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Between Wars: An Interview with The Flaming Lips
[1 September 2006]
Preparing to tour in support of At War With the Mystics, The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne discusses politics, drugs and divine intervention.
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by Brian Heater
In seven hours, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips will be onstage at Webster Hall in New York City, pounding together giant foam Hulk hands between warring armies of aliens and Santa Clauses. But first he will undertake a ritual that may be even more bizarre. "I think I'm getting my picture taken with some supermodel," he explains, "which is fine by me."
It's April Fool's day, around one p.m. Inside the venue the floor is still littered with confetti. The clean up crew still has a few more hours to finish the job before a new crowd starts trickling in, to start the cycle over again, and while the floors will be spotless by the time the Pink Mountaintops -- flown in from Vancouver to open these two shows -- start their set at an uncommonly early 7:30, The same can't be said for the streamers hanging from the rafters, a few of which will no doubt still be floating out of reach by the time the Flaming Lips come back around.
The place is swarming with a film crew, prepping themselves for the arrival of the band, including a man with a camera, trailing cables, standing aside the big square bar who introduces himself simply as "M." When he asks whether I'm with Vogue, I laugh self-consciously, wondering for a moment if my black hoodie and dirty jeans might actually be what the glossy magazine writers and their ilk are wearing this season. I ask M whether he might be able to help get me in touch with the publicist at Warner, who I last spoke with before the heady Texan nights of South by Southwest. "Be cool," he assures me with the confidence one would expect from a man who shares a name with a consonant. "It's rock and roll."
When Lips' lead singer, Wayne Coyne arrives, he's carrying a bottle of yellow Vitamin Water, posse in tow, dressed like he still hasn't gone to sleep after last night's prom. He wears a gray pinstripe suit with an unbuttoned collar and loosened bow tie, his hair carefully unkempt as ever, and he glows with that golden aura that somehow always manages to come across in the countless still photos and music videos that he's appeared in through the years. He's pulled aside by the camera crew and introduced to Shalom, the six-foot-three, rail-thin Canadian supermodel with whom he'll be posing for this afternoon's photo shoot. M asks him how it feels, some kid from Oklahoma, being interviewed for Fashion Rocks. Coyne answers casually, "Everyone's from somewhere."
The publicist pulls Coyne aside and introduces us, giving us 30 minutes, which the singer suggests we spend away from the maddening crowd. We forgo the chairless backstage in favor of the attached balcony, which in a few hours will be filled wall-to-wall with giant balloons and, once they're cleared, the evening's VIPs, including a shaved-headed Steve from Blue's Clues; Jim DeRogotis, author of recent Lips bio Staring at Sound; ex-Goonie Martha Plimpton; her date, SNL cast member Fred Armisen; and assorted members of System of a Down, texting on their PDAs throughout the duration of the show.
The venue seems a bit small for a band of the Flaming Lips' stature. "It's really great for the audience," Coyne says, in that gruff Oklahoma City accent. "You get the really rabid Flaming Lips freaks. I hate the idea that it excludes some people, because I think it sold out in like 10 minutes, but we'll come back." If there's any doubt about the sincerity of Coyne's words, the band's desire to connect with its fan base, it's put to rest every night the drums fire up on "Race for the Prize." "We love making that connection with people. And let them know that this night that we have together is a big deal, and we can really make it count. We can really make it mean something. Not 'we sing songs, you buy the fucking T-shirt, see you later' sort of thing, which I know a lot of people do." The show that night will include bags of confetti, streamer guns, two dozen oversize balloons (one of which Coyne inflates with a leaf blower until it explodes), two groups of fans dressed up as Santa Clauses and Martians ("Christians vs. Scientologists," Coyne lovingly exclaims, as somewhere in the distance former tour mate Beck grits his Dianetics-loving teeth) and a goose-bump-inducing version of Sabbath's "War Pigs" during the finale, complete with huge, projected images of bloodied war orphans behind them.
The imagery of war and religion are more prominent at this stage in the Lips' 20-plus year recording history than ever before. Many of those who've heard At War With the Mystics, which was set for release in the week after the show, call it a political record. Not a huge surprise, perhaps, when one considers Coyne's leftist politics and all that has happened in the world since the release of Yoshimi, four long frustrating years ago. I ask Coyne, who has penned what seems like dozens of songs name-checking that Jesus fellow, what his take on religion is. "I think the first rock band I ever saw was in church," he reminisces. "I thought it was the greatest thing ever, because they were playing in this old church that was all stone and marble, and they were playing the drums, and it was ricocheting, and I was like, 'Fuck, I'll go to church if there's a fucking rock band playing.' "
His current take on the experience is a touch more stark. "Humans have the capacity to be the greatest things ever. They also have the capacity to be the worst shits ever. I think we live in great times, and I think that this idea of organized religion will be put over there the way that we put Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I'd love to believe in UFOs and Jesus and all of these things, but I'd rather believe in me and you. If we're here by ourselves, I say fine. I'll take that."
Then he tells me what he says is a true story. "We played a show in Florida a couple of weeks ago. This guy followed me backstage, and his arm was missing. Eventually we get to the trailer, and he gets in. I'm talking to somebody else. He doesn't interrupt. He's patient, but he says, 'Wayne, I want you to know that you really inspired me tonight, and I think you'd be a really great motivational speaker. I say that because I'm a motivational speaker myself.' I figure it must be connected to some experience with getting his arm cut off, and he says, 'Yeah, about four years ago I was doing some extreme rock climbing and a rock fell on my arm, and I was there for six days.' And as he was telling this story, I realized he was that guy who had to cut off his own arm, and here he is, telling me that I inspired him. On the sixth day he was able to break his arm and by sheer leverage break the skin and the nerves, and he walked for eight miles after that and was 45 minutes away from being dead when the helicopter final spotted him. Somewhere along the way, he says he had this divine intervention and that's why he's alive today. And that's fine, but why wasn't there some divine intervention with those people trapped in the towers? God gets to pick and choose who wins a football game, who gets to live? It's just not true. You can call it whatever you want, but no one gets to come in and say, 'You get to live, and you don't.'"
If not a motivational speaker, one gets the distinct impression that Coyne might have made a fantastic cult leader or politician had music not gotten in the way. His involvement in the latter has been minimal thus far, comprising a few projects on the extremely local neighborhood level and a couple of trips to the Oklahoma governor's mansion, currently inhabited by Democrat Brad Henry. "I don't think politics is always the answer. You don't have to wait to be voted in. I try to remind people that if you were living in the South in 1946, everybody around you would have been not hiring black people and some people would have been lynching black people. It would have been allowed, but would you have waited for the laws to change before you said, Look, this is wrong?"
He's never really taken to flying the freak flag against the war, however, beyond what he says with his music and shows. "All the people who are going to war are certainly as educated as I am. I'm not some sort of supergenius who knows something they don't. In their own mind, they've decided to go. It's an all-volunteer army. My advice to them is if you don't want to go, don't go. I'd rather you go to jail and wait for our next president."
Coyne's wife, Michelle-Martin Coyne approaches, dressed in a Technicolor trench coat like something out of that Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, to tell us that our half hour is almost up. Shalom and M and the rest of them wait below. Wayne insists on one last question. "Okay," I say, "drugs."
Coyne replies, "Heroin, cocaine and crystal meth: Don't bother with them, don't hang around people that do them, because its dangerous to be around people who do them." The answer comes easily for Coyne after so many years of reports liberally tossing around the words drug damaged to describe his career. "They're made of horrible substances and hanging around people who do them will get you killed or get you AIDS some horrible shit." Hard shit aside, the rest of his response rings a bit more true for the long-haired commander of troops of magic rabbits. "I think there's other drugs that are left up to the individual. If you're young and you're seeking some intense experiences, there are things like LSD and ecstasy and peyote and marijuana that let you have a subjective, personal, intense moment, and they let you get a little bit braver or have a different mindset. If you don't want to them, you shouldn't do them, but there's elements of experimenting with yourself that I think are wonderful."
I ask whether he's touched the stuff. "I've done LSD a couple of times, and I've done some speedy drugs from time to time because you want to keep awake, but I've found the best option for me is to be healthy and be awake," he says, that yellow bottle of Vitamin Water still propped up on the table in front of him. "But I would never want to restrict anyone."
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