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RVA NO.5 : WAYNE COYNE of The FLAMING LIPS
Posted by: Tony – May 31, 2011
Over the course of their nearly three-decade-long career, The Flaming Lips have been through a number of surprising metamorphoses and unconventional side trips on their way to becoming an alternative rock institution. It might therefore come as a surprise to learn that they’ve spent the vast majority of their career signed to Warner Bros, one of the most conventional major labels of all. However, as singer/guitarist Wayne Coyne reveals in the interview below, that contract expired at the end of 2010. There will be a new contract with Warner Bros, and in fact, securing it is a mere formality at this point. But as of right now, for the first time in nearly 20 years, The Flaming Lips are an independent band. They’ve taken this brief label-free period as impetus for a frantic burst of musical activity, planning at the beginning of this year to release one song per month--a goal they have thus far wildly exceeded. Some of these releases have taken bizarre form (see our discussion below about their just-released gummy skull, each of which has a USB drive containing 3 songs embedded within it), but all of them have one thing in common--they display the same spirit of spontaneous adventure that has been a hallmark of the Flaming Lips’ career thus far.
On top of all this release-related activity, the band has found time to embark on one of their world-famous tours, which will bring their psychedelic sensory overload of a stage show to Richmond’s The National on May 15. In celebration of that upcoming appearance, I caught up with Wayne Coyne over a long-distance telephone connection. Our conversation took place on March 30.
READ THE FULL VERSION OF RVA #5 HERE
So I just found out this morning that you guys did a record with Neon Indian like a week ago.
Well, we released it about a week ago, yeah. I took it down to some record stores last Friday, I think.
Cool. So I haven’t heard it yet. What are you guys doing on that record?
Well, we committed ourselves to this thing where we put out a song every month. Some of them will be unique formats and some of them will just be 12 inch vinyl records and stuff like that. The very first one was one that we released specifically for iPhones back in February, on Valentine’s Day. This one that just came out last week was four songs; even though we’ve said we were only gonna do one song, it ended up being four songs. It's just our way of doing something different. Just saying, “Fuck, let’s do some weird music.”
I saw that you named one of the songs after a Minutemen song [“Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth Part 2,” named after a song on the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime.]
[laughs] Well, a lot of people don’t know that, but yeah. We did.
What inspired you to do that?
We’ve always loved that title. That just seemed like one of these call-to-arms things that’s both funny but also kind of a radical truth. [laughs] Specifically, they’re probably speaking of it as, “This is just trendy music. Why would you want that?” To me, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. I just think it’s funny that they thought it was so true. I don’t know if Mike Watt will be thrilled or pissed off about it, to tell you the truth. I’ve known him forever, but I didn’t think about that part of it too much. It’s an open-ended jam, where we start and stop four different times. Part of it’s live and part of it’s an overdub, but it’s like... we’re just trying to get this one thing down. And I think it mimics a version of the truth that Mike Watt would be talking about. It’s like: this music isn’t perfect, and it’s better because it’s not perfect. We don’t really know what we’re doing, and it’s better because we don’t know what we’re doing. This isn’t calculated, we don’t know what we’re gonna be. So [the song] is evoking something of that, I hope.
So you’ve got this gummy skull coming out next month. Can you tell me more about that?
We should be getting them in here on Monday. We’re still waiting on the boxes that we've designed to get ready. They should be ready in about another week or so. But yeah, I don't know where we began with the idea. This thing that we’re doing for this year is kind of an excuse to go back to being an independent group, and our first record that we ever put out featured a skull on its cover. Even when it was reissued a year later--this was back in 1984 and 1985--both of these covers featured this skull on it. I don’t really know what’s happened to it since. It wasn’t a real skull, but it was a good replica that I had taken from high school. This thing that we’re doing now... we’re not out of our contract with Warner Bros, but our initial contracts with Warner Bros. ran out at the end of 2010. And so we were in this strange limbo, where we know we’re doing a contract with them, but it’s probably gonna take another couple of months. In the meantime, we all got together and decided, “Let’s do all these things ourselves.” Meaning the gummy skull, and the vinyl records, and there’s a stompbox [guitar effects pedal] that we’re making. I think we’re gonna have a cereal box with a record on the back. I think there’s gonna be a thing in the back of Mad Magazine that has a record and a foldout. With Warner Bros, we’ve talked more intensely over the past couple years about what we would do if we were given the opportunity to release music any way that we wanted. And kind of casually, without giving it too much serious thought, I said, “I think we’d want to release music literally all the time, in all kinds of weird formats.” I probably said something like, “We want to release it inside cereal boxes and candy and machines!” And they [said], “OK, let’s try that.” So when January started, we announced that we were gonna put out a song a month, even though it’s really been more than that, and see if we can find interesting ways to deliver it to the audience. The gummy skull really came about because we had been messing with this idea of skulls. We had some plastic skulls, and we were messing with rubber, and we were messing with bubblegum. We got a hold of a guy in Raleigh, NC that has a giant gummy candy factory and was already making giant things. We talked to him about it, and we designed this skull and the stuff that he’s doing for us, and so it just kinda worked out. I don’t know if all [of the ideas will] work out, but you’ve gotta try.
Speaking of crazy things that end up working out, what made you guys decide to cover the entirety of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon?
[laughs] Well, I’m glad that you said that it worked out. We were putting out our last record, and when you release these things, you arrange things with iTunes and some of the big online distributors. There was a producer [at iTunes] that wanted to have some exclusive tracks, so you could go to iTunes to get this record, as opposed to the thousands of other websites. And so we were talking on the phone--I think we were actually on the way to The Colbert Report. There wasn’t very much time to talk or think or really do anything, but these things have to get done. You don’t really have much of a choice. And so we were sitting in the car, and I said, “Well, we don’t really have any other tracks to give you.” I suggested, kind of out of a panic, that we do Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, because we love that record, and we played a couple of the songs at Bonnaroo in 2003. And once I said it he was like, “Oh, cool. That sounds like a cool idea.” It was not a very big or serious decision. It was just like, “Sure, do it.” We only had two days to do it in, so there was a spirit of, “Fuck it! Let’s just make this kind of our own version of it.” I think some of it is a radical departure from [the original], and some of it isn’t that radical. We were doing it with Henry Rollins and Peaches and my nephew’s group, Stardeath And White Dwarfs, so there was a little bit of like, “Let’s just see if we can get everybody together and do this thing.” We didn’t really think it would be the greatest thing ever, but we also thought, “Well, we’re working with a lot of freaks here. It’ll probably be pretty cool.” And once we did it, you know, you get to the point where you have to ask the members of Pink Floyd if they’ll let you release it or whatever. So yeah, it’s an interesting thing to do. Like I said, we didn’t give it that much thought. It was just kind of, “Oh, fuck it, we have to do something,” and before you knew it, we were doing it.
You guys have now been chronicled multiple times, in the movie Fearless Freaks and the book Staring At Sound by Jim DeRogatis. Does being written about in that way, and having people try to get your legacy down, affect your creative process as you continue to be an active group?
Well, you’d like to think that it wouldn’t. You know, most of these things are done by people that absolutely love you anyway, so you’re surrounded by people who are interviewing you about music, and musicians love to talk about music and ideas and shit like that. For the movie specifically, [director] Bradley [Beesley] was around us. I’ve been making videos with him since the early 90s, so that was all very normal, and you really didn’t notice it was going on. But once this story gets told--this condensed version of what was 20 years even then [when Fearless Freaks was released in 2005], this story that encompassed Stephen's family, my family, Micheal's family, and goes back even to our childhood--you look at it, and you’re like, “You know, that's not really the way it was.” Something that could take five years for you to realize happens in a moment in a movie. It’s based on momentum and entertainment and drama. But as time goes on, I can say for sure... I ran into a friend of mine who [had been] trying to get his son to watch this movie for a while. And his son was like, “Dad, I don’t want to watch this boring movie about Wayne. I’ve met him, whatever.” He finally watched it, and I ran into him the other night--he’s only nine years old--and he’s like, “Wayne, I think you’re the greatest guy ever after seeing that movie.” You can’t help but want it to have an effect on people. And this story that it tells... it’s not absolutely the truth. But it’s an entertaining view into a version of our life that I suppose is true. I think it affects [us], but I would say you kind of want to be affected by things. I want to have experiences and opinions and things have an impact on me. I’m really not sure of what the fuck I’m thinking, or what I am about, ever. I want to go somewhere and do something and find out what it’s about. So I would say yeah, but any curious creative person would love that. You’d want powerful things to happen to you. [pause] My wife is laughing at me.
[laughs] I do agree with you, though. I feel that in my own life.
Yeah, and you want that! I have to say, sometimes I don't really know what the songs are about. I’ll read someone's interpretation of it, and be like, “Oh wow, that’s just amazing.” You’re really working from subconscious parts of your mind anyway, and you kinda want to. I don’t really wanna be a logical, smart person when I’m writing songs. I kinda wanna be a freak that has some insight into human nature, and our ridiculous lives. So I don’t know. You kinda want it to come at you as a surprise. You don’t really wanna know what's going on.
I find that people who got into The Flaming Lips since Soft Bulletin had gotten used to you sounding a certain way because that was all they knew of the Flaming Lips. And then when you guys did Embryonic, they were really surprised and kind of backlashed at it. So I’m wondering, with you guys doing less commercial-sounding music lately, do you feel this backlash at all? Do you feel like people are put off? How does that affect you?
To me personally, I don’t really get that. We will always have those records. That’s part of who we are, and those records have allowed us to keep growing and keep expanding. We do pay a lot of attention to the Yoshimi record, and the Soft Bulletin record, because we know there’s an audience there that has really been impacted by that. You can only have a Soft Bulletin happen to you one time. It’s not a sound that we are making, it is really a version of our life. So when I talk to people about it, if they were to ask me, I’d say, “We made that music at that specific time. We can never be those people again.” The things that we were realizing, the things that we were discovering about ourselves, we can’t discover them again. We can’t be walking into that unknown that The Soft Bulletin represents for us again; we’ve already done it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. I think that that record, and a lot of our records, mark such a specific creative moment in our life that I would not wanna copy it. It’s a creation that's better than I am as a person. And for me to sit here and analyze it and copy it and try to redo it, to me, would just take away from the power of something like The Soft Bulletin. I think the core of our audience are people that love music. Part of our audience is a casual listening audience that loves music that's a little bit more popular, but the core of our audience, I think, likes music to be interesting. They like the people that are making music to be ever-changing. And so, I would think most of our audience could love The Soft Bulletin, and love something as freaky as Embryonic or Zaireeka at the same time. I mean, I know I do. When I was young, my brothers and I listened to virtually all music. We could easily love the most popular music of the day, whether it be the Beatles, or Peter Frampton, or whatever was popular in the 70s, and we could also listen to freaky underground music. I remember listening to Frank Zappa and Yoko Ono and all that, and feeling like this is just music to us. So if it’s possible for me, and I’m really just sort of a normal person, it’s possible for anybody.
Do you guys feel like the newer stuff is integrating well into the live show? I feel like the live show really related a lot to the kind of things you were doing in The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi era, and I’m wondering how that all fits together.
I think it really is all the same thing. When we are making music, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. You don’t have any idea where it’s gonna take you. But then once it’s made--it’s not unlike these movies and books we were talking about. Once they’re made, they tell you an atmosphere and a story. When we started to play shows for The Soft Bulletin, that really changed the way we presented ourselves. Because we knew we wanted to sing these very powerful but delicate songs that really related [to] knowing that you’re going to die. Even though we’ve been singing about that since the very beginning, I think The Soft Bulletin really started to humanize that idea. So we’re singing songs that, for an older person--I was 35, 36 years old when that record was made, so I’m into a new phase of my being an adult. But I knew that we were going to be singing songs to people who weren’t in a new phase of being an adult. We were going to be singing songs to people who were 20 years old. And here I am singing about... DEATH. So we thought, we don’t really want to just sit up here--here it is, Saturday night, and we’re going to sing five or six songs in a row about death to these 20 year olds who are taking acid! We thought, “Damn, we don’t want them to go home and kill themselves,” and so we started to make our show seem more like a party. More like a freakout instead of this heavy rock show. We’d done heavy rock shows since the mid-80s, really. So we started to take this approach of being loud but gentle. If we’re gonna be singing about death, can we make this seem more like a birthday party than a funeral? I think the more we did that, the more we felt that that was right. We want the audience to be absorbed in what we’re doing and what we’re saying, but at the same time I don’t want to bring them down. That continued all through The Soft Bulletin, through Yoshimi, and even into what we do now. We start the show by saying, “Fuck, people, this is gonna be the fuckin’ greatest party you’ve ever been to. BLAM! Let's go!” And I think that allows us to have these other emotions in the set, because we’re saying, “Look, it’s about a party. It’s about a celebration of life. It’s not about the end of our life. It’s about what we do now that we know we are alive.”
http://www.flaminglips.com
http://www.youtube.com/flaminglipsfree
http://twitter.com/waynecoyne
Color photos by J. Michelle Martin-Coyne
B&W photos by PJ Sykes at the National in Richmond, VA
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