life, and though he sold weed as a teenager, he’s never much liked smoking it. “Life has a lot of nuances,” Coyne tells me as he sits in a bright orange dressing room after the Atlanta show, airing out his sweat-stained suit. “I felt like if I was messed up on drugs, I was missing those nuances. Plus, you see the way I am: I like to be in control.” Ivins, for his part, was always a quiet, studi- ous character and diligent introvert. (“Michael didn’t talk to me for the first month I was in the band,” says Drozd. “I was scared of him.”) But Drozd, a musical prodigy who initially joined as the band’s drummer in 1991, did enough drugs for all of them. In the mid-’90s he developed a heroin habit that persisted until he quit cold tur- key in 2002. Sitting on the band’s darkened tour bus, he’s amiable and easygoing. “I’m lucky. A lot of people, when they quit one thing, have to quit everything—it’s a whole life- style change,” he says. “If the Lips were a band of addicts, there’s no way it would’ve worked out.” The Lips’ career to this point can be reason- ably viewed as a series of things they should’ve never been able to get away with. When Coyne and Ivins started the band in 1983, neither could much play an instrument. Despite showcas- ing virtually no commercial potential, in 1991 they were signed by Warner Bros. to an eight- album deal. Although they scored a fluke hit with “She Don’t Use Jelly,” the band failed to sell many records during the ’90s, but some- how avoided getting dropped. Then in 1997, as many labels were shedding underperforming alt-rockers from their rosters, the Lips brought heirs Zaireeka, a set of four CDs intended to be played on four CD players simultaneously. Two years later, The Soft Bulletin’s expansive, death-haunted orchestral pop became a criti- cal favorite, a steady seller, and something of a blueprint for the band’s next two records, 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and 2006’s At War With the Mystics. Around this time, advertisers be- gan to discover the band as well, providing a lucra- tive new source of income: Mitsubishi peddled its Galant to the anthemic “Do You Realize??” Kraft put the jangly “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” in a salad ressing commercial, and Dell hawked a new laptop to the throbbing groove of “The W.A.N.D.” All the while, Coyne’s natural charisma and opti- mistic lyrics, combined with the band’s growing live spectacle, had raised the Lips from the level of veteran midlevel rock band to that of a genu- ine cultural phenomenon. Not only were they not getting dropped by Warners, they were now help- ing get Stardeath signed to the label as well. Embryonic, though, is a dark, cantankerous album that feels like something close to a repu- diation of the Lips’ recent music. Its few invit- ing melodies, on tunes like “Silver Trembling Hands” and “Your Bats,” are couched among odd grooves or buried beneath messy bits of dissonance. Coyne’s uplifting vision has mostly been obscured by lines such as “Love is…not as powerful as evil” (“IF”) and “There’s no way

46 NOVEMBER 2009 ; WANT DO WNLOADS? GO TO SPIN.COM

back / It’s complete devastation / There’s no
way out / How can you still believe what you
believe?” (“The Ego’s Last Stand”).
The album was conceived in jam sessions at a
house in Oklahoma City that Drozd, his wife, and
two kids had moved out of and were trying to sell.
Embryonic was planned as a double album,

How to

INFLATE BALLOONS

the Flaming Lips Way

1
Buy a cheap leaf blower.
“The ones we have blow at 220 mph,”
says Wayne Coyne. “Some go to 300—that’s
a lot of fucking air.” For that festive,
Lips-y touch, paint it pink.

2
Cut a plastic water bottle in half.
Attach the top half of the bottle to the
end of the leaf blower with duct tape.
Not only will this make it easier to attach a
balloon, it will help restrict the airflow.

3
Throw the best birthday party, like, ever.
“We just toured with Coldplay,” says Coyne.
“They use some elaborate device and only
get 60 balloons a night, while we do a couple
hundred. And we’re the opening band.”

with half dedicated to the sort of expansive, hooky tunes that filled the last three albums and half reserved for noisy, experimental weirdness. But they began working on the noisy, experimental weirdness and simply never went back to the hooks. “We weren’t going to worry about writing songs,” says Drozd. “It was definitely a conscious decision not to do another glistening pop record.”

“We just embraced this freedom to indulge and do whatever,” Coyne tells me in his hotel room outside Baltimore. “For our audience, this isn’t going to be a leap. But if we tried to be a big rock radio band and just get a Pepsi commercial, we wouldn’t be worthy of their forgiveness.”

Even Warners recognizes that Embryonic is the least commercial album the Lips have recorded since Zaireeka, if not ever. “It’s going to challenge people,” says Tom Biery, the label’s general manager. “If you’re a big fan, you could be in heaven. If you’re a medium fan, you’re going to go, ‘Man, what’s going on?’ If you’re not a fan, you’re just going to go, ‘ What the fuck?’ Because it’s out there.”

’M SITTING WITH Drozd in a trailer backstage at Festival Pier in Philadelphia—really, a glorified parking lot overlooking the Delaware River— when it begins pouring. In the ensuing scramble to cover the equipment with protective tarps, Shane slips and falls six feet from the stage, fracturing two ribs and tearing ligaments in his shoulder. After 30 minutes, the rain subsides, fans begin streaming into the uncovered venue, and an impromptu meeting is convened in the trailer. Shane’s various responsibilities are divvied up among other roadies, and Dennis is drafted back into his old job on the crew. But someone still needs to open and shut the LED screen door at the beginning of the show. Coyne looks at me.

“Didn’t Shane show you how yesterday?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Can you do it?”

For all his homespun charms, Coyne is a savvy operator when it comes to promoting the Lips, and deep down, I know this request comes less from necessity—at least a half-dozen other guys could do it just as easily—than from the P. T. Barnum in him that wants everyone to join the circus. Still, if I’ve learned anything the past few days, it’s that the Flaming Lips experience is about doing things, not just thinking about them. As Dave Fridmann, who has produced eight Flaming Lips albums, including Embry-

ILLUS TRATIONS BY JASON LEE