ON COYNE Calvin Klein suit.
onic, puts it, “The Lips are a beacon of hope for people who want to make a living doing something that is nonprescribed currently in popular music. What they represent, more than anything else, is freedom.”
A few hours later, I am standing atop some road cases behind the screen as the introductory music swells over the PA. Opening the door is relatively simple, but closing it is a bitch. While Coyne surfs over the crowd in his bubble, I jam my fingers between the sharp plastic slats on the screen, desperately trying to fasten the clasps on the door. Then I remember Shane’s needle-nose pliers tutorial; unfortunately, an hour ago, I handed the very same pliers to the tour manager who is now standing 200 yards away from me at the soundboard. I look around for a roadie who might be able to help, but most are inflating balloons and prepping confetti cannons. I manage to get most of the clasps closed, but my fingers
I climb down expecting a hero’s welcome, but everybody is too busy with other tasks to care. Nonetheless, I walk to the side of the stage and look at the screen with a hint of pride. (I am later assured that the screen’s brief malfunctioning during “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” almost definitely had nothing to do with me.) Then, a little more than halfway through the set, as the band finishes the warm, swaying Mystics track “Vein of Stars,” the rain starts again. Coyne announces that they’ll have to take a break until the storm passes.
It does not pass. About half the crowd dashes for the exits, but the other half presses closer to the stage, greeting the rain like a giddy baptism. Chants of “Fuck the storm! Fuck the storm!” and “Flaming Lips! Flaming Lips!” rise up from what is now a bedraggled, sloppy mess of humanity.
Meanwhile, Coyne is crouched behind the stage with a white towel, drying cables that lead to the video monitor. From the crowd, a new chant materializes: “Get in the bubble! Get in the bubble!” Coyne breaks into a wide smile, looks around at his bandmates and crew, then shakes his head: “The things I do.”
As the orb is retrieved and Coyne climbs back in, the audience roars in appreciation. The image of him being held aloft by his minions is vaguely religious, but their dedication is understandable. Hardly a gifted singer, musician, or lyricist, Coyne is the best version of themselves, and the ascension of the Flaming Lips is not alchemy or anything that any one of the soggy acolytes holding him up at the moment couldn’t replicate if they were willing to put in the effort and, as hokey as it sounds, believe. (Sometimes, they believe a little too much: After the show, one zonked-out disciple calling herself Erika Cheeseburger brings Coyne a photograph of her own feces adorned with alien stickers. “She said, ‘I want to give you a family picture,’” says Coyne. “We get some crazies.”)
As Coyne had told me earlier, “After The Soft Bulletin, when the audience sort of said, ‘We believe in you guys,’ that changed me. I want to make music and make these bizarre creations. I want to be free to be this weirdo, and here’s this audience saying, ‘We’ll give you money. We’ll give you encouragement. Go do it.’ ”
As such, even the Lips’ wackiest ideas— Zaireeka, Embryonic, or walking on their fans’ heads in a plastic bubble in a wet Philadelphia parking lot—aren’t really risks so much as the hard-earned fruits of the band’s not-insignifi-cant labor. And it’s because of this that the Lips have been able to pull off their most astounding feat: creating their own nurturing, self-sustaining universe within a major-label system that is crumbling all around them. It’s hard to decide which is more shocking: that Embryonic fulfills the terms of the eight-album deal the band signed with Warners or that both parties are enthusiastic about the idea of re-upping. The Lips have pitched a circus tent big enough to include spaced-out young ladies who photograph their turds and tow-headed four-year-old boys who love balloons. That is freedom. Arbeit macht frei.
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