Inside Music: Re: Masters

Aug. 8, 2007

On paper, this year's Bonnaroo festival peaked during the Police's Saturday-night headlining set. But in truth, the climax of the weekend occurred in the hours that immediately followed the appearance by Sting and the boys -- when the Flaming Lips hit the stage at midnight and blew 30,000 or so minds.

After the band descended on a "spaceship," Lips front man Wayne Coyne rolled out into the crowd encased in a giant, clear plastic bubble. The next two hours were a whirling blur of confetti, balloons, dozens of costumed dancers (Santa Clauses on one side of the stage, alien cheerleaders on the other), and various stunts involving the 10,000 laser pointers that had been handed out to the crowd.

Whatever substances those kids might have been using in the middle of the night on a farm in Manchester, Tenn., they didn't have a chance. Oh, yeah, and there was the music -- the grand, sweetly psychedelic pop that the Flaming Lips have mastered during their 20-plus-year career.

Another recent, comparably transcendent Lips event is captured in "UFOs at the Zoo: The Legendary Concert in Oklahoma City," a homecoming show shot last September. The DVD illustrates the extent to which Coyne has assumed an unparalleled onstage role as shaman, ringleader and acid preacher.

The Flaming Lips played their first date -- according to myth, with stolen instruments -- in 1983 as a punk band in an Oklahoma City transvestite bar. When "She Don't Use Jelly" became a left-field novelty hit in 1993, the band found themselves on "Beavis and Butt-head," and opening for the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They experimented with projects such as 1997's "Zaireeka," which requires playing four CDs in four separate players simultaneously.

Their breakthrough came in 1999 with the magnificent "The Soft Bulletin," considered by some as the decade's finest album. They backed that up with a tour that escalated their staging to new heights, and followed with another critical favorite, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," in 2002. "Yoshimi" is currently being developed into a Broadway musical.

In all that time, the band has tenaciously stuck with their hometown; late last year, Oklahoma City even honored the Flaming Lips by naming a downtown alley after them. Coyne spoke with me from his home while preparing for a tour of the far reaches of Europe. "We're going to weird places like Finland," he said. "And it's the summer, and the sun will just never go down. It briefly goes down around 2:30 and then comes back up at around 4. It sounds like fun now, but it just turns into torture."

MSN Music: What's the story behind this particular night that you shot for the DVD?

Wayne Coyne: We thought we were going to use the Hollywood Bowl show, which looked phenomenal. But the Oklahoma City show was going to be a big, significant show, too, so we thought we'd just shoot it and then look at them all later. And then this show just captured that undefinable magic that you want to be part of a show -- the crowd was insane, about 25 percent of them came dressed in costumes, it was this perfect night where you're just alive and outside. And it was in our hometown, and it was the first time we did the UFO landing.

If a crowd just chooses to erupt and go insane, that changes everything. And we also didn't realize that at the Hollywood Bowl, the first 5,000 people are all sitting at tables -- the whole front is full of older, rich Hollywood people with season tickets. I think Tom Jones played there the night before, and probably those exact same people were all there. Which adds a kind of weirdness itself, but it's just not as much fun watching people eating pork chops as it is watching kids wearing green makeup.

Read more of this exclusive interview on page 2 >>>

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