The Flaming Lips with The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger
Sunday, May 15 at The National
I was lucky that I even got a chance to go to this show. It sold out weeks in advance, before I’d even fully considered the question of whether I wanted to go. Then I got the chance to interview Wayne Coyne. During the process of transcription, I had plenty of time to think about the fact that the Flaming Lips had been one of my favorite bands for over two decades now, and I still hadn’t gone to see them play. I did want to go to this show–desperately. And it was sold out. Fortunately for me, one of our readers learned of my predicament and had an extra ticket he was willing to part with. So hey, shoutout to Will McGurn–thanks for making this review possible.
The line in front of the National was long, and I was close to the back of it. Then the doors were late opening up, presumably because of the extra setup time required by the Flaming Lips’s elaborate stage rig. We finally got in around 7:30, and it was close to 8:30 before the opening band, The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger, took the stage. This group is fronted by Sean Lennon, famous son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and his girlfriend, Charlotte Kemp Muhl. With Sean on guitar and Charlotte on bass, the group was rounded out by a keyboardist, a drummer, and a trumpeter. Their set consisted of extremely mellow psychedelic pop numbers that weren’t too far from the sort of music Sean’s famous father wrote in the later years of the Beatles. However, rather than mixing the slower, mellower numbers into a set that also featured some more upbeat, bouncy numbers, Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger kept it slow and mellow throughout. The songs were pleasant enough, but after a while they all just faded into a kind of sonic wallpaper. By halfway through their set, I was bored. I’d been standing up for multiple hours already, and all I could think about was the fact that my feet hurt. I was in no mood for any more of Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger, no matter how interesting it was to me that John Lennon’s kid was in the band. I just wanted them to finish up and make way for the Flaming Lips. Instead, they tried my patience even more sorely with their final song. The song itself wasn’t any worse than anything else they’d done, but what really made it obnoxious was when, after they’d gone through enough verses and choruses to fill up a normal song, they launched into an extended solo sequence, in which first the keyboardist, then the horn player, and finally Sean Lennon all wailed and noodled on their instruments while the rest of the band kept playing the same slow four-chord verse riff over… and over… and over. It was a moment that represented everything I hate about jam bands. Their psychedelic tendencies have led the Flaming Lips to brush against the edges of jam band culture somewhat frequently over the past decade (most obviously when they toured with the String Cheese Incident), and I had to write off the appearance of this rather obnoxious opening act on this tour to the negative influence that culture is bound to have on anyone who stays in its orbit for too long. Still, though, you’d think that Sean Lennon was capable of better. Very disappointing, on the whole.
After The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger were finished, there was a long and rather confusing interlude. At first, it seemed like any other intermission between bands at a concert. Soon enough, though, the difference between any other band’s pre-show preparations and those of the Flaming Lips became obvious. First, the giant LED screen behind the equipment lit up, glowing solid blue like your VCR does when it’s not receiving any signal (teenagers, pretend you know what I’m talking about). Then Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock and several roadies (including one that was actually Lips bassist Michael Ivins in disguise) came out onto the stage to start testing equipment. After a few minutes, the sound crew started playing strange tapes through the sound system in order to make sure they were getting the desired response from the equipment. A voice repeating something like “the speakers on the left” bounced from left to right, from the front of the house to the back of the house. It wasn’t the start of the set by any means, but something was definitely happening. And you know how crowds at large-scale concert events are–they scream at every little thing. Maybe this wasn’t a problem before 1964, when televised Beatles appearances taught our entire culture that the reason you go to see a musical performer is so you can scream because the performer is in the same room with you. But this idea has been an article of faith in our culture for so long that even 55 year olds probably can’t remember a time before people thought that the appropriate response to being at a concert was to scream a whole lot. So of course, all of these pre-show activities, which even included some members of the band (OMG!) led to a lot of screaming and yelling. But it was confused screaming and yelling, prone to dying off and then starting up again entirely at random. You see, nobody could figure out if it was time to scream or not. Something was happening, so it seemed like the answer was yes. But nobody was really playing any songs, per se, so maybe the answer was actually no, not yet? I’m sure the entire time that elapsed between the beginning of equipment testing and the beginning of the actual set–about fifteen minutes or so–caused a lot of confusion in certain segments of the audience. Being both a jaded old man of 35 and a lifelong punk-rocker, I am unwilling to scream unless something really truly AWESOME happens, so I spent most of this period of time shifting from foot to foot and checking my phone for text messages.
But finally, something really did happen. All the setup was finished, and the stagehands slid a ramp into place in front of the LED screen. It exploded into wild psychedelic colors, in the middle of which appeared a door-shaped section that was brilliant, glowing white. Suddenly, that section of the screen actually opened like a door, and Lips guitarist/keyboardist Steven Drozd stepped through. He was followed, in short order, by Scurlock, guitarist/percussionist Derek Brown, Ivins, and finally, Wayne Coyne, who climbed into his “space bubble” as the rest of the band played the instrumental “Powerless,” from Embryonic. The space bubble has been the opening ceremony of Flaming Lips concerts for several years now, and I’ve seen plenty of pictures in it in magazines and on the internet. I had no idea what it really was until I was in the room with it, though. I’d expected a hard plastic orb, something like a hamster wheel, that Wayne could run around in regardless of what it sat on. In reality, though, the bubble is more like a beach ball–it’s made of soft plastic, and needs to be inflated by stagehands. This also means that, when Wayne’s in it, if the crowd were to drop him, he runs a real risk of being hurt. And it might even mean that he’s got a limited amount of oxygen in there, and that if he stayed in it too long, he’d suffocate. He wasn’t in any real danger during the show, though–he was only inside of it for five minutes or so, and everybody did a great job of holding him up. He ran right overtop of me at one point–I held up his right foot for a second, before he suddenly reversed direction and the space bubble rolled back towards the center of the room. I’d always wondered if the space bubble trick would seem as cool in person as it always had when seeing it in pictures or on video, but it totally lived up to my expectations. It was silly, of course, but also a lot of fun.
What we were really there for was the music, though, and once Wayne had returned to stage and emerged from the bubble, music is what we got. I’d wondered when interviewing Wayne whether the distinctly different sounds the band had been exploring on their most recent LP, Embryonic, would fit in well with a live show that had originally been designed to connect to the more accessible psychedelic pop of early-2000s albums like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. It turned out that I needn’t have worried–the lion’s share of the Lips’s set that evening came from Embryonic, and at least in the live setting, what came through on these songs was less of a jammed out lo-fi psych-punk thing like on the LP and more of a logical continuation of what the band had done before. The first proper song we heard was “Silver Trembling Hands,” one of my personal faves from Embryonic, and I couldn’t help but notice the way the live performance placed it in similar sonic context to a lot of the earlier songs, despite its having sounded far different in the studio. As massive amounts of giant, brightly colored balloons poured overtop of the gleeful crowd from behind the stage, and as confetti cannons on either side of the stage belched out massive amounts of equally brightly colored paper into the air, it was all enough of a sensory overload that any vaguely rhythmic music would have induced the compulsion to dance. Nuances like the relative grittiness of a guitar’s distortion were not going to matter much in this context, and I might have thought about how ridiculous my concerns had been, were I not just as caught up in the moment as the rest of the crowd.
The set as a whole concentrated mainly on material from Embryonic, but mixed in quite a few songs from the last few Flaming Lips albums before that one, even reaching back into their distant past to resurrect their original one hit wonder, 1993’s “She Don’t Use Jelly.” It seems weird to think of it now, when it seems that songs like “Do You Realize” are far better known, but “She Don’t Use Jelly” is still the band’s highest-charting single, which might explain why they still include it in sets. But rather than assuming the posture of baleful obligation that we all remember from Radiohead’s scowling performance of “Creep” on the Meeting People Is Easy DVD, the Lips still seem to get a big kick out of the song, even reprising its last verse immediately after the song ended with a quiet, keyboard-driven faux-ballad treatment. They also blasted through other career highlights, such as “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1,” which got a surprisingly sweet and affecting reinterpretation as an acoustic ballad. Notably, this was one of the few songs on which Wayne played guitar–with the 2009 addition of Derek Brown, the band has freed Wayne up to spend most of the show as merely the singer and master of ceremonies. He played the role to the hilt, too, frequently exhorting the crowd to get lively with cries of “Come on, motherfuckers!” His efforts were effective, drawing enthusiasm even out of noted bitter cynics like myself. It probably has something to do with Wayne’s ability to seem just as enthralled with the show as the most wide-eyed idealistic fan–he’s there to have fun too, and he’s not trying to get us to yell because he wants to hear the adulation in our voices. For him, it’s more an attempt to be a cheerleader, to get everyone else as excited as he is.
The Lips maintained this excitement throughout the set, mixing strange and somewhat downbeat tunes like “The Ego’s Last Stand” (from Embryonic) into a wildly colorful party atmosphere without noticeably dampening the vibe. At one point, Wayne announced a new song, describing it as being about death, and the band proceeded to play one of the darkest riffs they’d lit into all evening. The new song had a crunching plod to it, and seemed to me like one of the heaviest songs I’d heard from the Flaming Lips since the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones in 1996. The induction of touring drummer Kliph Scurlock into the studio version of the Lips led to a more spontaneous, rocked-out sound on Embryonic, and has led to quite a few improvised studio experiments being released in the last few months (the band had copies of their USB-drive-impregnated gummy skulls for sale at the show, but like a fool, I had arrived broke and couldn’t afford to grab one). Based on this new song, I can’t help but expect that the next proper studio album from the Lips might go in an even heavier direction. As much as I have loved the psychedelic pop they’ve unleashed on the world over the past decade, I can’t deny that I miss the stomping guitar pyrotechnics of the earlier incarnations that I originally fell in love with. To hear a new song moving back in this direction is a welcome development, at least for me.
Towards the end of the set, the Lips broke out some of the material that has made them an unexpected darling in the jam-band scene over the past half-decade or so. “Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung,” the psychedelic masterpiece that marks the climax of 2006’s At War With The Mystics, featured lead vocals and lead guitar by Steven Drozd, while Wayne stepped to the side of the stage to play a massive gong, painted with the triangular prism many would recognize from the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. Despite the fact that the Lips released a song-for-song cover of this classic album in 2010, this subtle reference did not indicate the presence in the set of any Pink Floyd covers. Instead, the main set closed with a riveting, dramatic performance of The Soft Bulletin‘s “What Is The Light,” which, just as it did on the album, led into the quiet ambience of “The Observer,” an instrumental tune that marked the only time that night that Wayne Coyne played an actual electric guitar.
“The Observer” felt more like a dramatic interlude than a proper show-closer, so when the band put down their instruments and walked offstage after it concluded, the crowd knew that they could get more if they demanded it. The Lips obliged, returning to stage in short order to play “Race For The Prize,” the gorgeous pop classic that opened The Soft Bulletin and was their usual set opener for years after that album’s release. Indeed, it felt like an entire new beginning of the show, with the confetti cannons busting out the remaining multicolored paper explosions they’d kept in reserve, and more balloons being produced from some hidden storage area backstage to blanket the crowd once again. Worn out from a long, intense set, the people inside the National were nonetheless invigorated by this new infusion of beautiful energy, and when the Lips left the stage again after this song, the roar for a second encore was even more vehement than it had been the first time.
When the band returned to the stage and began to play “Do You Realize,” I knew that this was the true end of the set. There may have been higher-charting singles over the course of the Flaming Lips’ career, and there may be songs in their repertoire that are better able to get a crowd hyped up, but “Do You Realize” is their true signature tune, a deeply profound acoustic ballad about the importance of appreciating your loved ones. As Wayne indirectly acknowledged in the interview I did with him, it is actually a song about death, and the fact that every great thing you experience and every wonderful person you know will one day be gone. Life is a difficult thing to deal with most of the time, and it can be hard to make space in your head to recognize these bigger facts and, without letting the finite nature of the universe depress you, nonetheless be able to feel glad about the fact that you are at least making the most of one of your ever-lessening days on the earth. Attempts to do exactly that are what really drives the Flaming Lips in a live environment, what pushes them to make their shows not just another concert but a totally engrossing sensory experience that will stand out in the minds of everyone who is there for it. They know that we’re all going to die, but while the show is happening we’re all still alive, so they try to make the most of it, not just for themselves as a band but for everyone who shows up. At this point I’m shamelessly cribbing from what Wayne told me over the phone a couple of months ago, so I won’t elaborate further, but I will say that, especially during “Do You Realize,” it was clear from looking around that the point was not lost on the majority of people at the show. In particular, I saw a lot of couples in my vicinity turning to one another with obvious love in their eyes during the final moments of the song, and it made me sorry that I’d come to the show alone. Nonetheless, I felt my heart swelling with love for everyone I know and care about, for music and for life in general. Even as I stood there alone, I felt comforted by the thought that, even though it’s not perfect, life is all we’ve got, and really, it’s not that bad. It’s not bad at all.
If you were one of the many who were unable to get into this show due to the speed with which it sold out, let me just urge you to go see this band at the soonest possible opportunity. It is an experience that everyone who even somewhat likes their music should have at least once. The people who were there know what I mean. You should too.
Words by Andrew Necci
Photo by PJ Sykes
