of work has grown and broadened and lead Lip Wayne Coyne’s concepts have come to fruition in critical masterpieces like The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002), one track of which earned the band a Grammy. Since the Yoshimi album, their first gold record, the band’s been busier, and more popular, than ever.

 

A steady stream of projects has kept the Flaming Lips in the public eye and endeared them to a new generation of fans. Among them are the spring 2005 rockumentary, The Fearless Freaks (billed as "the wondrously improbable story of the Flaming Lips") by Lips cinematographer and independent filmmaker Bradley Beesley; singles on the SpongeBob SquarePants and Wedding Crashers soundtracks; a "Bohemian Rhapsody" cover on Killer Queen, a new Queen tribute album; the August release of the band’s music video collection on DVD; raves over their infrequent but notorious live shows; and ever-louder buzz on the upcoming CD, At War With the Mystics, and Coyne’s years-in-the-making art-rock flick, Christmas on Mars.

 

Add fans like Chris Martin of Coldplay, Jack White of the White Stripes, Beck, and Justin Timberlake and a big-time record label that believes in them and funds their projects accordingly, and what results is a band with legs and long-term cred where it counts—among loyal fans and those on the inside of the cutthroat, here-one-day, gone-the-next music industry.

 

Thanks to You

Like most successful enterprises, the Flaming Lips are a team effort, aided by a handful of veteran insiders. "All the right people loved the Lips, and that’s been their blessing since day one," says manager Scott Booker. "We’re all part of this strange team of either converts or slaves, or both."

 

Booker, a Midwest City native, has been a Lips fan since he and friends wandered into a Halloween night show in 1985 after a Sting concert at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman. His friends took one look around the nearly empty venue, shook their heads at the Lips’ noisy, virtually unrecognizable cover of Sting’s song, "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free," and left. Booker stayed.

 

"I loved it," he says. "From that show forward, there wasn’t a Lips show within a hundred-mile radius I haven’t seen, probably to this date."

Within a few years, Booker started booking the band after manager and Coyne flame Michele Vlasimsky moved to California. After Vlasimsky quit the band for good in 1989, Booker took the helm in an unofficial capacity, soon playing a role in securing the Lips’ $175,000 advance from Warner Bros. Records after their signing to the label in 1991. To the band members, who each had been scraping by on $5,000 a year or less, the advance was a mother lode. It wasn’t long before Booker became the Flaming Lips’ official manager at the urging of Roberta Petersen, the Warner Bros. Records A&R rep who signed the band.

 

"I’m the guy who talks people into giving us money," Booker says. "It’s all logical. I go to them with very specific numbers. It’s a win-win: Wayne has the freedom to be as crazy as he can be with the art, and I look like a genius convincing people to do these crazy things."

There’s more than one Coyne preoccupied with art. Wayne’s wife, photographer J. Michelle Martin-Coyne, has been riding the Lips wave since she met the charismatic singer while working at the Lovelight deli in Norman in 1987. The two quickly bonded, sharing ideas about art and life and taking long drives along miles of Oklahoma road.

 

Martin-Coyne, a Bethany native, was in art school at the University of Oklahoma, and her access to the department’s cameras and darkroom came in handy for the Lips, always in need of photos for albums and flyers. She’s been taking pictures of them ever since.

Michelle Martin-Coyne is the kind of woman who offers guests to the Coyne compound—a big, funky house built in 1936 that Coyne bought from HUD for $20,000 cash in 1992—a popsicle and who, at thirty-seven, looks fantastic in a short skirt and platform shoes.

In 2004, she collaborated with rock photographer Jay Blakesberg on a coffee-table book, Waking up With a Placebo Headwound: Images of the Flaming Lips From the Archives of Jay Blakesberg and J. Michelle Martin-Coyne—1987-2004, and since then, she’s had solo exhibitions in Venice, California, and Norman, with one planned for 2006 in London.

 

"It’s become a visual diary of my life," she says.

 

Coyne appreciates his wife for more than her photographic contributions. "I think Michelle saved me from the unknowns of the rock-and-roll lifestyle," he says. "Luckily, she was drawn to a freaky artist guy."

 

Martin-Coyne has, in addition to her critically acclaimed photography, become known as a stabilizing, nurturing force in the Lips world, always striving to beautify things at the inner-city compound in the rough-around-the-edges Classen Ten Penn neighborhood, feeding the troops, and helping out on video shoots and live shows. Sure, she’s a rock-and-roll wife, but she’s still a wife.

 

"When I talk to my girlfriends, we have the same issues as everybody else," she says. "The only thing we have that they don’t is strangers coming over and feeling right at home. When you’re mad at your husband and a car full of teenagers comes by and wants to go on about how he’s the greatest person that ever lived, it’s annoying."

 

The Fearless Freaks rockumentary is a big part of the reason total strangers hunt Coyne down at home: The film shows the street signs marking the corner of the Coyne compound. The movie, whose title derives from the name of the Coyne brothers’ childhood football team, premiered last spring at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, and has been wowing the critics ever since. In the New York Times, Dana Stevens said, "Mr. Beesley...achieves a level of intimacy with the band members that most rock documentary directors can only dream of."

 

It’s no wonder: Austin-based Beesley, a Moore native, has been filming the band since 1992. He hooked up with the Lips after Michelle Martin realized he, also an OU art school student, had access to the department’s motion picture film camera. The band needed music videos, too.

Beesley has contributed to fourteen Flaming Lips music videos, some as cameraman, some as assistant director. "Wayne doesn’t really like to rock the boat," Beesley says. "He finds somebody he likes to work with, whether his wife, his bass player, his manager, or in my case freelance filmmaker, and just sticks with it."

 

Coyne and Beesley have been collaborating on Christmas on Mars since Coyne started making the futuristic, twisted existential art film in his backyard in 2001. Working with the Lips, Beesley says, is something of an anomaly.

 

"What’s always amazed me about my professional relationship with the Flaming Lips is that our conversations are never about money," says Beesley, whose previous film, Okie Noodling, garnered rave reviews and took home honors from the 2001 SXSW film festival. "I always get a check in the end, and it’s always more than I thought. But it’s never been talked about, ever, in fifteen years. There’s a working model in place, and that model is trust."

 

Perhaps nowhere is that trust more evident than between the band and Warner Bros. Records, with whom they’ve released six albums (seven, counting the upcoming At War With the Mystics) and another dozen or so singles and EPs since 1991.

 

Not only that, the label has funded several of Coyne’s more outlandish capers, including the infamous and oft-discussed four-disc set, 1997’s Zaireeka, in which each disc is to be played simultaneously from a different stereo, all within listening range of one another.

 

Inspired by the Lips’ Parking Lot experiments of the midnineties—where Coyne conducted the stereos of forty cars, the vehicle owners his makeshift orchestra—Zaireeka was a truly vanguard exploration for modern music and far exceeded the record label’s expectations, selling a stunning 40,000 units.

 

Why would a major label that fetches multimillions in sales for records by Madonna, Faith Hill, and Green Day support an esoteric, experimental band like the Lips?

 

Tom Biery, senior vice president and head of promotion for Warner Bros. Records, who first listened to the Lips as an "indie rock kid" in Youngstown, Ohio, has an idea. "Magically, the Lips have always either been under the radar or way above its center. They knew at moments in our corporate history when to duck, and they knew when it was time to do whatever it was they were doing," he says.

 

Scott Booker has another explanation for why Warner Bros. Records has been so stalwart in their support of the band, including tough-to-market projects like Zaireeka: "Warner Bros. knew that they would look very cool doing it. And in the record business, being cool is worth a lot of money," he says matter-of-factly.

 

Michael, Time to Wake Up

The aura of coolness surrounding the Flaming Lips is far from a one-Coyne venture. The Flaming Lips are a trio, and Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd are huge parts of the Lips’ ongoing success.

 

One day in 1983, twenty-two-year-old Wayne Coyne showed up at Michael Ivins’s house in Oklahoma City and asked if he had a bass. Ivins answered in the affirmative, but after the first practice, it was clear that he wasn’t any good. Never one to let minor details interfere with a larger goal, Coyne didn’t consider that a problem since he was no whiz on the guitar, either. The two not only struck up a friendship but a band, and twenty-two years later, both are still going strong.

 

Between 1983 and 1991, Flaming Lips musicians came and went, with the exception of two constants: Coyne and Ivins. A textbook odd couple, Ivins is the steady-she-goes introvert to Coyne’s mercurial, expressive extrovert.

 

"You pick a friend, and you have adventures together," says Coyne. "Without giving it too much serious thought, Michael and I ended up going through things in life that have bonded us forever. Michael is proof of the obligation to care about each other."

 

"Michael’s incredibly brilliant," says Jim DeRogatis, music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of the forthcoming Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips (Broadway Books, Spring 2006). He offers a Biblical metaphor by way of explaining Ivins’s role: "Christ gets all the publicity; he’s the guy up on the cross. But Peter’s the guy who did all the work putting the church together. It’s not the Lips without those two."

 

DeRogatis also notes that Ivins graduated at the top of his class from Classen High School in Oklahoma City in 1981 with the kind of brains that could have led to success in any field.

 

"I try to do what needs to be done," Ivins says with characteristic understatement.

 

In addition to playing bass, Ivins is the computerized sound guru and excels at mixing the results of his, Coyne’s, and Drozd’s creative output ("I’m totally into that stuff, yeah," Ivins says).

 

"He’s always been more technically minded than the other fellows," says Dave Fridmann of Tarbox Road Studios in New York, coproducer of the last six Lips albums and the forthcoming At War With the Mystics. "You can ask him to do something that seems impossible and ask him to do it perfectly a million times. No problem."

 

After living in Oklahoma City for more than twenty years, Ivins married and, with wife Catherine, eventually moved to Bellevue, Kentucky, to be near her family. But between stints at Tarbox, Oklahoma City, and live shows, he spends half the year away from home. "I’ve always subscribed to the ‘No matter where you go, there you are’ philosophy," he says.

 

Waitin’ for a Superman

Steven Drozd grew up outside Houston in a house filled with music ranging from country and western and Motown to heavy metal and bubblegum pop. At eleven, he began playing drums in his father’s polka band. But Drozd had the heart of a rocker.

 

"Even though I loved my sister’s Bee Gees records, my mom’s Roberta Flack stuff, and my dad’s Waylon Jennings, the thing I wanted to play was rock and roll," he says. "I wanted to be a rock-and-roll dude."

 

With his father and stepmother, Drozd moved to Lawton in 1985, later graduating from Lawton Eisenhower High School. Eventually he made his way to Norman, drumming for a band called Janis 18. Shortly after they broke up, Coyne asked Drozd if he’d like to set up some drums and jam with the Lips, who had recently experienced yet another personnel change.

 

"They were my favorite band," says Drozd, a friendly, life-of-the-party kind of guy, who, with wife Becky, is the first to have Lips offspring. (The couple’s baby boy was born in September.) "How could I turn that down? It all happened really fast. There was no ‘You’re officially in the band.’ That never happened."

 

He has a lock on job security these days. The Lips sound of 1991, when Drozd came on board, and forward has been enriched and enlivened by his instrumental virtuosity, which, Coyne and Ivins quickly discovered, wasn’t limited to percussion but included keyboards and guitar as well. These days, Drozd doesn’t pound the skins at live Lips gigs (that’s become former roadie Kliph Scurlock’s job) but hops from keyboard to several guitars and back again, sporting a pink elephant costume.

 

The words musical genius have been directed at Drozd at an accelerated pace since the orchestral extravagances of The Soft Bulletin and the more playful electronic symphonies of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

 

"Steven is a great interpreter of Wayne’s ideas and has many of his own," says Dave Fridmann. "He has the ability to come up with sounds and chord structures put together in ways I haven’t heard before."

 

Drozd’s main contribution is to the band’s musical compositions rather than lyrics, which Coyne handles. But it’s the interaction of all the moving parts—music, lyrics, engineering, production—that makes it all happen with such synchronistic success.

 

Drozd says, "I can bring in a song like ‘Race for the Prize,’ and it’s a pretty instrumental thing. Then Wayne puts the lyrics to it, and we record it with Dave Fridmann and Michael at the studio proper. Then it’s got artwork, all this imagery, and a video attached to it. It becomes something that—it sounds hokey—can really affect people’s lives. And I get to feel like, hey, man, this is something; this is mine. I get to be the musician guy in the band."

 

Coyne, for one, wasn’t looking for the kind of magic Drozd brought to the Lips table. "I’m easily satisfied," he says. "He could’ve been a third as good, and I would’ve thought he was the greatest thing ever. But given that I have someone like Steven, I go for the moon. Nothing can stop me."

 

Brainville

Getting a handle on the particular, and peculiar, combination of creativity, positive energy, leadership, generosity, and work ethic that makes up Wayne Michael Coyne is no mean task. Most claim to never have met anyone like the always-working, always-thinking, always-creating son of Oklahoma, for whom the state’s motto, Labor Conquers All Things, seems especially fitting.

 

Whatever it is, Coyne’s older sister Lynda Cole says it started early.

 

"Wayne could draw from the time he could pick up a crayon," says Cole, a longtime Oklahoma City resident who moved to Iowa after her 1999 marriage. "There was a ton of paper around and pencils, crayons, paints. My dad would always say, ‘Does this stuff need to be all over the house?’ and our mom would say, ‘It’s for their creativeness.’ She didn’t want to tame it down; she wanted it to come out as big as it could."

 

It flowed from son Wayne, fifth of six Coyne children. By age ten, Cole says, her dad was commissioning portraits of his clients’ children, drawn by Wayne in pastels for ten dollars each.

 

Whether Dolly Coyne cheering on Wayne’s creativity, Tom Coyne taking advantage of an entrepreneurial opportunity, or either preaching the importance of family, the Coyne parents—each of whom died of cancer, Tom in 1997, Dolly in July 2004—were terrifically influential. Wayne himself has acknowledged that he has equal measures of "the old man’s" work ethic and his mother’s unbridled optimism and eagerness to embrace the present moment. Coyne says, "My mom would always say, even last year when she was dying, ‘Isn’t now the best time?’"

 

As a teenager, Coyne decided to grasp the possibilities of rock and roll. "When he first got his guitar, he said, ‘I’m gonna be a rock-and-roll star," Cole says. By age fifteen, Coyne, thanks to four older siblings into bands like Led Zeppelin and the Who, was a seasoned rocker.

 

His interest in art soon wrapped around the idea of making music, which gave his talents in drawing, philosophy, and writing full range of expression.

 

"To me, it’s all the same thing," he says.

 

Talkative as he is, Coyne generally doesn’t have a lot to say about himself (although he has a great deal to say about everything else), but Michelle Martin-Coyne, who’s shared her personal and artistic life with Coyne for sixteen years, can break him down in three succinct statements: "Wayne could sell sand to the Sahara. He’s really good at getting people wound up. He’s hands down the most curious person I’ve ever known and a bit of a workaholic."

 

Those qualities, Scott Booker attests, make Coyne a formidable idea man.

 

"There’s a certain confidence that Wayne definitely is a master of. It’s not a vain thing. Wayne’s the most humble guy I know, but he’s also the most confident guy I know. When he comes up with an idea, he stands behind it," he says.

 

Music critic Jim DeRogatis says Coyne’s particular brand of self-confidence is unusual.

 

"To be sure, he has an ego," says DeRogatis, "but it’s a very benevolent ego. His ego is always subsumed by this do-it-yourself, inspirational attitude which I think is the very best thing in rock and roll."

 

One component of Coyne’s magnetism may well be his generosity, which he showers over the Lips circle and fans alike.

 

Road drummer Kliph Scurlock made a recent road trip from his home in Lawrence, Kansas, to Oklahoma City for band practice when his fuel pump blew out seventy-five miles from the Coyne compound. Coyne hitched a small trailer to his Ford truck, picked up Scurlock, towed his car to Oklahoma City, then paid for the $800 repair. "He’s one of the greatest friends anyone could ever have," Scurlock says. "His sense of loyalty is unmatched."

 

Coyne also keeps a close eye on fans’ well-being. In an era when most cult-of-personality music stars do little more than get on stage and play, Coyne is known for showing fans his appreciation, always taking time to talk or sign autographs. And during the live shows, Coyne interacts with the audience from start to finish, asking how they’re doing, telling backstories to songs, filling them in on what he and Michelle have been doing while in town.

 

Scurlock, a Lips fan long before joining the band as a roadie in 1999 and as touring drummer in 2002, says, "I always loved that the Lips acknowledged their audience. It wasn’t just this band onstage staring at their shoes and mumbling ‘thanks.’ They seemed to want it to be the greatest night of your life."

 

Part of what makes the shows so memorable are Coyne’s ubiquitous white suits and devices like hand puppets, fake blood, smoke and bubble machines, monster fists, a megaphone, and his one-of-a-kind space bubble entrance.

 

"That damn space bubble," says Drozd. "At first I was like, here we go, another gimmick. But that’s the thing that’s going to get your picture on the front page of the San Diego paper over the White Stripes, Snoop Dogg, and the Pixies."

 

Coyne’s remarkable charisma and showmanship have earned him comparisons to legendary figures in pop culture, from the Wizard of Oz and Don Quixote to Edison, Einstein, and Napoleon, even a closer-to-home hero, Will Rogers. Drozd says, "Wayne is like Salvador Dali meets Bob Dylan meets P.T. Barnum."

 

Coyne’s wife says she definitely sees a mad scientist in her husband—and the unpredictability of living with one, likening him to Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "I have no idea what I’m going to walk home to. I wouldn’t bat an eye if I drove home and he was pulling up all the shrubs and putting them in the living room," she says.

 

As for Coyne, he seems most comfortable discussing ideas, art, and philosophy, repeatedly mentioning how much of the Flaming Lips story can be attributed to dumb luck. With typical modesty, he says, "When I get to put my life in the vehicle of this beautiful music, people can’t help but see me as responsible for it, but it’s not true. That’s just the power that music has. I’ve had a great life. I live in a great house with beautiful dogs and a beautiful wife. I have family and friends who could last me the rest of my life. If no one ever liked another single thing we did, I’m fine."

 

Chances are, Lips fans will continue to be drawn to Coyne’s music and art, whatever that next wild idea may be.

 

"The word genius is thrown around kind of lightly in pop culture these days," says DeRogatis. "But I would say in my career of twenty-five years of interviewing musicians, I’ve met a handful of people I would consider geniuses. Wayne is one of them. He is one of the most brilliant and most imaginative artists in the history of rock, period."

 

Superhumans

As any fool can tell you, the whole is inevitably greater than the sum of its parts, and the Flaming Lips are no exception. To music fans, in the annals of music history, what does this crazy, beautiful rock band with all their costumes, smoke, and spacey songs mean?

 

Spike Jonze, who has directed innovative films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and award-winning, visually interesting music videos, is a veteran of a half-dozen live Lips performances.

 

"I saw a show where they played ‘Do You Realize??.’ All these people in animal suits came down and hugged people in the crowd," says Jonze. "In that moment, it was a beautiful feeling. It transcended a rock show."

 

Actor Elijah Wood (Frodo from The Lord of the Rings trilogy) has loved the Lips since The Soft Bulletin was released in 1999. "It’s beautiful, grand, and epic, with some of my favorite drum sounds next to the sonics," he says. "I love the Flaming Lips’ sense of musical exploration. I can’t wait to hear what they come up with next."

 

One of the irons the Lips are forging is a possible collaboration with Tony-winning producer Des McAnuff (think the stage version of the Who’s Tommy) to bring Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to Broadway. Although the agreement isn’t yet official, Scott Booker says, "It’s much further along than anyone ever thought. I have no doubt it’s going to happen."

 

By all accounts, Wayne Coyne and his bandmates are poised to be unstoppable.

 

Says Tom Biery of Warner Bros. Records, "We sell more records now than we’ve ever sold. There’s nothing but positive energy."

 

And Jim DeRogatis: "It’s rare to find a band whose tenth album is not only as artistically great or better than anything that came before but is more commercially successful. Nobody stays around for twenty-two years and gets better and better and more and more successful. It just doesn’t happen."

 

Unless you’re the Flaming Lips, that is. Biery takes a broad view of the Lips legacy.

 

"I think they’re one of the greatest bands currently making music and one of the great success stories of rock and roll," he says. "These guys are going to go down in the rock-and-roll history books as being a very, very important band."

 

That it happened in Oklahoma is far from a coincidence. It’s nearly impossible to imagine the Flaming Lips and Oklahoma apart from one another, a fact that hasn’t escaped the notice of the national media. In a January 14, 2004, New York Times article, David Bernstein wrote, "[Coyne] and his bandmates come across as Dust Bowl Everymen with Bible Belt work ethics."

 

There are a few no-brainers involved in the Flaming Lips-Oklahoma connection. First, it’s home for most key Lips players. Second, living in Oklahoma has always been affordable, and earnings go further than in most other cities. Its central location has made Oklahoma a great place from which to base tour travel, especially during the lean drive-everywhere-in-a-scroungy-van years. And there’s always something just a little bit under the radar about Oklahoma, even for rock stars.

 

Jim DeRogatis says, "When you get to know Oklahoma, you realize there is this tradition of Will Rogers and labor conquers all and the down-home storyteller who is, in fact, a closeted intellectual genius. The Flaming Lips are perfectly Oklahoma."

 

Wayne Coyne has seen plenty of bands who end up hated in their hometowns. "What they miss out on is ‘where you come from’ meaning something," he says. He’s determined the Lips won’t be one of those bands, so he jogs down Nineteenth Street, saying hello to everyone he passes, and hits Ace Hardware, Fox Building Supply, the Home Depot, and Lowe’s for Christmas on Mars props. Lips fans often spot the Coynes and Drozds around Oklahoma City, at Deep Fork Grill, Sushi Neko, Junior’s, Banta’s Ribs, and Pepperoni Grill in Penn Square Mall.

Far better to be a hometown hero, Coyne says, than a too-big-for-your-britches goat. "Everybody gets to enjoy our success. It’s not just happening to us. Everybody gets to celebrate it, like, ‘Ah, he’s our guy,’" he says, raising his fist, a favorite Wayne gesture.

 

All We Have Is Now

Triumph is a funny word. Aside from its obvious definition of winning, it suggests incongruous childhood images—dressing up in costumes, fighting with plastic swords, stopping everything to do what must be done this very second.

 

The Flaming Lips, with their animal costumes, space bubbles, and balloons, make the best kind of triumphant connection to childhood feel both immediate and lasting, all at the same time. A kind of ridiculous happiness, reminiscent of the simple joy of childhood, seems to infect everyone who encounters the band and their music. Who could argue against ridiculous happiness?

 

Two lines from the Yoshimi album sum up the Flaming Lips, and Wayne Coyne’s, gestalt nicely: "All we have is now. All we’ll ever have is now."

Isn’t now the best time?