The Flaming Lips are an extraordinary band, but even more remarkable than its freak-out rock music and surreal, media-driven shows is the fact that the group is on a major label and selling out huge venues, including Red Rocks on Saturday night.
“We never dreamed in 1986 that we could sign to Warner Bros. and be there for 15 years,” said Wayne Coyne, the group’s unsinkable lead singer. “We were an underground band, and we weren’t trying to be commercial.”
Listening to the 23-year-old band’s most recent outing, this year’s political progressive rock epic “At War With the Mystics,” it seems as if the Lips are still operating under the same outsider philosophy. Songs like the freaky “Free Radicals” and the pointed “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)” are products of the Lips’ trademark production. But they also are pushing the boundaries of accessibility, especially considering the group’s far more user-friendly previous record, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.”
“At War With the Mystics” is more than just a challenging record. The Lips often sound like an accomplished indie band playing cavernous warehouses without concern for CD sales. This could be one of those records that is pronounced a masterpiece a decade or two after its release, or it could just be the Lips being crazier and more bizarre than normal.
Either way, the Oklahoma City band always has been one of those rock oddities that operated on a major label on its own terms, not unlike Beck or Neil Young. And while the group delightfully abuses its artistic freedom, it doesn’t come upon this freakout rock sound by accident.
“People think that we’re isolated out here and somehow we stumbled upon this Flaming Lips music by taking 20 hits of acid and running around a cornfield,” Coyne said of the many misinformed drug references to his band and its music. “What they don’t realize is that we were actually a test market for MTV in the early ’80s. It was one of the first places MTV ever played. And back then, they played great videos. There weren’t that many videos, but those that were made were strange, like the Psychedelic Furs or Public Image Limited.”
Coyne’s childhood in Oklahoma was an unusual one. Artfully depicted in the recent documentary “Fearless Freaks,” Coyne and his siblings gave a certain neon quality to the otherwise pallid dustbowl. When his band first started touring, they surprisingly found their geography benefited them in the way they were portrayed by the outside world – a mid-’80s Midwest that hadn’t yet been introduced to The Flaming Lips and their ridiculous sense of humor, style, pop.
“Early on in the Lips’ trajectory, when we started, we didn’t think that being from Oklahoma City would be of any value to anybody,” Coyne said. “But we found, when we’d drive to Dallas or Minneapolis, that the write-ups were always like, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but these guys are from Oklahoma!”‘
Coyne vividly recalls playing a show with the Minutemen in 1984. The band stayed at his place that night, and Coyne and Mike Watt, the band’s legendary bass player, stayed up all night talking music.
“Without those experiences I wouldn’t have understood what I was getting into,” Coyne said. “Being young and watching The Beatles and Woodstock and The Rolling Stones, we were always drawn to not just playing music but also what you do as an identity. Part of The Flaming Lips are the visuals – we’re not just guys who sit in our living rooms strumming banjos. We’ll do that too, but we also want to be surrounded by naked, 50-foot women.”