MUSIC INTERVIEW: THE FLAMING LIPS

Wayne Coyne Brings New Life to a Famed Cemetery in Hollywood...Forever

By: Team Buzzine

July 1, 2011

When The Flaming Lips announced that they would play a couple of special shows at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles this June, two things happened almost immediately: First, every single ticket was eagerly snapped up, and then the speculation began as to what one of the world’s greatest live bands would do to raise their bar even further than ever before. Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby headed into that atmosphere of excitement for a day-of-show graveside chat with The Flaming Lips' main man, Wayne Coyne, about why you have to keep trying new things, why music is the king of the senses, and why you need to see a dripping star tree at least once in your life…

Stefan Goldby: So here we are, just a few hours before you play a series of Flaming Lips shows at the Hollywood Forever cemetery: How did this amazing idea start to form, and what is it that the crowd is going to see from The Flaming Lips tonight? 

Wayne Coyne: I think the fact that The Flaming Lips is here is kind of secondary to just being here. These are some pretty grand grounds here. And I’ve told people that Tarzan is buried here. I don’t think he is…but shouldn’t he be…? But it’s just this grand experience, I guess. It sounds so intriguing for people to think that you’re playing in this cemetery. People ask me all the time -- like we’ll be in Detroit -- “Why don’t you play in a cemetery here?” It’s like, well, I suppose we could. But the people that are running this now, the epic-ness of it or whatever, maybe that’s why. I don’t know. It’s very intriguing.

When they first asked us would we want to do it, your imagination immediately goes: “Oh wow, yeah sure”. And that takes you quite a way into it, and then you get to the reality of it and it’s difficult. It’s difficult to do quickly. That’s where we’re already talking about maybe we would do this on a yearly basis, where we could organize our time so we could arrive three days beforehand and then have three days to clean up afterwards, because it’s a big undertaking, so you end up working around the clock. And it’s not that it’s that big of a deal – it’s just that even just to get power from these old buildings and get that out here because you really don’t want loud generators everywhere around – the audience has to be here as well. So it’s a big undertaking.

SG: As you look around us here on the day of the show, can you talk us through what you can see…

WC: This tree here is a beautiful giant…I don’t even know what kind of tree, but it’s just a beautiful giant tree that we sort of felt like, if you’re doing some LSD or something tonight, you could even sit under this tree without anything in it and think, “Trees are wonderful, and if there is God, God is a tree…” That could go through your mind. But these lights are just fantastic. Once it gets dark, you’ll see they do this dripping effect, and I know the first time we saw lights like this hanging in a tree -- probably about three years ago at a festival in Belgium – that did it, and we stood there, having experienced a lot of cool lighting and a lot of cool things. We stood there for probably a half-hour going, “Damn, that’s cool.”

So I thought, well if you’ve never seen this before and you’re at this Flaming Lips show, you’ll like this because it’s great to look at. So we’re calling this the Dripping Star Tree, and then we have our giant half-mirrorball over there. That doesn’t do that much. What people like about it during the day is you stand under it and it’s this giant structure that you feel like could probably fall and kill you, and then you lay under it and you can see yourself… For a lot of people, the experience of being that close to a mirror ball that’s that big is already pretty fantastic. And then, as it gets dark, it’s got these little laser beams that are shooting on it kind of secretly – you can’t really tell where the lasers are – and it makes the grass look like there are 10,000 little green fairies running through it. And it gets all in your face and your hands, and everybody around you is crawling with these little things. So it’s a multi-dimensional experience.

But a lot of it is depending on your state of mind, and not necessarily that you have to be on drugs, but you just have to hope that it’s the unexpected – there are little surprises and something different. I don’t know what you do with the rest of the thing. It’s dark, and after a while – not to put it down, but – one grave site looks a lot like the next if it’s not someone you know. And I’m not saying it’s not fantastical, but it has the element of that. But people are only going to be here for four or five hours, so it should be great. And the fact that you’re outside, and if you’re lucky, the universe cooperates and it’s a beautiful night. That’s part of why people like playing in the summertime so much. You get all this extra atmosphere. Of course, it can go bad if it rains or something. I don’t think it will rain, but it can go bad. But if it goes well, it can really be spectacular.

SG: Tonight’s show, aside from the staging and the spectacular location, is special because you go back and revisit The Soft Bulletin in it’s entirety… how do you feel now about that album with the hindsight that a few years distance brings…do you feel that is was made by a band that is dramatically different from the one playing here today?

WC: I’m 50 years old. If we made that record and I was 20 years old when it came out, and then to think that here it is 11-12 years later, it would feel different because that time in your life is a big difference between being 19 years old or 30 years old. But to me, that time already feels like the recent past. I sometimes forget, like is that a couple years ago, or is that five years ago, or is that ten…? Because as your life rolls along, ten years doesn’t seem like an insurmountable leap.

If someone said, “What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” I’d be like, “I’ll be doing this.” I already know because it’s not that long. But if someone asked me that when I was 20, I don’t know. You just think you’ll be a completely different person doing something completely different. But as you get older, you know, “Oh, this is what I do.” And people say, “That’s just not me anymore,” but that’s not true, especially with The Soft Bulletin.

I’ve become the person that gets to sing The Soft Bulletin, so for me, that’s really the bigger difference. I’m not me – I’m that music. So to be able to stand there and say, “Yes, I’m the guy that gets to sing these songs to you now,” is the way I look at it. It’s amazing that people have given this collection of songs this great meaning and this powerful emotional connection to it. You can’t create that. You can only create the music, but that connection that people have to music is really where the epic power comes from. That’s why music can be king of our senses, because we give it all of its meaning.

So I’m standing there tonight singing “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” there are going to be some people in the audience where that is the song. At some point in their life, they were one way, and whatever experience they were going through connected with that song and got them through something. That happens to a lot of people’s music. But I know, with some of those songs on that record, I talk to people every night about these certain little elements, and I want that. That’s a thing that all artists and all people who make music and sing to people – that’s the thing you want the most, is that connection to their life. It’s just a dumb song, but once they make a connection to it, it gives it this meaning that you could never make yourself. So I love singing it.

I love that there’s an audience that is touched by this music. We never think that we’re sick of playing a song. If we embrace it and perform it and make it a powerful experience for the audience, it will be powerful for us too. The difference between us rehearsing it – standing there going, “Yeah, that’s the chords, that’s the sounds, that’s what we want to get across…” that’s the nuts and bolts of the way music works. But what really makes it worthy, standing in front of it, is that the audience and us are having this orgasm.

SG: If you haven’t changed…

WC: Well I’ve changed…

SG: Not appreciably. You just called me out for saying you had… [Laughs]

WC: [Laughs] I’ve changed, but I’ve changed in the sense that it feels like that’s my life. I feel like younger people sometimes reject… “Two years ago I was this way, and now I’m this way…” and I see that as an accumulation of…there’s really no “you.” You’re just your experiences.

SG: Whether it has been sequentially or non-sequentially, the music world around us has changed radically since The Soft Bulletin first came out: Is it fair to say thatThe Flaming Lips are a band that is embracing the change: Can you talk about the things you are doing in releasing new music each month this year?

WC: We’re viewed as a group that can do a show like this, and these are unique concerts: “If you weren’t at that show, you’re a loser. You’re not one of the cool people.” These things are billed as like, if you’re hip and you know what’s going on and you’re up for the newest, greatest thing, you’ll be at one of these shows. And that’s just dumb luck. The way people view us as being the spectacle that’s worthy of standing in front of this emotional experience, I don’t really know. The way we’ve managed it, or the reason we are able to do it, we’re just doing what we like and are hoping to get away with it.

I suppose the old way of being a group would be you’d sit around for a couple years recording and writing songs, and then you’d decide when was the correct time to market your music, and if you’re lucky it charted and you’d make music videos and you’d go out and play for three years, promoting a record, and if you’re lucky it works and then you’d do that again over and over and over, and we’ve done that, and that’s great too. But now everybody is reaching a point where they’re just not really sure what works.

So for a group like us, this opened up this whole new area, especially with us and Warner Bros., to say, “I don’t know what would work. Why don’t we try some things?” And I love that. I love the idea that we can just see what happens. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a lot of work, but the idea of putting music in things like life-size gummy skulls, everybody would want to do these sorts of things. Any group would want to do them. It’s hard to do, and most of it is just work that we’re doing ourselves. But we like it. But I guess maybe that’s the difference.

SG: Do you have a sense that, in some ways, the world is coming around to your way of thinking? For years now, you’ve created non-traditional pieces of music that you couldn’t comprehend by just to listening to a single piece of music, like having multiple cars play different tracks on their stereos simultaneously… And now, everybody has a device that can achieve the same effect sitting in their pocket. Has that made it easier?

WC: The fact that you don’t have to rely on a radio station or a magazine, or you don’t have to be told what to buy – you can simply download it virtually for free any time you want – all of music, just about, that’s ever been recorded is right there at your fingertips… to me, that’s good news, if you love music. But you can see where it’s taken away, for some people anyway: this ability to make money. And that’s a bummer to them. But for me, I’m of the thinking, if one way of doing it goes away, if you really are creative and imaginative, you’ll think of another way or a thousand different ways – whatever it would take. To me, that just makes it more interesting.

It’s a much better world that people who don’t have the money are still able to hear your music and get it and have it and enjoy it and do all that stuff. So I’m not saying that the world has come around to my way of thinking, but I like doing all this stuff. To me, it’s mostly just our fans, though. It’s really all for them. I don’t really care what’s happening with a thousand other groups – I just care about our fans and what I’m doing for them, and how their money and their time and their energy and their love and all that stuff…that’s what I’m here for. But if what we’re doing looks like some version of a way to do things in the future, I’d say great. But it is difficult.

It would be hard for a young group to just wake up and say, “Yeah, we’d like to put our music in…” I don’t know – what would they put it in? [Laughs] Because no one knows how to do anything. When we first started to do the idea of skulls, it started out as just a plastic skull, and we were filling it full of this insulating foam. We’d stick it in there and it would explode, and we thought, “Wouldn’t this be great? You buy it and you have to destroy this thing to get the USB chip out…” And we were playing around with rubber… we had this weird, drippy rubber that we had mixed with some pink fluorescent paint, and we were getting these skulls and we were painting these skulls all up, and I had one that was a very great, drippy, shiny, plastic-coated skull, and my wife has some pretty exotic perfumes in her collection, and she has one that smells like bubblegum, and I sprayed this pink-coated skull with some bubblegum perfume, and I have parties at my house all the time, and people were over there and they were smelling this and they said, “Wayne, we want to eat this skull!” And I was like, “Well that’s great, but you can’t because it’s not really bubblegum or candy – it’s made out of rubber,” but I immediately got the idea of wouldn’t it be great if it was made out of bubble gum, then you could chew into this thing? 

We tried to get it initially made out of bubblegum, but no one could figure out how to do it, and then in the process of looking and failing, we stumbled upon this guy who was already making giant, gummy things, and we called him and he was a Flaming Lips fan – how lucky are we about that?!! And he was like one of us. He wanted to do it. He was like, “I’ve never done something this crazy, but I think it would be great.” And with him, knowing how that works, and us knowing the aesthetic that we’re trying to put into it, it all came together. But it takes that. You don’t know if your ideas are realizable. You don’t really know – you just have to keep trying. But now, and maybe it’s just the way you rationalize things, now I love it. 

Gummy just has a more psychedelic appeal to it. Bubblegum, to me, still seems something left over from the ‘50s or something, but gummy feels like a very modern, weird substance. What is it?! How do they make gummy? Isn’t it made out of bones and horse hooves and…? It’s gelatin. Isn’t it like fingernails and teeth and…? So I’m making a skull basically out of bones, but it’s gooshy and psychedelic now. How great is that?

So that’s what every group should do – devise your own way of saying, "This is not just the way we do music or the way we sing and what we sing about - it’s the way we give it to you and make it available to you". Those are all great opportunities. I’m sure a lot of people would be frustrated with it and bored by it; a lot of people simply want to make music, and I don’t blame them, but I don’t think we live in a world, or probably haven’t in a long time, where you just get to play music. It’s about everything all at once, and that’s what popular culture is – it’s never just one thing.

It’s take all this stuff and make your own trip, and I want to. I hope it works, but some of it will work and some of it won’t, but it’s like doing this – you have to embrace just that you get to do it and you get to have these new experiences, and you’ve just got to do stuff...

The Flaming Lips are releasing new music each month in 2011. Hear the latest at www.flaminglips.com.

See Buzzine's photo galleries from The Flaming Lips shows here: Hollywood Forever (By Night), Hollywood Forever (At Sunrise)