As the strobe lights flash and the confetti rains down on the crowd, singer Wayne Coyne pushes the audience into a full chorus sing-a-long exclaiming, “humiliation is nothing to fear!” He should know, leading the house along with a hand puppet of a nun, while he dons a classic white suit stained with fake blood. And this isn’t New Years, or a Halloween show…it’s a Wednesday night in April where a packed house dances and cheers alongside frogs and cows and every costume imaginable. Random images tear across the video screen, and the balloons fill the air, but it’s the pulsating bass and raging distortion seamlessly infiltrating the thematic compositions that energizes the room. It’s a complete battle of the senses, or pink robots if you will.
With a twenty-year history which includes; playing Oklahoma bars in the early 80s, opening for Black Flag, conducting “unscientific experiments” on themselves to investigate whether 30 hours without sleep would lead to hallucinations, and the mid-90s hit “She Don’t Use Jelly,” The Flaming Lips have done it all. Where most bands struggle their entire career trying to perfect both the live show and the studio release, The Lips have not only done so, they have brought the mediums to new levels. Reaching out to incorporate multi-media, exploratory instrumentation and virtually anything else they could come up with to create their own unique style of art, the band has constantly pushed the boundaries of one’s senses. As colorful as the long road has been, the past few years have truly engraved their name in music history.
The departure of Ronald Jones in 1995 wasn’t merely an end of an era, but the beginning of a new focus. Now a trio, lead Lip Coyne, founding bassist Michael Ivins and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd decided to continue on. Though rather than on the alternative rock path the band had forged, they shifted directions that were not yet definable. Fans of the band were not told of traditional tour dates and concerts welcoming them back, but invitations to participate in “experiments.” The first of which, deemed “The Parking Lot Experiment” involved forty cassette tapes, of forty different sections of music, and forty different fans providing cars with cassette decks to perform the improvised orchestra. Others included a similar soundscape involving numerous boom boxes, and yet another that allowed audience members to come to shows and wear headphones tapped into the board. With a newfound freedom, Warner Brothers let the band go ahead and record a most vigorous project, entitled Zaireeka. Viewed by some as a musical masterpiece, this four disc set is created to be played in four CD players simultaneously. A follow-up record would have to be quite a piece to continue this new level of progress, and 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, surpassed not only fan expectations, but the industry as a whole, attaining record of the year badges from many critics.
The past twelve months have added another epic year onto the history of The Flaming Lips. The release of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots secured them a Grammy win for rock instrumental, they rejuvenated their live show and solidified a fan base that continues to grow exponentially. And the fans aren’t the only ones. On Beck’s Sea Change tour this past fall, not only did they play the opening slot, but Beck choose The Lips to perform as his own band. The pairing placed them in front of unfamiliar audiences and word began to spread among the masses that this was one band not just to be heard, but to experience. Building on the momentum, the newly released Fight Test EP, which offers an assorted selection of both originals and eclectic covers allows Yoshimi’s quest to continue on.
Amidst a Spring tour that forged it’s way through Europe and into the clubs of the States, we recently caught up with Michael Ivins to discuss all things Lips.
The new Fight Test EP includes covers of Beck’s “The Golden Age” and Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” but also a slow, drawn out, live acoustic version of Kylie Minogue’s dance hit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Obviously you draw from many angles, but did the experimental music you have been creating the past few years open you up to the possibilities of everything from classical and progressive, to even pop and dance?
I don’t think it’s that we decided to be experimental, and then discovered all this other stuff. I think that it’s always been in us. Even to say experimental makes you think of [Karlheinz] Stockhausen or something like that. Experimental in a way for us is just opening ourselves up to everything, whether it was ‘hey, what happens when you actually create a four cd set to play all at one time,’ or just give in and say ‘you know, I like that Kylie Minogue song, it’s a good song’ and that sort of thing. I don’t think in the big picture one thing actually led to the other, and we said ‘well we did this, now we can do that.’ A lot of it’s just happened to be timing, and especially for the actual experimental stuff, in a lot of ways it just seemed like the right time for us to do that. We could have made another guitar record like Clouds Taste Metallic…but I think in some ways (laughing), by doing the least commercial thing that we possibly could have done, in a weird way has allowed us, just in a very practical sense, to continue actually making records.
Aside from being a musician, you’re also a sound engineer. Does engineering your own albums bring a whole new level of options to the studio process?
What it allowed us to do was just have another person in the studio able to do even some of the really mundane tasks; [because half of the engineers role] is keeping track of where everything is. So it allowed us to work more quickly, especially in the making of the Zaireeka record, and The Soft Bulletin, which sort of, in a weird way happened around the same time. So in a way we made five records in that two years. And people go ‘wow, you didn’t put a record out,’ or ‘The Soft Bulletin took so long to make,’ but actually we were able to do even more. So it allowed us, between Yoshimi, and The Soft Bulletin and Zaireeka, to attain a higher pace, or output, of actual work getting done.
Well, where most bands notate, say, an album recorded February-March, your albums often note, recorded over two years. Is that because you have so many pieces going on during that timeframe, or is it that the recording experience is really that intense?
It’s a combination of both. I think over the years we’ve gotten more meticulous. Our first record that we made for an actual label took four days, and the next one took a week, and the next one took two weeks, and the next a month, and so on. Even by our second record when we had honed down to a three-piece we decided even then…because on our very first record we were very ‘no, we can’t do overdubs, we have to keep it real’ and all this stuff. By the time the second record came out we said ‘hey, wait a minute, we don’t need to do that,’ and we decided that live was one thing, and making records was another thing, and that they are two totally separate things.
Well, I think that’s a crucial point in a band’s career.
Yeah, I’ve worked with a couple of people, I’ve only said this once, but I thought this sounded pretty good (laughs). You run into a lot of people that think, ‘no we have to do it like this, we have to record all at once…we can’t do this or this or this.’ But I said ‘well, you know, live…’ Oh no, know I can’t remember what it was (laughs). I just said something really redundant like, ‘live is live, but records are forever,’ I think that’s what it was. Because, why do that? That would be like making a film and not editing it, or lighting it properly. I mean, there are places for that, if something is just so outrageously special, like ‘ok, we’re just gonna throw up one microphone and record it,’ cause sometimes to get the most crappy sound, you have to do the most work (laughs). Like, to actually make it sound like it was recorded on a boom box outside, if you just got a boom box and recorded it outside, you actually wouldn’t know what was going on.
Right, to replica that sound….
Yeah, just like people who spend hours just to make themselves look like they just got out of bed (laughs). I think it’s the same sort of thing, going on that sort of analogy with records. But getting back to the original point (laughs), yeah, we sort of do always have stuff going on, but in a weird way we’re not really a band…and maybe we will experiment with this kind of thing, but a band that actually writes on the road. Stuff is always floating around, but we are rarely one to say ‘oh, we have to go record some songs, we have a day off, we have to go find a studio somewhere.’ That’s just not how we do things.
The recording process is more patient and thought out?
It’s definitely more patient, but not that ones a virtue and ones not. It just happens to be this is how we do things. As the years have gone on, I think instead of saying ‘ok, we’re gonna track all the drums, we’re gonna do this, this and this,’ a lot of times the songs come in, but they aren’t fully formed. Sometimes they turn into different songs. Sometimes even later on, six months later, we come back ‘eh, we need to change this, we need to change that,’ or ‘nah, that songs just not working, let’s try this idea.’ So we’ll use the ideas from that song in a newer song.
So when you go into the studio, it’s not just ‘ok, lets just lay it down?’
No. We’ve rarely done that. I think actually Yoshimi was a little closer to that, where it was a bit more structured prior to production.
Yoshimi is not necessarily supposed to be a concept album, even though that’s gonna be debated on the net for the next ten years, but there is certainly some sort of storyline flowing from start to finish. Did you go into it with a beginning, a middle and an end?
No. I think the first song that we actually said ‘ok, we’re starting the record,’ was “It’s Summertime,” which had been written a bit before we went into the studio. And I think “Yoshimi pt. 2” was actually written before “Yoshimi pt. 1.” Wayne just had this idea that it sounded…well, by the time we got done with it is when we actually decided to have Yoshimi [drummer for the Boredoms] sing on it. It’s kind of weird, because sometimes I’ll say the title, or the name, and I’ll forget that there’s a real person called Yoshimi (laughs). It’s sort of turned into this mythical figure that’s starring in this record of ours. Wayne actually thought it was a much more common name than it is (laughs) so we think it led to a little bit of confusion with the Japanese audience that actually follows us and knows us. There was some wonderment of, is it actually about her, but it’s ‘no…Yoshimi sounds better than Jane does’ (laughs).
Well, the album is obviously going to be a classic, but does winning the Grammy, and receiving the nod from the industry bring another level of validity to the whole endeavor?
Editors note: The Flaming Lips won a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for “Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)”
I think within the industry in some ways it does. I mean, we’re in good company…The Chemical Brothers won it one year, and The Police actually won it one year. And it was kind of strange, ’cause I was watching CNN when I found out about it, and was just in disbelief, and had to run upstairs and look on the Internet. But I don’t know. I think it does, in a way, let people take us a little more seriously. I mean, there are plenty of people who think what we’re doing is legitimate, and we like it, and we’re sure glad that other people like it. I guess it’s just sort of, to people who might say, ‘what is that, I don’t get it…but it won a Grammy, hmmm, maybe there is something to it.’ Maybe that way. And I don’t know if in the big picture it means anything, but we certainly don’t take it lightly.
And what does Dave [Fridmann] bring to a project?
Well, even from day one, not that we’re the Beatles or anything like that, but he’s sort of the George Martin of the band. In some ways, he brings a clarity or a vision. Looking at what’s going on and saying ‘well you could try this, or try that.’ And really knowing the gear in his studio backwards and forwards.
In both the studio and live settings, it seems that The Flaming Lips are constantly going for pristine sound quality, like the headphone experiments for instance. Is that just the audio engineering perfectionist side of you coming out, or the band as a whole placing an emphasis on audio capabilities?
Well definitely on record for sure. And to qualify that by saying, I don’t care if it’s feedback noise, or a piano being dropped on someone’s head, or electric guitars…whatever the sound you’re going for should be put on, whether it be vinyl or CD or tape or what have you, it should be perfect. Why wouldn’t you do that? And live, I mean it’s just so irritating [when a band is a washout]. If you’re going to pay $70, or $20 or whatever, why not be able to tell what the songs are (laughs). Granted we’ve learned over the years that a lot of times, shows are just people getting an excuse to go out, maybe it’s an excuse to go to a party after the concert, or just hang out with your friends and all that, and we’ve realized that we’re just part of the evening out, but if people are gonna make the effort to go out, it better be worth their money, let alone their time even.
Adding all the projectors, the strobe lights, the animal costumes, the confetti and all the props, are you going for a full sensory overload?
Not so much that, it’s just that we’re here to put on a good show. I mean, that’s the whole point. To have a good time, and a lot of that stuff is just fun. How could it not be fun? (laughs)
The Beck tour you did…in my opinion, Sea Change is one of the best albums of the year last year…
Oh yeah, I mean we wouldn’t have done it in a lot of ways if we weren’t Beck fans, or didn’t think the record was any good. We think that Sea Change record has got a lot of good songs on it. And it was a learning experience, and a lot of hard work, but on the whole it was a really good time. [It was hard work] because it was showing up at 10 sometimes in the morning and finishing basically at whatever time the show was over. Even though the shows went on earlier than some things we’re used to playing, there was basically no time just to sit down and take a breather for a while. You know, we’d do sound check all day long. We’d come in, we’d run through some stuff with him, and that would go right up to doors, and then we’d have to set up our whole show, and then we’re on, and then breakdown our show, and then turn around and play again for twice or three times as long, so it was sort of a bit grinding.
So this year, you’re playing Bonnaroo. That’s predominantly known as a jamband genre festival, though this year, the lineup is really eclectic with you, and Sonic Youth and Crazyhorse and all. It seems lately that the industry as a whole is starting to realize the jam audience is really open-eared; that they just want an honest performance, and enjoy seeing artists take risks.
What seems to be really cool is all of a sudden there seem to be these festivals popping up around the country. Maybe finally, America will get to have it’s Glastonbury and Reading and Leeds and stuff like that. Because that’s…I mean, If you’re a young kid these days, or any time, I mean I get tired of the mud after a while, just ’cause I’m getting old I guess or something (laughs), but the first few times we went to Reading and stuff like that, we’d stay like all three days, and hang out and just have good time. And we’re always careful to say we’re not actually operating on anyone’s brain, so it’s not a life and death situation or anything, but in the same way that people would say band’s are being risky within musical exploration, actual people just being open-minded are taking a risk in saying ‘hey, what’s all this about, what’s that all about, and what does this mean?’ ‘Cause…that’s when it starts getting fun (laughs).
